Wake In Fright : Text Classics

The controller stood back.
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Spin ‘em!’
The man flipped the piece of wood and the coins spun up into the air above his head and dropped down on to the carpet.
There was silence.

Wake in Fright tells the tale of John Grant’s journey into an alcoholic, sexual and spiritual nightmare. It is the original and the greatest outback horror story. Bundanyabba and its citizens will forever haunt its readers.

Wake in Fright was made into a film in 1971, arguably the greatest film ever made in Australia. It starred Donald Pleasence, Chips Rafferty, and Jack Thompson in his first screen role. Lost for many years, the restored film was re-released to acclaim in 2009.

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Listen to Raffaele Caputo interview Ted Kotcheff for Senses of Cinema here.

Watch clips from the 1971 film production of Wake In Fright on australianscreen, a website operated by the National Film and Sound Archive.

Praise for Wake In Fright:

‘It might be fifty years since the novel appeared yet it retains its freshness, its narrative still compels, and its bleak vision still disquiets.…Cook can make us feel the heat, see the endless horizon, hear the sad singing on a little train as it traverses the monotonous plain.’

Peter Temple, from the Introduction

‘Wake in Fright deserves its status as a modern classic. Cook’s prose is masterful and the story is gripping from the first page to the last.’

M. J. Hyland

‘A classic novel which became a classic film. The Outback without the sentimental bulldust. Australia without the sugar coating.’

Robert Drewe

‘Wake in Fright is a classic of the ugly side of Menzies’ Australia, its brutality, its drunkenness, its anxiety to crush all sensibility. All of this is harrowingly reacorded —the destruction of a young soul fresh to Australia—in Kenneth Cook’s remarkable novel.’

Thomas Keneally

‘A true dark classic of Australian literature.’

J. M. Coetzee