Westerns from an Aboriginal Point of View or Why the Australian Western (Still) Matters: The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) and Sweet Country (Warwick Thornton, 2017)
Résumé
David Roche analyzes two 21st century Westerns which endeavor to express a multiracial perspective on the Anglo-Aboriginal relations in the outback, The Tracker and Sweet Country. Evincing an awareness of the ideological implications of the Western narrative and motifs, both The Tracker and Sweet Country deploy a variety of formal strategies in an attempt to decenter the genre and destabilize its imperialist foundations; it is thus by interrogating the Western that the films confirm its relevance as a form and discourse with a historiographic potential to address its own history.