Australia's Rich and Revolting Criminal History

You wouldn't know it from watching bland Aussie movies such as Australia or The Man From Snowy River, but the Land Down Under has a rich and gloriously revolting history of true crime.

If you've seen the recent Animal Kingdom, The Boys, Snowtown, or the Blue Murder miniseries, you'll have some sense of the convict colony's lurid past and present. If any of the above have moistened your appetite for Aussie vice, I suggest you line up for these unbelievably lurid, stark, and graphic accounts of dozens of hideous, fascinating crimes.

 

Originally produced for network TV and the Aussie equivalent of America's Investigation ID, and hosted by a well known ex-'60 Minutes' journalist, these recreations of crimes that shook the Land Down Under caused considerable controversy for their graphic nature and upset more than a few victim' families and friends.

Personally, I think the series is a revelation, probably the best snapshot ever of a country's history of criminal behavior. A country under the Queen, mind you!

My problem with the recent feature film Snowtown (which I did like, by the way, and have reviewed here) was that it avoided key events of the crimes themselves and neglected to address the 'Bodies in the Barrels' aspect of the case. Fortunately, CIA's (Crime Investigation Australia) take on the case (made before the Snowtown film) leaves no stone unturned and captures the lurid "thrill" of murder the killers experienced. And this is the key to the series' success.

CIA doesn't whitewash its cases or spare us the gory details. It also does an excellent job of conveying the sweet juice of vice that criminals become addicted to. It is this  approach that, I feel, offends so many people. Producer Graham McNeice and director Gary Deans are to be congratulated for delivering a balls-to-the-wall true crime series that brutally injects us into frightening macro worlds of terror, lust, greed, racism, misogyny, and bigotry.  This is awfully scary stuff. 

Snowtown isn't the only story recently given both the CIA and feature treatment. The above disk contains a crime known in Australia as 'The Anita Cobby Murder'. Cobby was taken from a train station and brutally raped and murdered by three brothers. This episode can be watched in conjunction with Rowan Woods' powerful The Boys as, narratively, it is a sequel. The events of The Boys (one of the greatest crime dramas ever made) occur prior to the rape of Cobby. Woods' film ends with the brothers watching Cobby from their car. 

 

 

There is no reason for any horror, drama, or true crime fan to not have these in his or her collection. They are the duck's guts! For reasons unfathomable to me, the DVD's are particularly difficult to acquire and appear to have had very limited pressings in Australia. Only recently did I finally get my hands on the five disks comprising Volume I; there are three volumes so far.  

Ebay is a good place to start you're search for these if you're not living in Australia; even if you are living Australia, you'll have a tough time finding the first two volumes in stores. On a recent trip, I turned up empty-handed, but I did manage to pick up the just-released third volume.    

I can not overstate the value of this series to anybody interested in the human mind or curious about a side of the Australian psyche not often seen beyond its shores.

Australians do have a peculiar relationship with their criminals. Having virtually canonized bushranger killer 'Ned Kelly' in a series of films and a couple of TV manifestations, the public have recently lined up at pubs to hear the real Chopper Read ruminate on his life of crime. The likable Chopper, whose antics were immortalized in the film of the same name, maintains a healthy profile in Melbourne, and can be seen judging film festivals or making guest appearances at art openings. 

 

 

The Crime Investigation Australia series is bloody pulp perfection. 

Get a big motherfucking load of it. 

These discs are PAL, so you'll need a multi-system DVD player to view them.

If you haven't already invested in a multi-zone Blu-Ray and DVD player,

you're crazier than Mark David Chapman.

Snowtown

Australia has distinguished itself recently recently with a handful of dramas based on true crime stories; Animal Kingdom, one of the best,  did a US tour of duty, and garnered an Oscar nomination for Aussie actress Jackie Weaver. This week, Snowtown, based on the notorious Bodies in the Barrels story, hits theaters; it's another worthy addition to a genre that is gaining traction with filmmakers, audiences, and critics Down Under.

I'm very familiar with the 'Snowtown' story, so I needed zero introduction or explanation of the narrative gaps the film doesn't address. International audiences not familiar with the story may have trouble with the film's broader context because director Justin Kurzel does little to paint it, let alone explain the title (it's the name of the town where the film's victims were entombed in barrels).

