From the SelectedWorks of Jo Coghlan
2017
Reel Sheilas: The Depiction of Working Women
in Australian Films
Jo Coghlan , Dr
Available at: https://works.bepress.com/jo_coghlan/147/
Studies in Australasian Cinema
Reel sheilas: the depiction of working women in Australian films
--Manuscript Draft-Full Title:
Reel sheilas: the depiction of working women in Australian films
Manuscript Number:
RSAU- 2016-0008
Article Type:
Original Article
Keywords:
film; Australia; women; labour; gender
Manuscript Classifications:
Australasian Cinema; Feminist Theory; Film
Abstract:
Screen Australia's 2015 report on their initiative 'Gender Matters' notes the lack of
gender parity in representations of women in Australian films. It is a timely contribution
to the need to redress this gender imbalance. While funding changes are welcomed,
this paper outlines the structural and cultural conditions that have led to a lack of
cinematic representations about women's lived experiences and contributions to the
public sphere, by focusing on a study of the representation of working women as
protagonists in Australian feature films. Structural deficits are found in how the
Australian film industry under the Australian Film Commission (AFC) and later Screen
Australia embraced a view that Australian cinema has a responsibility to frame national
identity and character through its representations of people, space and place and its
rendering of the iconography of the 'Australia Legend'. The consequences of this were
a national narrative that preferenced masculinity, in turn, Othering and rendering
invisible social groups that didn't exemplify the narrative. Amongst many groups,
women, and their lived experiences, were negated. Othering is evident is how women
in the public sphere are binarised in ways which negate their experiences, labour and
social and public contributions.
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Title
Reel sheilas: the depiction of working women in Australian films
Authors
Lisa Milner and Jo Coghlan
Dr Lisa Milner, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Coffs
Harbour NSW 2450 Australia
Dr Jo Coghlan, School of Arts and Social Sciences, Southern Cross University, Bilinga
QLD 4225 Australia
Abstract
Screen Australia’s 2015 report on their initiative ‘Gender Matters’ notes the lack of
gender parity in representations of women in Australian films. It is a timely
contribution to the need to redress this gender imbalance. While funding changes are
welcomed, this paper outlines the structural and cultural conditions that have led to a
lack of cinematic representations about women’s lived experiences and contributions
to the public sphere, by focusing on a study of the representation of working women
as protagonists in Australian feature films. Structural deficits are found in how the
Australian film industry under the Australian Film Commission (AFC) and later Screen
Australia embraced a view that Australian cinema has a responsibility to frame national
identity and character through its representations of people, space and place and its
rendering of the iconography of the ‘Australia Legend’. The consequences of this were
a national narrative that preferenced masculinity, in turn, Othering and rendering
invisible social groups that didn’t exemplify the narrative. Amongst many groups,
women, and their lived experiences, were negated. Othering is evident is how women

Corresponding author). Email: [email protected]
2
in the public sphere are binarised in ways which negate their experiences, labour and
social and public contributions.
Keywords
Film; Australia; women; labour; Australian Film Commission; gender
Notes on contributors
Dr Lisa Milner is a lecturer in the media programme at Southern Cross University, Coffs
Harbour Australia. Her work includes Fighting Films: a History of the Waterside
Workers’ Federation Film Unit (Pluto Press, 2003) and Swimming Against the Tide: A
Biography of Freda Brown (Adelaide: Ginninderra Press, forthcoming). Her current
research interests focus on representations of workers and trade unions in film and
television, labour history, and left cultural activism.
Dr Jo Coghlan is a Lecturer in Australian and International Politics and Social Policy in
the School of Arts and Social Sciences at Southern Cross University, Coolangatta,
Queensland Australia. Current research is focused on the intersections between national
and international politics and representations of politics in popular culture and the
media. Her most recent publication in the Australasian Journal of Popular Culture
(2016) examined how neoliberalism framed American cultural discourse about family.
Jo has just completed an analysis of how the American media discursively frame the
costumed bodies of Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Manuscript - anonymous (excl. author information)
1
Introduction and aims
In 2015 Screen Australia announced a $5 million plan to address gender
imbalances in the Australian screen industry. The Screen Australia report ‘Gender
Matters’ (2015, 2) notes that women are underrepresented in front of and behind the
camera. Between 2010 and 2013 only 30% of 386 characters in Australian films were
women with ‘stark differences between how men and women were represented in these
films from the perspectives of employment status [and] profession’ (Screen Australia
2015, 6). In response to the gender disparity evidenced in the Australian film industry
and mirrored in international data, Screen Australia funded a Women’s Story Fund which
requires films seeking funding to have three of the following attached to the project: a
female director, a female writer, a female producer or a female protagonist. Whilst the
first aim of this ‘three ticks’ assessment is ‘to increase the number of women directors,
writers and producers working in the screen industry’, another is to ‘increase the number
of screen stories about women’ (Screen Australia 2016, 12).
