Into the badlands guardian3/20/2023 Wake in Fright, in fact, is the most resonant, most terrifying Australian film I’ve ever seen. At this point you’ll take what you can get. They engage the same surge of empathy in me: You’ve come to the end of the line. I see his chilling face in Doc, from the 1971 outback horror film Wake in Fright. In the morning, when we woke, he used his free hand to beckon us to come closer. He pulled at his numb cock all night as we slept. How did he get here? Who would drop a paraplegic man off in a caravan park in Coober Pedy, alone with his beans and tomatoes and no way to leave? And why?ĭuring the night the man used his torso to shuffle his unpegged tent around so he could see in through the van window and masturbate. The paraplegic’s disability aroused more curiosity in me than sympathy. Apparently Jana loves stories about young girls out on adventures. He kept ‘spinning yarns’ about how young girls like us will drink free when we get to Darwin, how he knows Jana Wendt, and, if we want, he’d get us onĦ0 Minutes. Its occupant turned out to be a paraplegic man, talkative, a bit nutso. The front entrance to the tent was littered with empty cans of tomatoes and beans. We set up next to a single tent, pitched all alone in the corner, no vehicles, nothing. We circled the town and decided to pull into a caravan park instead of sleeping in the car outside the pub. On my first visit I was with two girlfriends in a van, travelling around Australia in a gap between high school and university. Home to Indigenous communities with the same high instances of cancer that ‘inexplicably’ surfaced in Nevada and New Mexico after the late fifties. People come because it’s the first place you can stop after 600 kilometres of forbidden desert – the Woomera Prohibited Zone – home to nuclear tests and refugee detention centres. People come to see the underground houses, the dusty opal stores. Time is trapped in the significance of an incident: the machine accident, the weather event, the dust storm that rises up and makes the sky the same red of the ground. In Coober Pedy, the sky goes all the way to the ground, which is red and flat except for the gouged mine-pits. The outback is beautiful but it terrifies me. I will never publish a novel about a prodigal son returning to Mudgee under dubious compunction, only to fall in love with the quirky arborist’s daughter whilst smoking a spliff in a tree house at sunset. When I stare out over the canyon, my inner ear picks up no ambient string refrains. When writing fiction, I don’t open with the sunset. I find it very hard to write about Australia.
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