The Castle

Osman Faruqi

The Castle is an unusual favourite film for a Pakistani-Australian engineer and part-time taxi driver.

At least that’s what I thought growing up, when my dad would quote it endlessly, and force us to sit down and watch it whenever it was being aired on TV. At times I couldn’t figure out if he was shaping his personality around the main character, Michael Caton’s Darryl Kerrigan, or if he was drawn to him because they already had so much in common.

A love of cars and home renovations, an addiction to finding the best bargains in the Trading Post, and, most significantly, a deep belief in the importance of family and unconditional love. These are traits my dad shared with Darryl Kerrigan.

There’s a story from my childhood that feels like it could have been lifted out straight from the film. Actually, there’s plenty, but this one really feels like a deleted scene. When my parents moved to Australia in 1992, they couldn’t afford a working car – new or second-hand. The best they could do was buy two beaten-up and non-functional Datsun 120Ys for $400.

Why two? Because even though neither of the cars ran, their problems were complementary. One had a working engine but a rusted and broken chassis. The other had a solid chassis but a busted engine. They were basically being offered up as scrap metal, but Dad – in a very Kerrigan-esque manner – figured he could buy both, convince the neighbours in our apartment block to lend us their garage space, hit up a mechanic mate for the right equipment and conduct his own engine transplant. Which he did. And that’s how our family got our first car.

Thinking about these kinds of stories and the animated way my dad would tell them time and time again, as though we couldn’t already recite every detail, helped me realise why it wasn’t really that unusual for a man like him to love The Castle. Over time, I came to understand why people like my dad would relate to a story of a multiracial, multi-gender, multi-generational alliance of working-class Australians taking on elites, even if on the surface the central Kerrigan family had little in common with us.

But what’s fascinated me the most about The Castle over the years is how universally praised it is by Australians across class, social and political lines. It isn’t just people whose material interests align with the Kerrigans’ who love the film. Intriguingly, the kind of people who are cast as villains in the film claim it as one of their favourites. Even Australia’s conservative former deputy prime minister Mark Vaile heaped praise upon the film, saying, ‘There is nothing more important than family, and sticking together through the tough times is what will get you through.’ When I first saw that quote, I was floored. To me, and to most people (so I assumed), this film was a rejection of Howardism and the kind of Australia that Vaile’s government had created over their decade in power.

The Castle was released in 1997, just a year after John Howard’s Coalition rose to power. As a result, the film’s political themes aren’t explicitly about Howard-era policies; instead they evoke the political debates of the early 1990s: privatisation, globalisation and social reform. Nevertheless, the kind of ruthless neoliberal pragmatism the film rejects, ushered in by Hawke and Keating, was turbocharged under Howard’s reign.

Unusual for any kind of Australian comedy, let alone a mainstream blockbuster, the film has a blunt critique of the economic ideology that swept the West, including Australia, in the 1980s and 1990s. What drives The Castle’s narrative is the battle of the Kerrigans and their neighbours against a government corporation called AirLink, who are seeking to expand the airport in order to boost their profits. It’s revealed that AirLink is backed by a shadowy group of investors known as the Barlow Group.

Already you have a pretty clear and morally unambiguous frame for the film: a ragtag group of working-class Australians pitted against an amorphous collection of investors and industrialists, represented by slick corporate lawyers. It’s David v. Goliath, it’s the everyman v. the Big Corporations, it’s one family v. a rigged legal system. The stakes are set.

But The Castle takes things a step further. When Darryl expresses confusion at the apparent collusion between what appears to be a government organisation in AirLink, and the private investors the Barlow Group, his suburban lawyer, Dennis Denuto, explains: ‘The Barlow Group is AirLink. It’s government authority, but the money’s coming from the Barlow Group . . . It’s a way of privatising without privatising . . . They wrote the rules. They own the game.’

Now, at this point, the tension in the film has already been clearly established. We already know who the heroes and the villains are. But at this moment, we get a new bad guy. It’s not just the government. It’s not just the Barlow Group. It’s pure capitalism. It’s neoliberalism. It’s a doctrine about the state’s steady withdrawal from society, with its functions replaced by the private market.

It’s an incredible shift. It doesn’t change the narrative arc of the film, but it does elevate the stakes. Now the Kerrigans are fighting ideology itself. Not just any ideology, but the most powerful ideology in human history. It’s also a battle that makes sense in the context of the film, and the experiences of Australian audiences. Waves of privatisation had become commonplace across the developed world as right-wing economic orthodoxy took hold even within social democratic political parties, including in Australia.

The two highest-profile privatisations of the Keating era involved the Commonwealth Bank and Qantas, which both took place in the early 1990s. A few years later, the federal government announced the privatisation of the nation’s airports. In Melbourne, the airport was taken over by a private corporation owned by several fund managers. Soon after its privatisation was complete (ultimately signed off by the Howard government), the airport began a massive expansion program. Sound familiar?

