ABSTRACT
Musicals are pivotal to the history of film. They enact and perform the fashions, desires and disappointments of the era more than dramas, comedies and westerns. Philip Kerr maintains the history of supercilious English reviews of the Australian film industry. What actually makes any of these films Australian is an elusive question. With Australian cinema framed as an 'other' to Hollywood releases, internal divisions between the 'local product' seem arbitrary and meaningless. The land is the primary determinant of nation building. Baz Luhrmann was born in 1963 and was thirty-eight years old when Moulin Rouge was released. By the customary definition of Generation X, those born between 1961 and 1981, he slots cleanly into the category. He actually embodies the interests and expertise of this imagining community more than most. The spaces of the text create many of the reading options.
