The rape-revenge sub-genre is a real goer within exploitation cinema. The plot is always the same: hoity-toity city-slicker visits a backwater town, is terrorised, seeks help from local coppers (who are usually down at the pub), realises none is coming and takes the law into their own hands.

The most notorious is 1978’s I Spit on Your Grave, which has a kick-arse lead in former centrefold model Camille Keaton and the tagline “This woman has just cut, chopped, broken and burned five men beyond recognition” – and yet the fleshy promotional artwork and the rape scenes, which take up almost half of the movie’s run time, leave no doubt that the endgame is titillation, not empowerment.

Compare that with 1988’s Shame, remastered and restored by the Australian National Film and Sound Archive and now streaming on SBS On Demand. Directed by Steve Jodrell, Shame completely rejects the male gaze and doesn’t even depict the gang rape at the centre of the plot.

Deborra-Lee Furness was 30 when she was cast as Asta, a barrister stranded in a Western Australian country town, awaiting motorcycle parts. She’s not a fantasy in leathers like Marianne Faithfull in Girl on a Motorcycle, though I’d defy any girl to watch Shame and not want to be her. She’s measured, funny, fixes her own bike and doesn’t rise to the bait – unless violence is necessary.

Deborra-Lee Furness was 30 when she was cast as Asta, a barrister stranded in a country town awaiting motorcycle parts. Photograph: Umbrella Entertainment

Which, of course, it is. Shame draws on the classic western premise of a stranger in town – such as Django (1966), and Shane (1953), after which it’s named – which means it’s Asta’s fate to serve justice to the womenfolk of Ginborak (which combines the Aboriginal words for “woman” and “abuse”).

What’s depressing about Shame, 30 years on, is that its portrayal of the darker side of Australian masculinity is as relevant as ever. There’s far more emphasis put on insidious misogyny than in Mad Max – a film which motorcyclist Beverly Blankenship, who wrote Shame with Michael Brindley, had loved and wanted to subvert – in which Toecutter’s biker gang terrorises Max’s wife in a way that’s only cartoonishly threatening.

In Ginborak, rape culture takes its toll on all but the central instigators. If men don’t kowtow to harassing women, they’re “piss weak”, and those who don’t approve but don’t protest – like Tony Barry as mechanic Tim Curtis – slide deeper and deeper into turmoil, suffering the breakdown of their relationships to the appalled women in their lives.

Stills from the film Australian Shame - 1987. Photograph: Umbrella Entertainment

And the female characters certainly aren’t relegated to the sidelines. They’re achingly hard-bitten and brittle, just as many of the real-life women are in the Western Australian country pub documentary Hotel Coolgardie. They have to be, to survive. And so, some turn on their own. When the local matriarch warns off teenager Lizzie (Simone Buchanan) from making a complaint about being gang-raped, she points out the footy season is about to start and “the whole town could suffer”. It’s reminiscent of the way the supporters of former Stanford University student Brock Turner, who was convicted of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman, underlined his talent as a swimmer.

Stylistically, Shame is all-Australian. There’s the dry heat and menace of Wake in Fright – in fact, Peter Aanensen as Sergeant Wal Cuddy could be a nod to Chips Rafferty’s Sergeant Jock Crawford. Most of the scenes are set in the local pub or the abattoir. It’s only a shock that Asta crashes her motorcycle into a sheep and not a kangaroo or feral pig.

In an interview with The Movie Show back in 1988, Furness claimed not to consider Shame to be a feminist film – although, back then, the word was levelled at women in the same way that film-makers of the 1940s and 1950s might be asked if they were communist. But she was admiring of Asta’s complexity. Quite right, too – Shame was made in an era when, in Hollywood, Goldie Hawn and Melanie Griffiths were hamming up the ditzy blonde trope, and leading ladies were largely cast to get in the way of Harrison Ford.

In one of the film’s few respites from darkness, there’s a scene in which Lizzie holds tight in delight as Asta pops a wheelie. It predated the female-break-for-freedom of Thelma and Louise by three years, but also, by using a motorcycle, beautifully subverted what cinema has often exploited as a very male-female dynamic.

• Shame is available to watch now on SBS On Demand