Comparing Film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior And Cumpston's

The Australian landscape has been an interrogated site for uncanny imagining for director George Miller and photographer Nici Cumpston. Both Miller’s feature film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior (1981) and Cumpston’s photographic series Cultural Landscape – Nookamaka Lake (2008) & Bonney Lake (2010) describe a national connection to an austere landscape that resinates repetition and singularity of adjunct repressed histories. These depictions of dystopian Australian narratives radiate ideas of tenuous futures of the land, highlighting a concern for emerging tensions of climate, nomadism and isolatedness, labelled as sublime issues for man dating back to settler culture. Instructively Sigmund Freud describes the uncanny as encompassing tendencies of reoccurrence; “The frightening element can be shown to be something represented which recurs. This class of frightening things would then constitute the uncanny.” On another

The same can be said for Miller’s film Mad Max II: The Road Warrior produced in 1981 which offers a narrative of main character Max and his struggles to overcome intense pressures of degenerative madness of an indivisibly anarchic world of futuristic wasteland. A primal Australian outback characterized by straight endless roads inhabited by lawless gangs of bikers and petrol heads. Extensive sequences car chases down highways come to symbolize an uncanny gothicness that overarches the harshness of Australia’s landscape amounting to a horror of the road, linked precisely to its never-ending, reoccurring emptiness. However as never located as being Australia in filmic space, the narrative becomes a manipulated allegorical microcosm, whereby the uncanny landscape becomes a space for revised nightmares of settler mythology and fears a nuclear