ABSTRACT
For a cinema whose heroic male leads had been figures like Bryan Brown, Jack Thompson, and Paul Hogan, the films of the early 1990s represented a radical shift in its image of Australian masculinity. A new generation of actors was emerging, playing roles which, whilst they shared some continuities with earlier representations of masculinity, broke away from established stereotypes in several important ways. As Graeme Turner noted in 1994, ‘the semiotics of Australian ethnicities and masculinities would seem to have changed’. 1 Much more than a change of personnel marked the new decade however; not only was there a shift in the image of Australian masculinity embodied in particular performers, film narratives themselves seemed newly preoccupied with questions of gender identity, and the construction of the masculine subject. A crop of films, including many of the most successful Australian productions, were now consciously exploring the process of becoming a heterosexual man in contemporary Australian society. Ben Mendelsohn in The Big Steal (1990), Noah Taylor in Flirting (1991), Sam Neill in Death in Brunswick (1991), Hugo Weaving in Proof (1991), Paul Mercurio in Strictly Ballroom (1992), and Alex Dimitriades in The Heartbreak Kid (1993) offered fresh constructions of male identity, within films whose narratives turned openly on the issue of masculinity. This contribution examines four of these films in detail – The Big Steal (1990), Death in Brunswick (1991), Strictly Ballroom (1992) and The Heartbreak Kid (1993) – suggesting that they reveal a tension between the conventional narratives which are at their core, and changing patterns of masculinity in contemporary Australia.
