Men jeer and shoot their guns. A kangaroo stares, pinned in place by fear and a bright, glaring spotlight. A man grimaces, sweat drips. He leers and pulls a trigger, and the kangaroo flinches and falls. My knuckles are white gripping the bag in my lap. Yes. I think, this. Something about this feeling, a low hum of terror. This film is truly describing my life right now, our lives right now. I am frozen in place just like the kangaroo that I have just seen die. Something is coming and I can’t move to get out of the way.
I sit in the cinema, watching the restored 4K print of Wake in Fright and realise that I have never read the book. I had seen the film once before when I was younger, but never on the big screen, and even then I didn’t remember many of the scenes that were so vividly rolling out before me.
Wake in Fright was the great forgotten Australian classic. The master negative of the film went missing, so I only had access to it in 2009 when it was digitally remastered and released for the Cannes Film Festival. My first viewing was complicated. I became obsessed with the city–urban divide. Having come from the western suburbs of Sydney and moving to country Queensland, the culture shock led to a particular kind of nastiness from the other members of my family. I was very aware of my family making judgements of those around us. My sister was particularly down on the ‘dumb’ country bumpkins. My family were migrants, and although they had experienced classism and racism when they moved from Egypt to England, which prompted them to migrate again to Australia, they valued education above all else. The lack of good schools in country Queensland and a focus on manual labour meant that no matter how poor we were in my household, and no matter how wealthy the farmers were, my family saw the locals as less classy, not very smart and less refined. They didn’t use the Queen’s English, didn’t read books, and they knew nothing about art, which was of central importance to my family. I was embarrassed by our snobbery. At fifteen, I wanted to fit in, even though I knew I didn’t have much in common with those around me. At the very least, I wanted them to like me.
Because of this, the first time I watched Wake in Fright, I bristled at its blatant elitism. I wanted to rage against the supercilious tone of the teacher. Sure, I knew the threat and violence of the local men was the point of the film, but I took it personally. The smart, educated city slicker needed to be taken down a peg or two. Maybe I saw myself in him, and my hatred of my biases overwhelmed my viewing experience.
My second screening was a vastly different experience. As an adult in 2025, the film seems more relevant than ever. An edge of anxiety infuses it, one that I feel daily. The world is a mean and dangerous place, and the social rules are opaque and always shifting. One minute, it is important to be kind and inclusive, and the next, inclusivity is labelled ‘woke’ and a would-be prime minister is threatening to strip schools of funding if they don’t strip tolerance and inclusivity from the curriculum. One minute, Russia is a totalitarian, dangerous regime, and the next, Vladimir Putin is bosom buddies with our closest military ally, the United States. One minute, I am being supported in finally coming out as trans, and the next, I am being warned that travelling to America as a trans person is dangerous and should be avoided. The film spools on, the anxiety ramps up. I wake up anxious and that anxiety escalates as the news cycle turns over and more horrors unfold.
What has changed from one viewing of this film to the next? And is it just me, or were these nuances there in the original text? I immediately tracked down a copy of the reprinted Text Classics edition of Wake In Fright by Kenneth Cook, opened the cover emblazoned with five beers, and began to read.
I have always been attracted to outsider stories. I struggle to understand unwritten social rules. For most of my life, I felt like this struggle was because I had been so sheltered in the bosom of my migrant family that the world outside the doors of my house had become a confusing place. I didn’t understand the Australian way. I didn’t understand the appeal of ‘mateship’ or ‘the pub test’. I didn’t understand ball sports, couldn’t tell the difference between rugby and AFL, and I didn’t see the problem with eating a sausage sandwich from the middle out. The rules for inclusion seemed too rigid, too arbitrary. I was born in this country, but I could never hope to pass as an ocker Aussie and as a result, I spent all my school years hanging out with the migrant kids. Now that there has been a diagnosis of autism in my family, I wonder if some of my struggle to fit in was the result of a neurodivergent brain. Certainly, the idea of performing ‘woman’ has been something I tripped over my whole life, and identifying as trans at 53 was a huge and immediate relief that freed me from a world of trouble and pretence.
Reeling from one page to the next in Cook’s 1961 masterpiece felt familiar. An outsider, John Grant, is trying to get away from his teaching post in a small country town and gets stuck in Bundanyabba after losing all his money in a two-up game after a night of heavy drinking. For the rest of the book, Grant tries to navigate the social mores of this tight-knit community, copying behaviour but never completely fitting in and suffering the consequences of the huge effort of trying.
