The submissions from guest authors keep coming, with this fine article by Anna Gardner. Anna is a colleague of mine from La Trobe University who’s currently completing her honours, specifically focusing on the rise and fall of Buster Keaton.

-Morgan

The spirited bush girl was a feature of early Australian film. As part of the patriotic nation building drive of the 1920s and 1930s, the bush girl was a wholesome and admirable ideal of womanhood, independent and healthy, representing the prosperity and fertility of the nation. The bush heroine was a prominent figure in films such as A Girl of the Bush (Barrett, 1921) and The Squatter’s Daughter (Hall, 1933). However, somewhat in opposition to the emancipated bush girl, are bush heroines who suffer in their relationships with men. Films such as The Woman Suffers (Longford, 1918) and The Far Paradise (McDonagh, 1928) feature girls trapped by circumstances beyond their control. The young female protagonist is portrayed as the innocent victim of unprincipled men and the inevitable marriage that resolves the film rescues the heroine from her situation, rather than consolidating her power.

The idea of the bush girl is one that is heavily representative of the many changes surrounding the Australian identity as it developed around the beginning of the twentieth century. There is a marked absence of the feminine in the early development of the Australian national type, as cultural pioneers (in particular the bohemian artists of the late 1800s) were trying to present an active, bush-orientated masculine image as the quintessence of Australianness. Women were seen as a “negation of the type” (White 83) because of their natural passivity but more so than this, “’feminine’ values were associated with the ‘respectability’ which the young bohemians condemned” (White 101). However, the inter-war years (from 1919 to 1939) were characterised by a strong drive towards nation building and the taming of the land, and the girl of the bush was an apt symbol of the young, fertile, post-colonial ideal. She was the “flower of the bush” (Tulloch 378) and was a fixture in Australian film from around 1920 to the late 1930s when the increasing prominence of conservative ideology separated masculine and feminine roles and recast the role of women as “decoration and urban mother, […] almost entirely absent from images of rural productivity” (FitzSimons and Ward 128).

While independent women have featured in the cinema of many countries, the ‘bush girl’ appears to be uniquely Australian (Routt 31) and her role in the national consciousness was significant in the inter-war years. As the frontiers of the nation expanded, women gained a symbolic role as the “agents of civilisation and custodians of race” (Lake 154), charged with ensuring the continuation of empire. This is usually expressed through the father-daughter archetype that dominated many films of the time. The close relationship between the father (or father figure) and daughter is echoed in the imperial relationship between England and the empire (Routt 45). The engine of the plot in father-daughter films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter is the inheritance of land and the continuation of the established patriarchal hegemony through traditional relationships. The ‘bush girl’ may be an independent woman but it is this independence and economic self-sufficiency that makes her an object of desire for both worthy and unworthy men. It is interesting to note, however, that while the films reaffirm the necessity for men to sustain the economic strength of the nation (in these films, by means of the secure inheritance of property), “representations of young women on the Australian screen during the 1920s and 1930s are consistently more interesting and memorable than those of young men” (Routt 32).

These forthright women were not the only representations of bush femininity in the inter-war period. The ‘bush girl’ is used in a similar way in more melodramatic films such as Raymond Longford’s The Woman Suffers and, to a certain extent, in the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise. These films foreground the wholesomeness of young women in the country but unlike the “sheep films” (Verhoeven, Sheep Cinema 1), the bush is the setting for the suffering of women. However, they reinforce the simplistic association of the country with goodness and the city with evil, as the city is still presented as the environment ultimately responsible for their suffering as its “moral poverty” (Tulloch 384) can be seen to influence the male characters who cause their distress.

Franklyn Barrett’s A Girl of the Bush is a perfect example of the interpretation of the bush heroine as a symbol of imperial wealth and pastoral fertility. The film was made during a strongly nationalistic period in the Australian film industry (Shirley and Adams 59) and it immediately “locates its heroine at the centre of production and display of Australia’s ‘wealth’ of wool” (Verhoeven, Sheep Cinema 101). Lorna Denver is the quintessential “young rural woman with considerable knowledge and power in relation to the land” (FitzSimons and Ward 123), which is strongly emphasised in the film by the contrast with her lazy ‘cousin’ Oswald Keane, nephew to Lorna’s guardian. A Girl of the Bush is a film that draws a parallel between “country woman and country plenitude” (Tulloch 384) through the opening sequences showing Lorna as an active participant in the production of Kangaroo Flat’s famous wool. The father-daughter relationship between Lorna and her guardian, Jim Keane, is an essential part of the narrative as it establishes the fact that the daughter figure has inherited “the patriarch’s virtue” and is therefore the “rightful heir” to the property (Routt 33, 34). Viewed as an imperial analogy, the colony represents a continuation of empire.

