29.03.2006

Sun, sodomy and the lash

Nick Cave (writer), John Hillcoat (director) The proposition various venues

Under conservative prime minister John Howard, it sometimes feels Australia is running 20 years behind the rest of the western world. And so, two decades after Robert Hughes killed the romance of Australia's roots in his brutally honest historical exposé, The fatal shore (1986), comes The proposition. Courtesy of scriptwriter and sometime antipodean Nick Cave, it was always going to be a bloody article and, consequently, fair game for censorship. The film is rated 18 in the UK and attracted an MA rating in Australia, meaning its subjects aged 15 and over may finally view Oz history as she is wrote.

Yes, it is a violent, debased piece. True, there is a rape scene - and more than a dalliance with the lash. But even with Cave - the dark bastard from Melbourne - and his cultural credo, it is certainly no study of misspent angst against a backdrop of goth-punk-death iconology. Rather The proposition's controversy lies in its concern with the colonial heart of Empire Australia, and if we haven't bloody seen you lately, it is a fly-blown, rotten, soul-forsaken affair, which shaped its unwilling workforce more than their descendants care to admit.

The education of historically curious young Australians, at least on the east coast in the 1970s and 80s, often consisted of a visit to a theme park called Old Sydney Town, where hoop-skirted Sheilas - with teeth! - served hot tea and damper, clean-shaven redcoats said g'day and kids lined up for a mock flogging and a happy snap in the stocks. There was not an aborigine to be seen (he had called in sick due to the flu, so they said).

So it was that most Australians maintain their nation was built on the sheep's back, cringing from the violent penal issue and choosing instead to expound a golden vision of agricultural might. Rightly, The proposition asserts the sheep's back was broken quite early in the piece: at sea, most likely en route from Dorset. Indeed, the sheep's arse is a more powerful national allegory - if you can see it for the blowflies: the 'fresh hell', a land trod by such tortured quarters until death's merciful release; a system populated and perished under duress.

Cave's film raises the early hell of Australia and presents a real historical agenda: the wretchedness of the system, the politics of the empire, the scope of human cruelty and the consequence of betrayal. It is, more succinctly, a study of Australia's burgeoning class system, which shows that even in the empire's new, more spacious quarters, old Brit habits don't die - they horribly magnify.

The proposition begins at the arse-end of a terrifying gunfight, as bushranger-era Australia is nearing its end. The year is 1880. On the back of Ned Kelly's last stand and execution, the Hopkins's homestead is pillaged by the Burns mob - occupants slaughtered, its matriarch raped and slain and her unborn child sacrificed to the brothers' bloodlust. Cave fans, take note.

The Burns boys are of Irish stock and mongrels true, or so it seems. The eldest, Arthur, played by Danny Huston, is as mad as a meat axe and a mean bastard to boot. Two of the Burns boys - Charlie (Guy Pearce) and Mikey (Richard Wilson) - are retained by maniacal lawman captain Stanley (Ray Winstone), who further dissolves the tenuous loyalty of his rum-soaked corps with an air of implied violence: a gutless wonder down under.

Mikey Burns is the man-child of the pack - a terror-struck idiot savant who most likely quivered behind a gum tree during the slayings - but he will hang on Christmas Day unless Charlie retrieves and delivers the psychotic brother, Arthur, who remains at large. Charlie has nine days.

It is an evil deal, serving no immediate use other than to further sideline captain Stanley's band of sycophants and the townspeople, yet the bargain guarantees a modicum of sympathy for the brothers Burns - with which the viewer will wrestle. Charlie, if he succeeds, will receive a pardon for his roles: one brother's saviour and another, his scab. It is fitting Stanley recruits Charlie Burns as redcoat by proxy. Although Charlie is clearly disturbed, he is the most sober bloke there.

Charlie is, in effect, doing Stanley's job while his henchmen stab his back, stand back and drink, and the locals wonder why on god's hard-boiled red earth he let the bastard out of custody. Chaos - and a bloody uprising - ensue: such is the illogical nature of captain Stanley's 'proposition'.

Popular documentation supports the fact that no known sex offenders or murderers were shipped to Australia during the empire's policy of petty deportation and (London's) population relief. As Robert Hughes writes in The fatal shore, "From 1700 to 1740, the population of England and Wales remained constant at about six million people. Then it started rising fast - so fast that between 1750 and 1770 the population of London doubled - and by 1851 it stood at 18 million."

Hughes continues: "This meant that the median age of Englishmen kept dropping and the labour market was saturated with young. No mechanisms existed for the effective relief of mass unemployment; it was not a problem England had ever before had to contend with on this scale. The poor laws had been written for a different England.

"Parish relief and the workhouse were the primitive devices of a pre-industrial society; now they were overwhelmed. But crime is, was and always will be a young man's trade, and English youth, rootless and urban, took to it with a will."

Such miscreants were executed under British law, while petty thieves were deported. It is interesting, then, that the recalcitrant 'heroes' of The proposition, the victims of politico-ethnic cleansing and violent scapegoats, are Irish.

Many of the Irish transported to Australia landed after the 1798 Irish Rebellion: a clutch of political undesirables or agrarian revolt merchants; hated and feared, it seems, more than the indigenous people (it is only in the last 20 years the word 'Irishman' has been substituted with 'blonde' in the Australian lexicon of joke-telling, although bashing Poms is still a favourite, naturally). Indeed, St Patrick's Day is held in higher regard by the Australian population than Armistice Day.

This was not always so. The number of Irish present in the colony amounted to one quarter of its total - a minority forced through poverty, language barriers and racism to form what can now be regarded as Australia's first resistance. To illustrate this, one need only look at a case from history: Samuel 'the flogging parson' Marsden (1764-1838), a prominent Anglican in the early colony, called the Irish "the most wild, ignorant and savage race that were ever favoured with the light of civilisation".

So it is perhaps ironic that The proposition was borne of a funding and talent alliance between the UK and Australia; even more so is the current controversial ad campaign for Aussie tourism, asking: "Where the bloody hell are you?" Australians and Poms objected to the "bloody" (odd, given it is the great Australian adjective); Canada just railed against the "hell".

Cave's exposition of Australia's hell is part-western, part-Hitchcock, but all-Australiana - The proposition will not fail to intrigue, inform, disgust and educate. See it with a mate. It is, in truth, 200 years ahead of its time, and needs more bums on seats to truly smash the myth of a genteel British settlement.

So ... where the bloody hell are you?

Amelia Dalton