Inspired by the last aim of the Screen Australia report, this article, reporting on
an analysis of women protagonists in Australian film, outlines some of the key structural
and cultural issues that have significantly contributed to a lack of representation of
women’s lived experiences. It focuses on lived experiences of working women. This
framework has been adopted to distinguish how films reflect women’s roles in the public
sphere. An examination of how women in the public sphere are framed in Australian
films is insightful in understanding social constructions of gender because images of
fictitious female characters influence the way audiences view and judge the value of
women and women’s labour (Murphy 1998). Framing, for Robert Entman (2007, 164) is
the way ‘reality’ is assembled in narratives that shape social and political attitudes. It is
clear that film is a political process through which identities and experiences are both
constructed and represented. As McCarthy (2006, 92) notes, films are ‘conduits and
shapers of public opinion’. When there are challenges to social constructions of gender,
and when gender roles are questioned in popular culture including film, it has a
“destabilising effect on hegemonic conceptions of masculinity’ and triggers ‘deep
anxieties’. As a hegemonic project, Australian film has a long history of producing films
2
that aim to develop and restore (when under threat) the ‘proper subordinate position of
women in [Australian] society’ (Lindop 2010, 148).
The image of the working woman in Australian films has historically been
positioned as the Other. Othering occurs when frames and narratives use and repeat
images and symbols that reinforce society’s dominant and preferred ideology. Evident in
our survey of Australian feature films finds that a systematic and ongoing preference is
given to nation-building motifs that favour masculinity, and where women are
represented, their representations are minor and misleading. The structural basis for this
preference was propelled by the Australian Film Commission (AFC), and later Screen
Australia, who adopted a view that Australian film had a responsibility to create and
sustain a cohesive national identity (Gibson 1992, 68). One of the most successful and
ongoing ways this has been done is by rendering versions of Russel Ward’s 1958
Australian Legend as the normative discourse exemplifying Australian character and
unifying the nation in its identity. As Davidson (2012, 438) notes literature plays a pivotal
role in providing nations with its ‘national soul and coherence’.
The consequences of the normative positioning of masculinity as the authentic
representation of Australian identity and character is that it positions a number of social
and racial groups as the Other. Rendering as Other posits invisibility in society’s public
spaces. As the invisible Other, not only are they not seen as subjects, they are objectified
in terms of any contribution they make to society. This is the case of women and their
labour. While women are mostly excluded from the hegemonic nation discourse that
dominates Australian society and culture, when they are included, they are framed in
binaries that devalue their status, character and labour. As a result women’s labour has
regularly been undervalued and overlooked.
An interrogation of these practices evident in popular culture is insightful in
understanding how gender constructs manufacture consent for patriarchy. More
specifically, an interrogation of gender constructs in Australian films is insightful in
understanding how working women are discursively positioned in ways which not only
devalue their labour but negate working women’s agency and independence. Therefore,
this article contributes to an understanding of film “as a political process ensures that
filmmaking and film culture are acknowledged as crucial sites around which ideas about
gender and social value were created and enacted”, according to Mary Tomsic (2007,
289).
3
A review of women’s increasing role in the labour market since 1954, coupled
with legislative changes equalising the value of women’s labour, posit that Australian
films have generally failed to represent the reality of women’s economic, political and
social contribution to Australian society. This trend is mirrored in international data
which shows that female characters are underrepresented in popular culture and more so
their contributions to social and public life are even less represented.
Background
A number of studies of Australian women filmmakers have been published,
particularly in recent decades. Lisa French’s work in this area (2003, 2012, 2014, 2015)
has highlighted problems with the participation of women in the Australian film industry.
Despite this, there is no research on the twinned issue of representation: on the trajectory
of women protagonists in Australian films, apart from individual characters and actors.
Of the latter, one example is Diane Kirkby’s article on Caddie (2007). Studies of
Australian cinematic depictions of women, an in particular working women, are rare.
This article works to counter this.
Sue Maslin conducted a study in 1991 that showed that 16% of feature films made
in Australia between 1980 and 1989 had a female protagonist (Maslin 1992, 30). The
same figures resurfaced in a 1994 study (Prisk 1994, 7). Maslin identifies the
dysfunctional nature of the Australian screenscape when its ‘feature films continue to be
overwhelmingly about men’s stories [and when these films don’t] reflect the society in
which we live’ (Prisk 1994, 7).
