by Stephen Vagg
Our series on dodgy foreign films made of Australian stories takes aim at 1949’s Eureka Stockade, aka “whose idea was it to cast Chips Rafferty as Peter Lalor?”
We were hesitant to include this movie as part of the series since there is so much that we admire about Eureka Stockade: its incredible production values, spectacle, and action sequences, not to mention wholehearted effort to recreate the period and events.
However, we decided to do it after reading an interview with the film’s director and co-writer Harry Watt in November 1946 where he slagged off on Australian writers saying, “I find Australian writers too slow, and far too discursive. The accent is on dialogue probably because they have concentrated too much on radio script writing. This could cause the lack of a visual medium or approach so necessary in film writing.”
Well, you don’t make a declaration like that and not expect FilmInk to avenge it almost eighty years later. So, we’d thought it was time to take Harry Watt to town over his Eureka Stockade script.
For those unaware, the film was made off the back of the considerable critical and box office success of The Overlanders, written and directed by Watt in Australia for Britain’s Ealing Studios and released in 1946.
Now, for all our criticism in this series of foreign studios making movies here, we must emphasise that many of them did terrific jobs of telling Australian stories. Examples include The Sundowners, Smiley, They’re a Weird Mob, Wake in Fright, The Shiralee, The Kangaroo Kid (in its own unpretentious B Western way), and most of all, The Overlanders. The latter had a terrifically simple concept (small group escort cattle to safety through Australian outback during war), interesting characters who were sympathetic and different, and who had logical conflict, adventure and romance. Watt had a documentary background, and the story played to his strengths, being a semi-realistic account of a small group on a journey in a hostile environment (which had been the topic of his first dramatic features, Target for Tonight and Nine Men).
There was much interest after The Overlanders in what Ealing and Watt would do as a follow up. Early possibilities included a version of Robbery Under Arms, and the story of an RAF pilot written by Jon Cleary. However, the idea Watt really got jazzed about was the Eureka Rebellion, which he learned about when journalist and radio writer Rex Rienits (who we’ve written about a few times, including here) sent him a research dossier on the topic.
The Eureka Rebellion had taken place during the 1850s Victorian gold rush. There were a variety of causes, but basically it concerned a conflict between miners and the government over mining licence fees; things grew so toxic that miners took up arms and built a stockade, and the government sent in the troops, resulting in at least 27 people being killed. While the army won the battle relatively easily, the government then made concessions to the miners, and the whole event has come to be seen (by some) as a significant landmark in the growth of democracy and/or people power in Australia.
The story of the Eureka Rebellion features many elements that make it seem a natural for drama – colourful gold field setting, plucky miners, corrupt police, the murder of miner James Scobie by hotelier James Bentley, Bentley’s acquittal, the miners burning down Bentley’s hotel, the radicalisation of engineer Peter Lalor, who fell in love with school teacher Alicia Dunn, the miners swearing allegiance to the Southern Cross, the building of the stockade, the army charging in, Lalor escaping capture but losing an arm and returning to be voted into Parliament.
You can see the story’s appeal, especially to a director like Watt, who was a big socialist. The scope and scale of the story was in excess of anything that the director had attempted before, but he’d just delivered Ealing a fat hit and deserved his “blank cheque” movie. Besides, all his colleagues were trying epics around this time in Britain (Caesar and Cleopatra, A Matter of Life and Death, London Town, Henry V, The Red Shoes, Men of Two Worlds, Saraband for Dead Lovers, Blanche Fury, Christopher Columbus, Great Expectations), so why not Watt?
He decided to make the story as accurately as possible and most of the characters are based on real, significant figures in the rebellion. And this is what, in hindsight, doomed the film from its inception.
