It is no easy task for an outsider to anatomise a national cinema, and the Austrian academic Adi Wimmer suggests in this series of essays that Australian cinema has always been more national than most. In other words, our filmmakers have been unusually dedicated to the project of defining a collective identity through a set of instantly recognisable myths: the ultimate Australian film would be one that showed a group of sun-bronzed, laconic, Anglo-Saxon blokes battling droughts and big business in a wide brown land seen equally as a symbol of brooding masculinity and as a hostile mother.

Love them or hate them, these clichés have never quite faded away, and look set for a Sunset Boulevard-style revival in Baz Luhrmann’s forthcoming high-camp super-production Australia. Wimmer himself is both assisted and constrained by his focus on national mythmaking: as a European academic addressing an international readership, he has little freedom to improvise around his subject in the jazzy, unscientific manner of Raymond Durgnat in his pioneering study of British cinema, A Mirror for England (1971), or of Philip Brophy in his recent monograph on Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), reviewed on page 45 of this issue.