Overseas, however, more work has been produced in this area. In the US, the
Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media (2016) argues that gender stereotyping is
an inherent problem in popular culture. Messages that men are more important than
women are produced and reproduced via film. From 2006 to 2009, not one female
character was framed in American films as employed in medicine, business leadership,
law or in politics. In the same period, 80.5% of all working characters were men and
19.5% women, yet women make up 50% of the American labour market. Similar studies
of this topic have been conducted at The Center for the Study of Women in Television
and Film at San Diego State University, by Martha Lauzen, who found that women
4
comprised 22% of protagonists in the top one hundred films of 2015 (up from 15% in
2013), and that a higher proportion of male than female characters had an identifiable
occupation (Lauzen 2014, 1 and Lauzen 2015, 1 and 3).
One study on the visibility of female characters in the ten most profitable global
films markets1 for popular films released between 2010 and 2013 found that of the 5 799
speaking or named characters, 30.9% were women and 69.1% were men. Popular films
were identified as those reported by the Motion Picture Association of America. Of the 386
characters examined in the Australian films included in this study, only 29.8% were
women (Smith et al 2014, 3). In terms of representation by occupation (defined as income
for performance of a service or provision of some resource) found that of the Australian
films examined, 63.1% of employed characters were men. Globally, 69.1% of male
characters were narrated as employed (Smith et al 2014, 13-14).
This data is further contextualised by comparing fictitious female workforce
participation with actual female workforce participation. Data for the Australian films in
the US study showed that fictitious working women were represented 22.8% compared
with actual female work force participation rates of 45.5%, a difference of 22.7% (Smith
et al 2014, 14). Lastly, this study also compared gender data by occupation globally
finding women were most narrated in films as nurses (78%) and teachers (52%) and less
narrated in occupations associated with religion (4.5%), sports as participants or coaches
(6%), the military (7%), and law (8.5%) (Smith et al 2014, 18-19). Smith et al’s study
finds that media portrayals of gender and labour reinforce occupational knowledge,
career socialisation, and gender stereotypical attitudes and beliefs about work (2014, 13).
A study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center of American films released
between 1950 and 2006 found that male film characters outnumber female characters
two to one (Bleakley et al 2012). Another study of female characters in American films
in 2011 found that only 33% of characters in that year’s 100 top domestic grossing films
were women. When examined further, lead female protagonists accounted for only 11%
of roles. Female characters are also less likely to be shown in leadership roles. By
occupation women are framed in politics and government in seven% of films, eight% in
relation to religious occupations and 17% in business. Women were however narrated
higher in occupations with a social role (27 %) or in scientific or intellectual occupations
(30%) (Klos 2013, 42). On screen representations of women in the U.S’s top 100 films
1
Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Japan, Russia, South Korea, and the United Kingdom
5
of 2011, according to another study, found that male characters are more likely than
female characters to be identified by occupation. When occupational status is narrated
female characters are framed as homemakers (22%), white collar positions (15%) and
blue collar positions (13 %) (Lauzen 2011, 2). For gender researchers Stacy Smith and
Marc Choueiti (2013, online) the consequences of this gender disparity is
The dearth of females on-screen and/or behind the camera may have an effect on
younger audiences. A steady diet of viewing these types of depictions can send
the message that girls are less valuable and capable than boys. With time and
repeated exposure, young viewers may adopt or even fail to notice the lopsided
view of gender in film. Even worse, heavy viewing of these skewed patterns may
become so normal to audiences that they do not see the need for gender parity in
the media, or industry change. Future research should explore these potential
linkages and the role cinematic content plays in young viewers’ development.
Our study
The aim of this study was to examine the positioning of working women
characters who occupy leading roles in Australian feature films. We set two overarching
questions for the study: to determine the proportion of Australian feature films with
working women protagonists; and to analyse how their representations reflect the reality
of their period and the nation.
We firstly identified a total of 1505 Australian feature films made between 1900
and 2014. The synopses, reviews, and secondary material associated with these films
were analysed to further ascertain those films with a female protagonist who is a paid
worker.2 This resulted in a list of 94 films: 6.17% of all feature films made in Australia
up to 2014 have a female protagonist who is employed: 31 of these 94 were directed by
(26) women; and the majority, 63, were directed by men. From this identified list, the
study then worked to identify themes and occupations that related to how the image of
working women was portrayed (See Appendix 1 for all occupations represented).
Table 1 HERE
2
As per Smith et al (2014), occupations were defined as receipt of payment for the
performance of a service or provision of some resource.
6
The identification began with the Australian film history standard texts: for films
1900 to 1977, Pike and Cooper (1980); for films 1978 to 1992, Murray (1993); for films
1980 to 1990, Stratton (1990). No standard source exists for Australian feature films 1993
to 1997, so we conducted a search of all available sources, online and in other documents.
