Abstract

During the post-WWI period, with the gradual growth of white Australians’ emotional and spiritual links to the land, an increasing number of people began to feel a sense of belonging and an identification with Australian countryside. Meanwhile, because of the concern about the market, national image, and an ideological opposition to US film domination, the Australian government in the 1920s began to encourage the positive representation of the landscape. This led to the representation of the countryside as an Arcadia, which becomes the newly dominant myth in Australian silent film.

In this rural myth of city-country contrast, the countryside was represented not as an uninviting and dangerous environment, but more as a place of harmony between people and nature, and an idealized pastoral utopia safe from the destructive power of war, in which the ideology of rural prosperity rather than industrial development is promoted. It implied that the injuries to human beings brought by living in an industrialized society, could only be healed by restoration of close and harmonious contact of man with the natural world.

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