Even from an early age, prejudice along the lines of race or ethnic background never made much sense to me. Not because I’m any sort of profoundly enlightened individual or any such ponce like that; it’s more the result of what I understand to be the cultural makeup of where I was born and where I have spent the entirety of my life so far: Australia. It is, and I say with all the love I can muster for a geographical location, a mongrel nation. A former prison colony that has since become a hub for all manner of multicultural communities and existences, from the indigenous population that the ‘settlers’ fucked over, to our umbilical cord connection to Europe as a British colony, to our proximity to the rest of Asia. Our national identity (well, the parts of it that aren’t a result of our criminal ancestry) doesn’t make sense if not through the context of being the product of basically everywhere else on the planet, just filtered through the kind of laidback attitude that can take a word that is among the most visceral in the English language (cunt) and find a use for it in pretty much every single conversation.
And for as much as I understand how fraught that history of multiculturalism is, as we don’t have the best history when it comes to white Australians interacting with other cultures, that kind of ethnic melting pot is one of the reasons why, for all its faults, I still fucking love this country. And it’s one of the reasons why this particular film, an anthology co-produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, hits me right where I live. Almost literally, since the title and its setting are in Western Sydney, not that far from where I reside and work.
Starting out with a particularly charged scene of a woman stealing her granddaughter from a maternity ward, while the mother is hand-cuffed to a hospital bed (forced relocation of children is something of a dark spot in our national history), the film takes a Pulp Fiction-esque narrative structure, where background characters in one segment become the leads in another, across this film’s multiple chapters. In each chapter, a different ethnic background is highlighted, ranging from Indian to Filipino to Vietnamese to Chinese, with each playing out both as their own little short film and as part of a larger thesis about being a suffix -Australian and the family dynamics therein.
There’s a lot of little details that help tie all the different identities together, and most of them are especially local things that make the most sense if you’ve lived around them (i.e. knowing what a PCYC is), but that itself is part of what makes this film work as well as it does. Between its five directors and eight writers, there’s a real sense of communion to the storytelling and the overall mood of the production; like everyone is bringing their own unique experiences and skills to the table, and the combined product highlights both their individual merits and their cohesion as a group. The anthological story structure makes the most out of that kind of atmosphere, where characters from all walks of life come together in a sort of casual coexistence. Nothing feels showy or particularly dramatised for the screen, and while that can lead to some lulls here and there, it ultimately strengthens the whole through that approach.
Anthology films like this are quite rare. Usually, there’s some larger ranking conversation to be had about which segment is better than others and which would work best as a standalone feature, but not so much here. To separate any of these chapters from the others would only weaken them all in the process, and for a film that’s all about the intricacies of Australia’s cultural patchwork, there’s some real strength in a result like that. As more and more stories pull together, and more of the characters start to interact with each other, it made me feel like I was having an honest look at what this country is at its heart. It’s a showing that what far too many people say with a facetious sneer is wholly accurate to the reality of things: Diversity is strength. Not just homogenising everyone until they’re one and the same.
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