Australia

The Knowledge has just seen Australia and thought it would add its own two pennoth worth. Much of the criticism of the film seems unduly harsh, especially this from Germaine Greer. Yes, its history is, shall we say, a bit dubious (but then it was in Gone With The Wind - and no this is not a comparison!). Yes, the film is overlong and overcooked. No, it isn't the film of a generation, some all defining epochful masterpiece.

Instead it is full of tearful partings, joyous reunions and over wrought death scenes, of near misses and getting there in the nick of time. It is bizarre, entertaining and curiously old fashioned and we are of course in the world of movie (which in this case is half Western, half love torn apart by the horrors of war story). As if to drive home the point there are the continual references to The Wizard of Ox and 'Somewhare Over The Rainbow' - even the homestead owned by Nicole Kidman's character, Faraway Downs, seems to be deliberately modelled after Dorothy's farm in Kansas. For those who know and love classical Hollywood this is all familiar territory.

The problem for the film is the weight of the hype - both in terms of its place as the latest work in Baz Luhurman's ouevre and in the way it is supposed to represent Australia as a country to the world. Whereas someone who has spent any time there will know that the stereotypes it offers - the fighting, drinking, laconic bushmen, the mysterious mystical aborigines, the Outback itself - don't begin to address the complexities of the place: the fragility and doubts beneath that veneer of extreme self confidence, the landscape, as much sea and sky and tropical paradise as desert backwater, and yes, the ambiguities of the relationship between the whites and the blacks.

This is what Greer is getting at. Yet Hollywood - and wherever it was set or made, that is what this is - has always set stories against controversial backdrops, sometimes shamefully distorting the history (Birth of a Nation anyone?). Australia belongs in a long and not quite noble tradition and I suspect Luhrman wouldn't have it any other way.