‘Beethoven Had His Critics, Too...’: The Australian Biopic in the Twenty-First Century

The biopic has been a consistent if intermittent genre across the history of Australian film and television. Australia’s first feature film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, can be partly be classified as a biopic of the nation’s most famous and filmed outlaw; while contemporary television has produced a virtual flotilla of ’70s and ’80s-obsessed TV movies about famous celebrities, entertainment figures, politicians, sports people and media barons over the last 15 years. The Australian biopic is also dominated by movies about iconoclastic and larrikin-like figures whose lives are marked by a range of factors including conflict, adversity, “criminality”, identity and diversity. This chapter examines the Australian biopic in relation to the processes of adaptation, its complex connection to the historical record, dominant trends both locally and overseas, shifts in terms of the diversity of subject matter and voices over time, and its association with the historical film more broadly. It discusses the genre’s relationship to the much-derided “AFC genre”, as well as the contrast between its peripatetic cinematic form and its pre-eminence in contemporary television. In the process, this chapter focuses on five carefully chosen 21st-century examples of the Australian biopic (from Chopper, Red Dog and Tracks to Rabbit-Proof Fence and the TV-movie, Mabo) and how they reinforce, recast and deepen the genre’s relationship to history, cinema, subjectivity and nationalism and embrace particular individual, cultural, social, racial and political components.