“You’ve done some bad things, sweetie, haven’t ya?”
When Jacki Weaver uttered this menacing line in the 2010 Australian crime drama Animal Kingdom she was playing underworld matriarch Janine ‘Smurf’ Cody, a Melbourne grandmother with a cute, familiar face and a warm ocker accent – alongside some sociopathic tendencies like blackmail and murder.
The film’s writer and director, David Michôd, had always envisaged Weaver in that role, embracing those inherent contradictions between appearance and character that added layers to the film’s darkness. One of the reasons Smurf was so shocking was the fact that we thought we knew Weaver and could expect fun and sweetness from her, but she’s always been an actress, and a person, with a far wider range than that.
Jackie Weaver in 'Animal Kingdom'. Credit: Porchlight Films
As Australian documentary director Ile Baré says, “What is incredible about Jacki is that she's always been totally herself, and she is always going against the grain in some way. Like, who else ends up becoming known in Hollywood in their 60s?”
Baré is talking about Australia: An Unofficial History, the new three-part SBS documentary series narrated by and featuring Jacki Weaver, who we see in a studio looking back at some of her earliest appearances, laughing and commenting and sometimes crying. There’s commentary from others too, including director Phillip Noyce AO, cultural critics Benjamin Law and Jan Fran, comedian Zoë Coombs Marr Zoe Coombs Marr, broadcaster Leila Gurruwiwi, actress Rachael Maza and pioneering Indigenous activist Dr. Gary Foley – but Weaver is the host that holds it all together.
The series draws on a forgotten vault of films made during the 1970s by the Commonwealth Film Unit, later known as Film Australia. These were films that were government funded and supposed to “tell us who we were as Australians”, advertising the country to overseas migrants. But the films ended up being far more radical, subversive and diverse than anyone expected. The series, also directed by Christopher Eley and Pauline Clague, and produced by Jo-anne McGowan, is a cultural crash course about the ‘70s: that tumultuous, nation-changing decade that transformed the way Australia saw itself – and also made Weaver a household name.
“Jacki is the perfect narrator for the series,” says Baré, “not just because she has this great sense of humour and can have fun with the nostalgia of looking back through this archive, but she can offer us that perspective while still being a player in the current world.”
From Animal Kingdom to Hollywood
Weaver’s performance in Animal Kingdom won her numerous Australian and international awards and her first nomination for an Academy Award. This swiftly turned into a new late-life career in Hollywood and a second Oscar nomination, this time for Silver Linings Playbook (2012).
Jacki Weaver with Robert De Niro in 'Silver Linings Playbook'. Credit: Roadshow / The Wienstein Company
Right now, Weaver lives in Los Angeles with an ongoing role in the neo-Western streaming drama Yellowstone, playing powerful CEO Caroline Warner, for which she won her second Logie in 2022. (In the SBS series we see gorgeous footage of her running up to the stage, flowers in her hair, to collect her first Logie in 1976, but more on that later.)
Just weeks ago, Weaver was recognised with yet another AACTA Award, for voicing ‘Pinkie’, the lovable elderly adventurer in Adam Elliot’s animated feature film Memoir of a Snail. Accepting via video from “the city of Angels” which she said was alight with bushfires, Weaver looked tearful and sincere. “I miss you Australia, and I love you very much.” She followed up with a joke about not sleeping with John Denver – a recurrent awards season riff – which was a perfectly Jacki combination of sentiment and irreverent humour.
Jacki Weaver: an icon of 1970s Australian screen
For Australian audiences there will always be something endearingly familiar yet steely and unexpected about Weaver, as if she has been with us forever yet keeps evolving and can’t be pinned down.
Born in Sydney in 1947 and now in her mid 70s, Weaver started acting at the age of 15. A veteran of live theatre, film and television, she can do a cut glass English accent as well as she can an educated Australian, an Ocker (of course) or more recently, a wide range of Americans.
Her tiny stature (4’11), blonde hair and big blue eyes meant she was playing innocents and children well into her 30s, while also being cast in robustly sexual roles including in key new wave Australian comedies directed by Tim Burstall, like Stork (1971), Alvin Purple (1973) and Petersen (1974), as well as in Donald Crombie’s Caddie (1976) and Peter Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975). In the latter film she brought good natured sexuality to the role of housemaid Minnie, while in Caddie as the barmaid best friend, she brought spunky heart.
... both her personal and professional life reflected much of what was happening in Australia during that time.
Like the Australian screen industry itself, which was essentially born (or reborn) during the cultural renaissance of the ‘70s, Weaver came to prominence then, and both her personal and professional life reflected much of what was happening in Australia during that time: She was a sexually liberated woman who refused to be shamed by the tabloid media; a busy career actress; an unmarried mother and a divorcee – all of which the SBS series touches on through rarely seen clips and scenes from the Film Australia archive (held now and made available by the National Film and Sound Archive, NFSA).
Jacki Weaver hosts 'Australia: An Unofficial History'. Credit: Mark Rogers
These include Weaver’s playful appearances on The Mike Walsh Show, her Four Corners responses to the ‘scandal’ of being unmarried and pregnant – she mimes a yawn in the present day, though appears serious and resolute in black and white footage being asked if there’s anything ‘immoral’ in what she’s done. She cleverly turns back the question about what morality means.
We also see her cheeky cameo in a silent propaganda film about Sydney, playing a woman daydreaming about her washing on the line having a love affair. There’s the hilariously earnest early 70s film about worker’s rights, where she plays an office worker confused by rapid technological changes. “Can anybody tell me what an automatic typewriter is?” she says defiantly to an office of outraged coworkers.
Most significantly though, this series showcases Weaver’s first Logie-winning performance in the 1976 film about postnatal depression, Do I Have to Kill my Child? This fictional film based on real case studies by journalist Anne Deveson appears relevant even today, as we see her playing a young mother struggling to deal with the relentless demands of parenthood and an unsympathetic medical profession.
Jackie Weaver during the filming of 'Australia: An Unofficial History'. Credit: Mark Rogers
In the present day, watching these clips, Weaver gets tearful and says she feels so sorry for the character, who is eventually prescribed tranquillisers with their own problems attached, referencing the epidemic of housewives zonked out on Valium during that decade.
We see the rise of Whitlam, the flourishing of culture, the introduction of No Fault Divorce, the fall of Whitlam (Weaver says she cried at the news and her son asked her if the prime minister was dead, to which she said, “He might as well be.”)
Director Ile Baré says that accessing these rare archives has given her a renewed appreciation for the women’s rights movements, the Black and gay activists and protestors more generally of the ‘70s. Baré is amazed at the ways Weaver’s own story and personal perspective reflects perfectly the spirit of those times. “Jacki navigated a man's world expertly and on her terms,” says Baré. “Through looking at these films, you get a wider sense of the times and you see in her this renegade spirit that was in the air.”
Three-part series Australia: An Unofficial History airs Wednesdays from 5 March at 7.30pm on SBS . It will be subtitled at SBS On Demand in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Vietnamese and Korean.
You can also catch Jackie Weaver at SBS On Demand in another Australian film, Last Cab to Darwin.
Stream free On Demand
Last Cab to Darwin
