Männer ohne Sonntag

A great movie reflecting the the lead up to the Shearer's strike of 1955. Jack Thompson leads a group of shearers ( not sheep hearders) and shows life on an outback station just before the 9 month long strike when the "prosperity bonus" was cancelled and shearers pay was cut.

A great movie, made for Australians, showing how Australia was once. Highly recommended

This movie would definitely make my personal top ten. Along with "The Odd Angry Shot", "The Club", and "Newsfront" this is one of the highlights of that golden age of Aussie movies made in the mid 70s to the mid 80's.

Jack Thompson is magnificent as the chief shearer (I think the technical term is "Ringer") of an itinerant gang of shearers who arrive at sheep station to work. The wonderful photography captures the heat and dust of the landscape as well as the harsh living and working conditions.

The main dramatic event in the movie centres around a strike by the shearers and the owners attempts to break it using scab labour. In this aspect it gives a nod to the political agenda portrayed in "Newsfront". There are some great character roles by minor players, the sub plot involving the awful cook is a little gem. Which pretty much sums up the film, not a major epic or Hollywood rubbish, just a good honest well made movie that bears repeated viewing.

One of the few Australian movies that shows the outback and the men who worked there as they really were, without trying to romanticise and play down the brutality of the place and time. Great performance by Jack Thompson as the ageing gun shearer.

I am glad that I can sometimes revisit Australia as it once was through films like "Sunday Too Far Away" and "Newsfront". At the time of their making, we still had the faces and voices that rang true to the 50's - 60's prior to the influence of television that forever changed the way we talk and even the way we walk. Jack Thompson and the rest of the male cast moved in the way Australian men and, in particular, shearers moved. Compare this with the cast of "Kokoda". As my mother commented, Australian men of the 1940's just didn't look so muscular or move with such rigidity. They were a Depression generation - wiry with a casual slouch born of being raised on lean rabbits and fish and hardships that knocked pretentiousness sideways.

However, "Sunday Too Far Away" is far more than a sentimental journey. It is a view of life that is at once tragic and humorous. It also has genuinely touching moments when seemingly hard and practical men display their concern for each other in an understated manner that is indicative of their rejection of overt displays of sentimentality. They all know that they are probably going to end up like old Garth if they remain shearers. "That's shearing for you, Foley" says Garth as he muses about the fact that he has hardly seen his wife and son for over 30 years. Garth's death is symbolic for all the shearers and their indignation at the undertaker not providing "the proper vehicle" to bear his body on his final journey reflects their insistence upon their dignity as shearers. As in the strike action, "it wasn't so much about the money as the bloody insult."

But I intellectualize too much. I love this film for many reasons but most of all because it could have been made for people like me in mind. It is about yarns that my uncles told and characters who were like my father who had been a "rousie" on a shearing floor after leaving school at the end of year eight even though he had been the dux! Times were such that work was valued above all else - life was work.

In the 1980's, I once rented a farmhouse when I taught in rural Australia. One of the conditions of my tenancy was that shearers would share the house in the shearing season. These shearers were tough, smelled of lanolin no matter how they washed and ate mountains of food all cooked up in a giant iron skillet. And they argued about everything - who was a gun and who was not, which cocky had treated them the worst, which type of sheep were the easiest to shear. However, when I asked them about the authenticity of "Sunday Too Far Away", they always agreed that it was the best evocation of the life of a shearer they had ever seen - praise indeed for the film.(Not that they would have used the word "evocation")

The first time I saw this film was in my capacity as a projectionist on board a Royal Naval Warship. By the end of the first reel the dining hall (Cinema) was deserted except for myself and one other everyone having been put off by the lack of action. Because there was one remaining viewer I was obliged to show the entire movie. We were richly rewarded because this film is full of finely crafted observation well portrayed by fine actors expertly directed. A rich vein of understated comedy runs just beneath the surface occasionally erupting most notably in the hand laundry scene and again in the undertaker scene. Altogether a worthy film which should have received greater acclaim