In memory of Ted Kotcheff (1931-2025)

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a bonded teacher working in the remote township of Tiboonda. At the start of the Christmas holidays, he arrives in the outback mining town of Bundanyabba, only intending to stay one night before taking the flight to Sydney to meet his girlfriend. But once in “The Yabba” he is drawn into a gambling game, tempted to win just enough to buy him out of teaching – and loses everything. So begins a five-day period of boozing, fighting and discovering a whole dark side to himself that he never knew was there…

Wake in Fright’s narrative performs a circle, beginning and ending with a shot of the lonely railway station at Tiboonda, a small shelter beside a single track leading off in a straight line through the red desert, from horizon to horizon. By the end of the film John has learned something about himself, something he might not have wanted to know, but the film implies he has no way out. Wake in Fright (originally released outside Australia as Outback) stands near the start of the revival of the Australian film industry which bloomed in the 1970s. Once almost lost, in the last decade and a half Wake in Fright has found its rightful place as one of the classic films made in the country. It’s Australian to the core, and few films have painted such an unsparing picture of its beer-swilling, gambling, kangaroo-hunting culture, a society where not to have a drink with someone is unacceptable. It’s a very white and male society: women are sidelined and it’s telling that almost the only time we see an Aboriginal Australian he’s sitting on his own in a train. (There are a few other brown faces to be seen: one of the Tiboonda schoolgirls at the start, a single shot of the wife of Tiboonda hotel owner and barman Charlie (John Meillon), at least one observer of the two-up game, a man standing behind Pig Eyes (Robert McDarra, billed here as Bob McDarra) as Grant negotiates a lift. However, none of these have any lines to deliver, though the man of the train does sing to himself.) It was a picture of themselves that was just too unsparing to be palatable to many Australians at the time.

Kenneth Cook published Wake in Fright in 1961. It was his first novel, and a short one, and it’s the best-known of the seventeen he published. He died of a heart attack in 1987, aged fifty-seven. Two others of his novels were also filmed. Stockade, for which Cook wrote the script, was a musical version of the Eureka Stockade story which sunk without trace. Also from 1971, it was also lost for many years but has since been found. Wanted Dead, published under the pseudonym Alan Hale,became a TV movie, The Bushranger, in 1976. Cook’s novel was originally to be filmed by Joseph Losey with Dirk Bogarde in the lead, which would have been interesting but the money couldn’t be raised. I suspect that due to prevailing censorship of the time, any such film made then would have been very different, though the eventual film shared its screenwriter, in the shape of Jamaican Evan Jones, who had not set foot in Australia at that time. Wake in Fright follows its source novel closely, though there are some differences. Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence) is introduced earlier than he is in the novel, and his appearance in the final scene is new to the film. In the novel it’s made clear that John is a virgin, which is hinted at in the film but not specified. There’s also a hint that Robyn, his Sydney girlfriend, who we see on beach in brief flashbacks, may actually be imaginary, but in the film she exists at least to the point where John has photographs of her – though you wonder how convinced Janette (Sylvia Kay) is when she sees the one he keeps in his wallet. (In the 2018 miniseries, of which more below, Robyn has an entire backstory.) One necessary updating is that the characters spend pounds in the novel and dollars in the film, Australian currency having changed in 1966. But little had changed in ten years to make the story a period piece.

Films had been made in Australia since silent days. In fact, the first-ever feature (The Story of the Kelly Gang from 1906, originally an hour long but of which only fragments survive) was Australian. Local films were produced up until the mid 1950s, but after that most filmmaking on the continent was in the form of overseas productions using Australia’s landscapes as exotic locations. The local cinematic impulse was fed by tiny-budget films shot mainly in Melbourne and Sydney, shown in cooperatives and the like but not given commercial releases. Jump forward to 1966, and the domestic success of Michael Powell’s They're a Weird Mob, which attracted much attention even when it was in production, renewed calls for a local film industry. Tim Burstall’s 2000 Weeks (1969) is often regarded as the real start of the Australian film revival, and was the first local production to be given a cinema release in over ten years. But far higher-profile was an American-Australian coproduction, directed by a Canadian director then working in England, Ted Kotcheff:  Wake in Fright, with three British actors in lead roles (Donald Pleasence, Gary Bond and Sylvia Kay, who was married to Kotcheff at the time). This originated with an Australian company, NLT Productions, founded in 1961 and mainly a maker of television series.  NLT joined forces with an American company, Group W Films, an offshoot of Westinghouse Broadcasting, who had been making films for cinema release since 1967. The two companies made an agreement to make ten films over five years. Their first co-production was Squeeze a Flower (1970), a comedy starring Weird Mob star Walter Chiari, which did not set the world alight, critically or commercially. Their second, and as it turned out their final, co-production was Wake in Fright.

