When Australian New age movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far, a renowned tale about male culture and commitment in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first success of Australia's golden age of cinema however Americans were especially perplexed by it, manufacturer Matt Carroll keeps in mind.
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"They recognised that Sunday was a fantastic film however they didn't comprehend it," he says.

"It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might too have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were far more welcoming of the movie at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the wife of an Adelaide vehicle dealer who 'd offered Carroll a Peugeot.

"She stated, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I remember being in the cinema and the first thing that shows up is somebody in the shearing shed states about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the huge screening space, "the entire audience just went bananas, definitely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll chuckles.

"It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian star Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley.

"There's a fantastic sociability revealed in that film. Sunday says something much more extensive about the Australian character than a number of other motion pictures that examined our success and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states "it was like a diary, it was just how people acted - I remember, due to the fact that as a teenager, I was in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far Away has an actually vital part in my career and in my memory; I 'd worked on that wool press, I 'd gotten that wool. I understood how hard it was ... it was the world of working males."

Thompson was a star of a variety of other New Wave motion pictures, consisting of Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River.

Carroll recalls likewise feeling well qualified to be included in Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn.

"I grew up on a sheep residential or commercial property so I found out how to class wool. My thesis was in Australian shearing sheds. So when we required to find a shearing shed, I understood precisely where they were," he says.

"And Jack and I were sharing a house together, and I knew that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director stated, 'I do not know where we're going to discover shearers from'. And I stated, 'Well, I know'.

Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a key role in the period.

"The SAFC was an important beacon in the growth of the Australian film industry," states Thompson.

"Tale after tale essential to our understanding of ourselves was informed and financed by that entity."

The New York Times explained Australian New Wave as "recording a minute of freedom and abundance that was over nearly before we understood it" and "possessing a vigor, a love of open area and a propensity for unexpected violence and languorous sexuality".

"That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan.

"Used to be, mate," chuckles Carroll, 80.

As a young actor, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was spectacular", says Thompson.

"There was certainly a very focused vitality, an unique beauty, unlike anything else at the time."

Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, states the 1970s was an amazing duration for Australian motion pictures.

"More than 220 films, that's more than 20 movies a year. And when you read the titles, it's simply staggering," he states.

"We never ever had another period like that, with the originality and the creativity."

The SAFC's second function, the enigmatic and enormous Picnic at Hanging Rock, which also turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema.

"The fantastic thing that took place after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans comprehended it," says Carroll.

"And then Breaker Morant occurred and they clicked with it and it had big outcomes, and then the 2nd Mad Max was a huge hit. So those 3 films were essential to opening up the American market."

Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative film, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian movie industry in the quiet period approximately 1927".

"Hollywood and the American financial investment in theatre chains here was able to dominate the Australian movie market, and basically, in between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much occurred in Australian cinema," he says.

While Sunday Too Far Away was New age's very first business success, 1971's Wake In Fright is commonly considered as the period's opening movie.

It was Thompson's very first movie and the last for experienced character actor Chips Rafferty, who passed away of a cardiovascular disease before it was launched.

It evaluated at Cannes and received beneficial actions in France and the UK but struggled at the Australian ticket office.

It's the story of an instructor waylaid in a mining town where a gaming spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he takes part in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is likewise subjected to ethical destruction.

It ran for simply 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and people were stating 'that's not us', despite the truth the book was written by an Australian".

"Because when we were seen on screen (formerly), we were viewed as these enjoyable caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't desire to see it," he states.

During an early Australian screening, when a male stood, pointed at the screen and opposed "that's not us!", Thompson notoriously shouted back "sit down, mate. It is us".