ABSTRACT
Bazin’s insight can be usefully reworked. It suggests that Australian cinema’s distinctiveness can be found in how it borrows, its one-off nature and the resulting paradox of its achievements. The Overlanders ‘borrows’ a quintessentially American ‘western’ theme. Australian film history is rife with texts that could have been followed up: think of John Heyer’s extraordinary The Back of Beyond with its extending of the language of the classical documentary, Newsfront’s blending of its diverse inscriptive materials, the permutations on the Mad Max cycle that ended with Mad Max 3. Australia’s contribution to this or that pathway of the cinema is what it becomes known for and is what critics and film-makers then map.
