ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of the Western genre in Australian cinema. In addition to surveying the broad range of Westerns that have been made in Australia over the past 120 years, it explores the socio-cultural context and public discourse surrounding and informing this production. In his pioneering study of the Western, The Sixgun Mystique, John Cawelti highlights the adaptability of the Western as a film genre, a capacity which operates not only in terms of narrative and the audio-visual characterisation of the film, but in contexts of production and reception as well, opening the Western up as a storehouse of elements available for complex international remediation. Thus, it is in the relation between home-grown elements of Australian cinema that build on the nation’s colonial past, and the broad international remediation of the Western and its iconography, that this chapter asks about the role of the Western in Australian cinema. And it is the roles of the bushranger, the outlaw, and the Aboriginal tracker that are explored most closely, for it is the subtle and dramatic shifts in narrative characterisation of these roles, their status within and outside the law, and their engagement with landscape and the natural environment, that constitute Australia’s most enduring contribution to and innovation upon the genre of the Western.
