South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia Book by Ross Gibson; Indiana University Press, 1992

The landscape cinema has asserted both Australia's difference from the rest of the world and also the nation's singularity of constitution within its own boundaries. That is to say there has been an attempt to portray "us" as one people growing to maturity and confidence "together." Films such as Sunday Too Far Away , Picnic at Hanging Rock , The Man From Snowy River , or We of the Never Never have said, Here is the key to our identity.... Here are the myths that we need. They have been presented as generically Australian.

Realism has been the orthodoxy, therefore. The paradox is that the mythic argument of so many of the landscape films cannot logically be conducted through the techniques of realist representation. Take examples as wide-ranging as Sunday Too Far Away , Gallipoli , Crocodile Dundee , Picnic at Hanging Rock , and even Rikky and Pete with its deliberate emphasis on the interest (distressingly in excess of the narrative at most times) that we are meant to invest in the settings the protagonists trundle through.

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