68 • Metro Magazine 163 METRO FEATURE SECTION Metro Magazine 163 • 69 point will be taken up below in relation to post-Mabo attitudes to land rights, there is more at stake in the term ‘setting’ than the representation of an historical period: every history is grounded in a particular place. If westerns and bushranger ilms are mythologised versions of history, then their settings are ideologically charged repre- sentations of period and place. Genre theorist Jim Kitses argues convincingly that westerns use the setting of the contested frontier landscape of the late 1800s to stage conlict between lawmen and outlaws and validate colonisers’ treat- ment of colonised peoples and places. 6 More recently, Peter Limbrick has de- scribed Australian westerns as ‘settler colonial texts’ that are ‘concerned with the process of white subjects dominating space and others’. 7 The Proposition prob- lematises this white control over space. Since it is the physical location that unites the time of production with the time in which the story takes place, this analysis is grounded in the study of location. Drawing on textual, contextual and historical evi- dence associated with the ilm and its setting, I aim to show how location story- telling engages cultural memory, myth, history and the production of what counts as the truth of the Australian outback. To this end, it is necessary to consider the T HE Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) depicts the Australian outback landscape and the violence and dis- possession that mark the land’s colonial history. Following cultural theorist Graeme Turner’s assertion in National Fictions that ‘our view of the country is not created by history in any simple way. Rather, it is produced by the culture’s mythologising of its history’, 1 this article examines how history and landscape are represented, contested and interpreted in the ilm and in related narratives about Winton, the remote Queensland location where The Proposition was shot. In the process of mythologising history, I argue, ‘negative spaces’ – understood as awful and un- representable events and sites that make their presence felt in cultural texts largely through omissions and contradictions – are as telling as the dramatic ilm landscapes. The Proposition conveys ‘the mythic force of the rugged Australian landscape and the country’s brutal history’ in the Australian outback in the 1880s. 2 The ilm’s title refers to a non-negotiable proposition that Captain Stanley (Ray Winstone) puts to Charlie Burns (Guy Pearce) following a rape and murder in the district that Stanley is charged to protect and regulate. Captain Stanley proposes that Charlie kill his own brother Arthur (Danny Huston), leader of the bushranger gang responsible for the atrocity, in order to secure the release of his beloved simple-minded younger brother Mikey (Richard Wilson), or Mikey will be hanged for his involvement in the crime. The ilm’s lineage includes Westerns and bushranger ilms dating from a short ilm shot in Winton called Bushranging in North Queensland (Joe Perry, 1904) and The Story of the Kelly Gang (Charles Tait, 1906). Bushranger ilms – including more than eight versions of the Ned Kelly story and six screen adaptations of Rolf Boldrewood’s novel Robbery Under Arms – contributed to forging the legend of the Australian bush and the tough characters iguring in the nation’s harsh past. In Hillcoat’s view, The Story of the Kelly Gang ‘dealt with this aspect of our history and nation building through these bushrangers, but later bush- ranger ilms became colonial and costume dramas, not visiting that larger canvas’. 3 To show that ‘the cruel reality of the Australian frontier is the story of violent conlict; white on white, white on black, black on white and black on black’, Hillcoat sought inspira- tion from racial conlict in The Chant of Jim- mie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi,1978) and the moral ambiguity of Sam Peckinpah’s revisionist westerns. 4 Accordingly, The Proposition depicts a series of obliquely related acts of interracial and intra-racial violence and retribution in which heroes, villains and innocent parties are ill-deined. Film scholar Brian McFarlane argues that The Proposition ‘relected more about its time of production than of the period in which it was set’, by which he means that, as is the case with westerns, the fantasy of the nation’s past that the ilm articulates is shaped by contemporary sociopolitical perspectives. 5 While McFarlane’s valid THE PROPOSITION ▐ The sense of place evoked in The Proposition is conveyed through the overexposed, wide-angle images of the bleak, featureless downs that communicate the searing heat of the parched land and the relentless sun. ▐ Jane Stadler The Outback Landscape and ‘Negative Spaces’ in Australia’s Colonial History ABOVE: ARTHUR BURNS (DANNY HUSTON) BELOW LEFT: CHARLIE BURNS (GUY PEARCE) AND ARTHUR BURNS BELOW RIGHT: CHARLIE BURNS