Suburbs and Serenades: The Location of Australian CulturalIdentities

Through Popular Film MusicAdam Trainer

Australian identity is a discourse of plurality and

juxtaposition. It encompasses the limits of dialogue on

class, race, ethnicity, nation and a range of other

significant and often conflicting cultural conditions.

Cinematic representations of Australian culture are

similarly contradictory. Not all are inherently reflective

of the country’s anglo-colonial past or its many indigenous

identities. Although specific images or icons from

Australia’s celluloid history may act in certain contexts as

representative of its stylistic approach or concerns, there

can be no definitive approximation of Australian cinema, nor

its reflection of or relationship to national cultural

identity.

This diversity and disparity is reflected not only in visual

terms, but also in the aural approach taken by filmmakers

towards representing particular facets of Australian life.

The music of Australian cinema is as vast and varied as the

films that comprise it. From tightly structured orchestral

scores, through what Atherton terms the hybrid score1 where

orchestral movements are complimented by existing popular

music tracks, to complex fusions of field-recordings and

aural textures, Australian film music provides compelling

and varied confirmation of the multiplicity of identities

existent in the national cinema.

In particular two seemingly antithetical approaches to film

music have become popularized in Australian film over the

last two decades, as they have in other film cultures. These

are the compilation soundtrack, whereby existing pieces of

music are appropriated into a new cultural context through

their inclusion on a film soundtrack, and the popular film

score where an often recognizable popular artist composes

new music for a film in a style reminiscent of or divergent

from their own. Whilst seemingly oppositional in terms of

the cultural processes they enlist, these approaches are

connected.

The compilation soundtrack relies on pre-existent recordings

to impart ideological connections, tethering their filmic

use to either the political orientation of the aesthetics of

the music track or accompanying lyrics, or to the

subcultural affiliations of the attached performer or

musical era. Although in this regard the popular film score

is a new text, it carries similar political affinities, by

providing an ideological connection between the film and the

existing work of the score composer. By enlisting a popular

musician to score a film, the director is harnessing the

popular memory of that performer and their work, its

subcultural positioning and often the persona of that

musician in order to provide an ideological context for

their film.

These approaches can yield contradictory results. It might

be appealing to view the soundtrack compilation as a messy

1 Atherton, Michael. ‘The Composer as Alchemist: An Overview of Australian Film Scores 1994-2004.’ Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities. Rebecca Coyle ed. Eastley (UK): John Libbey, 2005. p. 232

and complex exercise in intertextuality and the popular film

score as a streamlined convergence of two cultural entities;

the meeting of film and music in their purest forms,

crystalised in a new, contextually unblemished

configuration. However, neither can be so exclusively

labeled as one or the other. The compilation requires unity;

an aesthetic affinity between tracks. There needs to be a

signifying concept or abstraction – some recognizable

quality that draws these disparate shards of culture

together in a new context. Several soundtrack compilations

for Australian films have achieved this through their

revelry in and celebration of one particular era or genre of

music. Often contemporary artists from similar genres might

be compiled on a soundtrack, offering a marketable

compilation of either popular musical figureheads or up-and-

comers, as in the case of youth-oriented pictures such as

Occasional Coarse Language2, Two Hands3 and Blackrock4. Another

popular approach to compilations is the cover compilation,

where contemporary performers contribute new versions of

established songs from a particular era or genre. This

approach was taken for the soundtrack to Thunderstruck5, where

a number of contemporary rock bands recreated AC/DC songs to

accompany the story of a group of fans on a road trip to the

grave of the band’s front man Bonn Scott.

However, the compilation soundtrack is not always

necessarily comprised of new music or contemporary artists.

