"'Come in, the Water's Fine': The Drowning World of Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977)"

Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977) is a profoundly in-between film. While many of the most celebrated Australian films of the mid-to-late 1970s feature film “revival” were about finding or expressing a voice, a home, an identity, or a history – even if questioning these ideas in particular cases – The Last Wave is much more uncertain, eerie, unhomely, even unnerved. This chapter traces and examines the Gothic qualities of The Last Wave and explores the ways in which it productively draws on the tensions and porous boundaries between First Nations and settler-colonial perspectives, Australian and international cinema. As in several other films of the 1970s feature film “revival,” it also highlights the unheimlich or uncanny sensibility lying beneath the Australian cinema of this era. It frames this dislocation or disjuncture within forms that are commonly aligned with descriptions of the Gothic, including the wild weather, ancient ruins, isolated landscapes, haunted histories of dispossession, and the self-conscious staging of all these elements. Where it is commonly the vast size and arid nature of the continent’s interior that engulfs the colonial visitor, The Last Wave stages a similar encounter through an inclement portrait of a figure lost between two worlds. In the process, it suggests to us that white settlement, clinging to the verdant coastline of the vast continent, is equally lost, inundated by more than the watery “last wave” that is heading to shore.