ABSTRACT
Australia underwent a social and political transition in the 1990s. In a shift away from state paternalism and towards neoliberalism, many Australians found themselves in a new world order that gave individuals a new-found freedom to rationally decide for themselves how to live their lives. This vision for Australia promised social and economic success for all yet, in practice, having this kind of freedom does not always guarantee prosperity. Geoffrey Wright’s award-winning film Romper Stomper uses extreme racial violence to critique Australia’s new political order to reveal the dangers of the free individual and explore what can happen when the state retreats from our daily lives. This chapter will examine how the film is an extreme parody of the self within Australia’s neoliberal polity of the 1990s. From this examination, it will show how Romper Stomper is an honest depiction of the state’s failure to redress historical racial injustices, which continues in modern Australia. The film’s projected aesthetics of this political failure show how the contradictory and pious aspects of neoliberalism expose the predictable crisis of the new world order, whereby the individual is not rational and cannot be saved from society. Romper Stomper’s projection of alarm offers a clash of ideological discourses from the New and Old order that completely displace Australia’s virtue of being a fair and just society.
