Culture and Life

by Rob Gowland

The spirit of luxury

Two days before Christmas, P&O Australian Resorts announced 
that over the next eight months or so it would be developing a 
"top class outback station resort" in Queensland.

The resort would be on Wrotham Park, a cattle station that 
sprawls over a mere 600,000 hectares (that's well over a million 
acres) on the Mitchell River west of Cairns.

"Capitalising on the strong demand both domestically and inbound 
for soft adventure tourism, Wrotham Park station will cater to a 
maximum of 20 guests at one time", said the boss of P&O 
Australian Resorts, one Mark Campbell.

Twenty people may not sound like a money-making crowd, but this 
resort is not catering to your common tourists on average 
incomes. Dear me, no.

Tariffs at Wrotham Park will be about $800 per person per night. 
The meals will want to be pretty good, eh?

The thinking is, presumably, that the idle rich, having "done" 
the Barrier Reef, will pop over to Cairns by plane and go on the 
extra 300km to Wrotham Park by Lear jet or even helicopter to 
whet their jaded appetites on "the outback".

P&O Australian Resorts is being joined in the project by a joint 
venture company formed by the late RM Williams, the outback 
clothing guy, and a company owned by Peter Holmes à Court. With 
no sense of irony, they have called their joint venture for the 
well-heeled The Authentic Outback Experience.

Mark Campbell echoes their warped idea of what constitutes the 
authentic outback: "Wrotham Park Station will position itself as 
a holiday experience that captures the heritage and spirit of 
outback Australia."

In a pig's eye it does. The heritage and spirit of the 
squattocracy, perhaps, but contrary to what bourgeois 
propagandists would have you believe, the outback of this country 
was not developed by "kings in grass castles".

It was developed by ordinary bush workers — drovers, stockmen, 
shearers, boundary riders, bullockies, timber-getters, fencers, 
farriers, cooks and practitioners of a 101 other trades.

They developed the genuinely authentic "heritage and spirit" of 
outback Australia, not the squatters who, picking whatever large 
stretch of fertile land they could find, simply dispossessed the 
Aborigines as of no importance (except as peons) and set 
themselves up as grandees.

What "heritage and spirit" could they reveal except that of 
robber barons?

The spirit of the bush, that Lawson and a whole generation of 
Australian writers recorded and celebrated, was inherently 
democratic, egalitarian, militant and anti-bourgeois.

The squatters, on the other hand, were concerned only with 
property, their property, and that included not only the land but 
the people on it.

A comrade, now dead, who had been a drover in Queensland and the 
Northern Territory, told me once of how he had been part of a 
team that brought a mob through to a large Queensland station. 
The grateful owner said "Go down to the Blacks' camp and get 
yourselves a gin each for the night."

Aboriginal stockmen were always paid less (sometimes much less) 
than their white counterparts, despite being acknowledged as 
excellent workers and splendid stockmen.

Aborigines that would work around a station could stay; those 
that wouldn't or couldn't were told to clear off. Those who 
fought back against the wholesale seizure of their tribal lands, 
watering places and food sources were murderously hunted down and 
attacked.

Will the "authentic" outback experience at Wrotham Park include 
the parading of Aborigines chained by the neck for the crime of 
defending themselves, their families and their land from invasion 
and occupation by European or (in the case of Nemarluk, for 
example) Japanese intruders?

I suspect not. For despite all the talk, the guests at Wrotham 
Park will be getting pampered luxury, not authenticity.

Changing the subject entirely, I recently acquired from an 
elderly friend a splendid and much appreciated addition to my 
collection of books on the cinema: Movie Parade, by 
British film historian Paul Rotha.

Published in 1936, this rare work is a pictorial survey of the 
then 40-year history of the cinema (European and Japanese as well 
as British and US).

Rotha had previously written what was for a long time the 
definitive (as well as the only) history of world cinema, The 
Film Till Now (first published in 1929).

Movie Parade contains stills I have never seen in any 
other publication (as well as many that have been reproduced many 
times since).

In the Introduction, Rotha deplores the fact that "from a profit-
making point of view, the executives of Wardour Street and Wall 
Street, of Berlin, Hollywood, Paris, Tokyo and Vienna will recall 
only those films of the widest success. In terms of coin, a 
Singing Fool [the first all-talking Hollywood film, with Al 
Jolson] takes a place prior to a Kameradschaft [G W Pabst's 
intensely powerful cinema classic of German coal miners 
overcoming post-WW1 prejudice to go to the aid of French miners 
following a cave-in].

"Only, I believe, in the Soviet Union might every field of cinema 
be developed to a degree of intellectual value fit to rank equal 
with the other arts.

"Only in a cinema based on cultural and social purpose should we 
find tragedy permitted to be tragedy without fear of commercial 
failure, should we find a sociological approach to modern 
problems without that extra quality which the executives of our 
film business call 'box-office'."

With "cinema" changed to "television industry", that final 
paragraph should be engraved on a plaque and given to every 
member of the ABC Board for their edification.