Riding the new Age: how Aussie Movies won The World

When Australian New age motion pictures burst on to world movie theater screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were at first baffled by the broad accents and strange colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far, an iconic tale about male culture and commitment in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first success of Australia's golden age of movie theater but Americans were specifically mystified by it, producer Matt Carroll keeps in mind.

"They identified that Sunday was an excellent film but they didn't comprehend it," he states.

"It was pretty incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you may too have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were much more inviting of the movie at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the partner of an Adelaide automobile dealership who 'd sold Carroll a Peugeot.

"She stated, 'oh yes beloved, I understand Parisian street slang, I'll equate everything for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I remember being in the movie theater and the very first thing that turns up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was equated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the big screening space, "the whole audience simply went nuts, absolutely crazy, and we got a huge sale to France", Carroll laughs.

"It's the language of the bush," describes legendary Australian star Jack Thompson, who portrayed the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley.

"There's a wonderful friendship expressed in that movie. Sunday states something much more extensive about the Australian character than a variety of other films that analyzed our success and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states "it was like a journal, it was just how individuals acted - I remember, since as a teen, I remained in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far has an actually important part in my profession and in my memory