Recalling romance and revision in the film adaptations of Robbery Under Arms and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith

This paper interrogates the adaptation of two literary bushranger narratives to film during the Australian Film Revival in the 1970s and 1980s: The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (Fred Schepisi, 1978), an adaptation of Thomas Keneally's 1972 novel of the same name, which itself was based on the true story of Jimmy Governor, and Donald Crombie and Ken Hannam's 1985 adaptation of Rolf Boldrewood's 1889 novel Robbery Under Arms, a text that has seen numerous other adaptations on both stage and screen. Analysis of these case studies demonstrates that the narratives' ideological positions regarding Australia's past can be understood in relation to the western genre, their narrative structures, selective deviations from their respective source materials, and the similitude of their bushranger characters to Graham Seal's 'outlaw legend'. I relate each film's ideological stance on bushranging to its production context and argue that Robbery Under Arms depicts a romantic idealisation of Australian history that is closer to Alfred Dampier and Garnet Walch's 1890 stage melodrama version than the original novel in its appeal to populist nationalism, while The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith attempts a visual translation of the novel's revisionist approach to bushranger and colonial legends.