Throughout history, people of all cultures have assumed that environment influences behaviour. Now modern science is confirming that our actions, thoughts, and feelings are indeed shaped not just by our genes and neuro-chemistry, history and relationships, but also by our surroundings.
~~ Winifred Gallagher. [1]

In the 1990s, Australian society and its concept of nationhood underwent tumultuous change, as successive Labor and Liberal governments grappled with an ambiguous post-Cold War geopolitical environment, and domestic crises ranging from the Wik and Mabo land-rights decisions to revelations of Olympics administrative incompetence.

Australian cultural critic McKenzie Wark aptly summed up this mood by often quoting a line of Sydney graffiti: "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." Australian cinema is a barometer of this cultural re-evaluation. Having decidedly emerged from the 10BA investment code period, Australian cinephiles found their local industry was increasingly being used as a Hollywood backlot; Australian landscapes were now as recognizable as Monument Valley (John Ford Westerns) and major cosmopolitan cities (London, Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo).

John Ruane's Death in Brunswick (1991) and Gillian Armstrong's Oscar and Lucinda (1997) are multi-layered films that deploy different strategies to negotiate these industry, cultural and sociopolitical changes. Both films challenge the hegemonic dominance of Anglo-Celtic, European, English-speaking national identity, and past cinematic sub-texts of genetics, class, and empire. [2] Both films also critique Australia's potential role in an emerging Pacific Rim culture through examining the clash of "multiple identities and loyalties." [3]

On the role of geographic location influencing colonialist values, Routt observed that "the colonialist begins a split identity; two sexes, two generations, even two classes co-exist in a symbiotic relation which is itself riddled with paradox and doubling." [4]

In Oscar and Lucinda, landscape explicitly mediates this dual identity, functioning as a site for the viewer to confront and exorcise the ghosts of Australia's troubled colonial past. The contrast of lush European and harsh Australian environments underscores a perception by Graeme Turner that "nationhood was retrojected into the past, Australia's distinctiveness submerged into its European heritage or seen in purely geographic terms." [5]

Commenting on period films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and The Getting of Wisdom (1978), Turner states that "the preoccupation with historical drama seemed designed to demonstrate that Australia had a history and therefore was a culture." [6] Armstrong was simultaneously meta-commenting on the intertextual relationship between first-wave and 1990s Australian cinema. In the former, period drama had an assured status, Turner claimed, as a cultural flagship. [7] In Oscar and Lucinda, Armstrong examined the Bicentennial project legacy (the same year that Peter Carey's novel was published), and through juxtaposing European-Australian relations, considered how self-reflexive cultures were formed. These cultures will be required, increasingly, for survival in the global infotainment marketplace.

Turner also makes a important observation that parallels Martin Seligman's study of explanatory styles and pessimism: "In our films the narrative happens to the protagonist, in American films the protagonist's actions drive the narrative." [8] Oscar and Lucinda explores this convention through the obsessive Oscar Hopkins (Ralph Fiennes) and the compulsive Lucinda Leplastrier (Cate Blanchett), creatively reworking the narrative through a series of gambits.

Oscar and Lucinda examines two of O'Regan's concepts of nationhood: the European-derived society and the New World (Settler) society (the exceptions are the Diasporic and the Multicultural societies described by O'Regan). [9] Except for a brief and fateful encounter between Hopkins's expedition and an outback tribe, the film largely excludes Aboriginal and Islander identities, [10] focusing on the transition of European institutions and cultural norms through the journey of Hopkins and Leplastrier.

The film's most poignant symbol is the glass and steel church erected by Leplastrier's glass-works, and carried by Hopkins inland to a stunned Reverend Dennis Hassett (Ciaran Hinds). Hopkins's journey is a 'rite of passage' during which he must overcome his fear of water and integrate his zealous religious past. The church is a metaphor, according to O'Regan, of "Australia's political, legal, social and cultural institutions [which] are European derived." [11]