By Dominic Cadden
The Oscars have rolled around once again, and no doubt you recognised the same swag of Aussies on the red carpet and been shocked to hear them speaking without their impeccably groomed American accents. Cate Blanchett, Russell Crowe and Geoffrey Rush alone could play a game of chess with all the statuettes they’ve won at various international award shows, but now it’s time to acknowledge a few star Aussie performers for how they’ve represented their country in the service of Cultya and The Yarts.
Best Actress in a Leading Role
Skippy, The Intruders
Skippy was Australia’s answer to Lassie and to date, Skippy The Bush Kangaroo is still Australia’s most exported television show. Skippy was a crime-fighting superhero Eastern Grey kangaroo who had to deal with his dense helper, Sonny Hammond, the young son of National Park ranger Matt Hammond. It was obvious that Skippy was the brains of the outfit. With Sonny translating his measured, clicking tongue, Skippy was able to solve crimes, coordinate bush rescues and teach two generations of kids around the world her own set of moral values.
“What’s that you say Skippy? You think that, based on Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the lost hiker will be at the bottom of the gully? Gee, I dunno about this quantum mechanics lark, Skippy…”
(Skippy makes a dignified, yet telling tchk-tchk noise again)
“What’s that? I am not an anti-Semite! OK, you got me – there was this one kike kid at the park, and…”
But Skippy wasn’t just remarkable for her intellect, she was an astonishing physical performer too. For a start, she was exceptionally dextrous for a marsupial without the use of an opposable thumb. She can untie ropes with her paws, operate a radio, she plays drums in one episode, and in another she places a bet on a horse at Randwick Racecourse – and wins (surely there’s some kind of animal-to-animal ethics code she was breaking there?). In another episode, no doubt frustrated by the thickhead Hammonds’ inability to grasp her urgent warnings about a motorist stuck in a flooding creek, she actually squirrel grips matt Hammonds nuts. This was, of course, cut out in the episode when it aired in the UK, USA and Australia, but across the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia and in Iran, both places where Skippy went great guns, they thought this was hilarious.
Skippy appeared in three series of the television show and the movie, The Intruders. She then retired to study Chaos Theory by correspondence at the University of Copenhagen.
Best Flatulence and Bodily Fluids in a Motion Picture
Bazza McKenzie
The character of Barry ‘Bazza’ McKenzie was an Aussie ingénue who went to the UK and, through a relentless campaign of shock and awesome vulgarity, showed the Poms that it was time to wake up and realise that Australians were not merely twisted mirror images of the English who flattered the Motherland through boorish attempts at imitation. Bazza showed that Aussies had their own language that rolled (or sometimes floated via a ‘technicolour yawn’) off the tongue in poetic couplets. We had our own culture, our own world view, and the days of the ‘cultural cringe’ – whereby Aussies considered their own culture and background inferior to the motherland – were well and truly over:
“There'd be no Mother England if it wasn't for Australia. Our fighting men came over here when you Poms were ready to throw in the towel…And if it hadn't been for Australia, Musso and them slant-eyed pricks would've strung every white kiddie up by the pills and gone chocka-block with all the nurses and bus conductresses. Oh look, let me outta here you ungrateful Pommy bastard!”
In this regard, life imitated art, as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie became the first Australian film to earn $1 million and kept the Australian film industry alive in the early 1970s. Inevitably, there was an equally successful sequel, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, as the English especially were fascinated to learn more about Bazza, the archetypical modern Aussie man. Sophisticated yet virile, he was often “that randy I could root the hair on a barber shop floor” and influenced stuffy London cuisine with his new direction in the preparation of beef steak: “Just knock off its horns, wipe its arse and bung it on a plate.”
Significantly, some of his exchanges with Auntie Edna Everage served as a lesson to help Australians of that dark time crawl out of the xenophobic gutter and up onto the curb:
Barry: I'm that thirsty I could drink out of a Japanese wrestler's jockstrap.
Auntie Edna: Oh Barry, don't make such crude remarks about our dear little stunted slant-eyed yellow friends.
If nothing else, Bazza made a generation of middle class Australians wake up to themselves and say, “Cripes, do we really look like that?”
Best Actor in a Supporting Role to His Penis and Liver
Errol Flynn
Flynn was the swashbuckling star of box-office adventure romps from the mid 1930s through to the mid-1950s. He liked his whiskey old and his women young, and noted that his public, “expected me to be a playboy and a decent chap never lets his public down”.
Despite his fame and box-office draw, Errol Flynn never won any acting award more significant than the ‘Sour Apple’ award (1943 and 1948) for Least Cooperative Actor. Yet Flynn is significant in that he was the precursor, the cultural ambassador if you like, for the mad rootin’, heavy drinkin’ arsey Aussie globe-trotting adventurer – even though he thought Australia was so unknown at the time that he told American film execs that he was Irish.
Flynn was the type of bloke who always seemed to fall on his arse, from which he would bounce to his feet and find his meat rapier conveniently sheathed inside a nubile young woman. His skill with the ladies (although ‘girls’ would, in this instance, be a more appropriate term) was so legendary that his name lives on in the lexicon of Aussie English – ‘in like Flynn’ means ‘a sure thing’ both for a woman and other contexts. Suave? He met his second wife while she was working at a snack counter in a courthouse during one of his statutory rape trials.
Hollywood success didn’t go to his head, unlike a certain Oscar-awarded Aussie actor who craps on about ‘the craft’ one minute while throwing a phone at an apparently far inferior being the next. Flynn said that he felt like an imposter for, “taking all that money for reciting 10 or 12 lines of nonsense each day”.
