Loaded Dogs: Dogs, Domesticity and "The Wild" in Australian Cinema

Abstract

One might expect that dogs figure prominently in Australian cinema. Perhaps this expectation is a result of the centrality of dogs in some well-known and oft-cited Australian prose fictions (such as the turn-of -the-twentieth-century short stories of Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton). There is also a pervasive notion of dogs as taking their place beside many a farmhand, or as herding in response to the commands of sheep farmers, or as strategically nipping at the heels of wayward bullocks driven along the stockroutes of outback Australia. Indeed, the perception that "in the outback the dog is both mate and an essential worker" (Marcus 1989/2005, 209) is quite widely held.