Ted Kotcheff, Wake In Fright, 1971 Note: Contains spoilers You know a film is truly seminal when it finds its way into the vernacular: a ‘Wake in Fright moment’ is now Australian for being confronted by menacing people, alien to you, in a harsh [...]

Peter Weir, Gallipoli, 1981 It’s an odd thing to look up Gallipoli on the internet. No one ever forgets this extraordinary visualisation of the journey and the pity of war which deepened a nation’s sense of how an Empire could use its youth as fodder for the [...]

David Williamson, 1971 Don’s Party is the play by David Williamson you would preserve on a desert island if the world was laid waste. And David Williamson is the Australian playwright that you would go to if you wanted to know what Australians looked like, how [...]

Peter Faiman, 1986 Crocodile Dundee was an immensely successful attempt to create an Australian hit movie, a residually comic depiction of a folk hero bushman who was at home in a world of crocodiles and snakes but could also do battle with the shadiness and sophistication of [...]

Henry Handel Richardson, 1910 The Getting of Wisdom is one of the finest books to come out of Australia and it’s characteristic of it that it should insinuate itself so quietly into Australian literature. This is Richardson’s school book, the story of Laura Ramsbotham and the [...]

Russel Ward, 1958 It is hard to believe but, once upon a time, historians looked at Australian history with a generous eye. Indeed, it was often avowedly left-wing historians who felt the need to find something uniquely good in the Australian story. The climax of this genre [...]

Bruce Beresford (Director), 2018 Ladies in Black captures the rich tapestry of human experience which shaped Australian culture in the late 1950s. By recreating an authentic and nuanced account of what post-WWII life was like in Sydney, the film earns its place on the IPA’s Australian Canon [...]

Rob Sitch, Working Dog, 1997 The 1997 Australian comedy classic the castle pits lovable oaf Darryl Kerrigan against an unholy marriage of government and big business in the form of an airport authority that wishes to compulsorily acquire his home.​​​​​​​ But the movie is [...]