At the end of The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) David Gulpilil's character, mimicking the lone hero of the Western, rides off into the far distance towards the horizon, leaving behind the young follower who will make his own way back to civilisation, a more civilised man after his enlightening encounter with the violence of the frontier between two laws. In this sense The Tracker re-imagines the frontier violence of the colonial encounter by suggesting, through the figure of The Follower, that there is an alternative national history to the ‘self-innocenting narrative casting our national forebears as caring, Christian civilisers motivated by concern for the hapless natives’. Two things matter here. The first is what will happen afterwards, after the return to civilisation, after the end of the frontier wars. The second is how these events, these violent conflicts on the frontier between two laws, will be understood afterwards, how they will be translated by the surviving generations of both sides of the conflict who will, at some point, face each other in the post-colonial context of the nation. The key claim here is that founding colonial or ‘frontier’ conflict lives on, afterwards in the nation's actions and in subsequent translations of an unreconciled history between Aboriginal and settler Australians. Through Mabo, Wik and native title legislation, conflict over the meaning of an unreconciled national history (the history wars) has continued to be about land and its possession, about who is entitled to possess or repossess the land, and to name it, under what system of law.

Throughout this book we have proposed that the post-Mabo era in Australian cinema can be read through the metaphor of backtracking. This intermittent activity of reviewing, mulling over and renewing icons, landscapes, characters and stories defines contemporary Australian national cinema. In our conclusion we want to propose that, in the post-Mabo context, this brooding passion for raking over the national repertoire of icons serves as a vernacular mode of collective mourning, a process involving both grief-work and testimony. If this is the case, then Australian national cinema, since the Mabo decision, has been an occasional participant in creating and corroborating national recognition of terra nullius as the nation's troubling, founding myth. This raises the question of whether a national cinema is in the business of confirming the nation's consoling myths or contesting the nation's historical memories. As Ross Gibson says at the end of his book on the badlands of central Queensland, ‘Myths help us live with contradictions, whereas histories help us analyse persistent contradictions so that we might avoid being lulled and ruled by the myths that we use to console and enable ourselves.’ Gibson's eloquent piece of literary backtracking ends with an exemplary call to mourn the failures and losses of the past in order to overcome the denial of the violence that founded the nation. In this view, mourning is a way to achieve national maturity by ‘recognising the issues that we wish we could deny, ignore or forget’.

The familiar yet estranged figure of the black tracker has enjoyed a certain longevity in Australian cultural traditions for it easily corresponds with the metaphor of exile and imprisonment in a purgatorial landscape, identified by Graeme Turner as one of the key tropes of Australian fiction. However, with shifts in the Australian social imaginary that accompanied the Land Rights movement of the 1970s, the tracker receded into the background, a result, perhaps, of a critique of racial stereotypes initiated by Aboriginal activists and critics. In 2001–02 the black tracker made an unexpected return to Australian screens in two feature films, Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) and The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002), and a short musical film, One Night the Moon (Rachel Perkins, 2001). In both features, an iconic actor of the 1970s, David Gulpilil, was cast in the role of the tracker. His startling, intense screen presence haunted Rabbit-Proof Fence and dominated The Tracker. After a period of relative obscurity (save for smaller roles in Crocodile Dundee, Peter Faiman, 1986; Until the End of the World, Wim Wenders, 1992; and Dead Heart, Nicholas Parsons, 1996), Gulpilil's return to the screen in two key films of the post-Mabo era, like the films themselves, can be understood as a kind of backtracking, a going over of old ground in Australian national cinema, a going over which reprises and at the same time retracts some of the seemingly intractable figures of Australian national identity.

