Globalisation and Home Values in New Australian Cinema Journal article by Rochelle Siemienowicz; Journal of Australian Studies, 1999

The history of Australian national cinema is one of visually claiming the nation as our own, of depicting the history, the landscape and the people in such a way as to take possession of them; of allowing a sense of being at home in a place, where there is ambivalence about our right to feel at home. As filmmaker and writer Ross Gibson has argued, `non-Aboriginal Australia is a young society, under-endowed with myths of "belonging"'. The persistent attempt to possess our geographical space and to tell our own stories reveals a profound sense of unease with the idea of Australia as home, whether this be in the depiction of a harsh and alien natural beauty (for example, the weirdly unknowable landscape of Peter Weir's 1975 Picnic at Hanging Rock) or through the narrative use of soul-numbingly bleak and isolating urban social environments, like that seen in Romper Stomper (Geoffrey Wright, 1992). Despite such diverse settings and stories, our cinematic narratives persistently revisit the physical and spiritual dimensions of these themes of displacement, alienation and homelessness.