Review: "Red Billabong"

SPARKE, Luke (Dir.), “Red Billabong”, Sparke Films Productions, 2016.

“Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolabah tree…”

-“Waltzing Matilda”, A.B. “Banjo” Paterson

That piece of doggerel, which at one time traded as our unofficial national anthem, is typical of many appropriative exercises which are the hallmarks of white history in this country. The poem and the song were pinned down by Paterson – it has a mongrel kind of origin – but its appeal to city-based, white residents of Australia lay mainly in all those funny words which seemed so foreign and yet were part of these folks’ daily lives. It’s the novelty of language which was the appeal here, and a kitsch appeal it is. This is why we’ve moved on to another national anthem with different funny words.

A “billabong” is not a foreign phenomenon anywhere in the world. When a meandering river erodes its way to a point where the curve in its trajectory gets cut off from the main thrust of the waterway - leaving a stagnant, crescent-shaped lake in its path – it has made what in the US is referred to as an ‘oxbow lake’ (and probably by other terms elsewhere on the planet). It is, in other words, an ordinary geological event, and unremarkable as such. Calling it by an exotic-sounding word like “billabong” however, makes it sound kinda funky and that is what this poem trades on. It’s also why it’s in the title of this movie - to catch the ear of the uninitiated.

(The word “billabong” itself probably doesn’t appear as such in the vocabulary of any indigenous collective – most likely, as in most cases, it is a corruption of an original word, mis-heard by some white settler… unless it derives from the Scots Gaelic, which has also been speculated. See other instances, like “kangaroo” and “goanna”.)

Back in the day, it was considered okay to just grab things from other cultures and use them as one saw fit in whatever creative endeavours were to hand. Australian culture is replete with instances of such borrowing, from the novels of Arthur Upfield, to the books of Patricia Wrightson, to some of Peter Weir’s movies. Many of our best-known artistic innovators have, at some point or other, dabbled with some aboriginality in their work, setting tales, cinema and art in indigenous contexts, often without more than a surface examination of the subtleties. In these more enlightened times, we try to rise above such cultural appropriation; sometimes we fail in that attempt. Thus, we have “Red Billabong”.

It’s a cheesy and simplistic trope in horror flicks to simply lay the source of some ancient evil at the door of some indigenous civilization and leave it at that. Stephen King does this all the time – look at Pet Sematary and It (the “Ritual of Chüd” – sheesh!). I’m constantly amazed that native Americans never call him to task on this, but maybe it’s because they have bigger fish to fry. Meanwhile, we’ve had “The Ninth Wave” and “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and you’d think that would be the end of it, but no. We now have this.

“Red Billabong” is a horror take on that old Bush stand-by, the Bunyip. Legends of this creature abound in the early tales of white settlers. There’s a notion that stories about this beastie were invented to keep Aboriginal children away from dangerous waterways and that, later, they did extra service in keeping white men away from indigenous hunting areas and sacred sites. In the early days of Federation there was a low-level fever amongst rural and scientific communities to find a specimen of the creature but these usually led nowhere (to the skull of a deformed sheep in one notable instance involving the Royal Society in London and the Australian Museum in Sydney). Descriptions of the monster are diverse, with nothing really coherent about them and this ambiguity should really have given the early monster hunters a clue:

There’s a feature of wilderness bogeys that holds true across the planet in all cultures – the closer you get to something, the more you pin it down, the better the net you cast, the more elusive the entity becomes. In the Congo, people have hunted for the monster known as the Mokéle-mbêmbe for decades – for over a century – and nothing has come of it. Initially, the creature was described as a flesh-and-blood animal – something you could take a potshot at with a rifle – but soon it became less concrete, more magical, until, as Roy Mackal found out, nowadays it’s a phantom, an intangible animus with spiritual capabilities which can no longer be tranquillized, netted, or captured on infrared film. It has become the ghost which it always was. So it is with the Bunyip.

Paleontologists have ruminated that perhaps the Bunyip was originally some kind of extinct gigantic marsupial, like Diprotodon or Thylacoleo carnifax, the memory of which has lingered in indigenous communities long after the creatures themselves passed from view. That’s entirely possible; however, as it is in the Congo, the most likely rationale is that it was always a fairy-tale, designed to keep children and unwanted intruders away from harm.

Here, the writer/director of this piece of fluff has taken the quick and easy options on everything to do with indigenous legend and spirituality. The monster - in this iteration - is real; it is being monitored by an aboriginal sect intent on keeping it out of the common view; it is also being hunted by a foreign, hi-tech agency intent on weaponizing it for corporate gain. So far, so ho-hum. This is by-the-numbers plotting for action-based horror flicks and it was done to death in the 80s. But it doesn’t stop there: our main actor is the eldest scion of the family who owns the property upon which the eponymous billabong is sited, who inherits said property but has to share it with his younger brother who hates his guts. One of them wants to sell it; the other wants to preserve it, in order to ensure that no-one interferes with the indigenous interests of the place. One of them has money troubles that a drug-peddling associate can ameliorate with a quick injection of cash; the other is shrouded by secrets about his family which he has decided not to make public. They both have girlfriends. They are all attractive. They all, for the most part, get their shirts off. It’s as formulaic as it gets, folks.

Before you’re even halfway through this experience, you become distinctly aware that it was always the intention of the director to make a cookie-cutter version of an 80s horror flick; there was absolutely no intention to break any moulds or to innovate at any point. Let me be clear: this is not pastiche; it’s not even homage; it’s paint-by-numbers. When the (inevitable) no-good mercenary dad walks back into view; when the (predictable) British bad guy pulls out his chrome-plated automatic pistol; when the (yawn-inducing) chop-socky henchmen stalk towards the camera cocking their AK-47s, you may as well go and make yourself a cup of coffee because it’s nothing you haven’t seen a thousand times before. And I suspect that is merely the point: Mr. Sparke is just showing us that he can make this particular kind of film. But do we really want it? Does anybody? I’d suggest not.

Is there anything of value to take away from this? Unusually – and it’s the only unusual thing about this film -  none of the female leads gets killed, and certainly not in a wholly gratuitous fashion which is what you’d expect; however, they do rather gratuitously get their gear off and then wander around semi-clad for large chunks of the proceedings. The rest of the Hollywood Morality Playbook is firmly in place, you can rest assured, and this one deviation doesn’t spare them in any way. The effects are a few notches up from completely ordinary – although the younger brother’s hair colour changes rather alarmingly throughout the runtime - and there’s some nice camerawork, but it’s all in service to this narrative dreck, more’s the pity. If you’ve even been paying a minimum amount of attention to the contents of this review, you’ve probably grasped how you could write a better Bunyip movie script yourself in a single afternoon.

This is a completely disappointing movie. I suspect the only reason that it was ever made was because someone dared someone else to do it – “Look at those Hollywood wankers: bet I could make a better flick than they could”; “Bet you can’t”; “Okay you’re on…” – and the rest was beers and the inevitable piece of crap which was this waste of time. The reek of cashing-in and selling-out coming off this project is so raw that it’s almost eye-watering. I’m positive that the sole purpose for making this film was the lure of cash, tax breaks and the associated glamour of the movie-making lifestyle; I hope those involved have enjoyed rolling in their bathtub full of money. Meanwhile, that elusive phantom of the cinematic wilderness, the compelling and genuinely haunting bunyip film, is still out there somewhere waiting to be found…