Oyster Farmer: 'Everyone needs a drama'

One of the strengths of Anna Reeves’s script is the unpredictability of her characters, and their sometimes cryptic dialogue. Jack Thompson’s Vietnam veteran is a good example; he has very little screen time, but manages to invest Skip with a strong sense of barely contained violence, as well as unexpected wisdom. The frankness of Brownie’s proposal to give Jack a sub-lease is also disarming and very funny – he can only have the lease if he takes the troublesome father with him.

Oyster farmer synopsis

Jack Flange (Alex O’Loughlin) takes a job as an oyster farmer on the Hawkesbury River, north of Sydney. To help his sister (Claudia Harrison), who’s recuperating after a car accident, he robs an armoured van at the Sydney Fish Markets and immediately mails the money to himself. The money never arrives and he begins to suspect the close-knit community on the river, even Pearl, the girl he’s falling in love with (Diana Glenn). Meanwhile his boss, Brownie (David Field), believes his oysters are going bad because his wife (Kerry Armstrong) has left him. Brownie’s Irish father (Jim Norton) plots a strategy to solve all their troubles.

Oyster farmer curator's notes

Oyster Farmer is largely a film about a location, rather than a plot. Writer–director Anna Reeves was so struck by the beauty and drama of the Hawkesbury River, a place of remote and eccentric charm so close to the city, that she spent four years immersing herself in its culture, especially the lives of the oyster farmers. The film has an almost ethnographic feel, combining the details of the working lives of the characters with a sly sense of comedy.

The lives of people in small coastal communities had been richly dramatised in the 1990s in Seachange, a television show that looked at the phenomenon of city people looking for a new lifestyle. Oyster Farmer has a similar sense of humour, but it’s about the people who were in a place before the outsiders began to arrive. Brownie is the fourth generation of his family to farm oysters on the river, but the film raises questions about whether his kind are dying out. At the same time, the film is about the bruising dynamics of families, with Brownie’s estrangement from his wife Trish (Kerry Armstrong) given almost as much screen time as the burgeoning romance of Jack and Pearl. The pacing of the film is uncertain at times, but the characters are vivid, and the tone light. Alun Bollinger, a veteran New Zealand cinematographer, gives the Hawkesbury River a mysterious grandeur that matches Anna Reeves’s quietly passionate script. Reeves was born in New Zealand but trained at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Oyster Farmer was her feature debut, and it ran about six months in Australia, grossing $2.6 million in the second half of 2005.

Notes by Paul Byrnes

Education Notes

This clip from a 2004 Australian feature film is divided into three distinct scenes. The first has Jack (Alex O’Lachlan) and Skippy (Jack Thompson) discussing love and life while fishing. A reunited Brownie and Trish (David Field and Kerry Armstrong) are then shown planning to retrieve an oyster lease, and the final scene shows a humorous exchange outside a shed where Brownie offers Jack an oyster lease on the condition he takes Brownie’s troublesome father Mumbles (Jim Norton) along with him.

Educational value points

• The first scene of this clip is an example of how a minor character can enrich the narrative by expanding both the audience’s appreciation of other characters and the setting. Fishing with Vietnam War veteran Skippy provides Jack an opportunity to articulate his feelings, but most importantly provides more information about the members of the river community, suggesting that the river is not just a place to farm oysters but a place to hide from society.

• The Hawkesbury River takes on the importance of a character in Oyster Farmer, providing a serene and peaceful setting against which to contrast the inner turmoil and dramas of the characters who make their living from it. The river itself is present in most of these scenes visually or heard in the soundtrack. Until recently the Hawkesbury was the fourth largest oyster-producing estuary in NSW with 400 ha of oyster leases farmed by 23 permit holders.

• This clip demonstrates how a script can weave several separate plot lines into one overarching story by episodically cutting between them. The first scene centres on Jack, who is possibly falling in love, and Skippy, a Vietnam War veteran. The second scene shows the reconciliation of a couple whose separation is a major plot line, and the final scene provides a humorous solution to the problem of Brownie’s interfering father.

• This clip shows how body language can be used to express the emotional subtext of a scene. Brownie and Trish exhibit their reconciliation by their posture and position. They are holding hands and their legs are touching. The final scene of Jack, Brownie and Mumbles also uses bodies to convey mood; the two men dozing at the table and the dog stretched out underneath convey a sense of heat and exhaustion.

• The controlled, reflective performance by Jack Thompson (1940–) shows the skills of one of Australia’s most experienced and celebrated actors. With little body movement, other than gesticulating almost menacingly with a fishing knife, his character slides disconcertingly from talking about the feeling of being alive that comes from falling in love to ‘the rush’ of killing another human being.

• In 2005, the QX, a single-celled parasite now known as Marteilia sydneyi, attacked the Hawkesbury River oysters and eventually spread to all of the leases around the estuary and its tributaries. Although the film was made before this outbreak, Oyster Farmer premiered at the Sydney Film Festival not long after the parasite was detected in the Hawkesbury, which added publicity and poignancy to the plight of the Hawkesbury River oyster farmers.

• The Australian Vietnam Veterans Health Study found that 31 per cent of veterans reported experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, 41 per cent anxiety disorders and 45 per cent depression. The impression of underlying anger and intimations of self-harm that are at the heart of Skippy’s character can be read in the context of the difficulties faced by Vietnam War veterans.

• Oyster Farmer (2004) is the debut feature film of award-winning short filmmaker Anna Reeves. The film was written and directed by Reeves, who trained at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. After spending time on the Hawkesbury River and meeting the communities who make their livelihoods on the river, Reeves decided she wanted to make a film about the oyster-farming industry and their vanishing way of life.

Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia