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Moby Dick on the Inland Sea.
Deane Williams, Visual Culture, School of Literary, Visual and Performance Studies
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Deane.Williams@arts.monash.edu.au
This paper will argue that John Heyer's 1954 film The Back of Beyond is to Australian film culture what Herman Melville's Moby Dick is to American literature. This paper will focus less on formal aspects of the two texts and will offer the comparison as a site for a theorising of the possibilities for the emergence of a post-colonial film culture in Australia after the second world war. The ways in which Melville's novel has been more recently reevaluated provides useful models to rethink The Back of Beyond out of traditional notions of 'essential Australianess' by taking into account the same kinds of oceanic considerations which have rendered Moby Dick as a classic of American literature as well as the issues of location which attend its reception.