For films produced between 1998 to 2014, the Screen Australia list was analysed. Online
sources were: IMDb; Australian Screen Online; Oz Movies; Screen Australia’s ‘The
Screen Guide’; the National Film and Sound Archive catalogue; and Jane Sloan’s ‘Reel
Women: An International Directory of Contemporary Feature Films about Women’.
Working women: labour and legislation
The status of Australian women has changed dramatically since they entered the
workforce. However how their status and labour was recognised as equal and valuable
was only recognised in legislation from the 1960s onwards. Since then legislative
changes in Australia have sought to normalise women’s contribution to the public sphere
in terms of work and its value. In 1966, for example, the marriage bar that previously
prevented married women from employment in the Commonwealth Public Service was
lifted. This was followed by a 1969 ruling of the Commonwealth Conciliation and
Arbitration Commission that women were to receive equal pay to men for equal work.
Following these decisions was the 1984 introduction of the Commonwealth Sex
Discrimination Act, the 1986 Affirmative Action (Equal Employment Opportunity for
Women) Act and the 2012 Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Amendment
Act. These legislative changes posit changing social attitudes towards the value of
women’s work.
Yet how popular culture represents and values women’s work seems to be at odds
with these legislative changes. Lindop (2010, 150) suggests this may be because of a
‘crisis of masculinity’. Drawing on masculinities scholars R.W. Connell, David
Buchbinder, Tim Edwards and Arthur Brittan, Lindop suggests there exists a feeling that
men’s power and authority is under threat, that male identity has been destabilised, and
that challenges to patriarchal domination (as evident in legislative changes) has created
anxiety. The result of this, at least in relation to film, has been to reassert discourses of
masculine hegemony and female subordination (Lindop 2010, 150).
7
Changes in employment data in Australia also reveal a different reality as that
represented in Australian films. In 1954 women comprised 23% of the Australian
workforce. This increased to 43% in 1998. Of all working women in 1998, 43% worked
full time and 61% of the female workforce was married. Despite the increasing numbers
of women entering the workforce since 1954, representations of working women in
Australian films until the end of the 1970s were few. There have also been significant
changes in the nature of work women do in Australian society. In 2004, women employed
as professionals comprised of 34 percent of the female workforce, compared with 26%
in 1987. The proportion of women working in more skilled occupations has increased
since 1987, while the proportion of women working in less skilled occupations has
decreased. The proportion of women working in least skilled occupations was seven %
in 2004 compared with 10% in 1987 (ABS 2006). Despite the increasing numbers of
women entering the workforce since the 1950s, and the increasing professionalisation of
working women, representations of professional working women in Australian films are
largely missing,
A feminist film theory approach explaining the differences between a legislative
agenda that has enacted policies that value women’s labour and data that suggests that
increasingly women’s contribution to the labour force is normative, would suggest the
cinema is a cultural practice where contradictory myths about gender are ‘produced,
reproduced and represented’ (Smelik 1998, 7). As earlier feminist film theorists Rosen
(1973) and Haskell (1987) note, cinema has historically used stereotypical
representations of women that acted to sustain female subordination. Film therefore has
a tendency to actively construct and produce meaning about women, their roles, and their
spatial location in society (Smelik 1998, 9). Adopting a feminist film theory lens allows
for the making of the invisible women to become visible and as a result finds the female
subject (Petro 2002, 33). One approach is to examine the binaries used to position women
and to understand how binaries reflect and reproduce cultural conditioning.
Binarised images of fictitious female characters in popular culture influence the
way audiences view and judge the value of women and their public contributions
(Murphy 1998). Cultural representations inculcate society with normative views
predicated on cultural conditioning and socialisation. Socialisation leads individuals to
accept discursive institutional and structural norms as reality, influencing an individual’s
conception of their abilities. Cinema, as well as television, not only socialises society
8
about gender identity but also provides socialising messages about women’s work and
its value. Generally informing this socialisation is the use of stereotypes which frame
women as passive, dependent, emotional and nurturing. When working women are
portrayed in popular culture, these stereotypes inform their characterisations and position
women within professions that are considered reflective of their apparently ‘natural’
characteristics. To locate women in non-traditional roles risks audience rejection.3
Even with decades of research the ‘taken-for-granted differentiation between men
and women’ still needs to be demonstrated as a social construction (Garcia-Blonco and
Wahl-Jorgensen 2012, 423). Popular culture is one space where social constructions of
gender require ongoing interrogation. As a space of social performance, popular culture
and in this case film, shapes ‘realities’ about gender (Butler 1999, 180). Social
performances normalise acceptable and preferred attributes of women and their role in
society as working women (Garcia-Blonco and Wahl-Jorgensen 2012, 424).
