Wake In Fright

© 1961

The Text Publishing Company

Kenneth Cook puts his finger on the menace at the core of Australia’s myth of mateship. My first experience of it was as a youth at the Croydon and Kilkenny RSL sub-branch in the 1960s. Cook’s protagonist, local schoolteacher John Grant, was sentenced to his confinement by the State Government for payment of a tertiary education bond; my father took me to the RSL to wash ashtrays in part-payment, I guess, for his having to hand over the money for the school fees that my mother’s faith demanded. One of the teachers at that Catholic School was named John Grant. He lived in a well to do eastern suburb.

‘Wake In Fright’s schoolteacher, too, hails from middle-class suburbia but has been transported from civilisation and set down in a cultural desert where it’s incumbent upon everyone – every white man, that is – to embrace the mindless mentality of beer-swilling ignorance and menacing brotherhood.

Straya. Oi, oi, oi.