“Australia. What Fresh Hell Is This?”: Conceptualizing the Australian Western in The Proposition

Abstract

Writing a transnational, comparative study of the Western film forces a confrontation with a fundamental question (and the eternal question for Western film scholars): “What is the Western?” Clearly the Western film genre has undergone multiple transformations over its long life; today we generally accept that the conceptualization of the Western film in US cinema has moved away from (if it ever was) a celebration of the patriarchal, imperial and uncomplicated narrative of the white man’s conquest of the allegedly “free” lands of the American West. Rather, from at least the 1960s, American Western films have, generally speaking, taken the generic tropes of the Western-the racial and feminine “Other,” white masculine hegemony, man’s mythic connection with landscape-and subverted them to various degrees, and in various complex and occasionally contradictory ways. Such subversion sought to reposition public conceptualizations of the meaning of “the West,” re-visioning it as a part of America’s historical, rather than mythic past, with “real” implications for American identities. Increasingly these films were concerned with seeing the West as an historical space within which to discuss American values and the impact of the historical past in transmitting those values into the present.