"Do You Not Like The Yabba?"

By The Highwayman

Wake and Fright is billed as a thriller, but it’s a horror film in disguise. The Yabba may as well be a circle of hell; try as you might, you cannot escape from it. It just expands its awfulness, the heat, the sweaty, hateful hangovers, the cruelty, the boredom, and the loneliness. The entire piece is reminiscent of drinking nights gone wrong; you can almost feel the dread. Wake and Fright follows a schoolteacher, Grant, supposedly only in the Yabba for one night who gambles all his money away and is almost forced into a serious episode of binge drinking by the locals. Through this, he gets some idea of their lives, in which beer is for drinking and water is only for showering.

Perhaps bleakest of all is Jeanette “if she was a man she’d be a rapist”, who sleeps with her father’s drunken friends out of a kind of nihilistic boredom. Some may read this as empowering; there’s also a line about how she wouldn’t be called a slut if she was a man; but it reads as desperate, anything to pierce the bleakness of ordinary country life. When she seduces Grant, she’s almost robotic, zoning out amongst the men, not drinking as they do, only useful to them not for her company but for her body. The most intriguing character is Doc, a self-professed alcoholic who almost philosophizes the madness he finds himself surrounded with. Unlike, perhaps, the other men he is there by choice, living off no money and eating kangaroo meat. He goes from apparently joyful to despairing “all the little devils are proud as hell”, and could be read as an older version of Grant, a learned man who became enthralled by the Yabba and its debauchery.

Overall Score: 5/5