Praise

Various Artists
Praise
Best Boy / Festival, 1999

There is a shot in the opening sequence of 1998 film Praise that is burned into my mind. It's a close-up of a spinning Holden hubcap on a car driving along a dusty road at night, set to The Dirty Three's 'I Remember A Time When Once You Used To Love Me'. It isn't blatantly jingoistic, but it carries an unmistakable message that this is the opening shot to an Australian film – one that couldn't possibly be made anywhere else. The man behind the wheel of the car is Gordon, played by Peter Fenton from the rock band Crow, a maliciously passive asthmatic who lights each cigarette with the last and becomes caught in an ill-fated affair with a tornado of a woman, played by Sascha Horler, who is as determined and single-minded as he is useless.

It was Praise, based on the 1992 "grunge lit" novel of the same name by Andrew McGahan, that first piqued my interest in Queensland as a sort of mythical wasteland north of the border – a humid and sinister place imagined by Sydneysiders in the same way New Yorkers have nightmares set in the swamps of Louisiana. The whole film is shot in shades of orange and set variously in Gordon's empty boarding house room, where the heat seems to condense in the paint on the walls, and a mixture of pubs, beer gardens and bottle shops. When a character appears and says he is from Melbourne, the southern metropolis seems as far away as Antarctica.

For the last decade that idea of Queensland has been kept alive, for me, by other works such as Andrew Stafford's extraordinary history of the Brisbane music scene, Pig City, the records of "canetrash" punk band Sixfthick and McGahan's other books, including 1988 and Last Drinks. It is also now what comes to mind whenever I listen to The Dirty Three, who feature heavily on the soundtrack to the film, along with Crow and John Ellis. They may have been from Melbourne, but there is something about the compressed tension in their songs and the flailing outbursts of Warren Ellis's violin that, in my head, only seem to make sense when placed in the hopeless nowheresville of Praise.