Jeanette Hoorn

Michael Powell's They're a Weird Mob: Dissolving the 'undigested fragments' in the Australian body politic

They’re a Weird Mob (1966) is a classic Australian film that has suffered from critical neglect. Apart from its brief appearance in discussion in anthologies about Australian cinema and media (Castles et al., 1992; O’Regan, 1996; Stratton, 1998) the film has not been taken up for study and has received no lengthy, serious critical examination or assessment. With race and immigration so firmly on the agenda in Australia at the beginning of the new millennium, a close reading of the film’s examination of monoculturalism is revealing. They’re a Weird Mob points to the power and complexity of assimilationism as a discourse at a time when the negotiation of cultural difference within the nation was as highly charged as it is now. In this article, I consider the structure and style of the film and suggest where it might be placed in Australian cinema as well as how it resonates as an historical text concerned with ‘managing’ difference in Australia nearly forty years ago. I argue that They’re a Weird Mob relates to earlier films from the Ealing Studios in its depiction of politics and popular culture but that it is shaped primarily by the discourse of assimilation which was dominant in Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. I also point out that the film argues briefly, but importantly, that European migration worked to exclude Aboriginal Australians from the land, as Nino is seen by the film to have displaced the land’s original owners, just as the British immigrants were seen to do in Bitter Springs (1950), where an actual contest over land takes place. I conclude by comparing the film to Strictly Ballroom (1992), suggesting that while They’re a Weird Mob is a nationalistic text, it nevertheless prefigures multiculturalism in a number of important ways. A close analysis of segments from both films reveals that each clearly reflects particular moments in debates about nation and migration at the time that they were made. Michael Powell made They’re a Weird Mob in Sydney during the lull in his career which followed the outrage surrounding his controversial film Peeping Tom (1960). The script was based on the popular novel written by John O’Grady, under the pseudonym Nino Culotta, almost a decade earlier and published by Ure Smith (O’Grady, 1957). The film follows the book closely, but Emeric Pressburger, Powell’s script writer and

History and Memory in the Art of Gordon Bennett

Gordon Bennett is an artist of Aboriginal descent who, growing up in Brisbane during the fifties and sixties, had to negotiate his way through the Anglo-Celtic identity which the assimilationist Australian state so vigorously promoted. Encouraging its citizens into the identity of the universal subject, the state persuaded all of us, whether we were of British, Italian, Aboriginal, Dutch or any other background, to think of ourselves as Anglo-Celtic Australians and to marginalise those who sought to develop different identities, or to simply think of them as outsiders.

Painting Portraits in Private: Hilda Rix Nicholas and Henri Matisse in Morocco

Abstract Henri Matisse and Hilda Rix left Paris in early February 1912 for the Moroccan city of Tangier. They stayed in the Grand Hôtel Villa de France for most of February and March. Matisse visited again in October of that year while Rix returned in 1914 accompanied by her sister. Rixs painting style took a new turn, developing a post-impressionist style in oils that incorporated abstraction, a primary palette and a flattened picture plain. Both artists executed portraits, working with the same models, in an unused room provided by the owner of the hotel, that became a temporary studio space. Matisse complained that his radical compositions met with derision from the hotels guests. Their art and letters produced in Tangier reveal the challenges they experienced in finding models and painting in public and in private. They were both representatives of European colonising cultures and committed advocates of modernism and of Morocco. Rix adopted a counter-orientalist position in lectures and articles upon her return to Australia.

Memory, History and Modernity

This article examines how official and unofficial early film footage intersects in the representation of Frances mission civilisatrice in films taken in West Congo in the early twentieth century. We study uncut, and largely unseen footage of the French soldier General Henri Gouraud in Syria and Lebanon, filmed during the French acquisition of these territories following the First World War. This footage taken by Albert Kahns photographer Lucien Le Saint, and now in the Archives de la Planète in Paris, reveals twin images of the General: one a powerful military commander of Frances ‘civilizing mission’ and the other a relaxed, modern man of the kind not usually seen in public film footage. This article then, examines various contradictions at the heart of imperialistic discourse that characterised French cultural self-confidence in the last decades of the Third Republic.