How to Talk Australians: The Movie review – viral web series lampooning Aussie culture gets big-screen adaptation
The popular satire’s humour resonates with an uncomfortable ring of truth
Sometimes sharp cultural satire comes from people outside the culture being lampooned – or, in the case of How to Talk Australians: The Movie, framed in a way that implies so. Adapted from the popular YouTube short-form series of the same name, the film’s principal characters are students and teachers from the (fictitious) Delhi College of Linguistics, though neither the director (Tony Rogers, co-creator/director of the 2007–2010 Australian series Wilfred) nor the screenwriters (Rogers and Rob Hibbert) are of Indian heritage. This allows the creators to draw on deeply ingrained knowledge of Australian culture while satirically positioning the work through an external lens.
The aforementioned folk from Delhi – including staff members Dean Devdan (Vikrant Narain), Professor Dillip (Robert Santiago), Chester (Rohan Ganju) and a dozen students – are devoted to learning the peculiar linguistic and cultural phenomenon known as (my words) sheer bloody Australianness. The central trick of the film – as in the famous Simpsons episode Bart vs Australia, and Stephan Elliott’s criminally under-appreciated Welcome to Woop Woop – is to present Australia as the rest of the world imagines us (Crocodile Dundee also did this, but without the satirical edge). Continue reading...
