Now restored and remastered from the original 35mm print, the notorious tale of ‘women going wild in the bush’ paints a brutal picture of the depravity of convict settlement – and of a group of women who reject their barbaric male ‘leaders’.
When compared to the lace-bodiced, melodramatic interpretations of our colonial past that typified the Australian cinema’s next wave, Journey Among Women is the black sheep of the family. Insanely uninhibited, the convict survival story is too steeped in graphic nudity and violence to sit alongside critic’s darlings like My Brilliant Career (1979), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) or The Getting of Wisdom (1978). But it is also too artistically and intellectually noteworthy to be embraced by the genre B-movie aficionados who claim Stone (1974) is the greatest Australian film ever. Cowan’s achievement exists within a niche all its own.
