Wake in Fright

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Come have a drink with me!

Wake in fright also known as Outback is a 1971 Australian film based on the book of the same name.

John Grant (Gary Bond) is a middle class school teacher from Sydney who is forced to teach in a remote Australian Outback outpost to pay off tertiary education. It is the Christmas holidays and John is traveling to Sydney to visit his girl friend but must first travel through the nearby mining town of Bundanyabba (known as “The Yabba”) in order to catch a Sydney-bound flight.

At "The Yabba", Grant encounters several of the locals including a policeman, Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), who encourages Grant to consume repeated glasses of beer before introducing him to the local obsession with the gambling game of two-up. Hoping to win enough money to pay off his tertiary education and escape the outback, Grant at first has a winning streak playing two-up but then loses all his cash. Unable now to leave "The Yabba", Grant finds himself dependent on the charity of bullying strangers while being drawn into the crude and hard-drinking lifestyle of the town's residents.

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Wake in fright provides examples of:

• The Alcoholic: Everybody
• Crapsack World
• Only Sane Man: John Grant
• Sanity Slippage
• Values Dissonance: What the film runs on, particularly the kangaroo shooting scenes.