There was a dilemma for me in the writing of this essay. First, I felt a certain obligation to “represent” Australian film and to speak about its relationship to the term “melodrama.” And yet recent Australian film presents a relatively impoverished surface when it comes to melodrama in the full sense of the term, so the case is a rather negative one.

Second, as I began thinking about this chapter, the interesting things that arose were the more philosophical questions about the importance, or not, of the form at this moment in time. While I feel an old interest and attraction toward melodrama, and gratitude that its embrace in the recent past has reenabled proper attention to be paid to trash and low forms of popular narrative, I also feel a curious caution toward it as a form. Its dynamic is a peculiarly rich and yet stuck one. I am interested first in making this ambivalence a conscious one, before feeling for the influence of the form on Australian film, and speculating on why it is not a genuine staple or compelling presence in our visual culture, despite the melodramatic effects discernible in almost every film and their persistence across television varieties of soap and serial.

There seems to me to be a need to recover a nineteenth-century sense of the particular register of dramatic form that may properly be called melodramatic before its scarcity in Australian film at the far end of the twentieth century can be considered.