When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were at first baffled by the broad accents and strange colloquialisms.
Sunday Too Far, an iconic tale about male culture and commitment in a 1950s shearing shed, was the very first big hit of Australia's golden era of cinema but Americans were particularly dumbfounded by it, manufacturer Matt Carroll remembers.
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"They identified that Sunday was a fantastic film but they didn't understand it," he states.
"It was pretty incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might too have had it in Dutch."
But French audiences were even more inviting of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the partner of an Adelaide cars and truck dealer who had actually sold Carroll a Peugeot.
"She said, 'oh yes darling, I understand Parisian street slang, I'll equate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.
"I remember being in the cinema and the first thing that comes up is someone in the shearing shed states about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was equated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."
In the big screening room, "the whole audience simply went crazy, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs.
"It's the language of the bush," explains legendary Australian star Jack Thompson, who represented the hard-drinking weapon shearer, Foley.
"There's a terrific camaraderie revealed in that film. Sunday says something far more profound about the Australian character than a number of other films that analyzed our victories and failures."
Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states "it resembled a diary, it was just how individuals acted - I remember, because as a teen, I was in those sheds.
"Sunday Too Far Away has a truly fundamental part in my profession and in my memory
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