In a course on Australian popular culture, I routinely ask students a pair of questions: is Australian culture increasingly Americanised; is Australian culture increasingly distinctive and original? They routinely answer yes to both. Australian National Cinema suggests why there might be more than poor logic behind their response. Its contradictoriness tells us something fundamental about how Australian cinema exists in the cinema world and the social world.

Tom O’Regan’s book is the most important study of the subject since Dermody and Jacka’s The Screening of Australia (1987–88). Such statements are always faintly absurd but this gives a perspective on the book and announces my sense of its achievement. O’Regan positions his argument in relation to Dermody and Jacka’s which considered Australian film as a ‘film industry’ and as a ‘national cinema’. He continues this double perspective but complicates and extends it. The book isn’t quite a history of Australian cinema or the film industry. Nor is it a study of the dominant themes and styles of Australian movies, an attempt to define what Australian cinema is, or a critical demolition of the myths and stereotypes it circulates. It’s all these things and something else again.