Manchester University Press

A book written by an English author and published by an English academic press with first-page references to New Labour, Conservative austerity, and Brexit might seem, at first glance, of little interest to or relevance for Australian readers. Yet anyone concerned with or about the state of the arts in this country and further afield will find much stimulus, provocation, and food for thought in the latest work of a prolific academic-activist entrepreneur who has occupied posts in three Australian universities since 2008, besides presenting at conferences and consulting widely with UN agencies and local and national governments throughout Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.

In July 1986, at the onset of the Glasnost era, a program featuring a discussion between American and Soviet women on a range of contemporary issues was broadcast on Soviet television. Reflecting on the prevalence of sex in US popular culture, an American participant asked her Soviet collocutors whether this was also the case in their country. The response was curt: ‘There is no sex in the USSR.’ 

In 1902 the New Zealander William Pember Reeves published a pioneering study of social innovations in Australia and New Zealand. He wrote it, he said, for the ‘increasing number of students in England, on the Continent, and in America who are sincerely interested in them’ ...

I approached this readable and well-informed study expecting a middling book on a middling filmmaker. Michael Winterbottom is obviously a talented man by the standards of modern British commercial cinema, but I have always associated his work with a routine blend of fashionable technique and pious liberal sentiment. Nor did Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams raise my hopes with their introduction, in which they praise Winterbottom’s business sense and his avoidance of ‘high-flown accounts of what he is up to’. Above all, they seem impressed by the sheer industry of a director who has averaged one feature a year for the past decade and a half; however you judge him, ‘he does keep getting his films made’.

Of late, there has been a welcome surge in the study of British migrants in Australia. James Jupp’s The English in Australia (2004) provided one of the first overviews since the 1960s. Andrew Hassam followed migrant Britons from the nineteenth into the twentieth century, and younger scholars such as Sara Wills, Carole Hamilton-Barwick and Lorraine Proctor have begun to explore the local intricacies of settlement and identity. Given both the subject – numerically the largest of the postwar migrant groups – and the growth in historical and sociological accounts of immigration and multiculturalism since the 1970s, the surge has been a long time coming.

Roy Ward Baker is quoted as saying ‘realism is my forte’. But Geoff Mayer’s book reveals that over a fifty-eight-year career in film and television, Baker was much more than just a ‘realist’. Baker began as a ‘gopher’ at Gainsborough Studios in 1934, but he is best known for directing what is perhaps the definitive film on the Titanic disaster, A Night to Remember (1958). He also directed horror productions for Hammer Films, including The Vampire Lovers (1960) and Quatermass and the Pit (1967). He ended his career at seventy-two with an episode of the British television series The Good Guys (1992). It is due to this long and diverse career that Baker has not been embraced as an auteur, a filmmaker who is able to project a consistent personal vision across a range of films. However, in Roy Ward Baker, Geoff Mayer, of La Trobe University, situates Baker as an auteur, tracing the vicissitudes of his career to provide a comprehensive and intriguing study of the filmmaker and his films, as well as his industrial, social, and political contexts.