Because the thing is, the Eureka story, for all its colour and movement, actually isn’t an automatic natural for dramatisation – not unless you start twisting the facts. Australians – well, European-descended Australians, anyway – don’t, on the whole, get that excited over stories about revolution. Rebellion, yes, but rebellion within the system, not actually overthrowing the system (eg The Castle, Priscilla, Strictly Ballroom, Australia). The Ned Kelly story is about a thwarted revolutionary, which is one of the reasons why almost every version of that story flops – because at the end of the day, it’s about a man who wanted to derail a train and kill hundreds of people, which many find hard to stomach, however harshly he and his family were undeniably treated by police. The one successful version, The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906), was based on a play that twisted facts to make it a more “goodies and baddies” story.
If you’re dramatising the Eureka Stockade story, the big risk is that the conflict boils down to, at its core, the saga of men who went, “I’m going to lead an armed revolt because I think I pay too much tax.” Which actually isn’t that stirring. That’s why all versions of the Eureka Stockade story flop. There have been countless attempts – stage plays in 1891, 1907, 1939, 1946 and 1948, films in 1907, 1915 (The Loyal Rebel), 1949 and 1971 (Stockade), the 1984 miniseries, the 1971 and 2004 stage musicals – but not one has been a hit. There has never been one single broadly popular dramatisation of the Eureka Stockade story.
Which isn’t to say that it’s an instant death with the public. The story of Eureka can be a very effective backdrop to broad appeal drama, as demonstrated by the success of the novel The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, where the fates of the lead characters were affected by the rebellion, or the 1974 TV series Rush, which dealt in the build up to the event. Watt’s version of Eureka Stockade might have had a chance with the public if he’d found a way to personalise the drama, to focus on a small group of characters with the background of the rebellion – a family, say, like the one in The Overlanders. You could have some characters sympathetic to the miners, others on the side of the government, a soldier and miner in love with the same girl, different age ranges, a mix of sexes, all that stuff. That could have worked – it did in Rush.
Watt, with his documentary background, found security in facts and history, so he wanted to make everything accurate. But he wasn’t that experienced in dramatising history, so he and co-writer Walter Greenwood “froze up” and wound up making a dramatised documentary rather than a dramatic film, where every main character gives speeches rather than talks in dialogue, and the cast are almost entirely men of the same age, and almost no one comes across like a real person.
Now, characters in The Overlanders made speeches, too, quite a lot of them, but they were at least recognisable, relatable types, and you had variety in gender and age – horse-riding country girl, cute kid, a sailor out of his element in the bush, comic relief conman, crusty housewife, laconic stockman, etc. They had a bit of personality; they had friends, family; the actors could breathe them to life. (This is true of Watt’s later hit, Where No Vultures Fly).
Eureka Stockade doesn’t have that. It has a bunch of actors in beards, costumes and accents. No one in the cast feels like a real person except for maybe Gordon Jackson and John Fernside (who play fictitious people – Scottish miner, and spy respectively). Peter Finch, one of the greatest Australian actors in history, was cast as John Hummfray, a key figure among the miners – but in the final film he just comes across as some guy in a beard. Watt knows how to make his characters move – they storm stockades, burn hotels, yell at meetings – but they never come alive as humans.
Eureka Stockade has been much criticised (deservedly) for the performance of Chips Rafferty as Peter Lalor, one of the most spectacular pieces of miscasting in Australian cinematic history. It wasn’t as though Ealing weren’t warned about this, either – complaints rolled in the second the casting was announced, and Rafferty’s work in Ealing’s The Loves of Joanna Godden, made immediately prior, should have warned the studio that the laconic bushman star of The Overlanders and Bush Christmas was unsuited for any part outside his narrow range. If Ealing wanted to use Rafferty in the movie – which was totally understandable – they should have invented a part more suitable to the actor. But then, Ealing was always a little uneasy with the star system and never quite got the knack of how best to exploit its leading movie personalities (in contrast with, say Ted Black).
