For those who aspire to respectability, finding suitable clothing in which to dress up the past has long been part of what being Australian means. (Flanagan 1998, 16–17)

Period Pains

The Irishman was one of a crop of period drama films produced in the late 1970s that formed the second stage of the revival of Australian cinema. The period genre was also dubbed the ‘AFC genre’ (Dermody and Jacka 1987, 1988; Elliott 2010). Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka (1988) define the genre in terms of the aesthetic influences generated by the role of the Australian Film Commission (AFC) in driving cultural and commercial aims in the Australian film industry at the time, even though the AFC did not directly fund these films. The period genre has also been seen as reflecting policy initiatives to do with ‘culture and quality’ as a reaction against the so-called ocker comedies of the first stage of the revival (O'Regan 1989, 77). There was also an agenda to represent Australian history, and it is for this in particular that the period genre gained distinction, but not without criticism. Visually impressive, the stories told were often criticised for their inconclusive endings and lack of historical depth, history being more a source of ‘imagery’ and ‘design’ (Dermody and Jacka 1988, 33). This emphasis, furthermore, descended to a romantic, uncritical view of Australian history that in Graeme Turner's words was ‘too decorous’, considering the historical events of ‘armed class conflict, a brutal legal system, and genocide’ (Turner 1989, 110, emphasis added). The period genre, he argues, ‘retrojected’ Australian ‘nationhood’ to the colonial past, mythologising Australia in a way that was divorced from the ‘complex contemporary realities of an urban […] “multicultural” society’ (115). Nevertheless, the genre played a role in the emerging national consciousness of the 1970s, insofar as ‘the preoccupation with historical drama seemed designed to demonstrate that Australia had a history and therefore was a culture’ (103). The genteel aesthetics of the period genre are also attributed partly to a ‘literariness’ that was traceable to the origins of some AFC-genre films as novels. This quality, Dermody and Jacka suggest, ‘inhere[s] in their gently descriptive and evocative creation of period’ and in ‘character rather than action-based narratives’ (1988, 32).