Of course, in Melbourne, where The Castle takes place, privatisation was an even more familiar – and reviled – experience. The election of the Kennett Coalition state government in 1992 led to hundreds of school closures, the sacking of thousands of public sector workers and the privatisation of electricity, gas and rail networks. Nearly 30 billion dollars’ worth of assets were transferred out of public hands and into the private sector. The consequences were devastating. They further deteriorated the link between the public and government, service quality declined, unemployment went up and the largest street mobilisations since the Vietnam War took place.

These privatisations, celebrated by politicians, bankers, fund managers and think tanks, proved deeply unpopular among the general public. Even at the time, working-class Australians, including my dad who continues to rail against them to this day, could tell they would lead to higher costs and cuts to services. That’s why The Castle doesn’t even need to explain why the privatisation by stealth of Melbourne Airport by the Barlow Group is a bad thing. It’s simply a given.

It also helps explain, I think, The Castle’s broad appeal to Australians. Despite the economic policies foisted on us by the elite alliance of policymakers and big business, most Australians remain sceptical of privatisation. In 2014, the research company Essential asked Australians: ‘Generally, do you think that privatisation – that is, having public services owned or run by private companies – is a good or bad idea?’ Across the political spectrum there was a resounding response that privatisation was a bad idea. Fifty-nine per cent thought that, generally, privatisation was a bad idea and 21 per cent thought that it was generally a good idea.

Another survey, this time in 2010, found that The Castle was the film most Australians identified as best representing the country. These figures speak to a cultural and political paradox that I believe The Castle exemplifies.

Australians despise privatisation, and they love The Castle partly because it’s one man’s battle against the odds to take on the combined interests of neoliberal government and big business. But Australians repeatedly voted in one of the most right-wing governments the country has seen, which accelerated privatisation, among a raft of other economically devastating policies that would have squarely targeted people like the Kerrigans. Then, after ensuring John Howard reigned for eleven years – including a final term with total control over both houses of parliament, which he used to further implement his neoliberal agenda – Australians say the film that best represents them is one explicitly about active resistance to the kind of policies Howard foisted on the country. In fact, the cognitive dissonance is so extreme that the second-most powerful man in the Howard administration, Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile, can say with a straight face that he is a fan of the movie because of how the Kerrigans mobilised as a family against the kind of policies he implemented over a decade.

So how do you explain the universal adoration for a film that expresses a vision of society that Australian voters seem unwilling to actually embrace? I think there’s a couple of different factors at play.

The first is what I refer to as ‘The Great Australian Denial’. It’s a foundational teaching in this country that post-invasion, white Australian culture is defined by its larrikinism and distrust of authority. Characters like Darryl Kerrigan, and Paul Hogan’s Mick Dundee, supposedly embody those generic traits.

The problem is the idea of Australians as relaxed and distrustful of authority is entirely confected. This is a country founded on the colonial subjugation and genocide of an entire race. When British rule was established, the convicts, who are themselves widely considered the origin of the myth of the subversive Australian, were incorporated into Royal Police units that hunted down and massacred Indigenous people. The first laws passed in our federal parliament involved the forced expulsion of immigrants because of the colour of their skin.

A country founded on these beliefs, that continues to persecute refugees in such a way that led former US president Donald Trump to declare, ‘You’re even worse than I am’, and continues to incarcerate First Nations people at a rate that makes them the most imprisoned people on the planet, cannot claim the title of ‘larrikin’ or ‘anti-authority’. But the myth persists, because it’s easier to deny than to reckon with reality.

So, the professed love for cultural objects like The Castle and what they embody, as well as the idea that it ‘best represents’ Australia, is less a statement about the values Australians actually possess, but the values they wish they possessed.

By defining themselves through characters like those on The Castle (or really any kind of Anglo suburban drama – think Kingswood Country, Always Greener, Packed to the Rafters) Australians can reassure themselves that this really is a country where the stakes are low, where they are isolated from any kind of serious hardship, and where the only thing that matters is ensuring your nuclear family is relaxed and comfortable. It’s much more convenient than being forced to confront the reality of what Australia looks like outside of specific pockets of white suburbia: a country with deepening inequality, institutionalised racism and a political leadership entirely captured by mining oligarchs. We’d rather be coddled.

To be clear, this isn’t any kind of indictment on the filmmakers. They are perfectly entitled to tell this story and portray the Kerrigans as they have. But the way that Australians across class and political divides have latched onto it as a kind of modern origin story for an Australia that doesn’t actually exist is what’s notable.

The other factor that I think helps explain this disconnect is slightly more forgiving of Australia. I don’t think that everyone who says they love The Castle is some kind of secret class traitor, pretending to support the working class while doing everything they can to enrich themselves. I think that a lot of them are, but there’s another category.

Politicians excel at making people vote against their own interests. It’s the precondition for how right-wing economic ideology has become so embedded across modern democracies. It doesn’t make any sense for ordinary working people to vote for politicians who promise to slash tax on big business, and cut back on social services, health and education spending. But they do it, time and again.