Throughout the 1990s a trend emerged in Australian cinema,

as it did in other national cinemas where cinematic

recreations of the country’s dry, earthy landscapes and

droll characters were contrasted by vibrant and playful

selections of older tracks from non-Australian musical

traditions, often used ironically as a direct contradiction

to the deadpan comedy favoured within the idiom of the

national cinema at that time. Both The Adventures of Priscilla:

Queen of the Desert6 and Muriel’s Wedding7, two of the most

2 Occasional Coarse Language. Dir. Brad Hayward. Prod. Brad Hayward. Dist. Roadshow Entertainment, 1998.3 Two Hands. Dir. Gregor Jordan. Prod. Marian Macgowan. Dist. Beyond Films International, 1999.4 Blackrock. Dir. Stephen Vidler. Prod. David Elfick. Dist. Globe Film Company, 1997.5 Thunderstruck. Dir. Darren Ashton. Prod. Jodi Matterson. Dist. Icon FilmDistribution, 2004.

successful Australian films of the 1990s infused their

quirky yet scathing comic narratives with bright, up-tempo

disco tunes, the former reintroducing audiences to Alicia

Bridges’ iconic queer anthem ‘I Love the Nightlife’8, the

latter popularising Abba for a new generation.

Arguably as successful as Priscilla and Muriel in its

appropriation of 1970s American pop music was Shirley

Barrett’s first film Love Serenade9. Set in the small country

town of Sunray, Love Serenade uses the character of Ken

Sherry, a washed-up radio personality from Brisbane as the

catalyst for its pointed use of 1970s soul and disco songs.

The film locates its narrative in the relationship between

Sherry and two sisters – Vicki-Anne and Dimity Hurley –

locals and lifetime residents of Sunray. Sherry’s arrival in

Sunray is, for this sleepy town, a significant event.

6 The Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert. Dir. Stephan Elliot. Prod. Al Clark. Dist. Roadshow Entertainment, 1994.7 Muriel’s Wedding. Dir. P.J Hogan. Prod. Jocelyn Moorhouse. Dist. RoadshowEntertainment, 1994.8 Alicia Bridges and Susan Hutcheson. ‘I Love the Nightlife’. London: Polydor, 1978.9 Love Serenade. Dir. Shirley Barrett. Prod. Jan Chapman. Dist. Miramax Films, 1996.

Immediately enamoured of Sherry’s semi-celebrity status in

the larger regional centre of Brisbane, Vicki-Anne and

Dimity fight for his affections.

Taking control of the local radio station, Sherry favours

disco and soul music from the 1970s, specifically the

innuendo-laden rhythm and blues of artists such as Barry

White and Billy Paul. Blasted from speakers around the town

the slick, lushly orchestrated and overtly sexual nature of

this music juxtaposes Sunray and its sun-bleached barrenness

like an omnipotent narrator; pointing out the its lack of

cosmopolitan influence, it’s desolation, emptiness and time-

warn sense of creepy rural nostalgia. This music is Ken

Sherry’s narration on Sunray and on himself. As explained by

Avila, in the post-war period in the United States, “black

became increasingly synonymous with urban”10 The black urban

soul music favoured by Ken Sherry projects onto rural,

(mostly) white Sunray all it lacks in urban sophistication,

emphasising the film’s visual focus on its decrepit

10 Avila, Eric. Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban LosAngeles. Berkley: University of California Press, 2004. p. 5

architecture, its dusty, wind-blown streets and parks, and

its desolate vastness. As Barry White pumps from a worn

speaker atop a rusty pole somewhere in the town, Sherry is

projecting onto Sunray all that its inhabitants, especially

Vicki-Ann, Dimity and Albert Lee, proprietor of the local

Chinese restaurant and Dimity’s employer, project onto him.

To Sunray, Sherry represents – as do his Barry White records

– the cosmopolitan glamour of the ‘big smoke’, although he

has come not from New York, London or even Sydney but

Brisbane. Vicki-Anne is excited by this injection of urbane

vitality, assuring Ken that “we’re all thrilled to bits”11

that he has chosen to grace the airwaves of their humble

country town. Albert is more suspicious. He makes a point of

introducing himself to Sherry during his meal at Albert’s

restaurant, but this introduction, although met with

indifference and impatience from Sherry, is vaguely baleful

in nature, a display of Alpha-male dominance and a masculine

threat, of what we are never overtly made aware.

