Picturing a Golden Age: September and Australian Rules

In two Australian coming-of-age feature films, Australian Rules and September, the central young characters hold idyllic notions about friendship and equality that prove to be the keys to transformative onscreen behaviours. Intimate intersubjectivity, deployed in the close relationships between the indigenous and nonindigenous protagonists, generates multiple questions about the value of normalised adult interculturalism. I suggest that the most pointed significance of these films lies in the compromises that the young adults make. As they reach the inevitable moral crisis that awaits them on the cusp of adulthood, despite pressures to abandon their childhood friendships they instead sustain their utopian (golden) visions of the future.