No Substance #170: The Two Visions of Wake in Fright
Wake in Fright opens in a one room school in Tiboonda, in the middle of nowhere. It’s hot. A drought is taking place and the land around it is flat, red, and empty. A single train track runs though the middle of the town. In the schoolhouse, the children are waiting for the bell to ring. It’ll signal the end of year. A young teacher, John Grant, is waiting with them. He’s a bonded teacher. The education department has sent him to work in Tiboonda for two years. He hates it. After the children leave, after they head outside into the heat and into the nowhere, he thinks, at least none of the girls are pregnant. You ask yourself, has he done his job right, then, or wrong? Later, when you realise that Grant is a virgin, the thought becomes one that reveals his small, growing misogyny, the characterisation of a man who could very well be termed an incel nowadays.
Quite often, when people talk about Wake in Fight, they talk about Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film. It’s much less common for people to talk about Kenneth Cook’s 1961 novel of the same title, even though the film is a fairly faithful adaptation of the book. Personally, I like both, and throughout this little piece, I am going to talk about both.
Ted Kotcheff’s film doesn’t give you the line about pregnancy, just as Kenneth Cook’s book doesn’t give you the imagine of the flat, endless land locked in drought. In the book, Grant’s girlfriend, the beautiful Robin, is hardly a girlfriend at all, more an unobtainable obsession. The film tells you otherwise, but you can hardly blame it for that. It’s simpler to say Robin is Grant’s girlfriend. It streamlines the narrative of sexual frustration and failure and confusion that ends after one drunken, violent night when Doc makes a forceful advance on Grant. Is it date rape? Is it consensual? Is the true meaning of Wake in Fright really just a homophobia dig because one morning you’ll wake up next to a drunk, amoral Donald Pleasence? Yes, maybe. The film is 50 years old. It’s not an ageless beauty. However, what’s interesting is that Cook doesn’t take Grant to this final moment in his book. Instead, he produces a more confused sexuality in Grant, one that feeds into his suicide attempt just as it does in Kotcheff’s film, but one that isn’t as cleanly done, narratively speaking.
I imagine Cook’s novel is hard find outside Australia. Within Australia, it’s available as a cheap Text Classic, a small book given little love by an ugly yellow cover with some pints of beer on the front. Look, I love Text Classics, a line of books that keeps Australian classics in print, and I am thankful for the publisher for keeping these texts alive because I know few others will, but the design of the series is absolutely horrendous. It feels like a crime that such a cover can be legally used on any on single book, much less a whole collection. (The original cover is, it must be said, a great example of colour usage.) Still, if you are curious, Cook’s book is definitely worth the time and money. The overbearing friendliness and the suffocating pressure to drink are all found in the book, mixed with a sense that all the people of Bundanyabba are, just a little, not all the seriously mind you, but just a little, bringing that uppity school teacher down a peg or two. Just to teach him a thing or two, y’know. And in doing so, of course, they reveal a dark side of themselves, and of this country. The film does that as well, and it picks a few other things to talk about. I noted the relationship between white and Indigenous Australia more than the book did, for example.
Cook was ripped off when it came to the film rights of Wake in Fright. According to Jacqueline Kent, Morris West bought the rights off Cook for $6k, who then later sold the rights for $50k to Westinghouse Broadcasting. Understandably, Cook was annoyed by that. He was annoyed, also, that Wake in Fright was the work he was most well known for. He had written better books, he believed, like all authors who have a successful book most readers love. He probably didn’t like that it was a cult film, either.
Wake in Fright wasn’t a successful film in Australia, not at first. Martin Scorsese might have loved Kotcheff’s film when he first saw it, but Australia by and large didn’t. It flopped in cinemas and was, reportedl, screened once, in 1988, on television. It was introduced by the stalwart of Australian TV cinema, Bill Collins. Reportedly there was no official video or DVD release for years because there were no good quality prints to be transferred from. That remained true until 2004 when the film’s editor, Tony Buckley, found the film’s negative print in a locker, marked for destruction. It was weeks away from being burnt up and lost, like so many films. Instead, it was saved and restored and released again where it found a new audience.
I’d heard about the film long before I watched it. Oddly, I heard about it through friends who were horror fans, and who talked it up as a weird, out there Australian horror film. Personally, I didn’t find much of it horrific at all. It seemed all too familiar to me, bits and pieces of my childhood, including country towns, dusty old RSLs, and kangaroo hunts. No hunt I ever went on was like the one that is used in Wake in Fright (real kangaroos are killed on screen, so just a heads up for those of you who will go to watch it), but the ones I went on echoed it enough. A couple of years ago I was in Broken Hill, as well, where most of the film was made, and you can still see much of the town in the streets and buildings. It’s got fifty years on it, but you don’t have to look hard to find the film there.
I’ve known plenty of people who are the shades of people who appear in Wake in Fright. I am sure, somewhere in there, I appear as well. Most of white Australia does, probably. Jack Thompson wasn’t wrong when, on the opening night, he told one viewer who shouted that this wasn’t us, to sit down, mate, because it is.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of eight books including The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories. His ninth book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)