title: A Cultural Legal Study of Speech Legality in Australian Film from the 1970s to 2010
Creators: name: Weinert, Kim D
Publisher: name: Griffith University
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: Australian speech
subject: Australian film
subject: speech legality

description: This thesis is about the representation of Australian speech in film. Connecting with law and legality, this thesis reveals that speech and speech acts are a pivotal aspect of the cultural process and practice of Othering in Australia – a process that legislate an imagined Australian who is white and male, aggressively egalitarian and the beneficiary of settler state violence. Through a cultural legal analysis of four Australian films from the 1970s to 2010, this thesis focuses on speech, speech acts and silence to examine the practice of Othering of First Nations people (Where the Green Ants Dream, 1984), women (Don’s Party, 1976), immigrants (Romper Stomper, 1992) and the stereotypical, heterosexual white Australian male (Animal Kingdom, 2010). In doing so, this thesis offers a new way to explain and critique speech legality in Australia. The speech, speech acts and silences projected in these films highlight deep cultural and social divisions. Australians see and hear themselves through speech and speech acts. Examining these films, the assumed ideas of free speech reveal a highly contested concept of Australian speech legality. In each film, speech and violence coalesce. Speech, speech acts and silence are rarely meaningless, and are interpolated with threats, pain, and senseless violence. The discussion of violence projected in each film points to a national understanding of speech legality. This privileging in speech and speech acts (culminating in the act of physical violence) is active and persistent. The anchoring of such power is overtly reliant on land taken from First Nations people and the exploitation of women and immigrants. This thesis comprises eight chapters. Chapter 2 argues that Australia’s confusing patchwork of speech laws reveals significant contradictions at the heart of the national cultural identity. From a critical analysis of the complex and messy juridical methods around Australian speech laws, Chapter 2 finds that the High Court of Australia’s jurisprudence around the implied freedom of political communication supports a collective liberal value. The articulation of this collective freedom is inextricably aligned with egalitarianism, which compounds the problems of exclusion for many groups. Exclusion through the process of othering is represented in Australian film. Chapter 3 examines and discusses the history of Australian film and how film has conceptualised the Australian identity around the themes of aggressive egalitarianism, embodied masculinities, and a traumatic colonial past. The analysis of the film Where the Green Ants Dream (1984) in Chapter 4 manifests the trauma and violence of the white settler state upon First Nations people. The projection of trauma illustrates the shortcomings of speech legality when confronted with fragmented speech, speech acts and silence. Chapter 5 examines Don’s Party (1976) to reveal a deep cultural ambivalence around contested acts of speech when women struggle to be heard within a discourse of gendered politics. Chapter 6’s analysis of Romper Stomper (1992) shows a troubling representation of aggressive egalitarianism. This film polarises the contradictory and pious aspects of neoliberalism in Australian polity to illustrate a deep ambivalence in the law around acts of speech and violence. Chapter 7 examines the film Animal Kingdom (2010) to expose the power of speech used to control white men. The projected speech acts in this film reveal that the white man can also be othered, highlighting the troubling problems in Australian speech laws. Chapter 8 reads the film Terror Nullius (2018) to find that the practice of othering is inverted. Acts of revenge by First Nations people, immigrants, and women against the white Australian man in Terror Nullius reveal that the troubles with Australian speech legality are inexplicitly tied to aggressive egalitarianism, colonial violence and trauma, and embodied masculinities. The films analysed in this thesis are genuine provocations to think about speech, speech acts and silence. They reveal the cultural, social, and legal powers in speech and speech acts that can reinforce – and occasionally challenge – the white Australian settler male hegemony.