The book is saying something about Australia that I have always known but never articulated. Our country is such a generous, magnanimous place as long as you play along and try to fit in. ‘(I)t’s possible to live on The Yabba without money,’ writes Cook, ‘provided you conform.’
The Indian, Chinese, Māori and First Nations students who were my friends at school would never be a part of the mainstream, no matter how many football games they went to or how many beers they downed with Duncan. My queer cohort in my high school years couldn’t fit into the rigidly segregated masculinities and femininities that are so fundamental to the Aussie persona. We try to pass, we try to put on a broad Australian accent, we try to divide into those who play football and those who clean up the dinner plates, but it is never going to work because our rainbow community is just not wired that way.
In Wake in Fright, an undercurrent of aggressive masculinity in the form of mateship runs through the whole story. Mateship is forced on people, and what might be pleasant inclusivity becomes an insistence to conform. As Cook puts it, ‘Oh God, these relentlessly friendly people whose sheer good-will bordered on impertinence.’ But hidden under the blokey veneer is a simmering sexuality. Grant finds himself almost having a sexual experience with a ‘mate’s’ daughter, Janette, and is then berated by the other outsider in the novel, Tydon, a doctor and an addict who squats in a shed, living off the generosity of others. Tydon is a drunken and often unhinged voice of reason in the book. He plainly states that there is nothing wrong with women who want and like sex. Tydon says that sex is a natural part of being human, like eating and sleeping, and that includes homosexuality. There is nothing wrong with it, says Tyden, ‘although he does not practice it himself’.
When a gun is revealed in any book, it must be used for something important. Just like that, the word homosexuality becomes another smoking gun. Tydon evokes the word, and then it simmers away under the debauchery of the following pages until something unnamed and unnameable happens between Tydon and Grant. We only catch glimpses of it—drunkenness, nakedness, grinning faces, panting—but we know that the homosexuality gun has been fired. No matter how hard Grant tries to hide the truth of his situation, something homosexually adjacent has occurred and no amount of hitchhiking will get him away from the scene of those events. Sexual suppression is another national sport in Australia. We are a country ringed by beaches, and Australian women are often presented as the stereotype of the tanned, blonde, youthful woman with big tits bouncing around in a bikini. Men are either beefed-up footballers or muscled surfers. Good blokes and hot sheilas are the culturally acceptable versions of Australians. No queer threesome-in-the-library for our Olympic opening ceremonies. The hinted-at homosexuality is a love that does not speak its name. If we don’t speak of it, we can pretend it does not happen. Suppression is such a huge part of Australian cultural life that, living here, you can feel the tremble of things suppressed, like a series of aftershocks.
Before I read Wake in Fright, there was another book that was trembling with the suppression of sexuality. That book obsessed me. Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, which won the Miles Franklin Award in 1987, felt like it pointed to something in our culture that needed to be revealed. Another rural tale, The Well features two women, one older, Hester, and one young, Katherine, who has been saved from an orphanage to live with Hester on her farm. Right from the first page, it is clear that Hester dotes on Katherine. She is fascinated and aroused by the life coursing through the girl’s veins. There is a sense that Hester is in love with Katherine, but Katherine is cruelly indifferent to the older woman. One night after a party, Katherine begs Hester to let her drive home, and on this journey, Katherine recklessly runs over something in the road. ‘There’s something on the track’ becomes ‘someone on the track’, and as Hester says, ‘It’s not a roo, Katherine. It’s not a roo. Don’t come out, it’s too horrible.’ Someone or something is dead, and Hester saves Katherine from prosecution by dropping whatever it is down the well.
But what is hidden cannot remain hidden forever. Katherine begins to hear a voice calling. Was the ‘man’ Katherine killed really dead when Hester threw him down the well? The anxiety mounts, threatening to unravel the safe little bubble that Hester has managed to make for herself and Katherine. Secrets will not remain buried; the rot bubbles to the surface.
These books, Wake in Fright from 1961 and The Well from 1986, resonate with the same tremors. We have built a myth of Australian wholesomeness and mateship on a cesspit of secrets but the rot at the heart of this construction will bubble to the surface.
I saw something in The Well when I first read it: something about belonging, being an outsider and being complicit in secret keeping. I loved the book and called it my favourite Australian novel. It had a kind of honesty that I wanted to see in more books. I rediscovered that honesty, belatedly, by finally picking up Wake in Fright. Now, weighing both books in my hands, I can’t tell you which I love more. They both seem to be singing a song in the same key, trembling with sympathetic vibrations that stretch across decades. Both detail our cultural anxiety that comes from living for so long with such terrible secrets, putting on a brave face and pretending that everything is okay.
