“The Touch of His Hairy Hand Offended You”: The Epistemological Indeterminacy of Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright

TY - CHAP

T1 - “The Touch of His Hairy Hand Offended You”

T2 - The Epistemological Indeterminacy of Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright

AU - Houlton, Thomas

N1 - Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2025.

PY - 2025/8/15

Y1 - 2025/8/15

N2 - Famous for its kangaroo hunt and its portrayal of a schoolteacher’s descent into violence in the Australian Outback, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film Wake in Fright is a landmark film in the Australian New Wave, with its controversial depiction of life in the country’s so-called Dead Heart. This chapter will examine, through animal film studies and queer theory, how the cycles of violence portrayed onscreen become sites of chaos and indeterminacy. Working with theorists examining cycles of mastery and sovereignty in human–animal relations, this chapter will link these manifestations in kangaroo hunting with sexual assault and violence between men, using Eve Sedgwick and other theorists. These violent encounters, in the context of postcolonial Australia and the massacres of both kangaroos and Aboriginal peoples, will be connected to the extractive silver ore mining that underpins the economics of the film, to demonstrate how Kotcheff portrays an Australian nation-state unable to break free from the patterns of its violent colonial past.

AB - Famous for its kangaroo hunt and its portrayal of a schoolteacher’s descent into violence in the Australian Outback, Ted Kotcheff’s 1971 film Wake in Fright is a landmark film in the Australian New Wave, with its controversial depiction of life in the country’s so-called Dead Heart. This chapter will examine, through animal film studies and queer theory, how the cycles of violence portrayed onscreen become sites of chaos and indeterminacy. Working with theorists examining cycles of mastery and sovereignty in human–animal relations, this chapter will link these manifestations in kangaroo hunting with sexual assault and violence between men, using Eve Sedgwick and other theorists. These violent encounters, in the context of postcolonial Australia and the massacres of both kangaroos and Aboriginal peoples, will be connected to the extractive silver ore mining that underpins the economics of the film, to demonstrate how Kotcheff portrays an Australian nation-state unable to break free from the patterns of its violent colonial past.

KW - Aborigine

KW - Australian cinema

KW - Homosocial

KW - Hunting

KW - Kangaroo

KW - Masculinity

KW - Necropolitics

KW - Outback

KW - Postcolonial

KW - Sexual Assault

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105014966061&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-031-87294-5_10

DO - 10.1007/978-3-031-87294-5_10

M3 - Chapter

AN - SCOPUS:105014966061

SN - 978-3-031-87293-8

T3 - Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

SP - 191

EP - 210

BT - Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature

PB - Springer Nature

ER -