Australian
Screen

Clip description

Colin’s cancer is progressing. He struggles to walk to the letterbox and back. Watching a television news report about the Australian government’s response to veterans’ concerns about Agent Orange, Colin (Chris Haywood) gets an idea. He tells Lorraine (Jennifer Cluff) of his plan – to ask the government for compensation for disability, citing Agent Orange as the cause. He is dismayed to discover that he gets no hearing in the case, and that his own cancer specialist, Dr Walker (John Hamblin), refuses to get involved.

Curator’s notes

The film is as much about the bureaucracies of medicine, justice and government as it is about Colin Turner’s illness and death. There is a strong theme of social justice in a lot of Bill Bennett’s early films – Malpractice (1989) and Mortgage (1989), especially. Bennett was a well-known television journalist before becoming a filmmaker. The early films have a strong journalistic background in research and a desire to expose social wrongs.

There have been very few movies in Australia about the experience of the soldiers who fought in Vietnam – either the war itself, or the aftermath. A Street to Die is perhaps the only one in the 35 years since the war ended to look at the health issues of returning soldiers and their families, but it’s also a powerful movie about institutional reluctance to deal with the aftermath of major political decisions. See also Vietnam (1988), Stone (1974), The Odd Angry Shot (1979), Public Enemy Number One (1981) and Frontline (1979).