Saw this on Australian ABC2TV last night.

They are showing a trilogy of Australian films under the banner of The Darkside of Oz. The first was Dogs in Space with Michael Hutchence, then Wake in Fright and next week, The Boys. Like all societies, there is a seedy underbelly of the national psyche, and these three films def. show under the laid back sunny exterior of Australians lies this darkness, needless to say mostly in men. One of the features of Wake In Fright showed the Australian man as gruff, ill natured, and in a darker tone, covertly homo-erotic. The scenes where men fight and wrestle with each other leads to this assumption. The women are portrayed as basically sour, as if they suffer from lack of true love from these men. Of course the great love of the god alcohol, is in plain sight as it fuels this destructive energy as if each drink brings out a dark genie from the bottle.

Unlike the current film Red Dog, which portrays isolated mining life in NW Australia, as joky and simplistic, Wake In Fright, is a truer depiction. The outback is in a way, similar to a prison where you are forced to do a life sentence and there is no escape.