William Theodore Kotcheff was born in Toronto, the child of Bulgarian migrants. He joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation at twenty-four. He left for England in 1958 and was soon directing plays for Armchair Theatre, made by ABC (then the ITV franchise holder for the London region at weekends). Often billed early in his career as W.T. Kotcheff, William Kotcheff or William T. Kotcheff, he rapidly gained a reputation as a director of television drama, at that time almost all transmitted live. One notable production was Underground (30 November 1958, not surviving in the archive), when actor Gareth Jones died of a heart attack mid-broadcast and Kotcheff and the rest of the cast had to improvise to get the play finished. His first cinema film was Tiara Tahiti (1962) and he continued to work in both media (and the stage). Wake in Fright was his fourth feature film. His third had been Two Gentlemen Sharing, in 1969, which had been written by Evan Jones. Kotcheff regarded it as the best film he made in Britain, but it was commercially unsuccessful to the point that it failed to achieve a UK cinema release. Likely Kotcheff’s first work after he completed Wake in Fright was the award-winning Play for Today, Edna, The Inebriate Woman.

If Powell’s film used Australian stereotypes as a vehicle for comedy, Wake in Fright is an altogether darker version, particularly on the perennial theme of mateship, of bonding with fellow men and not with women. John’s preference for having a solo conversation with Janette is commented on, even if it is explained away by his being a schoolteacher, a job often associated with women. This is a world where women are incidental: a barmaid, the bored receptionist of his hotel. Janette is sad-eyed, her promiscuity causes her to be dismissed by the men as a slag. Before the film’s production and after its release there were concerns that the Outback lifestyle shown here would be seen as an unflattering reflection on Australia’s image overseas. Similar concerns were raised over the ocker comedies which began the 1970s revival in earnest, commercially if not critically, such as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Alvin Purple. Masculinity in crisis was not a current term in 1968, but it’s prevalent in this film. It emphasises the homoerotic aspects of all of this: in the tussle which ends with an implied sexual encounter, a mock throat-cutting gesture mirrors a real one in the kangaroo hunt.

The first choices to play John Grant were Peter McEnery and Michael York, who both declined. (York saw the film and told Kotcheff more than once that turning down the role was a lifelong regret.) So the role went to Gary Bond, who is not playing an Englishman but an Australian, using the type of “high” accent which is almost English. It was his third and final film, and only big-screen lead, following smaller parts in Zulu and Anne of the Thousand Days. All his subsequent IMDB credits are on British television and he also acted widely on stage. He died of AIDS in 1995, aged just fifty-five. Bond is very good in his role, but the acting honours go to the rest of the cast. Top-billed Donald Pleasence shows that he spent too much time being typecast as icy bastards, as he excels as the doctor both repelled and enticed by the Yabba lifestyle, and resolving the contradiction with the bottle. He also manages a very convincing Australian accent. Chips Rafferty is chilling in a smaller role as local cop Jock Crawford, using his imposing stature (6’5”) to good effect, and Jack Thompson makes a strong impression. Wake in Fright was Rafferty's final film as he died of a heart attack a few weeks after completing shooting. This was Thompson's first to be released*. In a sense this film marks a changing of the guard, from one generation’s icon of Australian masculinity on screen to the next’s.

Wake in Fright was made at a time when film censorship was breaking down. You can sense the makers of this film taking advantage of what they could do, and steering clear of what they couldn’t. So we have some nudity (partial breast exposure and full male nudity from behind and also from the front, a year after Medium Cool and Women in Love – though Bond's modesty was preserved by his wearing underpants in the Outback version (see below), moderate violence (fisticuffs), implied homosexual assault but none of the strong language you suspect these characters would have used. We also get a bloody kangaroo hunt in the latter stages, which is not for the squeamish. Anthony Buckley’s editing is first-rate, integrating real hunt footage (involving licensed hunters) very convincingly with the actors. As a notice before the end credits states, this is why the film does not breach the animal cruelty laws of the UK or other countries.

