ABSTRACT
As a collection of reworked and culturally tweaked myths, the arts allow us to talk to ourselves. It can be argued that audiences engage with creative texts as a form of active imagination. The Australian stories of cinema are an eclectic mixture of the values, repressions and ideals of the country’s diverse indigenous, settler and diasporic clusters. In combination, these narratives facilitate what might be thought of as a ‘bigger picture’, collective self sensibility: not a unified or quantifiable identity, but a complex, multi-layered sense of interconnectedness. Still in a state of ‘becoming’ (adolescent perhaps), Australia is somewhat obsessed with its own internal dialogue, desperately trying to understand its complexity and potential before convincingly looking outward. Enforcing this self-talk, the overarching film and television funding body, Screen Australia, pushes for the global viability of each work it finances while imposing the need for cultural relevance. For these reasons, the Australian film industry seems to thrive on an introverted orientation, where the inner – national stories, cultural themes, and creativity – overrides outer concerns.