11 Rebecca Frith in Love Serenade, op. cit.

Albert provides an antithesis to Sherry’s city-slickness and

this binary is given aural context through his professed

preference for country and western performers more

traditionally favoured by rural audiences. At one point

Albert performs a compelling a cappella version of Jimmy

Webb’s ‘Wichita Lineman’12, made all the more touching by

the conviction with which he sings it to himself as he

solemnly prepares his kitchen for the night’s business.

Ken’s selection of tunes comes under attack from Albert, who

complains that Sherry only ever plays songs “about the act

of fornication.”13 Albert’s objections reflect not only the

controversial nature of this sexually suggestive music

within a conservative country town, but also its ill-fitting

aesthetic for a town like Sunray. But these songs are

ultimately harmless. Barry White is such an extreme

juxtaposition to Sunray’s blandness that any controversy or

confrontation distinguishable in Sherry’s music is

dissipated by its comparative absurdity; the sheer silliness

12 Jimmy Webb. ‘Wichita Linema’. New York: Canopy Music/Polygram, 1968.13 John Alansu in Love Serenade, op. cit.

of its bombast. Albert’s preference for Glen Campbell and

Charley Rich appears to run more in line with rural tastes.

But Albert prefers country performers from the US,

inadvertently revealing the neglect or disdain often

projected by Australian audiences towards Australian popular

music. This runs parallel with both Dermody and Jacka’s

notion of the unequal cultural exchange between Australia

and Britain14 or the United States and O’Regan’s argument

that Australian audiences often find their own culture

“unhip, boring, and not with the times”15. Lotman also

discusses this element of cultural transfer, where for local

audiences, texts from outside “hold a high position in the

scale of values, and are considered to be true, beautiful,

of divine origin.”16 These ideas might be considered in the

context of Australian popular culture generally, but can

certainly be recognized in the consumption of both local

musical and cinematic output. However, it is arguably not14 Dermody, Susan and Elizabeth Jacka. ‘An Australian Film Reader in Question..’ Continuum 1: 1 1987. pp. 140-15515 O’Regan, Tom. Australian National Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. p. 21616 Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Trans. Ann Shukman, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990. p. 146

for this reason that Love Serenade itself avoids Australian

music.

An Australian film in the fact that it is a made by

Australians, set in Australia, features an all-Australian

cast and was funded by Australian institutions, Love Serenade

does not feature any music by Australian performers. Yet it

is an undeniably Australian vision. The windswept Rotary

park where Dimity and Vicki-Ann meet for lunch characterised

by cracked concrete and weeds; the neglected, sun-bleached

storefronts of which Vicki-Ann’s hair salon is one; the

colourbond steel fence over which Dimity spies on Ken; the

dark-brick 70s suburban chic of his lounge-room. These are

all inherently Australian images. They no doubt resonate

with familiarity for some Australians, and yet this

familiarity becomes more pointed through the ironic use of

foreign (American) music on the film’s soundtrack. Ken’s

slick soul music serves to exaggerate Sunray’s backwater

aesthetic and Albert’s love for Glen Campbell provides an

idealized and impossible antithesis of rural Americana to

which the scorched wheat fields of country Australia compete

but can never hope to attain. Lotman’s notion of cultural

transfer is summoned here in that “[t]he texts coming in

from the outside keep their “strangeness”, such that they

are ‘read’ in the foreign language (both in the sense of

natural language and in the semiotic sense).”17 Foreign not

to Ken or Albert but to the world of Sunray, to the imagery

and aesthetic of Barrett’s film, the music of Love Serenade

works the films characters and its dramatic exchanges

through the incongruence of Barry White to bleak rural

Australia.