The film takes a little while to build momentum, but once it has, Kotcheff keeps the tension high. His direction shows a few markers of its time, such as the occasionally jagged editing – particularly the flashbacks of Robyn, emerging bikini-clad from the sea. This style – much influenced by directors like Alain Resnais, was very much in the air in the late 60s, and became particularly associated with the director of another major production made in Australia, namely Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, shot a little earlier, from August to December 1969. Kotcheff and Buckley’s use of fades to black in the final scenes is also very effective. Brian West’s photography is excellent, in that orange-toned colour prevalent at the time. There are intentionally very few cool hues in this film: just warm and hot ones, depicting a land of incessant heat and dust, from the opening 360-degree pan onwards. The most prominent blue is that of the sky, but it’s a harsh blue and not a comforting one.

Wake in Fright was critically acclaimed, and played the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. It was released in Australia on 9 October 1971 but was not a box-office success, except in France. No doubt the film was too bleak, downbeat and disturbing for mass acceptance. But the film’s importance was in showing that a film of world stature could be made in Australia. Although many of the key personnel on both sides of the camera were from overseas, much of the cast and crew were local, and the film acted as a showcase for their talent. At least three of the supporting cast – a surprisingly young-looking John Meillon, Robert McDarra (whose character name “Pig Eyes” comes from the novel but isn’t explained in the film) and Carlo Manchini – also appear in Walkabout. The film was released, as Outback, in the UK on 29 October 1971. That was three weeks after Walkabout, and if you had been in London and were over eighteen, you could have walked to one film’s main venue to the other (the Pavilion in Piccadilly Circus to the Rialto in Coventry Street, respectively) in a couple of minutes.

The story of Wake in Fright has a coda. The film had television screenings in Australia, but not in the UK. The latest UK cinema showing I have been able to trace was on 9 November 1988, as part of the then National Film Theatre’s five-month Australian retrospective in the country’s bicentennial year. Wake in Fright did receive a pre-Video Recordings Act video release in 1983, in its Outback version, though that vanished when the VRA was enforced and all films had to be submitted to the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC). By the turn of the twenty-first century, surviving 35mm and 16mm prints of the film (under either title) were in a poor state, and the original negative could no longer be located. Anthony Buckley set himself the task of hunting down the negative before this film was forever lost – and it was eventually found in 2004 in the US just as it was about to be destroyed. The film was digitally restored and became only the second film to be officially shown twice at Cannes (the other being L’Avventura), when it was reshown as a Cannes Classic in 2009.

Four and a half decades after their initial releases, many of the classics of the Australian Film Revival were ripe for remaking, either as cinema features or for television. In 2017, it was the turn of Wake in Fright, as a two-part, three-hour miniseries, updated to the present day, written by Stephen M. Irwin and directed by Kriv Stenders. If nothing else, this shows that the story of Wake in Fright in significant ways is anything but timeless, though no doubt the attitudes on display are still with us. The novel and the film capture a particular place and moment. The miniseries didn’t manage to recapture the core of the story in a modern setting. Some updatings were to be expected, such as the presence of mobile phones, social media and the Internet. There were more roles for women, including some in positions of authority, and for Aboriginal characters. John drives instead of taking a train. But you can quickly hear the gears shriek as the series contrives to strand its protagonist in The Yabba. On the surface, the town (novel and film version) is friendly on the surface, and no one sees anything wrong with a life where men work during the day and drink and gamble by night, even going kangaroo-shooting (pig-shooting in this version). John Grant (here played by Sean Keenan) unravels when he discovers the darkness within himself. However, John (miniseries version) doesn’t do this. He’s actively under threat, particularly from local drug dealers. John is loaned some money when he loses all of his, and it’s wanted back with increasing interest. So John’s actions in the film don’t come from within: he’s acting under duress. There are some interesting things about the miniseries, such as David Wenham as Jock Crawford (though he doesn’t have Chips Rafferty’s edge or imposing size) and Alex Dimitriades’ gonzo take on Doc Tydon. However this Wake in Fright was misconceived from start to finish. Stick with the film, and the novel.

Ted Kotcheff died on 10 April 2025, three days after his ninety-fourth birthday.