Australian cinema, perceived as an international genre, brings to mind iconic landscapes, characters and stories which take hold in the memory as visual images. However, in Australian Rules (Paul Goldman, 2002) and Walking on Water (Tony Ayres, 2002), it is the voice and the breath that linger in the memory as aural images. In Australian Rules there is a transformation from a polyglot of vernaculars in the opening sound sequence to one clear voice-over at the end. In Walking on Water, everything important hinges on the breath, from Gavin's last strangled gasp to the breakdown and recovery of each of the characters involved in Gavin's final expiration. This chapter will explore the loss of identity and recovery of the voice, and the breath, in Australian Rules and Walking on Water. Between them, the two films draw our attention to the reshaping of a transplanted Anglo-Celtic social imaginary in Australian cinema. Miriam Dixson argues that ‘Australian identity still carries the marks of yesterday's British connection’. David Malouf qualifies that assertion by arguing that an experimental and open sense of identity characterises the Australian social imaginary because ‘we are a bit of the motherland set down in a new place and left to develop as the new conditions demanded, as climate, a different mixture of people, changes in the world around us, and our reaction to them, determined’.

To be asked ‘where are you from?’ in Australia today is to imply not only that there is geographic mobility within the nation's borders but that your family's origins, within living memory, are elsewhere. Cultural commentators have long pointed to the problem of being at home in Australia as a recurring theme, usually articulated in terms of Australia's lack of self-confidence, maturity and independence. The difficulty of asserting an independent nationhood, particularly in relation to Britain and the United States, but also within the region, has often been linked to a set of national character traits including defensive brashness, cultural cringe, cutting down of tall poppies and a self-deprecating sense of humour. This set of traits appears to contradict those depicted in the national archetypes of the independent bushman, the courageous Anzac and the egalitarian fraternity of the white working class. A further contrast emerges in contemporary Australian cultural studies, repudiating the 19th-century bush as the template for a British-derived national identity, turning instead to the cosmopolitan city, the multicultural suburbs, and the hedonistic holiday coast as templates for a dynamic, post-national, post-multicultural identity in the 21st century. The problem of belonging, of being at home in Australia, of having a sense of identity, is evident in the afterwardness of the history wars that followed the Mabo decision, and the futureshock of globalisation across the new dividing line between ‘elites’ and ‘battlers’ in Australian society.

Since the High Court's judgment in Mabo and others v. The State of Queensland (No 2) (1992), ‘Mabo’ has become a household word in Australia. In his commentary on the cultural implications of the decision, Jeremy Beckett, anthropologist and witness for the plaintiffs, claims that media and politicians have added a new word to the Australian vernacular. ‘“Mabo”’, he says, ‘has come to stand for the whole issue of Aboriginal land rights, as in “Mabo law”, “Mabo deal”, “Mabo show” and of course, “Mabo madness”; if it has not already become a verb, it soon will.’ For Beckett, the over-use of ‘Mabo’ in popular discourse has, among other effects, ‘overshadowed’ the fate of the leading litigant. Put simply, ‘Mabo’ is a name without a face. This cultural oversight, this gap between a judgment and a historical subject, prompted the making of the award-winning biographical documentary film Mabo – Life of an Island Man (Trevor Graham, 1997). In this chapter we undertake a close analysis of this film, considering the role it has played in mediating public recognition of both the Mabo decision and Mabo ‘the man’. We are interested in how this documentary has become a popular history of Mabo and what this success tells us about shifts in documentary filmmaking in Australia in the 1990s and the forms of spectatorship they can enable.

The feature film Rabbit-Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002) was prompted by and responds to Bringing them Home (1997), the controversial national inquiry into the thousands of Aboriginal children forcibly taken from their families by Australian state authorities from 1900 to 1970, an inquiry that changed the face of Australia's self-understanding. While not the first film to deal with this subject, Rabbit-Proof Fence is a ‘breakthrough film’. It earned more than AUS$1.2 million in its first week of screening, reversing the historical lack of interest by Australian audiences in films about Aboriginal people. More than this, it became the film of the Stolen Generations, providing a set of powerful images that captured the popular imagination of both young and older Australians.

