"They burn their beastly bodies brown" - Nino Cullota's Weird Mob at the Beach.

Jeanette Hoorn, Cinema Studies, University of Melbourne

j.hoorn@finearts.unimelb.edu.au

This paper examines the role of the beach in Michael Powell's 1966 Classic film They’re a Weird Mob. Replete with matching terry Bikini, beach jacket and beach towel, Clare Dunne's celtic Australian body and those of the rugged lifesavers who rescue the newly arrived Nino Cullota - out of his depth in the surf - signify Australianess in this early narrative on multi-culturalism in Australia. Making fun of the old Anglo-Celtic Australia, this is the first 'local' film to valorise the culture of migrant Italians suggesting that the traditions of the Mediterranean might have something to offer Britons in Australia. Based on the novel by John O'Grady, Weird Mob is the first of a series of texts in which Anglos take on the identity of migrants by speaking in the first person in order to satirise the parent culture, presenting a pastiche of the culture of the invading hordes in order to contain it. Mark Mitchell's television series The Comedy Company of the 1980's is another example of this cross-cultural drag, while Baz Luhrmann's Strictly Ballroom of 1992 argues from the point of view of multi-cultural Australia, savagely satirising the old anglo culture which most of the script writers, actors and film crew represent.

This paper looks at how the beach - sand, surf, tanned bodies, bikinis, lifesavers - is configured as the primal scene in which migrants are 'naturalised' in They're a Weird Mob. This paper also examines a range of other cultural texts from the period in which the beach is similarly located.

Dr Jeanette Hoorn teaches in the Cinema Studies program at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on Australian art and is co-editor, with Barbara Creed of Bodytrade: Colonialism, Cannibalism and Captivity in the Pacific, forthcoming with Pluto Press.