Wake in Fright is released as a UHD and Blu-ray dual-format set by Umbrella Entertainment. Both discs are encoded for all regions. On its original release in Australia, the film carried the old SOA (Suitable Only for Adults) rating. Since 2009, and on this release, it has an M rating (advisory, particularly for the under-fifteens), for “violence and mature themes”. In the UK, it had an X certificate (over-eighteens only) without cuts in 1971 under the title Outback. When it was reissued in 2013, following its rediscovery and restoration, it was given an 18, solely for the kangaroo-hunt sequence. This does seem a little harsh, especially as Walkabout has some admittedly briefer hunting scenes, with at least one shot that’s much more graphically bloody than anything in Wake in Fright, and that film was a AA (fourteen and over) originally and is now a 12. Admittedly in that case a character we are meant to sympathise with wasn’t among those doing the hunting. Sunstruck has an Australian G rating, the equivalent of a BBFC U. This is what it had in British cinemas in 1972, but more recently it was given a PG certificate on DVD.

The UHD disc contains the film with the two commentaries and a 4K restoration trailer. The Blu-ray has these other than the restoration trailer plus all the other extras, including an entire second feature film (Sunstruck), total running time for everything around eleven and a half hours. There are three iterations of this release available, and this review will be of the middle one, with two hardbound books, plus an A3 poster, a beer mat and eight art cards. The poster is double-sided: the design for the 4K restoration on one side and an original under the title Outback on the other – presumably British, as the title is followed by an X certificate. There is a discs-only release and a larger one which includes a custom-designed T-shirt, a two-up set and a beer glass with coaster. The screengrabs in this review are from the Blu-ray. A comparison of the opening shot from this and the Masters of Cinema Blu-ray release follows.

2014 Eureka Masters of Cinema Blu-ray (above) and 2025 Umbrella Entertainment Blu-ray (below)

The film was shot in 35mm Eastmancolour and the transfer, based on the 2024 4K restoration, is in the intended ratio of 1.85:1. If you had only seen the film in high-definition before from its 2009 restoration (for me, the basis of my viewings of a DCP in the cinema and the 2019 Masters of Cinema release from Eureka), then this new rendition – and I’m judging it from the Blu-ray disc, not being UHD-enabled – will be a revelation. Those intentionally hot colours – yellows, reds, oranges, burnt siennas – show up more, and more importantly the noticeable degraining of the original is no longer present. I didn’t, and very likely won’t, get to see Wake in Fright in a 35mm print in any state of repair, but I’ve no doubt as good as it’s likely to get, particularly bearing in Anthony Buckley’s comments about the greater detail available in the original restoration, let alone this one, compared to 1970 film prints which would have been three generations (interpositive, internegative, positive) away from the original negatives.

Wake in Fright was released in cinemas with a mono soundtrack, rendered here as DTS-HD MA 2.0. The mix is a professional job of work, with dialogue, music and sound effects balanced as they should be. English subtitles, in US English, are available for the hard-of-hearing. I did pick up a couple of typos: “whiskey and cider” for “whisky and soda”  at 82 minutes and “eating dust” for “in heat and dust” (95 minutes).

Commentary by Peter Galvin
It’s not unheard of for an extras-laden disc release to have multiple commentaries, sometimes as many as five. Whether this largesse is always merited is another matter, but there’s a case for a track from one or more of the people who made the film balanced by one by a critic, scholar, historian or other knowledgeable person not associated with the film. And so it is with Umbrella’s release. This newly-recorded track is by Peter Galvin, writer of A Long Way from Anywhere: The Story of Wake in Fright, a book forthcoming as I write this. This is a scene-specific commentary, but packed with detail as it covers the film’s production, the careers of the people involved (many of whom Galvin has interviewed). He clarifies some points left implicit in the film (such as the procedure of Grant’s bonded teacher job, the scene in the bar with the Returned Services League). There’s plenty about the film’s reception in Australia in worldwide, with it seems residents of Broken Hill – where much of the film was shot – rather taking it personally, and anecdotes on the production. Donald Pleasence, for example, rejected the suit the wardrobe team gave him to wear and so bought one of the grottiest he could find in a Sydney shop. Galvin does point out some things I hadn’t caught on (so far) five viewings of the film, such as the fact that the station clock at Tiboonda as Grant waits for the train has no hands – something that contributes to the fever-dream feel of the film, which is not the work of strict realism some might think it is. An excellent commentary, which Galvin dedicates to Anthony Buckley, without whom we wouldn’t be watching this film at all nowadays, certainly not in the 4K restoration on this disc.

