Australia was an amazing place to visit, and I’m so thankful for the opportunity. Even after seeing a lot of Australian films, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I arrived. There were some things that weren’t quite as they seemed in a lot of the movies, but others that fit pretty well.
First, the way people talked was a bit different than it is portrayed in some of the movies. Maybe it’s because we stayed in major cities, but people sounded a lot more proper than some of our favorite outback heroes like Crocodile Dundee. There were a lot fewer exclamations of “crikey” or “g’day mate” than one might think from the movies.
Maybe it’s silly, but I also felt like there would have been a lot more massive bugs or venomous snakes than we saw. Considering I did not see any, maybe I can’t really speak to this. Maybe it’s because we stayed in major cities and were nowhere even close to the outback, but I almost expected dangerous things to be everywhere and all the citizens to have big knives like Crocodile Dundee. (Shocking news. Australians aren’t actually all like their most famous ambassador Crocodile Dundee.) Still, most of the films placed the audience in small town Australia or closer to or in the outback. It felt that the harsh land was one of the key aspects of Australian life, but in the cities, I couldn’t feel that at all. It felt a lot more like home than I expected, and nothing felt at all dangerous or intimidating other then perhaps the hot sun.
The sense of humor seen in the films, however, certainly seems to be on point. Films like Muriel’s Wedding and Strictly Ballroom reflect a somewhat ridiculous sense of humor that stems from the fact that they just don’t take themselves or their lives too seriously. That certainly seemed to be true for the majority of Australians that I met throughout the cities we traveled to. They were fun, quick, and laughed easily.
We also watched a lot of films about Aboriginals in preparation for the trip, and those seemed to be a generally accurate representation of the horrible things that happened to the Aboriginal people. Rabbit Proof Fence did a particularly good job at allowing an audience to feel the pain and struggle of the poor young girls taken from their families. Mabo also showed the court case that overthrew terra nullius, the belief that the land had no owner before white settlement. This influential court case gave back some Aboriginal rights to the land, and is the reason that all of our tour guides were very careful to acknowledge the Aboriginal tribes that lived on the land first.
I really loved watching Australian and New Zealand films for the class, and I will most certainly be watching more in anticipation for whenever I can go back to visit again!
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