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Tropical Darwin on screen: critiquing national values using urban frontier tropes in Charlie’s Country and Last Cab to Darwin
Citation
Blackwood, G, Tropical Darwin on screen: critiquing national values using urban frontier tropes in Charlie's Country and Last Cab to Darwin, eTropic, 17, (2) pp. 132-150. ISSN 1448-2940 (2018) [Refereed Article]
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Copyright the author(s).
Official URL: https://journals.jcu.edu.au/etropic/article/view/3...
DOI: doi:10.25120/etropic.17.2.2018.3661
Abstract
Australia’s northern-most tropical city of Darwin has a strong presence in the
domestic and international touristic imagination as a tropical escape
destination – a small city poised on the edge of outstanding natural beauty –
yet in national cinematic representations Darwin is often presented as a
frontier zone, whether these tropes are pivoted around culture or nature. I
would like to take up this idea of the city of Darwin as special and distinctive in
the national imaginary that is discernible in recent Australian cinema, an idea
that I show extends to the city’s representation in theatre and literature. This
paper performs a close textual reading of the city’s recent representation in
two high profile Australian feature films, Charlie’s Country (Rolf de Heer, 2013)
and Last Cab to Darwin (Jeremy Sims, 2015). These are films that employ
compassionate, humanistic themes, each maintaining a strong focus on main
characters who find themselves both marginalized and neglected within the
broader mechanisms of Australian society: hence each film is simultaneously
performing the secondary work of critiquing Australian culture. In both films, I
show how the tropical city of Darwin operates as a space of difference, but
unlike the contemporary tourism marketing that simplistically brands the region
as a "site of desire", here we find two unique critiques of Australian law and
society that work to show the ethical frontiers of legislation and of human
sovereignty.
Item Details
| Item Type: | Refereed Article |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Darwin, film, cinema, urban representation, screen studies, Charlie's Country, Last Cab to Darwin, indigenous |
| Research Division: | Creative Arts and Writing |
| Research Group: | Screen and digital media |
| Research Field: | Screen media |
| Objective Division: | Culture and Society |
| Objective Group: | Arts |
| Objective Field: | The creative arts |
| UTAS Author: | Blackwood, G (Dr Gemma Blackwood) |
| ID Code: | 130778 |
| Year Published: | 2018 |
| Deposited By: | Office of the School of Social Sciences |
| Deposited On: | 2019-02-12 |
| Last Modified: | 2021-06-30 |
| Downloads: | 9 View Download Statistics |
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