Commentary by Ted Kotcheff and Anthony Buckley
This commentary is from 2009, a few months after the film’s reshowing at Cannes, and features Ted Kotcheff and Anthony Buckley. Kotcheff says the most, and especially tells us what's happening on screen rather too much. It’s a while before Buckley says his first words, and at first adds his contributions in between Kotcheff’s so there’s no interaction between the two until some way in. Kotcheff also points out some intended symbolism, such as the recurrent image of a light shining in John's face. He also talks about his experiences in Broken Hill and how much the fictional Bundanyabba resembled it: the very male culture with men outnumbering women three to one (with no brothels, though) and among the women a rate of suicide five times higher than the national average. Buckley tends to act as feed for Kotcheff's anecdotes, especially the one about the man sitting behind him and making appreciative noises throughout the 1971 Cannes screening – a young director called Martin Scorsese. He also corrects some occasional memory slips from Kotcheff, though not the one where he says there are only three women in the film. (There are four credited.) Buckley talks about the digital restoration (the original one) which enables us to see details which didn’t show up in 1971 on the original photochemically-processed cinema prints: the patterns on walls and carpets and on Janette’s blouse, for example. Donald Pleasence’s opening scene was a difficult one to edit, given that the hand he was holding his beer can kept changing. While some of this commentary is now out of date, it’s still good to have it here, especially because it features two people who made the film, one of whom is no longer with us.

Return to the ’Yabba (49:46)
Andrew Mercado takes us to Broken Hill and a tour of the locations of the film, many of them still recognisable, others not and at least one not able to be precisely traced. It’s noticeable that some of the places which were red desert in 1970 are now overgrown, particularly Horse Lake (somewhere with no water nor horses, so named by someone with a sense of humour), which is the site of the Tiboonda railway track in the opening and closing scenes. Mercado saw the film first on television as a child – around 1974 on Channel 0 Brisbane, on a black and white set as Australia didn’t start colour broadcasting until the following year. If you want to do your own walking tour, each location is captioned for you with its latitude and longitude. Broken Hill has about three hundred days of sunshine per year and a very dry climate, which makes it attractive to filmmakers. Other films shot there include Mad Max 2, Razorback and The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. We have digressions into those films along the way, for example a visit to the Mad Max 2 museum in nearby Silverton. One interviewee is local actress June Marie Bennett, who has a memorable scene in Priscilla, and talks about the first showing of Wake in Fright in Broken Hill on 17 February 1972, two years after shooting. She says she was sitting waiting for something to happen other than drinking scenes. Clearly she wasn’t alone, as walkouts soon happened.

“Yer Mad, Ya Bastard!”: Interview with Ted Kotcheff (12:57)
Recorded in 2008 for Mark Hartley’s documentary Not Quite Hollywood, at a time when the film’s rediscovery was still unknown. At the start there is a spoiler warning for a film which virtually no one at the time was able to see. Kotcheff quotes D.H. Lawrence’s feeling when writing his novel Kangaroo (published 1923, the 1986 film version being directed by Tim Burstall and written by Evan Jones) that the Outback was a vast landscape looking back at you. Inevitably, as Kotcheff makes several appearances on this disc, there are repetitions of anecdotes, but they’re still good value.

Q&A with Ted Kotcheff (45:51)
The same applies to this, recorded at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2009, not the only item on this disc recorded in the initial flush after the announcement of the film’s rediscovery and its showing at Cannes. Kotcheff is interviewed by Martin Knelman, who tells him that he reviewed Wake in Fright on its original release and had to urge his readers to see it immediately as it was only to play for one more day. While there are stories told again, there are some that are new here. When Kotcheff started out in Canadian broadcasting, he was known as Bill Kotcheff but it was pointed out that “Bill” would apply to several men at any given time on a set, so he took his middle name and became Ted from that point on. There’s more about his early career as television being new to Canada meant that his lack of experience was not a demerit as no one else had any experience either. His English degree meant he became a script editor. Then he moved to England and worked with fellow Canadian Sydney Newman at ATV.

A Take in Fright: Interview with Brian West (20:42)
This interview is newly recorded for this release. West first worked with Kotcheff as the camera operator on Life at the Top, before becoming cinematographer on Wake in Fright. (He doesn’t mention it, but he was also DP on Squeeze a Flower, and his sojourn in Australia continued with Sunstruck, of which more below.) He found Broken Hill the best place to film, though it was sometimes a scary place. The clapper loader chatted up a local girl and was beaten up for it. As there was little filmmaking activity in the country at the time, the production commandeered the only two brute arcs in Australia. He had to use the excuse of flat batteries to stop shooting during the kangaroo hunt as he couldn’t stand it any more. His regret was that he was never able to capture the light caused by nickel dust blown by wind off the mines.

