Most standups will tell you that if they have a bad gig there are certain things they can blame. Broken sleep. Debilitating medication. A fight with a girlfriend or boyfriend. Drinking too much beforehand. But one thing they absolutely can’t: the audience.

A comedian friend explained this to me several years ago at a small bar in Melbourne while he fidgeted with a coaster and gazed into a pot of beer. He’d just come off stage. I thought he did pretty well but he looked crestfallen, convinced he bombed.

“You never,” he repeated, exhaling deeply, “blame the audience.”

I wonder to what extent those words can or should apply to a discussion about Australian cinema, given that over the course of the past decade something remarkable has happened. The Australian film industry has produced a wave of movies that are up there, quality-wise, with any period in its history – including the much vaunted New Wave of the 70s and 80s.

But here’s the thing: nobody seems to have noticed.

Frequently lacklustre box office performance has certainly played its part. Are the crowds who habitually shell out for tickets to the latest brain dead blockbusters partly responsible for letting so much high quality local product flop ? While every Joe Blow seems to be an expert about how Australian film-makers can succeed, I don’t recall anybody ever seriously putting forward the view that audience popularity is the best measurement of quality.

If it were, Minions would be one of the greatest motion pictures ever made and Michael Bay one of finest artists of the 20th and 21st century.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest David Gulpilil in a scene from Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country. Photograph: MIFF/Entertainment One

So who do we blame for so many great Australian films going under the radar? The audience for being suckers? Marketing departments for not ponying up enough dosh? Film critics for not yelling loud enough? An infrastructure in which foreign and predominantly Hollywood film content is more entrenched than ever?

Australia’s cinematic renaissance from 2005 onwards, and why nobody has noticed, are topics I’m currently exploring for a new book. Of course, the second question is less interesting than the films themselves. Viewed as a collective, it’s easy to see the extent of our the achievements.

After more than a century of Australian cinema, we’ve seen the arrival of the first great Indigenous Australian films: the breathtaking Samson and Delilah (2009) followed by Charlie’s Country (2014) and Ten Canoes (2006).

And while any “best ever” label is subjective, I defy you to name a finer Australian horror movie than The Babadook (2014), a better Australian crime drama than Animal Kingdom (2010) or a superior Australian western than The Proposition (2005).

Ditto for a better neo-western (Red Hill, 2010), neo-noir (The Square, 2008), suburban thriller (Snowtown, 2010), police procedural (Noise, 2007) or time travel movie (2014’s The Infinite Man).

Other terrific films from this period don’t fit as easily into umbrella genres. To name a few: bittersweet claymation Mary and Max (2009), gritty character study Boxing Day (2007), sex slave exposé The Jammed (2007), cancer-related dramas Look Both Ways (2005) and Burning Man (2011), war pics Lore (2012) and Balibo (2009), and Australian anthology The Turning (2013).

I’m not the only critic to express a deep affection for the films of the past decade. In Margaret Pomeranz’s top 10 list of Australian films, no less than five of her picks were released from 2005 onwards.



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If the quality was there, why not the audience? It’s a given that great art films will usually be clobbered at the box office by Hollywood blockbusters. All sorts of other issues come into play, too, including the “brand” of Australian film and a sense of cultural cringe.

“Australians are notoriously recalcitrant when it comes to seeing Australian films,” Animal Kingdom writer-director David Michôd said in a 2010 interview. “They need to be told not just that the film is good, but that it is exceptional.”

Then again, audiences were told that many times about the bone-chilling The Babadook. “Frightfully clever,” read the Sydney Morning Herald. “Brilliantly atmospheric,” rang the Canberra Times. An “edge-of-the-seat experience,” according to the Australian. “I was truly blown away,” said Pomeranz.

But The Bababook’s entire six week run in Australia earned a piddling $256,000. By comparison, the film took more than twice that amount ($633,000) in the first three days of its UK release.

On the surface, this suggests overseas audiences are more capable of appreciating the quality of Australian film-making than Australians themselves, and perhaps this is so. But other issues come into play.

The Bababook opened locally in art house cinemas on 13 screens. It opened on 147 (including multiplexes) in the UK. So, is it the fault of the distribution model? If The Babadook had received a wide release backed by a big publicity and advertising spend, would local audiences have come to the party?

They didn’t for the terrific apocalyptic drama These Final Hours, which collected great word of mouth (including buzz from Cannes and the Melbourne international film festival) in the lead-up to its July 2014 local release. Distributor Village Roadshow backed the film with an extensive marketing campaign and a release on 164 screens.

But the opening weekend figures were so disappointing that Fairfax asked, rather hyperbolically: “is there any hope for Australian films at the cinema?” It took $206,727. By comparison French film-maker Luc Besson’s dark sci-fi Lucy grossed $4.66m on the same weekend.

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There are lots of reasons so many great Australian films released in the past decade are yet to find the audiences they deserve. The simplest is that there is no magic formula for commercial success. Hollywood doesn’t have it and neither does Australia.

In the 70s and 80s, we had the so-called New Wave. From 2005 to 2015 (perhaps longer – time will tell) is a period I call the “Lost Wave”. Incredibly talented artists reinvigorated Australian cinema once more, and their efforts have not been justly acknowledged.

Perhaps the question of blame – or why, on so many instances, the audience never came along for the ride – is not the important one. Maybe a better question is: when will these films be discovered? They lie on shelves and digital platforms, waiting to be watched, and waiting for their spot in the history books.