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Australian literary fiction has been distinctly cautious in its use of highly generic narrative forms. Australian novels have tended to exploit the "natural" structures of the family saga and the documentary formal codes of an under-narrativised social realism in order to efface the means through which they construct their Fictions. This tendency has been particularly long lasting. Even in contemporary Australian fiction, while many novels do set themselves outside such a tradition, some of the most formally adventurous-Peter Carey's Illywhacker, Rod Jones's Julia Paradise, Rodney Hall's Just Relations-could still be said to fall into such a pattern. It is a pattern which is repeated in Australian narrative films made since the revival of the 1970s. Like their counterparts in literary fiction, the producers of these Australian Films have been suspicious of, and resistant to, the production of "genre" films-that is, Films structured by the narrative codes and conventions of mainstream commercial cinema. While this resistance began breaking down in the 1980s, examples of such Films are still infrequent. Among the reasons for such a formal preference, one could nominate particular industrial and economic factors which have reinforced the Filmmakers' resistance, but they are countered by equally powerful alternative industrial considerations which, one would think, might have prevailed. To explain the persistence of Australian narrative's wariness of established generic forms we need to refer to more culturally based considerations. This essay addresses such considerations initially in relation to literary Fiction before focussing on the problem of the contemporary "genre" Film and the climate of its critical reception in Australia.
Arguments for a dominant or even a significant strain within a literary tradition tend to build up momentum, escalating their claims and extending their explanatory regime. In proposing the dominance of certain kinds of formal structure-the historical family saga, and the documentary-realist novel in this case-I am not denying the existence of other formal patterns. Indeed, the history of Australian literary production reveals a rich vein of popular melodrama and romance writing in the nineteenth century employing formal structures entirely antithetical to those I am concentrating on in this discussion. This vein does run out, however, as does the popular tradition itself. The twentieth century has witnessed the virtual disappearance of an Australian popular fiction; popular colonial...