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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2023
ESCAPING ENGLAND: MICHAEL POWELL IN AUSTRALIA
Celebrated English filmmaker Michael Powell's career in Australia is a tale of considerable tenacity, pragmatism and, ultimately, missed opportunities. Amongst his mooted projects were films based on Arthur Upfield's popular Bony novels, Joan Lindsay's Picnic at Hanging Rock and Norman Lindsay's The Magic Pudding (Powell 1992: 508–509). The two films that he did make in 1960s Australia – They’re a Weird Mob (1966) and Age of Consent (1969); also adaptations – are amongst a small number of features produced in Australia during that leanest of decades. For example, They’re a Weird Mob, a significant box-office success in Australia and New Zealand but nowhere else, was the single Australian-made or -filmed feature to be commercially released in 1966. Powell's two features are also amongst the highest profile and budgeted ‘Australian international’ co-productions of their era.
Though they are, in some ways, studies in contrast – They’re a Weird Mob working to embrace and reflect upon the Australian idiom and character while signalling significant demographic changes in its population; Age of Consent labouring to escape the pressures, increased cosmopolitanism and transformations of modern Australia on the tropical idyll of Dunk Island in North Queensland – both films feature outsiders or exiles learning or relearning the rhythms and nuances of daily, Australian life. Although shot many thousands of kilometres from Britain, these films are as responsive to place as the filmmaker's more celebrated works, and reflect Powell's genuine commitment to working in Australia during this period. While various writers have claimed that Powell's subsequent ‘exile’ to the Antipodes marked a significant downturn in his work's quality and level of engagement, and represents a kind of purgatory to be endured after the scandal of Peeping Tom (1960), his efforts in the largely moribund Australian feature-film industry of the 1960s still draw upon his maverick personality, as well as his truly adaptive and responsive filmmaking practice. This is reflected in Powell's accounts of his time in Australia in the second volume of his autobiography, Million-Dollar Movie (see Powell 1992: 436–55, 472–88, 509–15).
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