Title: <i>Kenny</i>: the evolution of the battler figure in Howard's Australia
Abstract: Abstract This article explores ways in which the low-budget mockumentary film Kenny (Clayton Jacobson, 2006) evolves the figure of the Australian battler, from its earlier incarnation in The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997). A surprise hit on Australian screens, Kenny is the quietly humorous story of a portaloo worker, one of the ‘ordinary Australians’ that the Howard government claimed it spoke for. But whilst Kenny brought some old-fashioned toilet humour to the box office, he was overworked, underappreciated and apprehensive. The article maps the film from the perspective of its Australian audience, to suggest ways in which this comic but uneasy version of the working-class battler responded to socioeconomic change. It scrutinises the circumstances of the film's Australian reception to examine the legacies of an era in which many people became disengaged from politics, the work/family balance seemed harder than ever, and fear was exploited for political advantage. Such an analysis of the representation of the battler figure suggests that both Kenny and The Castle present an idealisation of the battler figure, but they do so differently in response to their sociocultural milieu. Keywords: Kenny the battlerAustralian filmAustralian identityJohn Howard Notes 1. Felicity Collins, ‘Kenny: the return of the decent Aussie bloke in Australian film comedy’, Metro, no 154, 2007, pp. 84, 90. 2. Australian Film Commission, ‘Top Australian films at the Australian box office, 1966–2007’ http://www.afc.gov.au/GTP/mrboxaust.html (accessed 13 June 2008). 3. Peter Malone, ‘A house is a castle’, Cinema Papers, April 1997, no. 115, pp.10–12. 4. Stephen Crofts, ‘The Castle: 1997's ‘Battlers’ and the Ir/Relevance of the Aesthetic’, in Ian Craven (ed) Australian Cinema in the 1990s, Frank Cass Publishers, London, 2001, p. 159. 5. Roger Ebert, ‘The Castle’ (review), 4 May, 1999 http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19990504/REVIEWS/905040301/1023 (accessed 5 December 2006). 6. David Stratton, ‘The Castle’ (review), Variety Review Database. New York: April 1997. 7. Poster, The Castle, Press Kit, Frontline Television Productions and Working Dog/Village Roadshow, Melbourne, 1997. 8. Cited in Crofts, ‘The Castle’, p. 168. 9. Malone, ‘A house is a castle’, p. 11. 10. Paul Fischer, ‘A place by the tarmac: The Castle’. Urban Cinefile. http://www.urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=139&s=Features (accessed 9 December 2007). 11. Miranda Devine, ‘A man's castle is his home’, Daily Telegraph, 15 April 1997, p. 10. 12. Michaela Boland, ‘Nonpro laffer Kenny kills Down Under’, Variety, 2–8 October 2006, p. 12. 13. Sasha Molitorisz, ‘Lifting the lid’, Sydney Morning Herald, 11 August 2006, p. 5. 14. Derek Parker, ‘Putting product in its place’, Fast Thinking, no. 6, 2007, p. 4. 15. Leigh Paatsch, ‘Weekend Movie Guide’, Herald-Sun, 6 January 2007, p. W14. 16. Interview with LAist, 19 July 2007, http://laist.com/2008/07/19/laist_interview_the_jacobson_brothe.php (accessed 4 November 2008). 17. Interview with Liz Hayes, Sixty Minutes, Channel Nine, 15 October 2006. 18. Interview with Liz Hayes. 19. Interview with LAist. 20. H.R. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, Trans. Timothy Bahti, Harvester Press, Brighton, p. 19. 21. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 28. 22. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 28. 23. This is not a new phenomenon; back in the Menzies era, this was also observed: ‘the fact is that the average Australian, having left his interests in the hands of his leaders, does not take a great interest in the way in which they are managed’. Frederick Eggleston, 'The Australian Nation', in George Caiger (ed), The Australian Way of Life, Heinemann, Melbourne, 1953, p. 12. 24. Hugh Mackay, quoted in Michelle Grattan, ‘Following Howard's way to victory in war for a nation's soul’, Age, 21 February 2006, p. 1. 25. See Clive Hamilton and Sarah Maddison (eds.), Silencing Dissent: How the Australian Government is Controlling Public Opinion and Shifting Debate, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2007. 26. ‘Kenny: Synopsis’, Australian Films and Awards – Features 2006, AFC, http://www.afc.gov.au/filmsandawards/recentfilms/cannes06/feature_178.aspx (accessed 2 February 2008). 27. From ‘Kenny's Book of Quotes’ accompanying the DVD of the film. 28. Don Aitken, ‘What was it for?’ The Inaugural Don Aitken Lecture, University of Canberra, 25 November 2005, www.canberra.edu.au/__data/assets/file/0010/23689/inauglecture.rtf (accessed 10 February 2008). 29. Anthony Giddens, The Third Way: The Renewal of Social Democracy, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1998, p. 15. 