Not Quite Hollywood interview with Jack Thompson (6:50)
Also an interview from 2008 for Not Quite Hollywood. Thompson is quite insistent that Wake in Fright is an Australian film, from most of the cast and crew other than the principals. As with Walkabout, he commends the film for its outsider’s perspective on his country and vouches for the accuracy of the kangaroo hunt, having been on one himself when working at a sheep station in his teens.

The Cinema’s Great Squeaky Bald Git (14:51)
Donald Pleasence once said that he rarely watched his own films, as he imagined a handsome movie star and instead saw a squeaky bald git. As Kim Newman relates in this newly recorded piece, he had a prolific career on television on both sides of the Atlantic and on stage as well as in the cinema, and would walk through major films and give his all on others hardly to be reckoned with such as 1974’s Frankenstein’s Great Aunt Tillie. Sometimes he even had lead roles, originating the title part of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker on stage and playing it again on film, though in that case Alan Bates had top billing. There are plenty of film clips and stills along the way in this whistlestop tour of Pleasence’s life and career.

The Filmmaker and the Filmbuff (20:07)
The latter is Paul Harris, longtime host of Film Buffs Forecast, originally a radio show and now a podcast. The former is Philippe Mora, and in 2023 the two men sat down in an office and chatted about Wake in Fright. Of several posters on the wall, one for the film itself is just behind Mora. He found the film an interesting watch when almost everything else in Australian cinemas came from the USA or UK. Kotcheff is called a journeyman, though in a good way, due to his work in multiple genres, and this is a warm if not especially in-depth appreciation of the film he made in Australia.

Foreign Visions of Local Stories: A Trailer Reel of Australian Films Helmed by Overseas Filmmakers (38:15)
Thematic trailer reels are a feature of many Umbrella releases, so here we have films shot in Australian by non-Australians. They are in chronological order and separately chaptered so you can jump to a particular trailer if you so wish. The films are: The Overlanders (1946), Bitter Springs (1950), A Town Like Alice (1956), The Siege of Pinchgut (1959), The Sundowners (1960), They’re a Weird Mob (1966), The High Commissioner (1968 aka Nobody Runs Forever), Age of Consent (1969), Walkabout (1971), Sunstruck (1972), Sidecar Racers (1975), The Pyjama Girl Case (1977), The Earthling (1980) and The Coca Cola Kid (1985). More about Sunstruck below, but the trailer misspells its co-star’s name as “John Mellion”. You have to wonder if the credits were dictated over the phone as that’s how his name was pronounced if not spelled. It’s correct in the credits of the film itself, though.

Alternate Scenes from Outback (10:40)
The title change from Wake in Fright to Outback wasn’t the only difference between the Australian and American and British release versions of the film. Some scenes were edited for likely potential censorship concerns (in the USA, though the UK had the same version). For example, the encounter between Grant and Janette stops before she unbuttons her dress, and the two most overtly homoerotic shots in a late montage go missing. In the best-known change, Grant wakes up after losing all his money wearing underpants rather than naked. (In the original version, Gary Bond performs the first male full-frontal nude scene by an adult in a commercially-made Australian film.) Other scenes have audio added: there’s a pub singalong on the soundtrack in the scene where Grant meets Crawford. Another change was a different producers’ notice just before the end credits concerning the kangaroo-hunt scenes. This is all sourced from what looks like a VHS copy, so any hope of having the Outback version on the disc as an alternative to the original version was no doubt a non-starter. The clips are shown without any captions other than an explanatory one at the start, so you’d have to know the film pretty well to be able to spot the differences, and I (with five viewings under my belt, not counting commentary listens) had to go back to the main feature for comparisons.

7.30 Report (6:35)
From 2009 on the ABC – so, unlike the other TV-sourced items, in colour and widescreen – comes an item on the rediscovery and restoration of Wake in Fright, with input from amongst others Jack Thompson, Anthony Buckley and Meg Labrum, Senior Curator of the NFSAA.