Tonally, Snowtown has more in common with Rowen Woods' The Boys, a superior work, than Animal Kingdom. A low budget production, it focuses on a small cast of characters through the eyes of Jamie (Lucas Pittaway),  an impressionable, rudderless young man whose world is turned upside down by a man, John Bunting (Daniel Henshall), who appears to offer a solution to the shithole that is his life. Unfortunately for Jamie, Bunting's solutions to his and a slew of local "problems" (including homosexuality) involve murder, betrayal, dismemberment, rape, torture, and assorted perversions -- committed under the pretext of vigilantism. Like the hero of Kinatay (reviewed in previous blog), Jamie finds himself spiralling helplessly downwards into an abyss of utter madness -- in this case, a strange kind of suburban madness, portrayed with chilling realism by all concerned -- under the tutelage of older adults who come bearing gifts of mature guidance.

The film opens with a wrong-headed voiceover that reeks of post-production jitters. Thankfully, this redundant gimmick is jettisoned lickety-split, allowing director Kurzel to get on with business. From the opening frames to the closing ones, the film's trance-like sound design plays a major role in establishing the grim, relentless tone. Credit Jez Kurzel with the hypnotic score and Frank Lipson with the crack sound design.

Though based on a true story, the story on screen doesn't feel like anything particularly new or original because key details of its origin story are ignored or glossed over. It's as if the filmmakers were too afraid to tick off certain plot details out of fear that they would offend relatives of the victims. 'Snowtown' has forever been associated with The Bodies in the Barrels, but you wouldn't know it here. At some juncture, the killers were forced to move their victims' bodies from one location to another. That second location was a bank vault. The bodies were stuffed into large, plastic barrels and left there. The crimes became public when the barrels surrendered their ghastly cargo. In Snowtown, we see barrels in the background of a handful of scenes, but anybody unfamiliar with the story would have no inkling of their significance.

As horror, this film delivers the goods. We're treated to homosexual rape, hints of pedophilia, strangulation, torture, and good, old-fashioned animal killing. The film is intense, with leads Pittaway (a natural first-timer) and Henshall (stunningly good!) confidently carrying heavy dramatic loads on their shoulders. Henshall's bigoted, corrupting patriarch is worth the price of admission alone. What a piece of work he is!

Like The Boys, Animal Kingdom, Blue Murder (the best crime drama ever produced in Australia), and the little seen Shame (just released on DVD Down Under), Snowtown's milieu is a dark, disturbing, horribly homophobic and racist underbelly of Aussie culture that is the product of nobody's imagination. An an Australian who has traveled broadly within the country, I can vouch for the chilling reality on display in these movies. It mightn't be pretty, but it's a side of Australia that is alive, well, and busy reproducing like vermin.

Just as the film begins with a wrong-headed choice, it ends with a surprising whimper. For mine, it totally cops out by not depicting the ultimate fate of the killers -- or at least how they were busted. Instead, it offers five or six sentences of explanation to pick up the slack it leaves us. Why describe in writing what should have been described on screen? For Australians who know the story, this decision to avoid a big bang ending isn't quite so tragic because the story is familiar. For those unfamiliar with the story, it will probably be a letdown.

Still, this is a film that is well worth chasing down and experiencing. One hundred plus minutes inside a world as depraved and morally bankrupt as this is the kind of  "entertainment"  that rattles you without a reach-around.  Cruel, yes, but compelling, nonetheless, for adventurous punters.

***

Interestingly, the 'Snowtown' story has already been vividly and more graphically depicted in the amazing and intense 'Crime Investigation Australia' series, a brutal TV anthology of lurid docudramas that explode any myth that Australia is all about dancing transvestites, yahoos fighting crocodiles, and boxing kangaroos. . 

Available on video in Australia, this series (and this episode) are highly, highly recommended; the 'Snowtown' entry represents a more exploitative, linear take on the story, hitting every grisly and grotesque punchline in its presentation of the crimes.

Other recommended crime features and TV from the proud penal colony:

The Boys

Blue Murder

Shame

Police Crop

Chopper

Scales of Justice