“In yer dreams” is a common phrase in the Australian vernacular, comically reworked by Darryl Kerrigan (Michael Caton) in Rob Sitch’s The Castle (1997) when he responds to his son, Steve (Anthony Simcoe), alerting him to yet another item for sale in a Trading Post newspaper, with “Tell ‘im he’s dreamin’”. But this is not a nasty or derogatory phrase. It is Australian slang. It is how Australians generally talk to each other. The Australian language, according to the Australian Government Culture and Recreation Portal (2007c), relies heavily on slang, and though that slang may often sound rude or insulting, invariably it is expressed as a friendly, even complimentary, communication. The widespread use and understanding of slang is indicative of the importance of humour to Australian national identity. Indeed, as the Culture and Recreation Portal (2007a) claims, “Comedy is central to Australian cultural identity”. In early 2006, La Trobe University (2006, p. 7) published the news that a research team, made up of Dr Felicity Collins, Dr Sue Turnbull and Dr Susan Bye, had received funding for a three year investigation into “the way comedy portrays Australian national types and how it looks at aspects of the Australian way of life”. According to that report (La Trobe University 2006, p. 7), the team hope their research will provide a “better understanding of how…[comedy and its characters]…influence ideas about our national character”. Given the importance placed on humour by both Government and Academia, it is hardly surprising that the cinema of Australia, home of the kookaburra, a bird renown for its call which resembles raucous human laughter, should be noted for the humour in many of its films. Through consideration of three Australian films, Crocodile Dundee (1986), The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) and The Castle, this article discusses the role of humour and considers how this relates to Australian cultural values and national identity.

Crocodile Dundee, referred to by O’Regan (1996, p. 92) as a “hillbilly classic”, is a romantic comedy in which an American journalist, Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski), the daughter of a wealthy newspaper proprietor, takes an unsophisticated bush-man, Mick ‘Crocodile’ Dundee (Paul Hogan), from the Australian outback to the urban jungle of New York City. Priscilla is a ‘picaresque’ narrative, which is a style of journey narrative or a journey of self-discovery. In this film of a journey quite the opposite to the travels of Dundee, a trio of ‘drag queen’ performers, Mitzi (Hugo Weaving), Bernadette (Terence Stamp) and Felicia (Guy Pearce), travel from the city of Sydney to the ‘capital’ of the outback, Alice Springs. Aside from weekends at the holiday home in Bonnie Doon, there is no journey in The Castle. This film concerns the trials of a man who just wants to stay put. Darryl Kerrigan must fight authority and a multi-national corporation to protect and keep his home.

These films offer quite different visions of the ‘typical’ Australian. The central character, or characters in the case of Priscilla, in each film is/are white and male, but that, perhaps, is where any obvious similarity ends. Dundee is the quintessential Aussie ‘bush tucker’ man, although, in a way of destroying his own iconic status, he prefers baked beans to yams or goanna. Darryl Kerrigan is quite the opposite - a tow truck driver who lives in the suburbs. Darryl is the epitome of the patriarchal father and husband, his wife, Sal, (Anne Tenney), equally epitomising the suburban housewife. Yet Darryl, by challenging authority, becomes the quintessential Aussie battler. Mitzi, Bernadette and Felicia, are far removed from either Dundee or Darryl. Mitzi and Felicia are homosexual transvestites. Bernadette is a transsexual. Yet these three, none of whom could be imagined either wrestling a crocodile with Dundee or fishing with Darryl at Bonnie Doon, do, with their self-deprecating humour, resilience in the face of adversity, and desire to conquer the landscape, to be “a cock in a frock on a rock”, exhibit, in a very ‘camp’ way, the traits of the quintessential Australian character.

Considering the diversity of all these characters, how does one determine just what is quintessential in regard to Australian national identity? While Dundee is more comfortable in the bush, sleeping under the stars, Darryl is very much the suburban dweller, whose trips to the countryside, to Bonnie Doon, are still quite suburban. The family dinner, over-cooked, barbequed steak, on these excursions, is still eaten around the kitchen table just as if that family were back home at Number 3 Highview Crescent, Coolaroo, a home that shares its fence with an international airport. In Priscilla, although the older Bernadette does decide to ‘retire’ from the city with the outback resident, Bob (Bill Hunter), she was a former member of the dance troupe, Les Girls, and Mitzi and Felicia are certainly far more comfortable in front of the bright lights of a city night-club. Bernadette, quite eloquently and satirically, while consoling a bruised Felicia, the victim of an outback ‘gay-bashing’, sums up her perceived social differences between all three localities, the city, the suburbs and the bush:

It’s funny. We all sit around mindlessly slagging off at that vile stink-hole of a city, but in some strange way, it takes care of us. I don’t know if that ugly wall of suburbia has been put there to stop them getting in or us getting out.

