ABSTRACT
Adaptation has been an ongoing feature but without dominating perception of the national cinema's subsequent output. Looking back on this very exciting period of Australian filmmaking, a few recurring elements now emerge with some clarity. The sheer preponderance of adaptation now seems surprising in the light of the prevailing 'ocker' titles that had set the revival in motion. This chapter focuses on those adaptations which helped to shape the all-important revival of Australian cinema in the often-tumultuous 1970s. Most of directors – Weir, Armstrong, Beresford and Schepisi, for instance – went on to work internationally, sometimes to award-winning effect, but their reputations were originally and memorably made with their work in literary adaptation in the Australian cinema they helped to create, and to which they have all intermittently returned. Re-watching their 1970s films, one registers that they cut their teeth on some potent material and in the process brought something equally potent of their own to bear on it.