The music in Love Serenade serves to illuminate the lack felt

by inhabitants of places like Sunray. There is a lack of

cosmopolitan hipness for which Ken yearns despite his

assurances on air that he has escaped to Sunray to forget

the hustle and bustle of city life. There is a lack of

romantic American frontier mystique that Albert craves and

finds in the music of Glen Campbell and Charley Rich. Yet

17 Lotman, op. cit. p. 146

this music connects each of them to something they cannot

find in Sunray. As a result, it connects Sunray to the

cluttered streets of Detroit or Chicago, to Nashville, to

personal identities and popular memories of place and space.

The film’s use of these subculturally specific texts in a

new spatial and aesthetic context activates Wark’s theory of

antipodality, expressed as “an active trajectory between

places, identities, formations, rather than a drawing of

borders, be they of the self or place.”18 Although it

illuminates difference through irony; the difference between

discursive oppositions such as urban/rural or

sophisticated/naïve, the music of Love Serenade also

illustrates a shared consciousness; Ken’s need for sexual

intimacy voiced through Barry White and Albert’s loneliness

and romanticism expressed through ‘Wichita Lineman’.

These cultural trajectories connect each character to larger

frameworks of subcultural literacy and ideological

connection that are mobile in both time and space. As Steve

18 Wark, McKenzie. ‘Elsewhere’. The Literary Review Fall 2001, 45: 1. p. 104

Rosen points out, the scene where Albert confronts Ken about

the sexual nature of his playlist is “an affecting and

serious conversation about pop music, made all the more

absurd because of the place where it's occurring - a Chinese

restaurant in a nowheresville Australian town.”19 The

cultural trajectories paved by these reappropriations offer

new interpretations of the songs used, their histories and

their popular memories. As Brabazon offers, “[p]opular

culture is a conduit for popular memory, moving words,

ideas, ideologies and narratives through time”20, and whilst

popular memory is a catalyst for consensus, it also exists

alongside – and is embedded within – individual experience,

which permits disparate remembrance and subjective opinion.

Both of these characters are explained and explainable

through their musical preferences. Although it cannot speak

definitively for them, they are able to speak through it, to

say the things they fear to reveal about themselves. Both

19 Rosen, Steve. ‘A Soundtrack to Love: Disc Jockey Seduces Wrong Women in Disco Serenade’. Denver Post 5, August 1997. p. E.0820 Brabazon, Tara. From Revolution to Revelation: Generation X, Popular Memory and Cultural Studies, Aldershot, Ashgate 2005. p. 67

the sexually loaded soul-funk favoured by Ken and Albert’s

sentimental MOR country-pop were created and popularized in

the 1970s - arguably the period in which both men, who are

of a similar age, were experiencing life as young adults.

Through a transparent timeline Love Serenade invokes the music

of their youth, which for them no doubt has personal

significance, but for Vicki-Ann and Dimity, represents their

romanticized masculine failings – Ken’s overt preoccupation

with sex and sensuality, and Albert’s nostalgic longing for

an impossible vision of the rural experience.

The juxtaposition of this lush, sentimental, charismatic

music with droll performances, the drained, sepia-toned

cinematography and the drab settings of Sunray itself is one

of the film’s central stylistic concerns. Sunray is bleak,

windblown and desolate; untouched by cosmopolitan taste or

rustic agrarian nostalgia. Both Ken and Albert rely on their

nostalgia in order to survive. These glamourous American

songs of heartbreak and lust prop them up; give them

strength. Oppositionally Dimity and Vicki-Ann, though

innocuous and parochial, are both strong willed and

independent. Although they each fall for Ken’s advances, by

the film’s end they have realised that they don’t need him,

that his faded glamour is less appealing once they’ve seen

the shallowness behind it. Director Barrett comments that

“He's cynical in the way he uses music. Barry White does all

the work for him. He's using fine music to spin his web to

lure his victims.”21 Vicki and Dimity realise that Ken’s

attachment to the sordid disco grooves of a faded era have

left him soulless and empty.

