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Australian Westerns in the Fifties
Kangaroo, Hopalong Cassidy on Tour, and Whiplash
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Book Presentation:
Australian Western in the Fifties: Kangaroo, Hopalong Cassidy on Tour, and Whiplash looks at Australian Westerns from three points of view―film, personal appearance, and television at the beginning, middle, and end of the 1950s, the American Western’s golden age. It looks at three significant but “forgotten” cases: (1) Kangaroo: The Australian Story, the first Technicolor film made in Australia, produced by the Hollywood movie studio 20th Century Fox, directed by the Academy Award-winning filmmaker Lewis Milestone, starring Maureen O’Hara, Peter Lawford, and Richard Boone. (2) The successful goodwill tour of Australia by the Hollywood actor William Boyd who played the film, radio, and television cowboy Hopalong Cassidy. (3) The British-American produced black-and-white TV series Whiplash, made in Australia and starring the Hollywood actor Peter Graves. The American filmmakers’ ignorance of Australia meant they learned the hard waythere was more to Australian Westerns than simply replacing the prairie with the bush, bison with kangaroos, and Native Americans with Aboriginals. Indeed, the depiction of place and the presentation of Aboriginal culture are two of the most intriguing aspects of Australian Westerns. In retelling the filmmakers’ stories, a unique picture of the Australian film and television industry and everyday life during the 1950s is revealed.
About the Author:
Derham Groves is a Senior Fellow in Architecture at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has written extensively on popular architecture and design, including about Anna May Wong, Arthur Purnell, Disney, feng-shui, letterboxes, Sherlock Holmes, television, and The Monkees.
Press Reviews:
"As Derham Groves shows us in this delightful book, the 1950s―the decade known as a Golden Age of Hollywood Westerns in the USA―witnessed a flourishing of Westerns across the Dateline and Down Under from Hollywood. On the big screen (in Kangaroo), small screen (in Whiplash), and in person (in Hopalong Cassidy on Tour), Australia was the setting for a fictional West parallel to, and yet distinct from, the North American variety. Drawing on the continent’s bush landscape, its Indigenous peoples, and its history of settler colonialism, the "Meat Pie Western" appears here as central to a genre that has in fact been global since its very beginnings." (Josh Garrett-Davis, Curator at the Autry Museum of the American West)
See the publisher website: Palgrave MacMillan
> From the same author:
Sherlock in the Seventies (2021)
A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films
> On a related topic:
Reel Men (2019)
Australian Masculinity in the Movies 1949-1962
Cast Mates (2023)
Australian Actors in Hollywood and at Home
Law, Lawyers and Justice (2021)
Through Australian Lenses
Dir. Kim D Weinert, Karen Crawley and Kieran Tranter
The Lost Child Complex in Australian Film (2019)
Jung, Story and Playing Beneath the Past
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