...Hundreds thousands citizens took to the streets demonstrating against unilateral action by Australia alongside U.S. forces. The Australian government accused the nation's public broadcaster, the ABC, with concerted and systemic bias against America in its news reportage during the war. The responsible Minister, Senator Richard Alston, launched an inquiry, publicly threatening the organization with punitive funding cuts (see Simper). But this controversy is nothing new as even a cursory glance at Australia's history over such matters will reveal (see Bartlett; Bell and Bell; Churchyard). Regardless of the current government's geopolitical allegiance and articulations of acting in Australia's "national interest," even prior to World War II the "special relationship" with America has never been far from scrutiny and criticism, if not rancorous dissention (see Barclay; Bell; Esthus; Levi).

More pointedly, several sceptics in the Australian media--many, surprisingly, from Rupert Murdoch's newspapers--have noted the synchronicity of events surrounding Australia's eagerness to commit troops to the U.S.-led "coalition of the willing" alongside simultaneous discussions with American representatives negotiating a bilateral trade agreement between the two nations (see Kelly; Shanahan). (1) At a postwar barbeque on his Texan ranch, while snubbing an existing commitment to meet the Canadian Prime Minister, U.S. President George W. Bush promised visiting Australian Prime Minister John Howard (whom he called a "man of steel") the trade agreement would be in place by Christmas. Bush spun this strategic quid pro quo in the following terms, "Australia came to America's aid in our time of need and we won't forget that." (2) Indeed, conservative Australian leader John Howard was in Washington staying about a mile away from the Pentagon when a United Airlines flight ploughed into the building on September 11, 2001 a few minutes after two earlier planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York. The experience was sobering. Within hours, Howard had unilaterally invoked the trilateral ANZUS security treaty, immediately offering military and political support.

The formal enactment of this defence pact was unprecedented. It was crafted in the early 1950s at the height of Western anticommunism and mutually committed American, Australian and New Zealand governments to assist each other in any regional conflict (see Holdich). Despite the superpower antagonisms of the cold war and Australia joining U.S. forces in the Korean war, Vietnam (for over a decade), the first Gulf War and several international peace-keeping missions, ANZUS had never formally been pressed into geopolitical service across its five decade long history. Part of the ANZUS raison d'etre was to formalise a range of military and intelligence operations already in existence across the three nations, many of which were inherited from postcolonial British agreements during the war.

So how have Australian filmmakers portrayed these associations and events over the years? This article examines a small, but significant, cluster of Australian feature drama films that entertain images of a U.S. military presence during and immediately after World War II (Attack Force Z [1982], Rebel [1985], Death of a Soldier [1986], Blood Oath [1990], beDevil [1993] and Paradise Road [1993]). While few in number these films are representative of approximately one fifth of all Australian feature dramas (200 plus) that have, to varying degrees, depicted America and Americans. Collectively, this taxonomy reflects a substantial body of Australian national cinema that has yet to receive the systematic analysis that the subject demands. (3) Such an exploration is clearly outside the scope of this article, but some broad allusions to the dominant trends and themes will illustrate the rich cultural vein available for analysis.

Key thematic associations within and outside of these military engagements suggest enduring patterns in representation and characterization of Americans. The sociological and historical literature suggests some fascinating observations (see Aitchison; Harper; Mosler and Catley; White) which have yet to be applied to textual readings of Australian features. Many of these stereotypes and myths have been debunked in such scholarship, yet their endurance and potential ongoing influence needs to be tested against nearly a century of cultural production (cinema), most of it state subsidized, in order to chart the evolution of popular perceptions of Australian-American relations.

Generally, the problematics of America and Americans vis-a-vis Australian cinema have been couched in terms of political economy or government subvention to support a domestic "second cinema" industry (see Dermody and Jacka), where the monolithic dominance of Hollywood is paradoxically something to aspire to yet simultaneously vilify (see Hodson; Lawson). The origins of this culturally specific admiration and hostility are ambiguous and vague, but scholars rarely consider evidence of such within the textuality of the cinema itself and as being objects worthy of investigation. Traditionally cultural historians who specialize in Australian cinema, (e.g. Bertrand and Collins; Shirley and Adams), draw from structural, economic and policy perspectives that have governed the emerging film industries at home and in comparison with the U.S. Unquestionably, these are important social indicators of evolution and contestation.

However, this article complements such studies by providing close readings of the productions themselves, rather than reliance upon aggregate generalizations across specific periods. The methodology foregrounds one dominant node of Australian national popular culture--the cinema feature film--for evidence of shifting representations of Americans as symbolic indicators of our trans-Pacific alliance. For instance, despite a commonly held view, and one often repeated in recent media commentary and letters to the editor--that the U.S. was instrumental in "saving" Australia from Japanese invasion and subjugation during World War Two (see Bell; Edwards)--there is an inherent antipathy towards our "cousins" across the ocean. As Dennis Phillips suggests:

Engagements such as the Coral Sea battle helped give rise to the myth that the United States 'saved' Australia in its hour of need. While there is no doubt that the American presence lifted Australian spirits and the common effort contributed to victory in the Pacific, we now know that the Japanese had rejected as impractical any plan to invade and occupy Australia.... Much of the ambivalence that exists today in Australian attitudes toward the United States can be traced to Australia's mixed reaction to the G.I. invasion during World War II. More than one digger confessed that, while he was relieved to have United States military power on his side, he also felt that hatred of the enemy was the only thing Australians and Americans had in common. (14) (4)

Hence this article will seek to provide a new pathway towards understanding "Australianness" via the frequent projection of a proximate but alien "other"--Americans--in order to assess and contemplate Australia's own national characteristics and priorities. The works of Homi K. Bhabha and Edward Said are important to this methodology. Both Bhabha and Said suggest that a key component of maintaining cultural hegemony is the representation and perpetuation of the binary "other" to connote, contain and symbolize discursively that which the dominant social order is not. The "other" enables the mainstream social and cultural order to negotiate and establish its own (national) identity. Importantly, such processes can involve, particularly in relation to colonial and post-colonial representation, "mimicry" and "hybridization" (see Ashcroft and Ahluwalia; Bhabba; Edwards; Said). In...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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