Contemporary Australia: Women

52 You do wonder where the heroic women are in Australian cinema. We seem to be too cynical to accept dynamic, powerful women on the big screen, whereas on television we’re producing drama featuring strong, complex, wonderful women like Susie Porter’s Patricia Wright in East West 101 2007–11, and Asher Keddie’s Ita Buttrose in Paper Giants: The Birth of Cleo 2011. Perhaps Australian television can present a more heightened reality than our cinema, which tends towards realism. But do not discount our big‑screen female characters. Muriel got it right in the end, Heidi was reconciled with one of the most important relationships in her life in Somersault , and Mia managed to sort out priorities in Love and Other Catastrophes . The working towards some sort of reconciliation with life is there in beautiful ways in our cinema. And, while we have talented women like Rachel Ward, Jane Campion, Cate Shortland, Dee McLachlan, Rachel Perkins, Claire McCarthy, Julia Leigh and Gillian Armstrong as well as other young talented women working to bring a particular female vision to cinema in this country, there is reason for optimism. The parenting in Sarah Watt’s My Year Without Sex 2009 is of the more functional variety, with concerns about tooth fairies, children’s birthday parties and pre-adolescent obsessions. Normality is disturbed by the mother’s recovery from an operation to remove a brain tumour. As with other works by Sarah Watt in this program, My Year Without Sex is distinguished by a gentle, wry humour that doesn’t shy away from the pain underneath. Where do we go from here? Having embraced the concept of a film program for ‘Contemporary Australia: Women’, I have been immensely rewarded by revisiting these films, sometimes after many years. I hope that audiences experience a similar exhilaration regarding the strength and variety of representations of women in our national cinema. The question is, where do we go from here?