The England of the 1960s was in the vanguard of cultural change. In music, fashion, art and satire, it seemed to set the pace and, even today, the "swinging" status of that era is seldom challenged. But according to a new documentary presented by the novelist Howard Jacobson, it was the Aussies what swung it.

Without four key arrivals from Australia: the writer and critic Clive James, the academic and feminist Germaine Greer, the satirist Barry Humphries and the cultural historian Robert Hughes, the 60s wouldn't have been the same.

Brilliant Creatures: Rebels of Oz, which premieres at the Sheffield Documentary Festival next week, makes the case that the impact of these four Australian immigrants has never been properly acknowledged. Before their arrival in the early 60s, Jacobson argues, Britain was still hamstrung by caution and sorely in need of bold interventions from down under.

"In postwar England, and that was still the mood in the 1960s, we were very reverential," said Jacobson this weekend. "England was peculiarly receptive to the ideas of these people, perhaps because it badly needed to change."

Jacobson went out to Australia just as Humphries, Greer, Hughes and James were each travelling the other way and so he examines the reasons the foursome felt, one after the other, that they had to journey to the northern hemisphere to pursue their careers.

"They had been quite deferential to traditional British culture, but they got here and found they had to teach the supposedly cultured British how to do it," he said. "In some ways it was up to them to bring some of the European sense of intellectual life back here."

James, who along with Greer and Hughes had been part of an innovative cultural movement in Sydney known as "the Push", was disappointed to find less going on in London. "So Clive came over here and created the salon life he had expected to discover," said Jacobson. "He had his famous lunches with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens. He made it happen."

In the documentary, screened in two parts on BBC Four this summer, Jacobson places the foursome at the centre of an enduring moment of change for Britain. He also talks to the surviving three as they approach the end of their creative lives – Hughes died in 2012.

It is a valedictory homage, Jacobson admits, and he asks them how they will face their own ends. "There is a certain elegiac quality to the film," he said, "because one of them is dead already of course and Clive is very ill. Germaine and Clive are 75 and Barry is 80, so there is a sense of something passing, although Barry says he will be doing farewell performances for some time to come."

James, Jacobson said, does not seem frightened, although he is suffering from both emphysema and leukaemia. "He is very evasive, but brave. He feels it would be bad manners not to be like that after such a good life. He is strong on manners," said Jacobson.

In the documentary the writer asks Greer where she would like to be buried, but the feminist, who wrote the groundbreaking bestseller The Female Eunuch, in 1970, and who now crusades to preserve a section of the Queensland rainforest that she owns, told Jacobson she might decide not be buried. "She told me she might prefer to be eaten by the goannas [lizards] on her land – because they would eat up everything, even the rings on her fingers."

Jacobson first met Greer just before he graduated from Cambridge in 1964. He was about to leave for Australia to take up an academic post in Sydney that Greer had just vacated. "I was just going and she was just arriving. I thought immediately: 'This woman is going to take the country by storm'. We had never seen anyone like that, although there wasn't time to ascertain whether she had good ideas. She was fearless and she had cheek. She sat on the ground and unfolded herself like a long snake. I had not seen anything like it. If you had a woman round in those days, then they sat on a chair and you offered her crumpets and tea. They didn't unfold themselves on the floor."

After the screening of the first part of Jacobson's film in Sheffield this month, Greer will recount her own part in the story. Jacobson, a long-time fan of Australia, said that when he arrived in Sydney he found other women who shared Greer's combative spirit. "She was tough because she had survived in Australia where it was still common for blokes to jeer at girls. However remarkable Germaine is, and she certainly is, when I got to Australia I found there were other women just as fearless. You see more women like her there. They really had to fight for their chances and so they became acerbic."

Humphries created a subversive role for himself in British culture, before going on to create aliases as the monstrous Australian superstar housewife, Dame Edna Everage, and the spoof Australian cultural attaché, Sir Les Patterson. "Barry, like the others, had longed for British sophistication," said Jacobson. "Yet he had to come over and beat us at our own game. He became a European dandy."

Once they had arrived, their native Australian sense of having been culturally deprived disappeared. "They brought with them many of the European ideas of intellectualism and sophistication. They were very well read, all four of them. I always say, if you want to know which gallery a famous picture hangs in, ask an Australian. They studied them. They knew them, although they had not seen the real pictures."

Hughes, who like James once wrote for the Observer, is best known for his book The Fatal Shore, which tells the story of the white man's conquering of Australia, and for his landmark TV series about modern art, The Shock of the New.

Jacobson said all four of his subjects enjoyed going back to Australia, but felt that they could never go back for good. "For a start, there was a hostility to them there, a feeling they were the 'tall poppies' who would return only if their careers were flagging. They were attacked for their success. So at that point they cut their ties.

"Germaine, I think, feels an obligation to Australia now, at least to the land. Robert Hughes also used to go back to fish. They each felt they belonged here, although they have flirted with Italy. They never felt they had used it all in Britain. Once here, there was no sense they were anywhere but where they should be."