From colonial outsider to postcolonial insider: some screen adaptations from Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa

This paper examines the ways that screen adaptations of novels in the cinema of Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa have contributed to new versions of national identity by redeploying and redefining images of the colonial past that were previously represented in oral and literary formats. By reinforcing and critiquing the dominant narrative motifs of the Lost Child in Australia and the Man Alone in New Zealand, often by reinterpreting them from more recent and global perspectives, screen adaptations of novels help reconstruct the national imaginary in relation to the postcolonial and global contemporary. Films examined include Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs (1977), and Brad McGann’s In My Father’s Den (2004). Each, in different ways, rearticulates cultural constructions of male protagonists to show new dimensions of heroism in the national imaginary.