'The Castle': home of the brave

'Darryl Kerrigan would have been so proud - the locals cheering outside the Mildura Council offices certainly were. After a concerted community campaign they had beaten the State Government into submission and had saved their bit of 'castle' (well patch of land) from a toxic waste dump.' This comment in The Age, ten years after the release of The Castle (Rob Sitch, 1997), obviously counts on the name of its protagonist to be sufficiently well known as to need no further explanation, and the film's title is alluded to only in the oblique reference to 'castle'. At very least, this suggests something significant about the film's status in the popular imagination.