Ever since Voltaire penned L’Ingénu, about a young French-Canadian in France, there has been a stream of storytelling which has used the observations of a naive outsider to comment on metropolitan society. Crocodile Dundee owes not a little of its success abroad to the fact that it draws on this tradition: the whole film, when not explicitly challenging America, can be read as questioning modern values. As everyone knows, this comment has not come in classic fashion from within the metropolitan society; both Crocodile Dundee and the earlier The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (set in Britain) are clearly Australian comedies playing on Australia’s image and identity. Nevertheless the two strands are inseparable. Both become ‘revenge’ films, striking back through comedy at the sources of power and sophistication, and are perfectly happy to use metropolitan actors to make their point (and their dollars) all the more effectively.

The Australian film revival effectively began with Bruce Beresford’s The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972). Already this film was a considerable advance upon Ted Kotcheff’s Wake In Fright (1971), which was not only shot by a Canadian director on location, but used an English actor to take the part of a Sydney schoolteacher in the Outback, vaguely longing for a nice quiet life in England. By comparison, Bazza was unequivocally Australian. Quite justifiably, Barry Humphries has claimed that Barry McKenzie was the ‘midwife’ of Paul Hogan and the ocker advertisements.⁵ Now that Hogan himself has devised a character for export in Crocodile Dundee, the earlier film is worth a second look.