The Australian film industry
Cultural representations of identity, be they gender, class or sexuality, are
informed by temporalities, suggesting representations of women and their labour must
be read within the context they were made. This also suggests that as social attitudes
about working women have progressed then so film representations of working women
have changed. As Beirne (2012, 213) puts it ‘no film text can escape the influences of its
era’. How this reflects the pattern of Australian film representations of working women
is discerning.
In Reynaud’s review of representations of Australian war films produced between
1914 and 1918, the bias towards cinematic narratives of conflict, action and resolution
3
The film Evil Angels (1988) is a good example of this. The Fred Schepisi film narrates the case of missing
baby Azaria Chamberlain and accusations of her mother’s role in her murder. Mothers are ideally accepted
by audiences when they conform to nurturing roles rather than as women suspected of killing their children.
While Evil Angels secured an Academy Award for lead actress Meryl Streep, the film only grossed
AUS$3million, ranking it a lowly 89 on Screen Australia’s list of reported gross Australian box office
revenues (Screen Australia 2016).
9
favoured a masculine culture which represented women as having a ‘role limited ideally
to the home front’ (Reynaud 1999, 217). The temporality of the period discursively
reflected social constructs of womanhood. The popular ideology of the period drew on
Western traditions of distinct gender roles. Differences were explained in biological
terms informing views that clearly definable sex roles existed. Using binaries women
were stereotypically framed as opposite to men. Reynaud (1999, 219) claims
Men were usually imaged as natural warriors, strong and aggressive…these
qualities emerged as a manly defence of the weak…women on the other hand
were considered to be the embodiment of the gentler qualities of the human spirit:
passivity, compassion and nurture.
The socially prescribed and proscribed roles of women as feminine were further
perpetuated with ‘glamorous images of enthusiastic womanhood” mobilised to boost war
recruitment and boost war morale. Here, representations of women operated in two ways:
as the idealised mother willingly sacrificing her son or daughter or husband, and the nurse
filling the “characteristic nurturing role in their devotion to the wounded men” (Reynaud
1999, 222). Even as working women, nurses were framed in terms of a temporal
construction of femininity. One of the early films appearing in our study, The Martyrdom
of Nurse Cavell (1916) fits this description, the Australian-made biopic of the British
nurse as heroic and self-sacrificing. Reynaud (1999, 223–224) notes that this screen
version of Cavell was emblematic of the representation of women in films of this period:
a nurse embodied many of the myths of the role of womanhood common to the
art and literature of the time. Robed in pure white, she symbolised devoted
motherly care to the wounded warrior, while retaining sufficient femininity to
appeal as a sexual symbol as well… her beauty and spirituality were added
markers of stereotyped womanhood.
From the war years to the 1950s, the domestic mother/wife was the dominant
representation of Australian women, hence our study includes no films from this period.
Familial relations defined the narrative role of women. In rural setting, the mother/wife
engaged in farm labour. As ‘girl of the bush’ dramas, girls worked on family-owned rural
properties while waiting to meet her husband. As wives they were obedient and bore
children. Examples of the rural mother/wife narrative are found in The Overlanders
(1946) and Bush Christmas (1947). In city settings, the mother/wife was framed almost
exclusively in the domestic setting. Mother/wife was narrated as a highly valued
10
occupation and the ideal of womanhood. The respectable domestic city wife in films like
Smithy (1946), A Son is Born (1946) and Always Another Dawn (1947) was rendered as
secondary to powerful men.
By the 1950s the camera’s gaze shifted to the modernisation and commodification
of domestic production, yet domestic drama was almost entirely absent in Australian
films of the era. When women were represented in Australian films in this period, Lloyd
puts it that women were famed as a ‘reason for men to leave domestic settings or pioneer
wives in rural and nation-building adventures alongside their husbands’ (Lloyd 2014,
1047). Drawing on the work of Doane (1987) and Byars (1991), Lloyd further argues
that the British and American films of this period operated as important sites of
politicisation that informed second-wave feminist understandings of gendered-subject
formation (Lloyd 2014, 1047). With representations of women so limited in Australian
film, the second wave feminist movement in Australia had to look elsewhere.
