The film of the book: adaptation and the Australian cinema

When Michael Powell, one of the most flamboyantly 'cinematic' of British film directors, came to Australia in the 1960s, when local cinema was still in the doldrums, he made two films both based on novels: 'They're a Weird Mob' (1966) and 'Age of Consent' (1969). Powell famously didn't belong to the literary strand of British filmmaking (nor to the equally prestigious realist strand), but when confronted with a new country the films he chose to make came with novelistic antecedents.