Though the differences between these characters - and their preferred environments - are obvious, each is Australian and each film displays the elements of parody, irony and self-deprecation which O’Regan (1996, p. 234) considers are “part of an antipodal strand of Australian comic cinema”, elements the Culture and Recreation Portal (2007b) considers part of an Australian “tradition”. While Shaw (cited in Abbey & Crawford 1990, p. 172) suggests the quintessential Australian “would have to be a hybrid of rich/poor, flabby/taut, garrulous/introverted, smartly/sloppily dressed”, it would seem even that definition is not broad enough.

O’Regan (1996, p. 234) argues that the strategy of comedy in Australian cinema is to strengthen a culture perceived, both internally and externally, as weak. This apparent weakness may also go some way toward explaining why the Australian national imaginary has tended to be masculinist in outlook. Yet at the same time, the male protagonists in the films under consideration here are weak as well as strong. Dundee appears outwardly rugged, yet his inner ‘other’ is emotional and somewhat insecure. When he frightens off three muggers in New York with his bigger knife, Sue says:

I’m always allright when I’m with you, Dundee… Why do you always make me feel like Jane in a Tarzan comic?

Mick ‘Tarzan’ Dundee’s response is a weak tapping of the chest with an even weaker attempt at the jungle-man’s call. This self-parodic act is not a deconstruction of his masculinity, but rather, an indication of his innocence and unpretentiousness, traits which, as Rattigan (1988, p. 149) argues, are factors in “Australian cultural perceptions of self-identity”. It is an act that displays his Australian ‘down-to-earth’ innocence as opposed to an American urban sophistication. It is a quaint and endearing moment that reveals his more emotional side. It is at this moment, when Sue sees more to this bush-man than a rugged exterior. Indeed, it is at this moment when she realises her attraction to him. She approaches him and they kiss, passionately.

Dundee’s innocence is also portrayed through his rustic naivety. He mistakes sex-workers for women who might prefer to join him for a movie or a dance; he is fooled by a transvestite; he thinks a party-goer ‘snorting’ cocaine has a head-cold. His unsophistication - displayed by his preference to sleep on the floor of his luxurious hotel room, washing his clothes while he takes a bath, his expectation and easy development of a casual camaraderie with the chauffeur, Gus (Reginald VelJohnson), the hotel staff, a policeman, a taxi-driver and people in a bar, even strangers in the street and the subway - his “unworldliness”, as Rattigan (1988, p. 152) calls it, endows Dundee with “heroic status in terms of Australians’ perceptions of themselves”. What is heroic here, however, is not the chest-beating of a Tarzan, or the bravado of a Rambo, or the self-determination of a Rocky. The heroism here is, as Barker (cited in Abbey & Crawford 1990, p. 156) claims, Dundee’s embodiment of “the Australian personal style…what it is to be Australian”. Abbey and Crawford (1990, p. 156) argue that “one of the most appealing features…[of the Australian ethos is]…our ability to laugh at ourselves”, and that is what Crocodile Dundee allows us to do. Dundee, as Barker (cited in Abbey & Crawford 1990, p. 156) states, takes “neither himself nor anyone else seriously”. In this regard, with the understanding, as O’Regan (1996, p. 249) proposes, that such an attitude is a major aspect of Australian culture, Dundee is indeed Australian.