Having said that, even if someone more suitable than Rafferty had been cast as Peter Lalor – Peter Finch or Grant Taylor say (both of whom were in the movie), or a British actor – it wouldn’t have saved Eureka Stockade, not with this script. Peter Lalor is a tricky character to dramatise, unless you can convey in an interesting way why he becomes radicalised, and Watt fails to do it. (In fairness, the 1984 Bryan Brown miniseries didn’t pull it off either.)
While Rafferty’s Lalor is the most obvious clanger among the cast, the other leads don’t cover themselves in glory either. Jane Barrett, who plays Alicia Dunne, isn’t miscast, but she is dull, in part because of her unexciting screen presence, but mostly because of the script. For instance, Alicia and Lalor meet cute when Lalor thinks gold is on the grounds of the school where Alicia teaches. Now, this could have been a sweet, funny and romantic scene between Alicia and Lalor, but instead of being a two hander it’s between Alicia, Lalor, and three other men, and there’s no flirting or playfulness from Alicia, she just gives the men a lecture. We think that’s Watt trying to be progressive – “see, the women boss the men around!” – but it just makes Alicia a sexless killjoy who is never given any real agency in the story.
Part of the reason The Overlanders was so successful was the presence in the film of strong female characters played by Daphne Campbell, Jean Blue and Helen Grieve. They did cool stuff, like forge rivers, gallop around on horseback, make out with sailors and stop rampaging cattle. This lesson was not learned for Eureka Stockade, which only has one female character of note, Alicia, and she just lectures, patches up miners or looks on adoringly while Lalor gives a speech. The relationship between Alicia and Lalor should be the heart of Eureka Stockade, but instead they’re both these animatronic dummies.
Also a drag is Jack Lambert, who plays Commissioner Rede. Lambert, like Jane Barrett, was an utterly non-famous and non-exciting actor who, for some reason, Ealing decided to import all the way from Britain to play a lead role. Rede should be the movie’s antagonist and technically he is, but really, he’s just another man with a beard and a hat, spouting words. The film consistently points out that Rede is just doing his job, and that the government have a justifiable case (that the influx of people to the goldfields risked sending the country broke) which is very fair of Watt… but it’s also dull for drama.
The movie cries out for some dodgy moustache-twiring villain for us to get excited about. As mentioned, John Fernside livens up things as a spy and we were looking forward to him doing some villainy, but his part is tiny. Rede mentions having to hire shifty ex-convicts to be police and that sounded promising – we fully expected Grant Taylor (who plays a sergeant) to do that job and be all brutal, smacking around miners and taking bribes but… nope. The film pulls its punches on its villains, making it hard for us to get fired up about the miners.
It also wimps out on its heroes too. For all of Watt’s determination to be authentic, Eureka Stockade skirts around key influences of the rebellion – the Chartist movement and Irish activism. These issues were hot button topics and we don’t want to be unreaslistic about what Watt could show – he was working for a British film studio after all, that was quite conservative. We are just pointing out that a film whose selling point was authenticity wasn’t authentic.
We think that Watt also fell in love with his sets and costumes – can’t blame him, they look terrific, but it meant he had endless scenes of meetings and police looking for licence, instead of focusing on personalised drama.
The 1949 film of Eureka Stockade is a case of a filmmaker coming off a big fat hit and given carte blanche for his next project, then picking a story that gave him full scope to spend a lot of money on production value, but it was beyond his capabilities to dramatise.
And you know something? Despite everything we’ve written in this article, we don’t want to be overly harsh on Harry Watt for doing this. It happens, goodness knows, and Watt was a major talent, he deserved the right to have a crack at an epic. He – and Ealing – weren’t to know that he wasn’t up to the demands of that genre. And, as mentioned, there is plenty to enjoy about Eureka Stockade; in particular, it’s a tragedy that all those sets were wasted on the one film, they are stunning.
We just get annoyed that Watt felt obliged to slag off Australian writers and then go concoct a badly written film himself. That’s the thing about trash talk – it can make you look foolish. Which is what Harry Watt did with Eureka Stockade.
