mtb.com
When Australian New age films burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and strange colloquialisms.
morty.com
Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first success of Australia's golden period of movie theater but Americans were particularly mystified by it, manufacturer Matt Carroll keeps in mind.

"They recognised that Sunday was a fantastic movie but they didn't understand it," he says.

"It was pretty incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were even more welcoming of the movie at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the spouse of an Adelaide vehicle dealer who 'd offered Carroll a Peugeot.

"She said, 'oh yes darling, I know Parisian street slang, I'll equate everything for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I keep in mind being in the movie theater and the first thing that shows up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the substantial screening space, "the whole audience just went nuts, absolutely insane, and we got a substantial sale to France", Carroll chuckles.

"It's the language of the bush," describes famous Australian actor Jack Thompson, who represented the hard-drinking weapon shearer, Foley.

"There's a terrific camaraderie expressed in that motion picture. Sunday states something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other films that examined our triumphes and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states "it resembled a diary, it was just how individuals acted - I remember, because as a teenager, I was in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far Away has an actually fundamental part in my profession and in my memory