Interview with Ted Kotcheff About His Career (130:27)
Paul Harris again, audio-only this time, interviewing Kotcheff in the Sydney offices of the National Film and Sound Archive on, he specifies, 18 September 2009. So this is another item catching Kotcheff and his film after its rediscovery and Cannes reprise. This is billed as a career interview but inevitably Wake in Fright dominates, being discussed for the first 71 minutes and being returned to at the end. Given that this was not made to be included on a disc with other Kotcheff pieces, it’s understandable that most of the stories Kotcheff tells you will have heard elsewhere. However, the part of the chat about the rest of his career will be new to most people, including a detailed account of Underground and how they had to finish the play after Gareth Jones’s sudden death. He also talks about lessons he quickly learned about directing actors on film in his first feature Tiara Tahiti and there is a lot about working with Sylvester Stallone on First Blood, paring the dialogue down so that it was almost a silent film in part. Kirk Douglas was originally to play Trautman, but they parted company due to Douglas’s penchant for rewriting his own dialogue (badly) and appropriating lines from other actors. So he left the production and Richard Crenna took the role. Kotcheff also discusses his rare acting role in Shattered Glass (2003) and his return to television as executive producer on 286 episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, directing seven of them as well. He puts his versatility down to his origins in television, where he could be making a drama one week, a comedy the next, a historical piece the week after.

Interview with John Scott (15:31)
A newly-recorded audio interview with Wake in Fright’s composer, interviewed by Daniel Schweiger. Scott began as a session musician and played on a lot of film scores composed by the likes of Malcolm Arnold, Henry Mancini and John Barry, for whom he was the regular saxophonist. He also contributed to a lot of library music. He began to compose scores in the 1960s, with such films as A Study in Terror (1965) and a brace of Joan Crawfords, Berserk (1967) and Trog (1970). He had not met Ted Kotcheff when he was asked to score Wake in Fright, and wondered if his name came up as he was less expensive than other composers. His score featured an ondes martenot, an electric guitar with a wah pedal (played by someone he doesn’t remember**) and Scott himself on flute. Understandably you won’t hear Rolf Harris’s name mentioned much nowadays, but Scott goes there: he knew him from session days under George Martin’s production and picked his brains for his expertise in Australian music. Harris taught him the wobbleboard and Scott played it on the soundtrack. Ninety-four as of this writing, Scott is still working. This is a very interesting piece, particularly if you have any interest in music for films or otherwise.

Who Needs Art? (5:52)
The item comes from Australian television and is a segment of Who Needs Art? from 1971 on Wake in Fright. Along with behind-the-scenes footage, much of the piece is a discussion on the whys and wherefores of a local film industry.

US TV Spot (0:31)
As it says – its American providence confirmed by the final voiceover saying, “Outback, rated R”. It’s clearly trying to sell the film as much more of an action and shooting piece than it actually is.

Chips Rafferty Obituary by Ken G. Hall (3:27)
Also from Australian television, this piece on Chips Rafferty begins with archival interview footage of the man himself, smoking as he talks, before leading into a tribute by pioneering Australian filmmaker Ken G. Hall, who had worked with Rafferty since the late 1930s.

Stills gallery (5:00)
Self-navigating, featuring stills both black and white and colour and some poster designs.

Sunstruck (91:52)
Made in 1972, Sunstruck is a strange film if not a good one, not dissimilar to Wake in Fright if that film was a family-friendly comedy with Harry Secombe in the Gary Bond role. Not quite from the same producers of Wake in Fright as the menu suggests, this film from 1972 still has a lot of links with it. NLT’s co-founder Bobby Limb does however have an acting role and the films have in common the acting talents of John Meillon, Peter Whittle, Dawn Lake (who was married to Limb), Norman Erskine and John Armstrong. Both films were shot by Brian West, camera-operated by John McLean, edited by Anthony Buckley and Anthony/Tony Tegg was the gaffer for both. Wake in Fright’s focus puller Peter Hannan served as camera operator for the Welsh shoot on Sunstruck. Yes, Wales, as the film starts there with teacher Stanley Evans (Secombe), on the rebound as his intended goes off with an another man, seeing an advertisement for teachers on the other side of the world. He imagines teaching music to and admiring crowd of pupils on a beach, most of them bikini-clad young lovelies. Six minutes in, the credits play over his flight to Australia and he soon finds that the reality in the little township of Kookaburra Springs, New South Wales, with his landlords being Mick and Sal Cassidy (Meillon and Lake), is rather different. His pupils prank him by leaving a snake in his desk and lace his tea with laxative. Stanley founds a choir and meets Shirley Marshall (Maggie Fitzgibbon). This is a very mild and frankly barely funny film, so determinedly (then) U/G-rated to the extent that Stanley gets called a bathplug rather than something else beginning with the same two letters and the only things which are shot are not kangaroos but beer bottles. This was the only cinema feature of director James Gilbert, who spent most of his career in television comedy. Sunstruck sank without trace everywhere it played, and it’s no unsung classic to say the least. Presented on this disc in an aspect ratio of 1.66:1 with mono sound.