Like any modern-day Aussie backpacker, Flynn had so many unbelievable travel stories that you’d think he was full of shit. He claimed that as a young man in Papua New Guinea, he had adventurous jobs as a gold prospector, slave recruiter, a diamond smuggler, and a short time as a cadet patrol officer until he was discovered to be a fraud.
To this day, Aussie alcoholics and pissheads use some of Flynn’s pioneering techniques, which include injecting oranges with vodka – one of the many tricks he perfected when banned from drinking on film sets.
Best Original Inhabitant
David Gulpilil
Up until as late as 1971, Aboriginal Australians were portrayed on film by whitefellas in blackface. David Gulpilil changed all that forever when he hit the screens in the starring role of Brit Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout.
Gulpilil is still going strong – you might have seen him as ‘King George’ in Australia. He’s a superstar who’s hung out backstage with Jimi Hendrix, partied with John Lennon, and visited Mohammed Ali and Bob Marley. He speaks 14 different tribal languages and is considered one of the great indigenous Australian dancers, but when you visit the home of other Aussie stars, say, Hugh Jackman or Nicole Kidman, you don’t expect to find them sitting on the dirt floor of a tin shed and hitting a bong after a hard night’s crocodile hunting.
David Gulpilil is no pretend blackfella. He’s travelled to some of the world’s great cities promoting his movies, but he lives in traditional Yolngu country, Central Arnhem Land, where he is a respected elder, tracker and lawman. Finding him isn’t easy – when one US company wanted him for a commercial, it took a two-day trek just to get a message to him. When Gulpilil has gone to his acting job, he would walk for miles, swim across crocodile-infested river, find his 4WD, then take a long trip that would eventually end up in his agent’s office, where a suit would be kept for him. His earnings go back into his underprivileged community to top up the dough they make from selling crocodile skins. Mind you, he’s still pissed at only being paid $10,000 for Crocodile Dundee, a film that made $245m from US cinema and video sales alone. Forget Robert Downey Jnr, Gulpilil is the artist with all the charm and the bad boy persona. Women love him (he’s had four wives, two of them still contact him for film work), he’s battled with alcoholism and been jailed for drink-driving, and in 2006 he was charged after pulling out a machete during an argument in Darwin. (He said he carried a machete because it was his ‘tool’ much like a whitefella might use a knife and fork.)
In a country where the indigenous people are often misunderstood, at least when you see David Gulpilil on screen you know you’re getting the real deal.
Best Animated Role
Taz the Tasmanian Devil
Ask people from Andorra to Zimbabwe what they know about Australia’s smallest state and they will tell you, “Taz the Tasmanian Devil”. For that alone he should be honoured, but Taz is one of the great comeback stories of showbiz. Picked up by Warner Bros. Looney Tunes in 1954, he was shafted after his first feature because Bob Selzer, who was head of directors, thought he was a “stupid-looking, unfunny character”. Years later, Selzer got a call from Jack Warner himself asking for Taz to be put back on.
More importantly, Taz gave due warning to the rest of the world about certain elements of the Australian social persona. See, if you replace ‘food’ with ‘alcohol’, then Taz the Tasmanian Devil represents most Australian men aged 18-35: he has an appetite like a tornado, picking up everything in its path and sucking it inside him through a huge mouth, while the rest of him is shaped like a funnel that leads to a bottomless stomach. All the while he slobbered, drooled and made inarticulate grunts and shrieks. The only thing that would ever distract him from hurtling the alcohol – uh, I mean food – down his gullet would be a female (any female at all) of the same species.
To his credit, Taz has done something that none of the other big-name Australian actors working in American movies and primetime TV shows: he’s cashed in on his fame for commercial endorsements. (I mean, what’s Mel Gibson going to endorse – Manischewitz wine?) In 1994 he landed a deal advertising the KFC Mega Meal under the catchline, “Big enough to feed your whole family … or one Tasmanian Devil.” In 2000 he scored big with a Subway commercial, while in the UK he had his own chocolate bar (a caramel version of the Cadbury's 10p Freddo Frog bar). These days, Taz can often be found on the lucrative American competitive eating circuit. He’s also recently put the bite into Warner Bros. to cough up money to help save his Tasmanian devil brothers (whose image they’ve been exploiting for decades) from horrible facial cancer that is wiping out the species.
Best Performance by a Pelican
Mr Percival, Storm Boy
Storm Boy has a place in Australian cinema history due to its overseas commercial success alone, but Mr Percival creates one of those performances that creates a timeless classic for children, yet also makes adults cry like Ricky Hatton.
Mr Percival is a gentle, waddling spiritual guru who keeps a big scary Aborigine (David Gulpilil) for muscle, just in case shit goes down. He communicates in flatulent honks that we don’t understand, but recognise as being gravely serious. In this respect, he’s much like Gordon Brown, but more popular with the ladies.
It’s a story about race relations, ecology, and family breakdown. Through Mr Percival, the title character learns about life and how to reconcile the conflict between his lifestyle and the externally imposed requirement for him to attend a school.
Mr Percival’s own demise only furthered the sadness and moral overtones of the Storm Boy tale. Mr Percival did not deal with fame well, and he was in and out of rehab (euphemistically termed ‘bird sanctuaries’ and ‘animal parks’ by his PR) for years, wrecking any chance of a sequel. It all seemed harmless enough, but soon he had progressed to the hard stuff – at one point he was huffing anchovies up to a dozen times a day. Then there was the business with the chicks and you know how the movie business frowns upon stars using their fame to get some underage action (see Errol Flynn). He died last year, aged 33, with coroners drawing comparisons with the deaths of those other early-departed stars of his generation, Heath Ledger and Brittany Murphy.