What did however emerge in Australian cinema in the 1970s were Ozploitation
films. These films celebrated a particularly masculinist narrative of working class men
who were ‘hedonistic and beer-swilling’ reinforcing as ‘real’ the ‘fictional perception’ of
a type of particular Australian masculinity, drawn clearly from the Australian Legend,
and generally objectifying and sexualising women (Simmons 2003, 61). Reflecting
every-day Australian culture, anti-authoritarian and subversive (Laseur 1992; Martin
2010), they did, however, offer some opportunities for women to be framed in ways
challenging the dominant norms perpetuated by the AFC and its demand for coming-ofage, family, costume dramas rendered authentic with the inclusion of the iconography of
the Australian Legend (Martin 2010, 12). Indeed, our survey of Australian films of the
period found three films with working women protagonists: Snapshot (1979), Touch and
Go (1980) and Fortress (1985).
After the many changes that ushered in the revival of the Australian feature film
industry in the early 1970s, notably the establishment of a National Film and Television
School, an Australian Film Development Corporation and an Experimental Film Fund,
feature films with working women protagonists were, once again, on Australian cinema
screens, as our study notes; and the period 1970 to 2014 features the vast majority of our
films, with an increasing variety of workplace roles given to female protagonists.
Prominent titles of our study in this early part of this era are Caddie (1979) Winter of Our
Dreams (1981) and High Tide (1987). As films emerged that championed strong female
lead roles, and particularly represented independent working women, the ‘masculine
11
bias’ historically evident in Australian film that functioned to reinforce patriarchal
structures was under threat. As Graeme Turner wrote about the change in Australian film
in this period, there was a change in how the nation ‘is represented in our cinema, and
this may be related to the fact that something has happened to the way arguments about
the category of the nation are currently framed’ (1994/1995, p.33).
Whilst the AFC Women’s Film Fund (1976–1989) was established within the
Australian Film Commission to help develop women's skills as film makers and to
encourage the making of films that present alternative representations of women on
Australian screens, it only funded three feature films in total; and one of the films on our
list, Caddie (1976), which was directed by a man. So although it might have had a
substantial influence on the work of women behind the camera in Australia, and certainly
funded a number of ground-breaking experimental and short films made by women, it
did not contribute in a substantial way to the increasing representation of working women
in feature films. In 1990 the AFC replaced the Women’s Film Fund with the Women’s
Program, which again, was focused on the development of women as crew members and
creatives rather than women protagonists in the films it supported.
As the film industry made many changes through the end of one century to the
start of another, the older stereotypes shifted in favour of more complex and nuanced
representations, with female characters represented as journalists (Dating the Enemy,
1996), psychiatrists (Lantana, 2001), lawyers (Love in the First Degree, 2006), even
geologists (Japanese Story, 2003). These films work in different ways to construct
women as active citizens and participants in their society, with more agency than in
earlier works. However the older stereotypes of sex workers (X, 2011; Black and White
and Sex, 2011; Careless Love, 2012) were still represented.
Social constructions of gender on screen
As our study shows, the public image of women is an important barometer of how
women are understood and valued in society, and the big screen plays an important role
in establishing and sustaining notions of a preferred Australia. As Pickering (2014, 88)
argues ‘our sense of identity as Australians is, in large part, the product of what
nationalistic stories we tell ourselves’. The most dominant ‘story’ that informed
Australian national identity is the ‘Australian Legend’. Russel Ward’s The Australian
12
Legend first published in 1958, sought to trace the ‘national mystique’ that informed the
uniqueness of Australianness (Alder 2008, online). For Ward, the ‘Legend’ embodied the
Australian characteristics of egalitarianism and mateship, anti-intellectualism, swearing,
drinking, and gambling reflecting the apparent attributes of Australian convicts (Ward
1958). Ward dismissed the idea that The Australian Legend was ‘another cosily
impressionistic sketch of what wild boys we Australians are’. Rather Ward saw the
Australian Legend as representing ‘a national self-image: a set of manners and attitudes
cultivated by Australians across the years to reflect a type’ (Ward cited in Alder 2008,
online). As Rosemary Pringle and Sophie Watson remind us, ‘Australia has a long
tradition of male “mateship”, and bases its national identity on the doings of these mates
… women are largely excluded from the national myths that legitimate the Australian
state’ (Pringle and Watson 1990, 232).
For image makers, such as the Australian film industry under auspice of the AFC
and Screen Australia, who adopted the role of being ‘culturally responsible’ for
developing and sustaining nation-building narratives and a cohesive national character
(Gibson 1992, 68) the Australian Legend provided fertile iconography. In film, the
Australian Legend became the shearer, the bushranger, the battler, the soldier, and the
sporting hero. The result was the consolidation of a ‘highly masculinised notion of
Australianness’ (Pickering 2014, 88). Because of the preferencing of the characteristic of
Australian discourses of ‘mateship and masculine solidarity, set predominantly against
the background of the bush, the sports field, the pub, and the smoko room’ women were
excluded or positioned at the margins (Byrski 2010, 8).