Aesthetically the syrupy string-laden pop that Ken plays

juxtaposes Sunray’s bland dryness. It works structurally to

heighten the barrenness of the landscapes featured in the

film, whilst Albert’s romanticized Americana provides a

maudlin emphasis on the town’s lack of romance; offering

passion to counteract Sunray’s boredom and monotony. But the

reappropriation of these distant songs provides the film

with one of its dominant stylistic techniques. The

21 Shirley Barrett in Rosen. op. cit.

compilation soundtrack is capable of this process of drawing

upon established cultural texts in order to create new

mechanisms with which to frame specific cultural identities.

Pop music soundtracks mesh discourses of filmic form,

popular cultural consumption, audio-visual aesthetics and

sub-cultural specificity. The relationship between these

discourses is constantly changing, as Love Serenade

exemplifies. The social and historical positioning of texts

and readers triggers specific readerships within precise

contexts so that individual cultural identities, as they

relate to notions of community and aesthetic taste can be

cultivated, read and recognized in their new cinematic

context.

The soundtrack compilation works to collect disparate texts

and sew them together, to form a cohesive whole from

culturally scattered fragments. The popular film score

however begins with a film as a blank canvas upon which to

place sounds, as opposed to collecting and attaching. In a

cultural economy where the voice of art is disembodied from

the tangible, and the transitive nature of cultural goods

forces us to live with fragmentation as a constant, the

compilation soundtrack mines this cultural ether whilst the

popular film score attempts to harness something just as

transitive but larger, more complete; singular. As opposed

to creating an identity from remnants, the popular film

score utilizes the subcultural and ideological affinities of

an artist to create a new cinematic aesthetic.

This approach, arguably borne as much out of the marketing

and promotional possibilities of media cross-pollination as

the aesthetic and political affinities between specific

filmmakers and musicians, has enabled the expansion of film

music into new markets, as well as attracting popular music

audiences to films they may otherwise not have seen. The

attachment of a recognizable name to a film as score

composer is a guarantee of at least partial interest by fans

and potential sales for soundtrack recordings, but it may be

argued that the decision to enlist a popular musician as

scorer does not have to be purely financially motivated. The

aesthetic oeuvre of a popular recording artist has been

harnessed as a dominant structural characteristic of a

number of Australian films. This specific cinematic

apparatus works to crystallize the sound and image,

providing a sonic equivalent for the colours, shapes and

textures of Australian films, a bridge between media that

draws upon local musical styles to provide aural context for

local stories told on celluloid.

This trend became increasingly popular in the late 1990s and

early into the new millennium, when a number of established

musical acts married their sounds to locally made films.

Making a clean sweep of the 2004 Australian Film Institutes

annual awards was Somersault22, written and directed by Cate

Shortland. The film won in all thirteen categories of the

AFIs, including Best Original Music Score, which was

composed and performed by six-piece Sydney act Decoder Ring,

The band looked to the childlike-innocence of lead character

Heidi for inspiration23, creating a score adorned with

glimmering glockenspiels and quietly pattering electronic

beats to match the glacial post-rock guitar textures that

aestheticise the film’s mountainous setting. Decoder Ring’s

score for Somersault stands as not only a successful

collaboration between director and composer(s) but also an

impressive collision of musical characteristics with the

interior world of a film’s central character. Acting as much

as a form of interior narration by Heidi – a lost and

confused adolescent who flees Canberra for the alpine town

of Jindabyne after domestic conflict, the score exemplifies

the diverse cultural identities fostered and expressed in

the national cinema, not only in visual terms, but also in

and through film music.

