The Proposition: Imagining Race, Family and Violence on the Nineteenth-Century Australian Frontier

Abstract This article analyses John Hillcoat's 2005 film The Proposition in relation to a spate of Australian films about violence and the (post)colonial encounter released in the early twenty-first century. Extending on Felicity Collins and Therese Davis argument that these films can be read in terms of the ways they capture or refract aspects of contemporary race relations in Australia in a post-Mabo, this article analyses how The Proposition reconstructs the trauma of the Australian frontier; how from the perspective of the twenty-first century it worries over the meaning of violence on the...