Older Australians will bemoan how hard it is for their children to break into the housing market while rewarding politicians for retaining lucrative tax breaks on investment properties. The exact reasons why are complicated and for another essay, but parts of the problem are the lack of genuine policy disagreement between our major parties on these issues, a narrow and insular media that limits debate, and the insidious way that Australians have been convinced that their wellbeing is tied to that of private industry following the financialisation and privatisation of basically everything.

What all of this means is that people can genuinely relate to the story of the Kerrigans, see Darryl’s plight as an avatar of their own problems, but still be convinced that the solution is to vote for John Howard, Tony Abbott or Scott Morrison.

Which brings us to the most important question of The Castle: who would Darryl Kerrigan vote for today? The answer is both obvious and depressing.

There’s one party that has been the biggest beneficiary of broad disenchantment with the political consensus of the past few decades. This party, to be clear, isn’t actually coherent about what it would change, and in fact has supported some of the worst attacks on working people in recent times. But its rhetoric is aimed squarely at people like the Kerrigans. People who played by the rules but feel like they’ve been betrayed by the people in the charge and the system they operate.

That party is One Nation.

Demographically, Darryl Kerrigan is almost a perfect match for the cohort most likely to vote for One Nation: an outer-suburban blue-collar man who views himself as self-sufficient rather than someone reliant on government support. But One Nation voters aren’t just identifiable by their economic status; it’s also a question of values, particularly on race and immigration.

The Castle’s portrayal of race issues is . . . messy, to say the least. The only non-European character in the film is Darryl’s neighbour Farouk, a Lebanese-Australian with an apparent background in explosives. It’s not exactly a subtle or complex portrayal. The character is played by Costas Kilias, a Greek-Australian, further complicating things. On top of that, there’s the use of an explicit racial slur by Darryl.

The moments where is race is explicitly discussed in the film and few and far between. They’re certainly not frequent enough to make a judgement about whether Darryl Kerrigan is a racist or not, but in some ways that isn’t really the point. One Nation voters, and even their politicians, regularly deny charges of racism. And many of them claim to have immigrant friends; in fact, many are immigrants themselves. It’s entirely believable to think of Darryl as someone who has a Lebanese-Australian neighbour he’s mates with, but still feels wary of rising immigration threatening the livelihoods of his family.

Intriguingly, where the film gets more explicit about race is on the issue of First Nations sovereignty and land rights. The Castle was written and produced in the aftermath of the Mabo High Court case, and the film doesn’t hide the fact that it sees Darryl’s attempt to rebuff the government as a direct parallel to the fightback against terra nullius. At one point Darryl even says, pointedly, ‘This country has got to stop stealing other people’s land!’

There are two ways to interpret this. The more generous reading is that The Castle is using the airport dispute as a kind of Trojan horse to get middle Australia to feel more sympathetically towards First Nations people. The other is that it’s a shameless exploitation of invasion, land theft and genocide to make a few gags. Either way, Darryl’s apparent sympathy for Mabo is probably the strongest character trait of his that points against an embrace of One Nation. But that’s a reflection of Darryl frozen in time, in the Australia of the film’s release in 1997.

How would he respond to contemporary political questions after twenty-five years of dog-whistling and race-baiting by politicians across the political spectrum?

The sad thing is we actually don’t need to guess, we know. Darryl Kerrigan isn’t real, but voters like him are. And sure, there are exceptions, but by and large Australian politics has shifted dramatically to the right – especially on issues of race and immigration. And the vanguard of that shift has been voters who look exactly like Darryl Kerrigan.

A decade of John Howard’s prime ministership – including the Tampa affair, the Pacific Solution, the indefinite detention of children, the War on Terror – leading into Tony Abbott’s ‘Stop the Boats’ rhetoric. All of these things occurred after the events of The Castle, and they were explicitly about radicalising people like Darryl Kerrigan into voting for right-wing parties. Since then? We’ve seen the resurgence of Pauline Hanson, the election of overt neo-Nazis like Fraser Anning and the rise of another right-wing populist in Clive Palmer.

This realisation doesn’t bring me any joy. In fact, it’s the total opposite. When I reflect on the kind of Australia that existed just prior to The Castle being released, I think of a country where someone like my dad and someone like Darryl Kerrigan were on the same side, and thought of each other as such. Obviously, things were very far from perfect, but the calculated attempts to further wedge, divide and atomise Australians by the likes of John Howard hadn’t yet shaped the country into the insular and terrified country it has become.

This doesn’t make me like or appreciate The Castle any less. But it does make me wish that when Australians watch it now, they think harder about what kind of country is being portrayed and how that stacks up against the kind of country we actually are. Yes, there’s an enormous disconnect and there probably always will be. And the answer isn’t simply to rewind the tape back to 1997.

But the moments of the film that made people like my dad fall in love with it – the solidarity across individuals and communities of so many different backgrounds – are genuine. And they provide a glimpse into the kind of Australia this place could be, if we wanted it.