The Castle also employs this self-mockery as a celebration of Australianness. Though it is a parody of a stereotype, that stereotype is one with which, according to Mortimer (1998, p. 117), many Australians may relate. McElroy (2006) argues the Kerrigans are “improbable characters who warm your heart even as you laugh at their lack of sophistication”. The Castle is a comedy that, as Mortimer (1998, p. 117) claims, using Australian slang, is “‘taking the piss’ out of something and celebrating it at the same time”. Though it may be, as Mortimer (1998, p. 116) suggests, embarrassing, it is very much a celebration of the ‘David versus Goliath’, Aussie battler myth, a celebration which shifts that myth from its traditional site in the bush and posits it fairly and squarely in working-class suburbia. Though the Kerrigans may come across as naive and unsophisticated with their tackiness and simplicity, they ultimately display a defiant dignity that places family and home above all other considerations. Confronted with a “compulsory acquisition” of his house in Coolaroo, Darryl is committed to do battle in order to save, not his house, but his home. He explains to his legal representative, Lawrence Hammill (Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell):

They’re judgin’ a place by what it looks like…but it’s not a house, it’s a home. It’s got everything…it’s a place for the family to turn to, come back to. But that doesn’t seem to mean as much as a big fuckin’ driveway.

There is a general desire in Australia, evidenced by constant news coverage of rental hikes, housing prices and interest rate rises, for the acquisition of one’s own home in the suburbs. Indeed, the majority of Australians reside in an urban sprawl which emanates from the capital cities of each of the three eastern States. In reality, perhaps, the ‘typical’ Australian would not be the bush-dwelling Dundee, but rather, more likely, be the suburban Darryl Kerrigan.

Very much the ‘other’ of the more traditional view of a heterosexual patriarchal Australia, Priscilla deconstructs the idea of masculinity and stereotypes of Australianness. Where Crocodile Dundee is a performance of masculinity, Priscilla is sexuality as performance. But more than that, it presents a ‘culture of difference’, a culture, which Cassar (n.d., p. 13) asserts, has developed in Australia as the nation built up by a constant influx of migrants, whether as convicts exiled from the British Isles, as post-World War Two European refugees, or as ‘boat people’ who now arrive on our shores from “all parts of the world”. Turner (1995, p. 33), who may have, perhaps, missed the joke of Priscilla’s overt ‘camp’ expression of Australian masculinity, considering it misogynistic, racist, “simple” and “crude”, does, at least, accept that it “could pass as an ocker film”. But it is those negative aspects perceived by Turner which inspire him to propose that generic categorisation. One valid point which Turner (1995, p. 34) does make, however, is that “the term ‘identity’ is increasingly giving way to the plural: ‘identities’”. While Turner may prefer a more homogeneous representation of national identity than that presented in Priscilla, such a singular representation simply is no longer possible. Multiculturalism has replaced White Australia as the official cultural policy of the nation. Australia, as a nation of migrants, must accept difference with all the uncomfortableness that acceptance may entail.

With the plethora of comedy presented in films, on television, on radio and on stage, humour is something greatly valued by the Australian people. Perhaps, rather than clinging onto ideas of a white, male, battler ethos as an identifier of Australianness, it may be more culturally profitable to look, not at an outdated iconography, but to a more expressive representation - the commonality and gregariousness afforded by humour, a humour which thrives on a nation’s ability and preparedness to not take itself as seriously as other nations might. Given, as the Culture and Recreation Portal (2007b) admits, the “country itself is the ultimate joke” from sharks in the surf to bushfires in suburbia, why should we not be united in targeting ourselves with the arrows of irony and self-deprecation? Why should we not consider ourselves a nation of ‘stand-up’ comics, or, at least, fodder for that form of entertainment, which, according to the Culture and Recreation Portal (2007a), has united us in laughter since the early 1900s with the likes of Harry Rickards and Mo McCackie (Roy Rene)? Is what Thomas (1996, p. 103) puts forth, the concept of “performance as national identity” really such a preposterous proposal? Humour can be, as O’Regan (1996, p. 234) suggests, a way to “transform” a perceived cultural weakness into a unified strength.

To revisit the definition of the quintessential Australian proposed by Shaw (cited in Abbey & Crawford 1990, p. 172) previously quoted, perhaps it would be more economical to simply accept difference itself as a trait of the Australian national character and consider the commonality of an Australian sense of humour as an identifier of Australian cultural values and national character. Afterall, to borrow from the title of the 1983 television comedy show produced by our national broadcaster, the ABC, ‘Australia, you’re standing in it’. It may well be that, as Thomas (1996, p. 108) contends, “in terms of national identity, all of us here, you and I, are drag queens”. If not, to use the vernacular, ‘ya gotta laugh’, because in Australia, if you can laugh at yourself, you are, at least, part of the crowd.

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