The narrative constantly reiterates the degenerate nature of the city and contrasts it with the wholesome country. The city-country divide is the means by which country life is presented as the ideal, as vice (in reality, a universal phenomenon) is “transferred to the mores of the city” (Tulloch 358) through the character of Oswald and his actions – drinking, gambling and the suggestion of sex. The bush heroine is presented as both the heroine of a naturalistic world, where she is defined by her economic power and fertility, as well as the subject of melodrama. This creates a tension within the story as the bush heroine is the ideal rural woman but as a female protagonist, is strongly associated with melodrama. To solve this, the film establishes an “alternate female discourse” (Tulloch 378) in the story of Mary Burns, who becomes the villain’s innocent victim. In this way, female power is separated from female sexuality (Tulloch 396) and the film reaffirms the traditional cinematic archetype that “younger, unmarried women tend to conform […] to the dichotomy of “damned whores” and “God’s police”” (Molloy 77).

Similarly, historians and critics argue that Ken G. Hall’s The Squatter’s Daughter is a film that is concerned with the association of rural women, breeding and reproductive purity, as “the question of breeding, both of sheep and of men, is at the heart of the plot” (Molloy 67). As in A Girl of the Bush, the narrative is driven by a father-daughter motif and the search for a partner worthy of the bush heroine Joan Enderby in order to safeguard the inheritance of the land. However, there is also a significant fixation with breeding and identity in The Squatter’s Daughter. This association of suitability with good breeding makes it almost inevitable that the foundling Wayne will turn out to be the rightful heir to the neighbouring Waratah Station rather than the villainous Clive Sherrington, as he is clearly the heroine’s choice of mate. Verhoeven suggests that the country of the film is an “Edenic location” (Sheep Cinema, 116), imbuing the couple with biblical significance in their roles as mother and father to the newly united Waratah-Enderby land. Again the bush heroine is associated with the population of the fertile outback and “encapsulates a national desire for prosperity through productivity” (Verhoeven, “Sheep’s Clothing” 153).

Raymond Longford’s The Woman Suffers is a film about young women of the bush that is motivated by a different (and possibly more realistic) conception of the bush girl. In contrast to the female heroines of films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter, The Woman Suffers conveys just that – female suffering. In portraying women as the victims of men however, “the film hammers home a fairly strong feminist message in which men are the villains” (Creed 88). If Lorna Denver and Joan Enderby are ideals of active rural womanhood, Joan Stockdale and Marjory Manton are equally representative of the innocent female victim on the frontier. For these women the frontier society represents not a pure country existence but one defined by “isolation, vulnerability and defencelessness” (Lake 153). Unlike the films with strong bush heroines, The Woman Suffers does not reject the cultural archetype that insists on women being victims.

In the context of the bush heroine, the film explores the negative aspects of feminine fertility and life on the frontier. It highlights the danger young women are exposed to on the edges of civilisation and emphasises their need for protection from “marauding frontiersmen” (Lake 153). In doing so it continues to emphasise the purity of the bush girl. In particular, the strong association of religion, whiteness, nature and water equates Joan’s suicide with a “holy sacrifice” (Creed 88). Creed also suggests that Joan’s death is “used […] to emphasise the form and nature of female suffering” and, with its echoes of pre-Raphaelite Ophelia, reinforces the impression of her as a “betrayed and abandoned heroine” (88). Initially, Marjory appears to be a bush heroine in the style of Lorna Denver, active on the farm during mustering and quite comfortable on horseback. This emphasises the tragedy of her situation, as it seems utterly out of character. Despite being a stronger woman than Joan, this offers her no protection from Philip’s revenge.