For Chapman (2014, 30) the masculine myth that the Australian Legend informed
has become entrenched in the twentieth century as a fundamental part of Australian
identity. In film it has influentially informed celluloid representations of masculinity. It
has become a ‘grand narrative’ (Bracalente 2011, iii). Along with entrenching
masculinity as the norm, the Australian Legend in its cinematic iconography excludes
women from the national imagination (Bracalente 2011, 222). Going further, Miriam
Dixson, describes the Australian Legend as misogynistic (Dixson cited in Roberts 2008,
online). For (Byrski 2010, 8) this nationalising construct generates and maintains
‘cultural expectations which are often detrimental to women’.
Othering women: national space and binary place
13
The Australian film industry, while informed by the generic and conventional
structures of Hollywood, has been proud of what Graeme Turner calls its ‘national
utterances’ that give authenticity to both film and its embedded narratives of national
character and national identity. Authenticity, however, as our study demonstrates, tends
to produce a ‘particular, privileged, set of definitions: one preferred version of Australia.
The effect is exclusive, elitist, hegemonic’ (Turner 1991, 26).
The preference for the iconography of the Australian Legend renders women as
Others. While the authenticity of the Australian Legend is imagined as occupying the
national space, the Legend’s authenticity is particularly noted when ‘he’ is located in the
natural environment, specifically the bush and the outback. With Australian films
highlighting the outback and bush as authentic place, the inclusion of the Legend
reinforces both the space and the normative authenticity of the Legend in the space. In
turn the space becomes normatively understood as one of masculinity.
Nation-building, and its maintenance, requires spatial control. As Henri Lefebvre
(2009) argues public space needs to be dominated, appropriated and mediated in order
for hegemonic forces (the state, its economic pillars and its cultural industries) to
maintain their control and dominance. Cities and places of work, as well as the natural
environment and landscape require appropriation or risk emerging as counter-hegemonic
sites. Appropriated spaces serve the social relation of political and economic
reproduction and gender relations. Appropriated spaces shape ‘biophysiological
relations’ between men and women, namely regulating the organisation of labour and
divisions of labour (Lefebvre 2009, 183). In The Production of Space Lefebvre (1991,
166) argues that ‘similar considerations apply to the body and to sexuality. Dominated
by overpowering forces, including a variety of brutal techniques and an extreme
emphasis on visualisation, the body fragments, abdicates responsibility for itself-in a
word, disappropriates itself’. The power of ongoing positioning of the Australian Legend
in the natural landscape is that it becomes normatively seen as a place embodying
masculinity. In the masculinsation of the Australian landscape, women are rendered as
Others.
As noted, the AFC has a long history of propagating ‘culturally responsible’
nation-building narratives in its cinematic representations that aimed to ‘create a cohesive
view of nation character through the rendition of Australian landscape’ (Gibson 1992,
68). In celebrating the natural landscape as a place of masculinity, the Australian Legend
14
has anchored the myth of masculinity to the Australian landscape (Cottle 2009, 40)
meaning that men feel ‘such a comfortable ownership of the national space’ (Hage 1998,
42).
This is not to say women aren’t represented in the space of the Australian
landscape. They are, however it is in how they are represented that posits another
problematic aspect of Australian film and its nation-building agenda (Reynaud 1999,
216). Because Australian films are characteristically masculine (Zonn and Aitken 1994),
representations of women are atypical. When women are represented they are framed
within contradictory binaries: mothers/non-mothers; domestic women/working women;
rural
women/city
women;
permanent
workers/temporary
workers;
skilled
women/unskilled women; industrial class working women/professional class working
women; and working women/working men.
Deviancy also acts as another set of frames to Other women and their labour. Here
working women are framed as outsiders, tough, desexualised or working in what are
considered as aberrant professions such as prostitution, theatre and dance – occupations
that figure prominently in our study. Often embedded in these binaries are discursive
reasons to explain, and generally negate, the reasons why women work. Women’s work
is generally framed as occurring for a reason: because they are widowed, have no husband
or are single mothers. This positions women’s work as relational to men rather than
framing their work as a career choice or act of independence or agency. In a significant
number of cases, women’s work is narrated as temporary or short term, often in unskilled
positions.
A further level of consideration is the dichotomy between representations of
gendered labour. While the iconography of the Australian Legend can accommodate
working class men it struggles to accommodate working class women. When working
class women are framed in Australian films they are positioned in deviant occupations,
such as prostitution or in unskilled occupations. In skilled professions, representations of
women are positioned within normative gender frameworks, such as nursing which
reflects the apparent female traits of nurturing (see Milner and Bridgen 2014). There
appear no Australian films that show representations of women as unionists or engaging
in a central role in collectivising women’s work, union organising or union leadership,
even though there have been three female presidents of the Australian Council of
Australian Unions (ACTU) Jennie George (1996-2000), Sharan Burrow (2000-2010),
and Ged Kearney (2010-). It has been union documentaries rather than Australian feature
15
films that have shown working class women in ways that inform society of their
contribution to working class and feminist history (See Milner 2009).