30. Judith Brett, ‘Relaxed and Comfortable: The Liberal Party's Australia’, Quarterly Essay, Issue 19, 2005, p. 27. 31. John Howard, ‘Address to the Enterprise Forum lunch’, 8 July 2004, http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/10052/20040821-0000/www.pm.gov.au/news/speeches/speech978.html(accessed 18 June 2008). 32. John Howard, speech, ABC Radio 774, 10 May 2001. 33. Deborah Brennan, ‘Reinventing government’, in A. Farrar and J. Inglis (eds), Keeping it Together: State and Civil Society in Australia, Pluto, Sydney, 1996, p. 15. 34. Average weekly hours for full-time workers increased between 1985 and 2005. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Social Trends 2006, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, 2006, p. 127. 35. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australian Social Trends 2007, Australian Bureau of Statistics, Canberra, 2007, p. 34. 36. M. Wooden and R. Drago, The Changing Distribution of Working Hours in Australia, Working paper no. 19/07, 2007, Melbourne Institute, Melbourne. See also Iain Campbell, Cross National Comparisons: Work Time Around the World, ACTU, Melbourne, 2001. 37. For more evidence on this, see Professor Barbara Pocock, Director of the Centre for Work + Life at the University of South Australia, in particular, The Work/Life Collision: What Work is Doing to Australians and What to do About it, Federation Press, Annandale, 2003. 38. For more evidence on this, see An Unexpected Tragedy: Evidence for the Connection Between Working Hours and Family Breakdown in Australia, Relationships Forum Australia, Sydney, 2007. 39. For working fathers like Kenny: in 1999, a study of 1,000 Australian fathers showed that 68 per cent felt they did not spend enough time with their children and 53% felt that their job and family lives interfered with each other. Graeme Russell, Lesley Barclay, Gay Edgecombe, Jenny Donovan, George Habib, Helen Callaghan, and Quinn Pawson, Fitting Fathers into Families: Men and the Fatherhood Role in Contemporary Australia, Report prepared for the Department of Family and Community Services, Canberra, 1999. 40. Sara Charlesworth, ‘Work family conflict in the workplace: manifestations and disputes’, in Barbara Pocock, Chris Provis, and Eileen Willis (eds), 21st Century Work: High Road or Low Road, Proceedings of the 20th Conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand, Volume 1, Adelaide: University of South Australia, 2006, p. 122. 41. Mark Vaile, quoted in ‘At the movies with John, Kim, Lyn, Bob and...’, Storyline, Australian Writers’ Guild, no. 15, 2006, p. 29. 42. Ghassan Hage, ‘Values to have and to have not’, Australian, 27 September 2006, p. 34. 43. Ghassan Hage, ‘The shrinking society: ethics and hope in the era of global capitalism’, http://evatt.labor.net.au/publications/papers/5.html (accessed 7 April 2008). 44. Tom Allard, ‘It may be a misfortune for many, but it's Beazley's chance to show some leadership’, Sydney Morning Herald, 15–16 September 2001, p. 34. 45. Judith Brett, ‘The turning tide’, in D. Modjeska (ed), The Best Australian Essays 2007, Black Inc, Melbourne, 2007, p. 322. 46. John Howard, in an interview with Liz Jackson, Four Corners, ABC-TV, 19 February 1996, www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2004/s1212701.htm (accessed 15 May 2008). 47. See, for instance, Evan Williams, ‘Suburbia in the front line’, review of The Castle, Weekend Australian, 12 April, 1997, p. 11. 48. John Howard, quoted in Mark Metherell, ‘They want tax cuts, not reforms – Howard,’ Sydney Morning Herald, 10–11 December 2005, p. 9. 49. Mary Kalantzis, ‘Australia fair: realities and banalities of nation in the Howard era’, Overland, no. 178, 2005, p. 17. 50. Michelle Grattan, ‘Following Howard's way to victory in war for a nation's soul’, Age, 21 February 2006, p. 1. 51. Other people noticed this as well: Glen Preusker, owner of Splashdown and sponsor of Kenny, said that ‘I hope the guys who do these tough sort of jobs, and someone's got to do it, will actually be thought of in higher esteem’ now that the film has been released. Glen Preusker, quoted in Andrew Bolt, ‘Why Kenny is just one of us’, Sunday Mail, 3 September 2006, p. 50. 52. For more on this topic, see Nick Dyrenfurth, 'Battlers, refugees and the republic: John Howard's language of citizenship', Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 84, 2005, pp. 183-96. 53. Felicity Collins and Therese Davis, Australian Cinema after Mabo, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, p. 118. 54. Collins, Kenny, p. 90. 55. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 32. 56. Jauss, Towards an Aesthetic of Reception, p. 32.
Publication Year: 2009
Publication Date: 2009-05-29
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 8
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