John Slavin

The Battle of Crete began on the morning of 20 May 1941 with a new kind of warfare. German paratrooper battalions either parachuted or rode gliders down onto a defending force of British, ANZAC and Greek troops. The invasion took two weeks of bloody fighting to achieve its objectives. It was not, as Greek-Australian writer, Angelo Loukakis has his Australian soldier, Vic Stockton describe it: ‘For the Germans Crete had proved no more than an exercise.’ In fact, airborne invasion was not attempted again. Hitler’s thrust into the Soviet Union on June 22 was almost destabilised, and when the battle was over, 5000 Allied troops were abandoned to certain captivity on the southern coast near the town of Xora Sfakion.

To state the case bluntly, is there in fact any place for opera in the twenty-first century? What is the use of opera? Many would say that it is a moribund art form, traditional and arthritic, class-ridden, a minority and élitist pursuit of an arcane society harbouring secret rituals in the mode of cabbalists with their adherence to vision and the genealogy of seers. My questions suggest some kind of crisis. Yet they are unanswerable because, like all art at a profound level, opera is useless.

This book fulfils two objectives. Within popular culture’s contribution to concepts of national identity, it energises a gap left in cinema studies by taking the contemporary discussion from the 1990s through to Japanese Story (Brooks, 2003). Secondly, it attempts to place films produced in the last ten years within the context of what the authors clearly believe to be the single most important recent event in the positioning of a dialogue between white and Aboriginal populations about belonging. That event is the Mabo decision of 1992 by the High Court that native title did exist at the time of the British invasion in 1788. The authors contend that this decision marks a watershed in the political unconscious of the nation. The assumption of terra nullius, that the land was not occupied and therefore entailed no transaction of settlement rights, was overthrown. More contentiously, they argue that this decision has caused a deep trauma in the white community, symptoms of which may be seen in the movement for reconciliation. At the heart of their study is the idea that this trauma is entangled in the major themes of most, if not all, the films produced locally post-Mabo.