Existing in a similar musical mileau as Decoder Ring’s

score, but placing the filmic action for their work in

Australia’s distant past is Nick Cave and Warren Ellis’22 Somersault. Dir: Cate Shortland. Prod. Anthony Anderson. Dist. Hopscotch Productions, 2004.23 Keyboardist with the band Matt Fitzgerald commented that their collaboration with Shortland was based around “get[ting]inside [Heidi]'shead and get the sounds of what she sees, or her interpretation of it”. Matt Fitzgerald in James Wigney. ‘Film Soundtrack Has the Right Ring’. Sunday Herald-Sun [Sydney, NSW] 3 October 2004. p. E.15

score for The Proposition24. Cave and Ellis, both elder

statesmen of Australian indie rock25 and bandmates from The

Bad Seeds, collaborated on the score for John Hillcoat’s

vision of Australia as a scorched and savage colonial

outpost ravaged by the rampant epidemics of alcoholism and

racist brutality. Cave had collaborated with Hillcoat on his

previous film Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead26, having co-written the

screenplay and appeared in the film as a homicidal inmate of

a high-tech maximum security prison of the future. The

imagery of violence that had always permeated his music,

especially his engagement with the personal and emotional

implications of a death-row prisoner about to be executed,

‘Mercy Seat’27, is the musical counterpart to his

involvement in Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead, and the two were

conceptualized within a similar time frame. This cross-media

output provides the kind of political and ideological

affinity filmmakers aim to harness for their films by

enlisting popular musicians to score their work.

The Proposition marked Cave’s second screenwriting credit and

one of many film soundtracks to which he had contributed.

Providing a sonic framework for the film’s investigation of

the politics of early nationhood, Cave commented that whilst

the film’s ideological overtones were never intended to be

overtly stated, they had subsequently emerged from the

filmmaking process.28 It might be argued that the inherent

political content of Cave and Ellis’ recorded output with

The Bad Seeds was being summoned in their involvement in

Hillcoat’s film. Throughout their career, arguably

culminating in the macabre Murder Ballads29 The Bad Seeds had

explored death and violence both literally in Cave’s lyrics

and musical personae, and in their dark and often brooding

24 The Proposition. Dir: John Hillcoat. Prod. Chris Brown. Dist. Columbia Tri-Star, 2005.25 Both Cave and Ellis’ other band The Dirty Three are mentioned as proponents of the musical genre of ‘indie rock’ in Hibbert, Ryan. ‘What is Indie Rock?’ Popular Music & Society 28: 1 February 2005. pp. 55-7726 Ghosts… Of the Civil Dead. Dir. John Hillcoat. Prod. Evan English. Dist. Electric Pictures, 1988.27 Nick Cave & Mick Harvey. ‘Mercy Seat’. Mercy Seat. Mute, 1988.28 Cave stated that “It doesn't obviously offer any answers to anything,but it does raise a lot of questions. It wasn't something that we ever set out to discuss that it was going to end up being a political film but it's turned out that way.” Nick Cave in Simon Ferguson. ‘Writer, Muso, Actor… Now Don’t Forget Icon Says Cave’. The Daily Telegraph [Sydney, NSW] 6 October 2005. p. 329 Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Murder Ballads. Mute/Reprise, 1996.

music. Whilst Cave and Ellis’ score follows many of the

musical traditions of the Bad Seeds sound it is recognizably

divergent, adding a pastoral beauty and lilting majesty

matched by the film’s often surreal cinematographic

rendering of the brutal Australian landscape. The score

comprises of a series of sonic vignettes; poems and clusters

of verse backed by swollen strings and abstract textures.

Cave’s words find a melodic counterpoint in Ellis’

melancholic, wandering violin which weaves through the

scorched and blustering windswept vistas of the filmic

landscape. The score becomes submerged within the film’s

overall visceral approach, blending with other elements of

the production design to create an aesthetic unity, albeit

one achieved through creative collaboration. The most

affecting film scores, both traditional orchestral

compositions and those incorporating more contemporary

musical styles and approaches become enmeshed in the story

and characters of a film. As Atherton points out, “the

composer is also a filmmaker caught up in an evolving

aesthetic”30, mediated by technology and film practice, but

ultimately working towards structural synergy.

