It is often in the interests of empires for the lands they covet to hover in an intermediary realm of reality. This context goes some way to explain why the ambivalent postcolonial politics of Beyond Thunderdome slips into the background as the narrative builds to a conclusion: the completion of Max's reluctant heroic status requires the film's ambivalence towards the colonial tradition to disappear into the desert sand. This last section sees in the film the culmination of a popular archetypal trajectory developed in the first two films. The final section of this chapter considers the generic factors that subdue the film's play with the colonial tradition, namely the importance of seeing Beyond Thunderdome as the final instalment in a trilogy across which Max's heroic persona evolves. Significantly, the film confuses traditional colonial roles of gender and race, and in doing so it registers how contradictory and mutated those narratives of colonization have become. The film's vision of the Outback stimulates a terrifying contemplation of its uncertain depths and nothingness as well as a sense of exhilaration that this blank canvas is the stage for feats of adventure where the hero masters the landscape.
Further, the traditional mode of representing lands pre-existent to settlement carries ambivalence at its heart, and Beyond Thunderdome, drawing on the colonial tradition to visualize the post-nuclear-war world, reproduces this ambivalence. The post-nuclear-war landscape and narrative of the film is influenced by at least two cultural forces, namely the history of colonial representation and the pleasure that SF and related genres offer in fulfilling expectations of character development. Another factor influencing this tradition of representation is that nuclear bomb tests took place in Australia and the Pacific, including American tests in the Marshall Islands and British tests at Maralinga in the Australian Western Desert. Novels such as Aldous Huxley's Ape and Essence ( 1949) and Philip Wylie's Triumph ( 1963) see Australia and New Zealand as privileged sites of survival – their location is deemed to offer a greater chance of avoiding the fallout generated by a Third World War. Ballard, the comic Tank Girl ( 1990 film 1995), and a section of Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters ( 1989) (in some of these texts the psychosis of focalizing characters makes actual locations and historical events uncertain).
Seminal post-nuclear-war text On the Beach (novel 1957 film 1959) is set in the region, as are short stories by Martin Amis and J. Several depictions of the world after nuclear war are situated in Australia and the Pacific, and this chapter closely analyses the colonial and postcolonial politics of one such depiction in detail.
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