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When Australian New age films burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and strange colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first huge hit of Australia's golden age of cinema but Americans were specifically bewildered by it, manufacturer Matt Carroll remembers.

"They acknowledged that Sunday was a terrific film but they didn't understand it," he states.

"It was quite incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you may too have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were far more inviting of the film at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the better half of an Adelaide vehicle dealer who had actually offered Carroll a Peugeot.

"She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll translate it all for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I remember being in the movie theater and the very first thing that turns up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was equated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the big screening room, "the whole audience just went insane, definitely insane, and we got a substantial sale to France", Carroll laughs.

"It's the language of the bush," discusses legendary Australian Thompson, who depicted the hard-drinking gun shearer, Foley.

"There's a fantastic camaraderie revealed because movie. Sunday says something far more extensive about the Australian character than a number of other movies that analyzed our success and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states "it was like a journal, it was simply how people acted - I keep in mind, due to the fact that as a teen, I remained in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far has a really fundamental part in my career and in my memory; I 'd worked on that wool press, I 'd chosen up that wool. I knew how difficult it was ... it was the world of working males."

Thompson was a star of a multitude of other New Wave films, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River.

Carroll recalls also feeling well qualified to be involved in Sunday Too Far, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn.

"I matured on a sheep residential or commercial property so I found out how to class wool. My honours thesis remained in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to discover a shearing shed, I knew precisely where they were," he states.

"And Jack and I were sharing a home together, and I understood that he was a shearer, and I existed when the director said, 'I do not understand where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I understand'.

Thompson and Carroll recently visited Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a crucial role in the period.

"The SAFC was an essential beacon in the growth of the Australian movie market," states Thompson.

"Tale after tale important to our understanding of ourselves was told and funded by that entity."

The New york city Times described Australian New age as "recording a minute of flexibility and abundance that was over nearly before we understood it" and "possessing a vigor, a love of open area and a tendency for sudden violence and languorous sexuality".

"That's me," says Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan.

"Used to be, mate," laughs Carroll, 80.

As a young star, it was like "riding the crest of a wave, it was stunning", says Thompson.

"There was undoubtedly an extremely concentrated vitality, a distinct charm, unlike anything else at the time."

Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, states the 1970s was an exceptional duration for Australian motion pictures.

"More than 220 movies, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you check out the titles, it's simply incredible," he states.

"We never ever had another duration like that, with the originality and the imagination."

The SAFC's second feature, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which likewise turns 50 this year, ended up being an icon of Australian cinema.

"The terrific thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans understood it," states Carroll.

"And then Breaker Morant occurred and they clicked with it and it had huge outcomes, and after that the 2nd Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three movies were crucial to opening the American market."

Thompson notes that Australia made the world's first feature-length narrative motion picture, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had an important Australian film market in the silent period as much as 1927".

"Hollywood and the American financial investment in theatre chains here had the ability to control the Australian movie market, and basically, between 1930 and the 70s, nothing much occurred in Australian cinema," he states.

While Sunday Too Far was New Wave's first business success, 1971's Wake In Fright is extensively considered as the era's opening film.

It was Thompson's very first film and the last for veteran character star Chips Rafferty, who passed away of a cardiac arrest before it was launched.

It screened at Cannes and got favourable actions in France and the UK however had a hard time at the Australian ticket office.

It's the story of an instructor waylaid in a mining town where a gaming spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he takes part in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is likewise subjected to moral degradation.

It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson remembers, "and people were stating 'that's not us', regardless of the reality the book was written by an Australian".

"Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these enjoyable caricatures, we weren't used to seeing it and we didn't wish to see it," he says.

During an early Australian screening, when a guy stood, pointed at the screen and opposed "that's not us!", Thompson notoriously screamed back "take a seat, mate. It is us".
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