One of the best examples of this synergy in contemporary

Australian film sound is Phillip Brophy’s sound design for

Vincent Giarrusso’s 1995 film Mallboy31. Whilst the film

deals with the adolescent difficulties of a working class

youth stuck in the monotony of the suburban landscape, the

score is layered, cerebral and dense, moving between

contemporary popular musical sounds and structures and the

more experimental aspects of film sound. True to Brophy’s

other work, the score also includes diegetic sounds and

suggestive or implied sonic phenomena such as field

recordings.32 Not only does it encompass several styles

including jazz, electronica and hip hop, but the film’s

overall sound design has been influenced by music concrete,

with large sections of the score devoted to reflecting and30 Atherton, op. cit. p. 22831 Mallboy. Dir: Vincent Giarrusso. Prod. Fionna Eagger. Dist. Buena Vista International, 2001.32 Brophy’s sound design has been examined in Philip Samartzis. ‘Avant-garde Meets Mainstream: The Film Scores of Philip Brophy’. Screen Scores: Studies in Contemporary Australian Film Music. Rebecca Coyle ed. North Ryde: Australian Film, Television and Radio School, 1997. pp. 124-140

submerging the audio environment of the film within the

score as opposed to commenting on it in purely musicological

terms. For these reasons, Brophy’s work on Mallboy is a

literal example of the way in which popular music can be

anchored aesthetically to the form of a particular film.

Brophy’s soundtrack blends popular musical genres such as

hip hop, which matches and voices the subcultural

positioning of its young protagonist Sean and his friends,

with the music concrete approach of the film’s diegetic

sound design, creating a hybrid that achieves synergy by

allowing the two elements of the sound design to influence

each other.

The Mallboy soundtrack is alternately jagged and submersive,

stimulating and calming; moving from samples of rickety

trains speeding along their tracks with bursts of free jazz

percussion to the sonic periphera of a shopping mall or

distant, echoing conversations accompanying gritty

breakbeats. Brophy explains his technique of using the

“noise of life”:

The cinema is not a concert hall: it does not requirethe hush of mute respect to follow its stories. Thecinema expels us, projects us and snares us in itsenlivened spaces. More films could sound the noise oflife and immerse us in all that occurs beyond the edgeof the frame.33

The sonic environment of the suburbs, with its cluttered

malls, rustling trees and passing cars is never far from the

heart of Mallboy, which Brophy performed as a part of

Underground LOVERS, the experimental rock band that

Giarrusso had fronted with guitarist Glen Bennie since the

late 1980s. The sounds of the suburbs are immersed in the

score, shimmering to the surface, then submerging themselves

within the non-diegetic hues and textures of the sound mix.

The Underground LOVERS’ score and Brophy’s sound design move

in and out of the film’s diegesis. This exemplifies the

ability of the aural elements of the mise en scene to

rupture the reality of the film whilst also adding an

emotional context to the characters and plot.

33 Philip Brophy. Mallboy Soundtrack sleeve notes. Silvertone Records, 2001.

As Corrigan and White comment, film music exists both within

the world of a film and as a cinematic construction – a

comment on that world. “In the back of our minds, we are

aware that the practise of scoring films with music that has

no source in the story violates verisimilitude, and yet we

readily accept this convention.34 In submerging the score

within ‘natural’ diegetic sounds and vice versa, Underground

LOVERS score for Mallboy attempts to lessen this

contradiction between the violation of verisimilitude and

our acceptance of it through an understanding of film form.

The bouncy, plastic sounds of shopping malls filter through

guitar drones and waves of synths; the interference of

telephone towers, planes overhead and busy traffic fade in

and out of ambient pieces, which in turn bookend structured

songs, be they thrashy rock numbers, beat-heavy hip hop or

expansive psychedelia. In Mallboy, the suburbs have been

sonically ingrained. As Brophy himself points out:

The suburbs are full of sonic irritation and auralaggravation... Many people are attracted to thesuburbs, believing they will escape the claustrophobia

34 Corrigan, Timothy & Patricia White. The Film Experience. Boston: Bedford/St Martins, 2004. p. 191

of housing commission flats or inner-city apartmentblocks. The acoustic reality is that in the suburbs,the people next door are amplifiers of all you wish tocensor, suppress, silence.35

This metaphor is the film’s central narrative device.

