Dangerous Locations: The Missing Person in Australian Cinema

The outback has long had a mysterious place in white Australia's psyche, depicted on the big screen as a vast landscape in which one might get lost and never come back. Yet, as Dean Biron and Tiffany Sutherland outline – with reference to a selection of films about lost or missing characters from the last fifty years – these cultural and cinematic anxieties have slowly but surely shifted away from the rural and towards the suburban, a milieu that can be as threatening as it is familiar.

Additional keywords:
Screens in the Classroom, middle years, senior secondary, Walkabout, Wake in Fright, Picnic at Hanging Rock, Heatwave, Evil Angels, Jindabyne, Snowtown, Hounds of Love, Robert Hughes, Frederick McCubbin, anti-idyll, Beaumont children, Anita Cobby, Janine Balding, Donald Horne