Books
That’s books plural as this edition contains two of them, both hardcovers. The first is a reprint of Kenneth Cook’s novel, which will be a short read: 120 pages of text (out of 144 in all) and just over 40,000 words by my estimate. I had read this before – partly in a pub, aptly enough. As well as the novel itself this book contains the same extras from that edition: an introduction, “A Novel of Menace” by Peter Temple, and an afterword, “Wake in Fright – The Movie” by David Stratton.

The second book is much thicker, running to 242 pages. Evan Jones’s screenplay takes up the first 111 of them. It’s dated December 1969, so is pretty close what must have been filmed a few months later, though there’s one crossing-out in it. This is followed by “Lost and Found” by Anthony Buckley, from 2009. This piece also appeared in the booklet for the 2019 Masters of Cinema Blu-ray from Eureka, so the rather abrupt segue from a brief description of the setting up of the production, culminating in the casting of Donald Pleasence, to Buckley’s description of the aftermath and his search for and eventual finding of the film is not an edit for this edition. As a first-hand account of how films can be lost, found again and restored, this is very interesting if maybe a little dry for some.

“50º in the Shade” by Peter Galvin is next. Given that Galvin is significantly featured elsewhere in this release, it’s worth noting that this doesn’t repeat too much of what you might read or hear elsewhere. There is more of the background of NLT and Group W’s previous films, both separately and together, and more about the cultural background and the state of cinema in Australia when Wake in Fright was made. Galvin also goes into more detail about the film’s reception at the time, with quotes from critics from Australia, the UK (The Guardian’s Derek Malcolm) and the USA.

Next up, is “‘That’s Not Us!’: Wake in Fright and the Australian Nightmare” by Gregory Marks, from 2022. This is a more analytical and thematic piece than the others in this book, using the film as an illustration of two sides of Australian culture and the country’s cultural cringe in the face of so much culture imported from the USA and UK particular which is almost automatically assumed to be far superior to anything it might produce itself. (2000 Weeks, mentioned above, explicitly tackles this subject. Its protagonist (Mark McManus, then a Scottish expat who had started his acting career in Australia in his only film lead role – he returned to the UK in 1970) is a Melbourne writer given the opportunity to work for “WTV” in the UK – as after all, why make television in Australia when you can get it from overseas and do you need to go abroad to make art or can you do it in your home country?)

Paul Harris contributes a two-page piece on Sunstruck and, other than an account of its making, clearly struggles to say much good about it. He leaves the final word to the film’s editor Anthony Buckley, whose enormous contribution to Australian cinema sadly includes duds like this: “lacklustre and basically dull”.

After ten pages of reproductions of the press sheet, ad mats, posters from various countries and other publicity material, the book concludes with a reprint of Tina Kaufman’s 2013 monograph on Wake in Fright as part of Currency Press’s Australian Cinema Classics series. This is an account from inside as Kaufman (1938-2023) became involved in Australian cinema circles at University. She was a friend and sometimes housemate with Albie Thoms and others of the Sydney-based Ubu Films group, whose tiny-budget and sometimes experimental work was almost all of what passed as local film production in the 1960s, along with the films of the Melbourne-based “Carlton bubble”. Kaufman provides a go-through of the film’s production, how it was lost and was found, and an account of its reception on original release and after its reissue. It’s useful stuff though inevitably it overlaps with other, later contributions.

If you weren’t old enough to have seen Wake in Fright on its original release then for many years it was a film heard about but not seen. For me that was the case from when I first learned about Australian film history in the 1980s until the film’s rediscovery and restoration in 2009. That was when I first saw it, on an imported DVD from Australia. Now, having come back from the edge of destruction its place as a major film made in the country is assured. This UHD/Blu-ray set from a new 4K restoration, containing extras which define the word “comprehensive”, is with a few minor reservations one of the releases of this year.

* Thompson’s actual first film was That Lady from Peking, which was made in 1969 but not released in Australian cinemas until November 1975, though it had been shown on British television earlier that same year.