Protagonist Sean is in trouble with the law and under attack

from welfare authorities as a result. His only escape is the

mall, with its massive swarm of consumers. Its glass and

tile reflects collective noise and its expansive dimensions

dissipate it into a subdued babble. Mallboy embodies this

experience through a synthesis of sound design and visual

exposition. The sonic landscape of the suburbs has

influenced the film’s musical component not only in terms of

mood, but also through the integration of the two

structurally. The sound design infuses the score, and the

score reflects the sound design.

But the subject of this approach is arguably what makes

Brophy’s score and Giarrusso’s film important and relevant

texts. Through their incorporation of the mundane, the

quotidian sounds of contemporary existence – an existence35 Brophy. Mallboy Soundtrack sleeve notes, op. cit.

that for the vast majority of Australians is encapsulated by

suburban spaces – Mallboy supports and expands upon a

diverse, culturally sophisticated language of Australian

identity on celluloid. Through a complex rendering of a

specific Australian identity tethered to discourses of

class, work, crime, youth and the spaces within which these

operate, Mallboy marries sound and vision in an original and

culturally relevant context. The project of Australian

literature and literary theory to “dismantle the European

perspective that represents Australia as colonial, marginal

“peripheral” or provincial”36 can be viewed as an active

proposition for other facets of Australian culture, and in

particular for both its cinema and popular music. Through

the story it tells and its sonic rendering of that story,

Mallboy provides a contemporary vision of Australia that

moves away from the colonial and the provincial into a

globally relevant vision with a local context and a

contemporary aural aesthetic and literate musical approach

that matches and enables its goal of cultural transcendence.

36 Yelin, Louise. From the margins of empire: Christina Stead, Doris Lessing, Nadine Gordimer. New York: Cornell University Press, 1998. p. 39

As with all film cultures that collect from disparate

sources, that incorporate works from a range of cultural

environments, Australian film culture embraces and practices

divergence. Similarly the music, and in particular the

popular music of the national film culture is embedded in

processes that transgress borders, that utilize

international texts in local contexts. As Wark points out:

Cultural differences are no longer so tied to theexperience of the particularities of place. These‘vertical’ differences, of locality, ethnicity, nationare doubled by ‘horizontal’ differences, determined notby being rooted in a particular place but by beingplugged into a particular circuit.37

By plugging their own texts into particular circuits,

Australian filmmakers have expressed local identities

through the universal appeal of popular culture.

Alternately, Australian film culture has fostered texts that

create new visions of specific identities that are expressed

and explained through the political and ideological tethers

of culturally and creatively specific musical styles and

37 Wark, op. cit. p. 105

personalities. These two practices, the compilation score

and the popular film score are both borne out of the

expanding potential for cross-media pollination and are

facilitated by new and changing discourses of art, commerce

and creative identity.

Popular film music is emerging as an increasingly relevant

field of academic investigation. The place and importance of

popular music in cinema has shifted and evolved due to

changing cultural economies of taste. The industrial

circumstances that have both influenced and been influenced

by these shifts, as well as the texts that emerge from them

are in constant need of academic appraisal. Journals such as

Music and the Moving Image and the Journal of Film Music ensure that

new and relevant scholarly debate on film music includes and

addresses popular music in its various cinematic guises. It

is vital that both Australian film and Australian music,

whether utilized cinematically in a local or international

context, are represented within this field and that new

Australian film and film music is catalogued and debated

from a scholarly perspective. Texts such as Coyle’s edited

collection Reel Tracks: Australian Feature Film Music and Cultural Identities

and Brophy’s trio of edited collections emerging from the

Cinesonic conference of film scores and sound design have

created a precedent for academic discussion of film music

from an Australian perspective. As Australian cinema

continues its evolution as a recognized and recognizable

national cinema that contributes to international film

culture through its originality and innovation, scholarly

discussion of the language of Australian film music is

imperative.