ABSTRACT
Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008) has garnered a considerable amount of scholarly attention over the last decade, primarily in regard to the film’s engagement with the politics of Aboriginal child removal. As has been the case with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to Aboriginal Australians (2008), critics of Luhrmann’s film tend to argue that it ultimately serves to alleviate culpability and shame amongst the settler population by promoting a fantasy of triumphant national unity. This chapter adds to this scholarly discourse by discussing the film’s reliance on the invasion narrative and its attendant Asian stereotype to forge a bond between settler and Aboriginal characters. I demonstrate how the film’s depiction of the events surrounding Japan’s bombing of Darwin in 1942 marries negative tropes of Asian invasion and Aboriginal sacrificial death in a way that mirrors decades of segregationist policies aimed at excluding Asian arrivants to and assimilating Aboriginal inhabitants of Australia’s northern regions prior to World War II.
