Platform Papers > Issue 05: Shooting Though

Shooting Through: Australian Film and the Brain Drain

by Storry Walton

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Paperback. $12.95 rrp. Publication July 2005

ISBN 097573-011-8

Australia’s expatriate filmmakers are an investment waiting to be realised, writes Storry Walton in a wide-ranging examination of the Australian feature film industry, They leave because they need to. Here is ‘not an environment conducive to making a decent living. It is easy to conclude that the Australian cinema is borne along by faith and oily rags’.

Now these expatriates could change all that. ‘Are we incapable of an angry cinema, an ecstatic cinema, a cinema of revelation, of political and social outrage, of the heroic and the epic?’ He argues cogently for a government-funded expatriate-return strategy to benefit both the filmmaker and the home industry. A time-out strategy to ‘turn the notion of the homeland upside down, so that it is no longer regarded as a place of the past but as a place of renewal. With this extra strength, he says, we could do some brave things.

Walton praises government’s three-tier funding structure for film development and sees a dynamic future in the Film Finance Corporation’s radical new policy of quality evaluation. Modestly-funded movies with character and depth. And filmmakers endorse him. ‘From the outside, with clear vision, I could see how many good things there were—good writers, good actors, top crews, tremendous government support,’ says Gillian Armstrong. Phillip Noyce believes that Australia is the best place in the world to secure script development support. ‘I never had so much joy as I had with Rabbit-Proof Fence. ‘The smaller the budget, the more it releases you to take risks.' 

Storry Walton, script writer and filmmaker, was an early producer of arts programs for ABC-TV, made documentaries for the BBC-TV and was director of the precursor to the Australian Film, TV and Radio School. He has wide connections in the arts and is currently a visiting teacher in the School of Visual and Performing Arts at Charles Sturt University.

This issue also includes responses to Robyn Archer.

Platform Papers invites considered responses to Storry Waltonr's argument for publication in the October edition.