Set in outback Australia in 1931, the film takes its name from the wire fence that once ran from the south coast of Western Australia through to the north, acting as a barrier to rabbit hordes migrating from the east to the west. For the three Aboriginal girls at the centre of this true story – Molly (Everlyn Sampi), Daisy (Tianna Sainsbury) and Gracie (Laura Monaghan) – the fence is a lifeline. After escaping from the isolated Moore River Native Settlement where they were taken to be trained as domestic servants, the girls use the rabbit-proof fence to navigate their way across more than 2000 kilometres of some of the world's harshest terrain to their home in Jigalong, a small government outpost located at the far north end of the fence.

The impetus for this chapter comes out of a particular viewing experience which we are calling ‘aftershock’. For us, this experience is associated with the unbearable weight of history embedded in the Australian landscape film of the 1990s. The landscape cinema of the 1970s established Australian film as an international genre. The ‘AFC genre’, as it was christened by Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka, was defined by the period film which became the flagship of an inward and backward-looking national identity through quality films like Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975), Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) and My Brilliant Career (Gillian Armstrong, 1979). However, after a decade of official support through the Australian Film Commission, the period film was repudiated as the nation's standard-bearer during the commercially oriented 1980s, particularly after the first two Mad Max films (George Miller, 1979, 1981) reclaimed the landscape for a contemporary, outward-looking cinema. The cinematic landscape has re-emerged as a more complex figure of national identity in the 1990s, after the High Court ended the nation's sustaining myth of terra nullius.

Writing about the landscape tradition in Australian feature films of the 1970s, Ross Gibson argues that ‘the majority of Australian films have been about landscape’. They participate fully in the 200-year-old landscape tradition whereby non-Aboriginal Australia, ‘underendowed’ with myths of belonging, tried ‘to promote a sense of the significance of European society in the antipodes’.

Australian film critics often claim that one new film or another marks the coming of age of the Australian film industry. In the 1980s, Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981) achieved this by telling the story of the Allies' World War I invasion of Turkey from an Australian perspective. In the 1990s, the term was no longer applied to nationalist narratives but to ‘outward-looking’ genre films, such as the thriller Lantana (Ray Lawrence, 2001) and the musical Moulin Rouge (Baz Luhrmann, 2001), as discussed in Chapter 2. In addition, each era of the Australian cinema has its share of coming-of-age narratives. In a reappraisal of the genre, Raffaele Caputo argues that the coming-of-age film serves as a ‘mirror’ of the nation's development. Stories of personal maturity are often set against the background of a major turning point in a nation's past: the Vietnam War in American Graffiti (George Lucas, 1973), World War II in Summer of 42 (Robert Mulligan, 1971) and Racing the Moon (Richard Benjamin, 1984). The subgenre routinely uses first-person narration – an adult looking back at a key turning point in his or her adolescence, a socialising moment in which he or she crosses the threshold into the world of adulthood. As Caputo and others have argued, this characteristic nostalgic view leads to a depiction of the past as a more innocent and secure place than the present, even when set against a background of large-scale historical turning points.

When Russell Crowe became the inaugural winner of the Global Achievement Award at the nationally televised 2001 Australian Film Institute (AFI) Awards, he ended his acceptance speech with the provocative words, ‘God bless America’. It was not hard to imagine the assembled film and television industry catching its collective breath. Only two years before, in 1999, the AFI Awards had provided a public platform for the industry's attack on the High Court's decision that New Zealand programs would henceforth qualify as Australian content when broadcast on free-to-air commercial television. In 2003 the AFI Awards ceremony once again became a public forum for the industry's vociferous attack on the bilateral trade agreement being negotiated with the United States. For a national feature film industry struggling to extract more than 5–7 per cent of the nation's annual box office revenue from Australian cinema-goers, Crowe's words must have felt like a rude betrayal of the home-grown industry that had nurtured his talent. So it is not hard to imagine a collective sigh of relief going through the auditorium when Crowe added, after a perfectly timed pause, ‘And thank God for Australia’. In 2002, accepting the award for his leading role in The Tracker, David Gulpilil, again with impeccable timing, responded to the ovation with a laid-back one-liner, ‘Thanks. I deserve this.’ Unlike Crowe, Gulpilil did not get to deliver a preamble or elaborate on his punchline, at least to the television viewers, who were immediately diverted to a commercial break.