Structurally, the film offers a solution to the tragedy of Joan by the exact parallel of Marjory’s story. As Philip seduces Marjory in exactly the same way as her brother Ralph seduced Philip’s sister Joan, there are two outcomes to the story. The negative resolution – suicide – is contrasted with the positive – marriage. The implicit observation in the story is that in a society that has “enshrined masculine values and interests” (Lake 152), women are in particular need of protection from the freedom a patriarchal society affords men. As such, the bush heroine is presented as a symbol of purity and fertility but one in need of masculine protection. It is Philip’s marriage to Marjory that saves her (and her child) from disgrace. This emphasises the truth of the film’s tagline “- while the man goes free!” as neither Philip nor Ralph are held publicly accountable for their actions and while Philip appears to repent, Ralph does not.

In the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise the heroine is not a traditional bush heroine, but is forced into the role of frontier daughter by her father’s criminal activity and alcoholism which have ruined him. In this film, the country is not seen as a bastion of goodness and a respite from the wickedness of the city but a form of purgatory for the heroine, as she is separated from her group of friends by both distance and social circumstance. However, despite the extreme negativity of her situation and the fact that she is not a bush heroine in the traditional sense, she still conveys the image of rural female purity and vulnerability. She is exhausted and ashamed of the “ramshackle farm” (Shirley and Adams 84) but is saved from her situation by Peter, the man she loves. As in The Woman Suffers, the male protagonist acts as rescuer.

The bush heroine was a key figure of the 1920s and 1930s Australian cinema. As a symbol of fertility, national prosperity and the continuation of empire, the active young girl of the bush was an important facet of the national consciousness. Her independence and power were associated with economic self-sufficiency, a fact emphasised by the contrast between the naturalistic heroines of films such as A Girl of the Bush and The Squatter’s Daughter and the melodramatic heroine-victims of Longford’s The Woman Suffers and the McDonagh sisters’ The Far Paradise. The narrative of films featuring the active bush heroine tend to emphasise the notions of patriarchy and succession as both necessary and positive while the films of the passive bush heroine tend to foreground the darker side of a patriarchal social system and women’s vulnerability within it. The former is the more recognised cinematic archetype but both Lake in her study of women on the frontier, and FitzSimons and Ward in their overview of the character across various artistic forms, suggest that the latter is closer to the reality of the bush heroine.

Works Cited

A Girl of the Bush. Dir. Franklyn Barrett. Perf. Vera James, Jack Martin and Herbert Linden. 1921. VHS. NFSA, 1996.

Creed, Barbara, “The Woman Suffers – Again!” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

The Far Paradise in Women of the Silent Era: Virgins, Vamps and Heroines (Selections from Australian Film 1896 – 1930). VHS. NFSA, 1997.

FitzSimons, Trish and Ward, Susan. “Girls of the Bush – Tracking an Enigma Across Films, Fictions, Memories and Histories.” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

Lake, Marilyn. “Frontier Feminism.” The Australian Legend and Its Discontents. Ed. Nile, Richard. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2000.

Molloy, Bruce. Before the Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930 – 1960. Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1990.

Routt, William D. “The Fairest Child of the Motherland: Colonialism and Family in Films of the 1920s and 1930s.” The Australian Screen. Ed. Moran, Albert and O’Regan, Tom. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1989.

Shirley, Graham and Adams, Brian. Australian Cinema: The First Eighty Years. A&R Publishing/Currency Press, 1983.

The Squatter’s Daughter in Don’t Call Me Girlie. Dir. Young, Stewart and Wright, Andree. VHS. Ronin Films, 1985.

The Squatter’s Daughter in Now You’re Talking. Dir. Gow, Keith. VHS. Film Australia, 1981.

Tulloch, John. Legends on the Screen. Sydney: Currency Press, 1981.

Verhoeven, Deb. Sheep and the Australian Cinema. Carlton, Vic: Melbourne University Publishing, 2006.

Verhoeven, Deb. “Sheep’s Clothing: A dress in some Australian films.” Screening The Past: Aspects of Early Australian Film. Ed. Berryman, Ken. Acton, ACT: NFSA, 1995.

White, Richard. Inventing Australia: Images and Identity. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1981.

The Woman Suffers. Dir. Raymond Longford. Perf. Lottie Lyell and Boyd Irwin. 1918. VHS. NFSA, 1996.

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