Word: australia
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...LEFT the Orson Welles, I had a rush of understanding. Australia is the most urbanized country in the world. Eighty per cent of its people live in its cities. Much as we Americans cling to a self-image of rugged individualism while going to work every day for IBM, Australians see themselves as tough rural types bonded by the 'mateship' of the bush. The reality is different. Huddled together in the cities, they turn their backs on the inhospitable and incorruptible land. The ones who choose to live in the wild become the crazies about whom the bush ballads...
...AUSTRALIA is a strange piece of land. I spent a year and a half there, on a farm in coastal Victoria. The shire of Orbost, where I lived, has a population of 6000. It is the size of the state of Massachusetts. Three thousand people live in the market town of Orbost, the other 3000 clustered on tiny sawmill settlements and scattered on a few small farms carved out of the dense brush...
Most foreign images of Australia are formed around the outback, that monotonous expanse of brown grassland that stretches inlamd from the eastern mountain chain to the central desert, broken only by equally monotonous and enormous herds of sheep. The Australians' love-hate relationship with this inscrutable piece of earth is well-chronicled...
Weir's film captures so much of what I experienced of Australia. Lovely pale schoolgirls in white dresses climbing on million-year-old frozen lava, a wry picture of the ridiculous Victorian society that tried so desperately to implant itself on so much of the globe, and here more than anywhere else was so out of place, out of time...
...Even as they leave for their picnic, they are instructed not to remove their white gloves until they have safely passed through a neighboring town. There will of course be no question of disencumbering themselves from all their heavy corsetry. The time is 1900, and the place is provincial Australia; the most repressive tenets of the Victorian behavioral code, especially regarding sexuality, are rigidly enforced...