2000 Weeks

Clip 1: ‘A nation without a mind’

Taken from the feature 2000 Weeks (1969)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be G

Curator’s clip description

Will Gardener (Mark McManus) has just picked up returning expatriate Noel Oakshot (David Turnbull) from the airport. They visit an old house where Oakshot lived, that’s now being demolished. Oakshot holds forth on the ‘awful mediocrity’ of Australia, with its ‘hideous provincial attitudes’.

Curator’s notes

Much of the film is about the question of Australia’s cultural isolation, and whether an artist of ambition and talent should stay, or try to prove himself on the wider stage of London or the USA. This was a much more serious question in 1969 than it is now, partly because international travel was so much less accessible (and more expensive). Generations of Australian painters and writers had left Australia thinking exactly as Oakshot does. Burstall had himself spent two years in the USA on a fellowship, during which he visited the Actor’s Studio in New York, and worked as an assistant to Hollywood director Martin Ritt. 2000 Weeks was his first Australian feature, and to some extent, it was a nationalist call-to-arms for the film industry.

Paul Byrnes, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This black-and-white clip shows fictional expatriate Noel (David Turnbull) in Melbourne with his friend Will (Mark McManus). Will has collected Noel, who now lives in London, from the airport and as they travel through the streets of Melbourne, stopping to take a look at Noel’s childhood home, which is being demolished, Noel talks about the provincialism and mediocrity of Australia. He says that most Australian writers and painters have gone to London, and dismisses Will’s suggestion that if they returned home ‘we’d have a very distinguished society’.

Educational value points

In describing Australia as provincial and mediocre Noel demonstrates an attitude that was dubbed the ‘Australian cultural cringe’ by literary critic AA Phillips in the journal Meanjin in 1950, referring to a belief among Australians at the time that Australia was culturally inferior to the ‘great cultural metropolises’ such as London and New York. The writer PR Stephensen had already denounced this attitude as early as 1936 in his Foundations of a Culture of Australia.

Like the fictional Noel in the clip, a number of Australian artists, writers and musicians left for London and the USA in the 1960s and 70s. They included satirist Barry Humphries, entertainer Rolf Harris, painters Sidney Nolan and Arthur Boyd, art critic Robert Hughes, feminist and academic Germaine Greer and writer Clive James. James has been quoted as referring to Australia as a mysterious triangle in the southern oceans where talent disappears without trace.

Will’s claim that the return of expatriate artists and writers would make Australia ‘a very distinguished society’ can be read as a clarion call by director Tim Burstall. It implies that if creative people remained in Australia they could shape or contribute to a sense of national identity, so that the country would no longer be seen as ‘a nation without a mind’.

Noel views the demolition of his childhood home, a Victorian terrace house, which he imagines will be replaced by a ‘dreadful concrete box’, as confirmation of his belief that Australia has no sense of the past or of heritage but rather is a repository of the vulgar and mediocre. However, the demolition is also a sign that the Australia that Noel grew up in did not remain static, and therefore could be read as a metaphor for a country not afraid to embrace change.

Through Will and Noel’s discussion, director Tim Burstall mounts an argument in defence of Australia and makes a case for Australians with creative or intellectual sensibilities to remain in Australia and contribute to the cultural life of the nation. To this end Noel, the expatriate, is depicted as pompous, smug and condescending, in contrast to Will, who has chosen to remain and who is shown to be a more likeable character despite his reticence.

The film 2000 Weeks was the first feature film of director Tim Burstall (1927–2004), who was passionate about the Australian film industry, contributing much to the debate about Australian film culture. He taught himself filmmaking by making short films, including The Prize (1960), which won a bronze medal at the Venice Film Festival in 1960. His feature films include Alvin Purple (1973), Petersen (1974), Eliza Fraser (1976) and Kangaroo (1987).