Blonde hair, bronzed bodies, sunscreen and surf. This is the official picture presented in The Big Island, a promotional film made by the Commonwealth Film Unit in 1970 to sell the idea of Australia to the world. Couples pashed and lounged around on the beach and the camera lingered salaciously on bikini-clad bottoms. All this was accompanied by an upbeat male voiceover: “Most Australians live along the edge of their big island, and in summer, a lot of the living is on the long sandy beaches”.
These cheesy scenes first played at the Australian Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka, Japan. But in today’s Australia we see comedian Zoë Coombs Marr watching snippets from that film and many others. She’s one of the commentators in the hugely entertaining and informative documentary series about the tumultuous 1970s, Australia: An Unofficial History.
So white, so Anglo
Gazing up at the screen where The Big Island is projected, we see Coombs Marr finding it both hilarious and disturbing. All the bodies on the beach are white, young and presumably heterosexual. She gives her wry take on the skimpy bathers: “So low cut!”; and the constant application of sunscreen. She reads an unintended subtext: “White people shouldn’t be here,” she observes with a laugh, “because we’re sunburnt!”
This is just one piece of gobsmacking footage appearing in the three-part series that draws on a forgotten vault of films made during the 1970s by the Commonwealth Film Unit, later known as Film Australia. These films, which include documentaries, vox pops and dramas, were supposed to “tell us who we were as Australians” while also advertising the country to overseas migrants and businesses.
A cultural crash course on the 1970s
But this was the tumultuous decade that included the progressive Whitlam Government’s reforms – a Labor government that ended 23 years of conservative rule. It was the decade that saw the legal emancipation of women from husbands, including No Fault Divorce, the single parent allowance, the enshrinement of equal pay for equal work and free tertiary education.
It was also the decade of gay activism and the first Mardi Gras in 1978 – the one that got shut down by police; the fight for Indigenous land rights and the Aboriginal tent embassy in Canberra (also attacked by police) along with the birth of a National Black Theatre. The end of the official White Australia Policy saw waves of Asian immigration including Vietnamese refugees.
Defining who we were as Australians didn’t look so simple anymore.
Zoë Coombs Marr is among a diverse collection of commentators in 'Australia: An Unofficial History'. Credit: Rewind Photo Lab
So, in recording the times, these government-funded films, initiated by a conservative government of the late 60s, ended up far more radical and multi-voiced than expected, with renegade filmmakers swept up in the spirit of the times, many even ‘borrowing’ official equipment on weekends to tell their own stories of protest and change or simply showing what they saw, whether that was unhappy migrants, ‘poofter-bashers’ or ‘homosexuals’.
As Coombs Marr says at one point in the series: “It feels like the government asked a question [about national identity] and started to get an answer. But it was too late –they’d already paid for it!”
Just one version of history
Australia: An Unofficial History is narrated by beloved screen icon Jacki Weaver who twinkles when she tells us that this is history as we’ve never seen it before – “one version of it anyway!” Weaver also appears on camera reacting to number of films featuring her own performances from the 70s that are included in the archive. One of these is a groundbreaking social issue drama about postnatal depression and the Valium epidemic that drugged housewives of the 70s. Weaver won her first Logie for that 1978 film, which has the jaw-dropping title Do I Have to Kill my Child?.
Jacki Weaver during the filming of 'Australia: An Unofficial History'. Credit: Mark Rogers
All of them watch and respond to clips from the films, which show not only how much we’ve changed, but also how far we still have to go in challenging stereotypes.
Benjamin Law during filming for 'Australia: An Unofficial History'. Credit: SBS
Fun, funny and shocking
Speaking on the phone about the series, Coombs Marr, currently on a , says that although she was familiar with bits of historical footage from the archives that she accessed during the making of her queer history series for the ABC, (Queerstralia, 2023), this new and largely unseen collection was “a fascinating treasure trove and just so interesting and fun. It was a privilege to watch.”
She says: “There are two things I get from watching this footage. One is that it’s very entertaining and sounds funny. The people we see are saying funny things. And it looks really cool and daggy. This is the unironic birth of the aesthetic that we’d now see parodied in something like The Betoota Advocate.
“But it’s also kind of shocking. You can really see how much we have evolved as a society, with attitudes changing around race, queer politics and the status and rights of women.”
Coombs Marr is referring to a number of portraits in the series of ‘ordinary’ Australian women going about their lives, which mainly seem to involve shopping, cooking, decorating their homes and dreaming of their boyfriends’ ‘popping the question’. The making and eating of casseroles features largely in depicted lives, even when it’s a more radical portrait of a lesbian couple or a young gay man whose mother defends her son from very real hostility. This was, after all, a decade when being gay and being out was not technically legal and definitely dangerous.
Philip Noyce on set for 'Australia: An Unofficial History'. Credit: Mark Rogers
Ile Baré, the writer and director of Episode Two of Australia: An Unofficial History, says that the most shocking moment for her came with the scene from a Philip Noyce documentary where a homophobe brags straight to camera: “I bought this pair of steel capped boots, especially for bashing poofters.”
“It was pretty sobering. That one really rocked me,’ Baré remembers. “And it rocked Ben Law too, who we see watching and reacting to it [as a gay man now].”
Baré also notes shock around the documentary featuring teenage boys rebelling against brutal corporal punishment at school. Now grown men, these characters appear in the present day to rewatch the film. We see them torn between acceptance and even pride for what their younger selves endured, while also being affected by the violence. It’s that complexity and nuance that marks the archive and the series.
Then and Now: First Nations
One of the most poignant revelations of the series revolves around footage of the National Aboriginal Consultative Committee in 1973 – a kind of Indigenous Voice to Parliament more than 50 years ago that was a very real and actively supported form of representation.
“I didn’t know about this!” says Rachael Maza with amazement when she’s shown. “It’s like being in a time warp.”
Actress and director Rachael Maza. Credit: Scott Barbour / WireImage / Getty Images
Wiradjuri poet and artist, Jazz Money, has a similar response: “I've never seen this before. How could we have just gone through a referendum about this topic and not have seen it?”
Like the failed 2023 Indigenous Voice referendum, that original committee turned out to be less empowered than they’d hoped for and the alliance eventually dissolved. Progress can be infuriatingly slow, and as Coombs Marr reminds us, “It’s not always linear and there are often backlashes.”
Baré says of the series, “I hope the audience asks themselves: What’s changed? What stays the same? And why?”
A more flexible idea of Australian identity
While this unofficial history of the 70s has some serious and poignant moments, the overwhelming experience is one of having fun. As Rachael Maza says, quoting her activist father, Bob Maza, who started the National Black Theatre, “If you can entertain, you can educate.”
The series shows the decade where diverse faces and stories started to make up the picture of who was a ‘real Australian’ – and under Malcolm Fraser of SBS itself made this picture even more colourful.
So who are we now, as Australians, apart from a group of people who live on this continent and share a passport? Coombs Marr says the stereotypes were always narrow and ridiculous.
“So what if we’re not shearing sheep or sunburnt on a surfboard?” she jokes. “Or a jackaroo in a bikini. Even the people who fit the stereotype didn’t actually fit the stereotype. It’s a ridiculous made-up thing that we can have fun with and play up to in an ironic way, as long as we know it’s not real.”
Three-part series Australia: An Unofficial History airs Wednesdays from 5 March at 7.30pm on SBS and SBS On Demand. It will be subtitled on SBS On Demand in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.
Stream free On Demand
Australia: An Unofficial History