If Wake in Fright and The Well herald the subterranean trembling of a country built on lies, reading Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) was the moment when the volcanic activity finally erupted for me, spilling its toxic waste into the harsh light of the sun. It is a book set during a pandemic and one that I read during our pandemic lockdowns, but unlike other pandemic books, Animals felt as if all our anxieties had finally been articulated. This book had opened a window, stuck its head out and shouted, ‘We’ve fucked it all and we are all going to die,’ which was exactly what I felt like shouting at the time.
Hester quotes from Ecclesiastes in The Well: ‘For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts… as the one dieth, so dieth the other.’ It is a quote that could easily be used to preface The Animals in That Country, which articulates so clearly another one of the many anxieties that face our country today, the terror that we may one day be able to understand the voice of the natural world and no longer pretend that the violence we visit on nature has no implications for humankind. As McKay writes, ‘Animals are straight up like that, it’s people you have to watch out for.’
The pandemic in Animals is a virus, the zooflu that allows us to understand the ‘language’ of animals. For the first time ever, we begin to understand what they think of us and what we are doing to them. People who live with pets are suddenly abandoning them, and the voices of insects are driving people mad. Jean, who works in an animal sanctuary, is suddenly challenged by the safe environment of her workplace as she realises that she had no idea what animals were really saying to her. For Jean, it starts with mice. She can smell their words as much as hear them; it is a kind of gas coming off their fur.
I run. The door behind me heavy with all those little words. The gasses push out in clouds and hang around my nose and eyes, jitter-bugging my brain. Everything. The body. Run.
All the unsaid things erupt with the coming of the zooflu. Through the language of animals, Jean begins to see the world as it really is, without the ‘she’ll be right’ filter of humanity that pushes the harsh reality down. Jean is the protagonist, but perhaps she is just our human interpreter for the real queen of the story, Sue the Dingo, who emerges as the alpha animal, the wise and instinctual creature of past and present and future. Sue straight-talks right from the start. ‘Bloody / Colony,’ she says with her fur and her heat and her body. She looks back to the ‘yesterday’, to the bones and the blood. Suddenly the secrets erupt out of the earth, spilling out from the body of an animal whose ancestors have seen it all unfold.
These three books spell out an anxiety that, in 2025, is there on our newsfeeds on a daily basis. As a country, we can no longer mask the dark and bitter heart of our culture with a She’ll be right, mate, and a couple more schooners. The trembling under the surface has erupted out into the bright Australian sun.
While I once felt that the simmering of anxiety reflected the current state of our cultural life, I now feel like we can no longer hide the horrors, we can’t tamp them down. Each summer brings scouring droughts and fires or floods and cyclones of catastrophic proportions. Bird flu is winging its way towards the continent. Global political partners have bared their teeth, showing us that they are really not so benign after all. Wars are killing children on our phones as we cradle them in the palms of our hands. It is close and it is personal. We can no longer pretend we do not understand the cries of help from our environment, our non-human partners, our fellow humans around the world.
These three books track our national anxiety, and this last one, The Animals in That Country, has split open the world for me. In McKay’s book, the sentences become fractured. Even the truth of language falls apart. The more we understand, the less we understand. McKay breaks the world and puts it back together in a way that is more complex, more true. I read the language of insects in McKay’s text and I feel like I am reading the internet, social media, the all-caps words shouted between people who have no way of understanding each other. ‘HAS BLOOD. | THE WALL IS MOVING. | bugs. Talking. Making words. | DRINK TILL DEAD.’ Like Jean, ‘I yell, but my words, my thoughts, my everything is sucked into the fog of meaning that buzzes, crawls, twists, and burrows. They’re all over me. In my mouth, my nose, my ears, like they said they would be. Black, twisting bodies. Legs over my skin. Biblical. A plague of tongues.’ That is the truth of our digital world today—a plague of tongues.
I think of the threateningly friendly blokes in the Wake in Fright of 1961, the ghostly voice from the well-shaft of The Well in 1986. We have moved past that now. The voices are multiple, shouting all at once, making no sense.
No. She will not be right, mate. Perhaps the only way forward is to make like dingo Sue and ‘Run / For Tomorrow’.
…
Kris Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry and non-fiction. Their latest book Fat Girl Dancing was shortlisted for both the Victorian and the Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, and the SA Literary Award.
