Without a doubt, the oddest-looking entry in my professional writing CV involves an American venture called Eye International in 1986. It was a magazine devoted to the arts and popular culture, but it didn’t get terribly far: the only issue that ever emerged was a pilot, prominently numbered ‘Volume Zero, Number Zero’ on its cover. I was once asked, in a job interview, whether this phantom publication constituted a hoax on my part.
I avoided the respectable Weir-Schepisi-Beresford lineage altogether, made a polite detour around the Ebert-approved legacy of Paul Cox, and took a different approach: experimental films, shorts, documentaries, animation, and fiction-feature comets in the sky of Australian cinema like Haydn Keenan’s Going Down (1983), Margot Nash’s Vacant Possession (1995) and Frank Shields’ Hostage: The Christine Maresch Story (1983) – the memory of that last one lingers in Argentina, where I was recently called upon for a video discussion tribute organised by the lively magazine La vida útil. A complete documentation of my BAFICI programme, titled A Secret History of Australian Cinema, can be found online.
