fzi.de
When Australian New Wave movies burst on to world movie theater screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far, a renowned tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first success of Australia's golden age of cinema but Americans were particularly dumbfounded by it, producer Matt Carroll keeps in mind.
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"They identified that Sunday was a terrific film however they didn't understand it," he says.

"It was pretty incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might also have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were far more welcoming of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the spouse of an Adelaide automobile dealership who 'd sold Carroll a Peugeot.

"She stated, 'oh yes darling, I understand Parisian street slang, I'll equate everything for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I remember being in the movie theater and the very first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed states about the squatter, 'his shit does not stink'. When it was equated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the huge screening space, "the whole audience just went bananas, definitely insane, and we got a big sale to France", Carroll chuckles.

"It's the language of the bush," describes legendary Australian actor Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking weapon shearer, Foley.

"There's a terrific sociability expressed in that motion picture. Sunday says something much more extensive about the Australian character than a number of other motion pictures that analyzed our success and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states "it resembled a journal, it was simply how individuals acted - I keep in mind, because as a teen, I remained in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far has a truly important part in my career and in my memory