Conclusion
The ‘Gender Matters’ project outlined by Screen Australia goes some way to
redressing the imbalances evident in gender representations behind Australian cameras.
However funding alone will not change the structural and cultural conditions that have
built and sustained the Australian film industry, and who and how it chooses to represent
women. A re-examination of issues of national identity and character, particularly a
careful assessment of how cultural myths such as the Australian Legend act to exclude
and render invisible social groups seen to not embody its characteristics or appearances,
is needed. With women making up just over 50% of the population and 59% of the labour
market (World Bank 2014), and with legislative changes that posit their normative role
in the labour market, their lived experiences have a place in Australian cinema. Finding
meaningful frameworks to tell their stories, for young female audiences to see their
stories, for their historical and political contributions to Australian society to be told,
requires urgent attention by the Australian film industry.
Our study builds on Margaret Marshment’s reminder that representation is a
political issue: ‘if women are being defined, for example, as wives and mothers to the
exclusion of their work outside the home … then they are not receiving fair representation
in society’ (1997, 125-6). While research, such as that of Godfrey (2009), suggests that
the boundaries between popular culture representations and praxis are porous because
film auteurs construct their own versions of society and audiences bring their own
readings to films, what is evident is that in a lack of representation women, and in
particular working women, are largely invisible. When they are represented, this film
survey suggests that are framed in contradictory binaries against both masculinity and
other women. There appears little place or space for working women within Australia’s
hegemonic film industry, positing there is little place or space for women in Australian
society in terms of valued labour.
Blonski et al remind us that ‘so much of women’s work has gone unrecorded and
unmarked; so much of our history exists merely as footnotes to accounts of the exploits
of famous men’ (Blonski et al 1987, ‘Preface’). The representation and construction of
16
women on Australian screens as mostly non-working citizens restricts the employment
opportunities of all women. Constituting women as an overwhelmingly unitary category
is problematic as it does not recognise diversity in material conditions or life experiences.
Just as the Indigenous film industry has sought to reframe the culture wars that
acted to maintain the myth of terra nullius (see Collins and Davis 2004), the work of
Screen Australia, and in general the Australian screen industry, need to reframe the
absence of women on screens and their social, political and economic contributions. A
re-imagining of how women and their labour can be (re)introduced into the national
consciousness is an important task, and there is a long way to go to reach some form of
representative equality. Twenty years ago, Tom O’Regan noted that ‘surveys which
provide evidence of a lack of equality of opportunity and on-screen outcome for women
in a male-dominated industry produce information which is recognizable to and therefore
potentially actionable by governments’ (O’Regan 1996, 289). In studies of Australian
cinema in the 1970s and early 1980s, Susan Dermody and Elizabeth Jacka adopted the
concept of ‘social imaginaries’ rather than national identity as a tool to reconceptualise
how national stories are told in films (Dermody and Jacka 1988). A rethinking of gender
roles, women and their lived experiences, and women’s contributions to social life, as
‘social imaginaries’ rather than perpetuating the myth of masculinisation posits a more
diverse, rich and equitable society.
17
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22
Appendix 1: Occupations of female protagonists in
Australian feature films, 1900-2014.
Occupation
journalist
actor
Sex worker
dancer
lawyer
nurse
School teacher
writer
entertainer
singer
barmaid
Business owner
Fashion designer
hairdresser
nanny
photographer
Police officer
Video store worker
Agricultural workers
Animal sanctuary manager
Anthropologist
artist
athlete
bank clerk
Book shop worker
bookkeeper
Boutique owner
Cannery worker
Cinema attendant
Dance instructor
detective
Disability therapist
Espionage operative??
executive
politician
Film producer
forensic psychologist
geologist
Insurance company worker
Kindergarten teacher
Number of Films
7
5
5
4
4
4
4
4
3
3
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
2
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
23
Legal firm worker
Magazine editor
maid
Professional executive businesswoman
Psychiatrist
Publisher
Retirement home manager
Social worker
sportswoman
Stable hand
Television industry worker
Television personality
University research assistant
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
24
Table 1: Australian Feature Films with Working
Women Protagonists, 1900-2014
Australian Feature Films with Working Women Protagonists, 1900-2014
9
8
7
6
5
4
3
2
1
0
1900
1920
1940
1960
Number of Films
1980
2000
2020