The Impact Of Backroads On Indigenous Contributions To The Australian Film Industry

Within this text 'Backroads: From identity to Interval', Stephen Muecke highlights the importance of Phillip Noyce as a driving force in the Australian film industry, providing contextual information on his contributions to Australian film and quoting his ethos in the initial stages of creating a film. Muecke speculates that Noyce chose Gary Foley as the lead actor as he was developing his theory that achieving a true aesthetic in a character stems directly out of having real life experience. Muecke argues that Noyce deliberately worked with Foley in this way to keep the politics associated with the Indigenous community as true as possible, and also so as not to cause further inconsistencies in the portrayal of Aboriginal people.

This text comes from the third chapter in the biography 'Phillip Noyce: Backroads to Hollywood' by Ingo Petzke. It details the commentary of Noyce in an interview with Petzke, discussing the difficulties encountered while making the film and reflects on the outcome and its receipt by the public. There is further discussion of the ways in which Indigenous Australians such as Gary Foley became integral in the creative processes in the film and how the film was used to portray a political aspect of Australia's history as much as it was portraying the original story written by John Emery. Foley's contribution is highlighted as being critical in the accurate portrayal of the Aboriginal people. For the most part, this text is a commentary on how the film came to be and the ways in which the filmmaker sought to experiment and improvise within the film making process. It concludes with a comparison to Noyce's later work Rabbit Proof Fence, highlighting the distinction between hope and hopelessness in Indigenous themed films. As a secondary resource where the director was directly interviewed, the information given in this text is clear and accurate, however Noyce admits that some of the details are unclear, particularly in those sequences where the filmmaking was improvised. The information is particularly useful for placing the film in a historical and factual context, as well as posing questions about the effect the contributions of Foley had on the films final outcome.

Historical Context







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Impacts of the Film​



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Textual Discussions