LA TROBE UNIVERSITY NEWS

What does the Australian accent really say about us? It was, somewhat unexpectedly, during a screening of Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke (1999), starring Kate Winslet as a young Sydney woman called Ruth, that I first became preoccupied with this question. As I watched Campion’s follow-up to The Piano (1993), it struck me that Winslet’s Australian accent was so damned perfect that an explanation was mandatory. I mean, Winslet could even sigh like an Aussie. A subsequent interview with Winslet’s Sydney-based voice coach, Victoria Mielewska, got me thinking about the mechanics of our accent, the way so many of us obsess about our national voice, and the extent to which the story of the way we speak might provide a new way of looking at, and listening to, the nuances of our identity. Six years after this article was published in the Age, I found myself ruminating out loud to Laura Waters and Yael Bergman – from the Melbourne production company Princess Pictures – about the possibility of making a documentary about the story of our accent. Princess had just finished the Chris Lilley series, We Can Be Heroes, which had aired on the ABC, and Princess Pictures were also planning their next juggernaut-in-waiting, Summer Heights High. The ABC would come on board, too, as the broadcaster for the ‘accent doco’, which eventually became The Sounds of Aus. There was, of course, no obvious way to make a television programme about the way we sound. But once we embarked on the first of the more than one hundred interviews that would be boiled down into less than fifty-four minutes of screen time, there was a sense that we were unravelling a story that somehow connected to all of us – whether urban, rural, indigenous, or, like me, the children of migrants. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about at least one dimension of the accent, with regional variations, the scourge of cultural cringe, the real meaning of upward inflexions and the possible impact of Americanisation all high on the list of barbecue stoppers. On screen, all of this had to be underpinned by an explanation of the defining features of our national twang, a task that seemed to be easier to fulfill once we deployed the purpose-built mantra: ‘Ask the master to pass the banana.’ The sequence was spearheaded by Mielewska and Rachel Griffiths, before unfurling into a montage featuring an array of Far North Queensland characters on a warm afternoon. In many respects, that single sequence sums up our storytelling strategy. Our documentary would have been an incoherent ramble without the cogent expertise of language experts such as Mielewska, Dr Felicity Cox and Dr Bruce Moore, historians Michael Cathcart and Professor Joy Damousi, and a range of well-known actors, directors and entertainers whose relationships to the Australian voice dramatised its shifting fortunes and close shaves. As Bruce Beresford explained when talking about directing Breaker Morant, ‘there was a suggestion at one point that when we show the film in America, we revoice it with American actors, so they had American accents’. Our trump card, it turned out, was John Clarke, who imbued the presenter role with an understated good humour that allowed the material to suggest rather than instruct, and to engage rather than simply inform. Yet from the outset, The Sounds of Aus was always going to feature a broader array of Australians, many of whom had their own compelling accent tales to tell. For how could a story of the accent succeed as television if it didn’t play like a conversation? To our genuine surprise, The Sounds of Aus proved both a critical hit and a ratings winner when it screened on 8 November 2007. It attracted more than 1.2 million viewers in our five largest cities, and even won its timeslot in Melbourne and Sydney. It has since been nominated for a Logie, was named most outstanding documentary at the Chicago-based Hugo Television Awards in May, and has been invited to Frances Festival Résistances in July. We have produced a DVD, and I spend lots of Friday afternoons talking to schools, all of which bodes well for a ‘long tail’: in other words, an active shelf life for the documentary. But the big payoff of this two-year collaboration with a committed production team and a generous army of interviewees is that we seem to have sparked off an on-going conversation about how we speak, and by extension, about who we are. I hope that we all get to talk again.

Lawrie Zion

From the New Issue

2024 Calibre Essay Prize (Winner) | ‘why your hair is long & your stories short’ by Tracey Slaughter

Open Page with Anne Manne

Becoming Ella Fitzgerald: The jazz singer who transformed American song by Judith Tick

God and the Angel: Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier’s tour de force of Australia and New Zealand by Shiroma Perera-Nathan

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