In which our hero Guy Rundle attends the London Australian Film Festival, where he learns that Germaine Greer is considering suing Morry Schwartz,  John Hillcoat and Nick Cave would love to make a romcom together, and Londoners serve sausage rolls with Vegemite:

The stars came out to play in London tonight … somewhere, presumably, it’s a big city.

In the cinema centre of the Barbican, the bizarre and brilliant modernist/brutalist apartment/cultural complex that looks like it was landed on a whole patch of central London by Martians in the 1970s, members of the Kangarati gathered for this year’s London Australian Film Festival. I recognised wossisname, and oh her, and Stephanie Bunbury I think, but apparently there’s some by-law that you can’t have a film festival without her.

“Would you like one of these?” said a diminutive waitress, with a doubtful tone of voice.

“What are they?”

“Home-made sausage in wrap, with Vegemite,” she said, which explained the doubtful tone.

People ten feet away retched.

“Has anyone eaten that in Australia, anywhere ever?”

“Maybe the Martians made it.”

The festival is opening with Samson and Delilah, Warwick Thornton’s extraordinary teen love story set in the north. Thornton lolled in the space-station foyer, as journalists filed past in ten minute bursts. He looked relaxed, as any debut-film Cannes winner might. Turns out he was jet-lagged, and possibly could have been persuaded to say anything.

“I grew up in Alice Springs, which is a large Australian town…”

“Ah I’m Australian, I won’t need the footnotes…”

“Ah…”

Extraordinary, really. Samson and Delilah is an instant classic, of cinema, not merely Australian. Yet his Cannes win got a brief mention and then the country went back to who cricketers were f-cking. The whole cast should have got a ticker-tape parade.

“Australian film is looking up,” John Hillcoat, director of The Proposition, and the festival’s patron, said as the foyer began to fill up.

The cinema’s in the basement, level minus 2. It’s like being in an amateur theatrical version of Space 1999.

“That’s despite a lot of the American money flowing out?”

“It’s because of it.”

“The Australia-as-backlot strategy…”

“We told people that wouldn’t work … and it didn’t…”

Hillcoat’s most recent film is The Road, which is screening towards the end of the festival. It seems to be one of about half a dozen road movies in the fest. After coming-of-age films, young-women-who-confuse-s-x-with-love-films, little guy against the system films, is this the new Australian cinematic trope? Trope. Love that word. Trope.

The reception filled. The sausages yielded to tiny plates of barramundi, eagerly grabbed by expats deprived of essential vitamins and minerals for months, years.

I heard cut-glass strine behind me.

It was Germaine.

“So what’s the story behind the Louis Nowra piece?” I asked (actually, I didn’t. I blurted “so are you replying to Louis Nowra?’ which was a dumb thing to ask, so I’ve edited it).

“[Edited (see below)]”

Someone went to the PA to say a few words.

“zzxxxxyffhhe sghshh fghhgheyyy shhed Australian Film Finance Corporation dgrysysy,” it sounded like.

“I’m still taking legal advice on suing him,” Greer continued. “It’s a question of whether malice can be established.”

“dgrgrgwgsagb tgshshsh sskkm five minutes to showtime shgebs nskks.”

A flying-V of burly men in suits rushed in, like a whole leagues team up for the tribunal.

“The High Commission’s arrived,” someone remarked.

“Huge culture cultures,” someone remarked.

“They had Nick Cave to lunch recently.”

“How’d that go?”

“They thought he was someone from a West End musical.”

“Are your films Gothic or realist?” I asked Hillcoat.

“I think they’re just uh … the story.”

“Ghosts of the Civil Dead? The Proposition? The Road? No offense but it’s a trilogy of blighted worlds. I mean how would you do, say, a romcom?”

He brightened.

“I want to do a romcom. Nick wants to do a romcom. He loves romcoms…”

“Did you do the vid for No Pussy Blues?” I said

“I did.”

“There’s your romcom.”

But he was gone. They were all gone, into the past’s future of the Barbican. I walked home in the rain, passing beneath an enormous poster of Meow Meow, six foot high, with evil hair.

[Ed: CORRECTION: This story has been amended: Germaine Greer was misquoted as suggesting that The Monthly publisher Morry Schwartz withheld payment for a story, that quote, and that assertion, was incorrect.]