red dog analysis essay

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RED DOG: The Pilbara Wanderer

This article seeks to provide an overview and analysis of the 2011 Australian film, Red Dog as a popular cultural product from Western Australia. Set in a working class mining community in the 1970s, I argue that it provides a new outback legend in the form of Red Dog. This article stems from a review of Red Dog as Film of the Year written for the forthcoming Directory of World Cinema: Australian and New Zealand Second Edition from Intellect Books.

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Peta Mitchell

Although the American West is well theorised as a space that is central to narratives of national identity, the place of the West in Australian fiction has received little scholarly attention. Where the dominant narrative trajectory in road movies and the American Western genre moves inexorably from the East Coast toward the shifting western frontier, here we demonstrate that different patterns and pathways of mobility, carrying a different cultural and economic logic, are evident in Western Australian narratives. In this paper, we contextualise mobility in the Australian West in relation to the travels of Red Dog, a beloved 'Red Cloud' Kelpie-cross who was adopted by the mining community of Australia's Pilbara region in the early 1970s. Red Dog's peripatetic life has inspired a commemorative bronze statue, three books, and a highly successful Australian film whose production relied upon funding from the multinational mining giant Rio Tinto Group. We track Red Dog through the stories that map his movements, interpreting these narratives in terms of Tim Cresswell and Deborah Dixon's theories of mobility and identity. Drawing also on perspectives from cultural economic geography, we examine how economic power works its way through the production of cultural texts and we seek to understand the relationship between geographical knowledge and socioeconomic development. Representations of Red Dog's travels, we argue, reveal patterns of movement in and throughout Western Australia, highlighting the complex network of economic, geographical, and cultural factors that shape mobility in Australia's largest, richest, and least densely populated state.

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The Tracker and Red Hill are cinematic re-interpretations of Australia's colonial past, which they characterise by a sense of postcolonial longing and an expectation of intimacy. Both films are portals through which arguments about historical truth, subjective memory and contemporary realities are explored and tested. In this article I argue that both these two films create the idea that the historical colonial space was a constant interplay of violence and beauty, and of hatred and friendship. As black and white characters negotiate their way in and around these seemingly polemical positions, viewers are also challenged to do the same.

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Helen Grace

Anthony Lambert

Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television

Chelsea Barnett

The dominant narrative in Australian film historiography declares that the postwar period is unworthy of scholarly attention, particularly in contrast to the ‘renaissance’ of the 1970s. For historians working on twentieth-century Australian film production, the postwar years were a time in which very few Australian-authored films were made and released, and very few Australian people bothered to see them. This article intervenes into this narrative, and argues that the postwar era was a time of cinematic activity and audience engagement. It contends that the 1970s notion of ‘cultural nationalism’ has anachronistically shaped the majority of Australian film historiography, and instead argues for a new approach to Australian postwar cinema shaped by the new cultural history emphasis on historical specificity.

Annette Hamilton

National cinemas are generally contrasted with a universal cinema which refers largely to US/Hollywood films. National identities are reflected on film through the use of distinctive symbols and narratives which convey hegemonic meanings underpinning a sense of collectivity and mutual recognition. The national cinema approach is useful in some ways, but in the case of Australia fails to grasp the complex interplay of narratives and myths which construct Australia in the broader historical context (cf O’Regan 2002). Australian films brim with complex meditations on the question of “Australianness”, rarely celebratory, more often full of ambivalence, silences, doubt, irony, parody and the embrace of failure. This paper explores the concept of national identity in Australian cinema, expanding on themes established in my earlier paper (1991) Aborigines, Asians and the national imaginary. Australian Cultural History, 9, pps. 14-35.

Lindsay Hallam

The Australian outback is a place of isolation. Harsh and uninviting, it seems to hold with in it the ghosts of past crimes and a will to destroy anyone who dare try to colonise and contain it. Yet, for the past two hundred years many hav e sought to dominate this land and in Australian horror cinema the land is beginning to take its revenge. ‘Ozploitation’ films such as Wake i n Fright (1971) , Long Weekend (1978) , Roadg ames (1981) , Razorback (1984), Fair Game (1986), and Dark Age (1987), as well as post - 2000 horror films such as Black Water (2007), Rogue (2007) , and Dying Breed (2008), often have characters batt ling against the unforgiving environment and its inhabitants . In retaliation against the exploitation and abuse perpetrated by these white settlers, these films present nature as a presence that s eeks to avenge and punish past wrongs. T hrough the analysis of several key fi lms from Oz ploitation past and present, this article will investigate how these films subve...

Critical Arts

Constantine E Verevis

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