I sent a link to this movie to a friend who's of the same age albeit better-looking than me, and who'd already drawn the winning ticket in life's lottery by having been born in Australia, with the words, "watch this movie to take you back sixty years or more ..."
And it did. He replied, "It was probably the first film my parents took me to as a child, and I do have fond memories of it. It really was like that in Australia then; vibrant social interaction and integrity were pretty evident to us minions that were protected from anything of a nasty nature! Life was pretty well 'happily ever after' at that stage. Now that we have 'developed', life in Australia is not nearly so simple."
I arrived in Australia many years after my friend had first seen "Smiley" on the silver screen, and life was still simple and mostly protected from anything nasty as well as naughty that went on in the rest of the world.
Donald Horne had written his best-known book and given it a title which was negative in the context of the book but Australians used favourably, and Geoffrey Blainey's book had absolutely nothing to do with the 34 hours and 30 minutes and eight stops it took to fly from Sydney to London. As for the naughty bits, D.H. Lawrence's salacious 1928 novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover" was still banned; and PLAYBOY magazines, if available at all, changed hands surreptitiously in brown paper bags.
Moore Raymond's novel "Smiley" and their sequels "Smiley Gets a Gun" and "Smiley Roams the Road" are now collector's items but the two movies based on them are still available on YouTube. We're so lucky!
Reg, put this on auto-repeat: click here.
