Dark Aussie Parable 'Romper Stomper' Gets A Timely Reboot

With the recent boom in local streaming services, the Australian film & television industry has turned to cannibalising its past to deliver new content, taking to remakes and reboots with a zeal reminiscent of Hollywood. But out of all these series spun from familiar local-cinematic titles — Wolf Creek, Picnic At Hanging Rock, Wake In Fright, Chopper — what the new TV series Romper Stomper has, in spades, is cultural relevance.

The original 1992 film was director Geoffrey Wright's response to battles between White Power and Vietnamese gangs in Western Melbourne. But, returning a quarter of a century later, the televisual Romper Stomper gets to riff on the contemporary battles that play out in the mass media: neo-Nazis rebranded as true-blue Aussie patriots, the rising tide of Islamophobia, the right-wing talkback blowhards fanning the flames, and the left-wing activists counter-protesting.

"Last year, with Brexit and the rise of Trump, it became obvious that this story needed to be revisited," says Wright, 58. "I cannot think of another Australian TV show that is more appropriate for the current day. What we present in the series is nothing that you haven't seen in a million news reports. We're just getting inside of them."

Where the original film was out "to put the audience inside the bubble of [a neo-Nazi] gang", the series gets to make good on its own format; to look at its world, of Melbourne in conflict, with race at the centre, from many varied perspectives. "You're going to get bored of just one point-of-view across six hours, so longform almost obliges that you explore different elements of the story," says Wright.

So, there's Lachy Hulme as the leader of far right-wing group Patriot Blue, and Sophie Lowe as his seemingly-bland/secretly wicked wife. Toby Wallace, as a young skinhead who rises up the ranks, scans as the series' breakout star. Nicole Chamoun plays a young Muslim student drawn into the media hysteria, David Wenham as the neo-con shock-jock smug upon his nightly TV pedestal. And a handful of the original cast return: Dan Wyllie now silver-haired, John Brumpton gone full bunker-in-the-bush paranoia, and Jacqueline McKenzie as the upwardly-mobile professional who can't escape the original film's past.

Over the years, Wright, producer Daniel Scharf, and McKenzie often tossed around the idea of returning to the story. "By the time we actually set out on production," McKenzie says, "it'd been something we'd been talking about for 22 years."

McKenzie is talking, in a South Yarra cafe prior to Romper Stomper's gala premiere, just days after publicly writing about her experience with the film industry's endemic culture of sexual harassment; but before Russell Crowe would make his car-crash comments on simulated on-screen sodomy at the AACTA Awards a few nights later.

"I just wanted to start a conversation," the 50-year-old says, simply. "Because, we all talk. We've all been talking about this for years. Half the time, we've been laughing about it: 'oh, you're working with such-and-such, look out, hahaha!' I felt the need to say something. We need to talk about this, and we need answers. We need this dialogue. I don't like the idea of naming names, of publicly shaming people. I don't want to point fingers. What I want to do is discuss how we change this culture that has existed. This is a fabulous opportunity to move forward, and protect ourselves for the future."

McKenzie is, as an interviewee, garrulous and generous. She's full of ideas for how to change film-sets — completion guarantees being tied to past examples of "disruptive behaviour", film workers requiring "working with children" qualifications for dealing with child actors — and happy to talk about the #metoo movement, and ideas of greater cultural shifts. But, she's also there to promote Romper Stomper; the series spun from the film in which she made her debut.

"I just remember running, running, running my ass off, up-and-down alleyways in Melbourne," McKenzie says of the 1992 original. "There was a real sense of camaraderie amongst the actors, a real ensemble. [Because] it was my first film, I didn't realise how special that was. I thought that all film-sets must feel that way, all directors must work like that."

Having spent years working in studio-shot, formula TV-series — "think about those two words: 'block' and 'cover'," she laughs, of the televisual language, "they're anti-freedom!" — McKenzie is glad to be working with Wright, who still works with his "extraordinary energy"; the camera always moving around actors, through locations (Footscray again features heavily, but the St Kilda foreshore gets a starring role in a pair of series brawls).

And, like Wright, she knows that the arrival of Romper Stomper is timely. "I think it's fantastic that we're telling [this story], that we're asking these questions," McKenzie says. "The film, what we were depicting was really fringe. Now, it's front-row-centre in our society. There's Charlottesville, that freak [Milo Yiannopoulos] who's getting way too much air-time right now, travel bans, Trump. It's not some tiny little group of lost souls with a lot of muscle, it's part of our cultural dialogue."

Once again, this means that Wright has to answer criticisms of the Romper Stomper story; from those who feel that depicting race-hate and gang violence, even critically, can legitimise its existence. The original film was, famously, denounced by David Stratton, who refused to review it on the grounds that it was "dangerous".

"[That] became a textbook example of how not to treat a film that you're frightened of, or loathe," Wright says, even as he sees some of the same arguments playing out, 25 years on. "If you ask [critics] if watching the film turned them into card-carrying fascists, they would say no. But they make the assumption that there are people who could see the film — or now, the series — and suddenly go 'gee, being a fascist looks like fun, I'm going to do that!'

"There's a real paralysis in this country," Wright continues, "in addressing this situation, and the people involved in it. But no one should be scared of having this conversation, of addressing this reality that's playing out in front of us."

Romper Stomper airs exclusively on Stan from 1 Jan.