"They Said It'd Be an Adventure": Masculinity, Nation, and Empire in Centennial Australian World War I Film and Television

Abstract

Centennial commemorations of WWI in 2014-15 triggered a slew of Australian film and television mini-series depicting the nation's early experiences in the Gallipoli campaign. This article maps how these recent productions' deployment of adventure as an explicit narrative frame reveals complex continuities, transformations and subversions of adventure tropes and themes that have long structured Australian screen representations. Adventure-war remains a masculinist mode and Australian soldier masculinity idealized as forging the young nation. Yet recent productions also unsettle the customary "coming of age" chronology, indict the influence of adventure fiction, render adventure-war more inclusive and undermine traditional constructions of racial superiority