The best Australian film showing on silver screens this year won't be one that has been produced in the past twelve months. Instead, it will be this long unseen masterpiece from 1971.

John Grant (an immaculate Gary Bond) is a bonded school tutor who is marooned in The Yabba, a micro-community whose readily apparent limitations are perfectly encapsulated by the film's tagline: "Have a drink, mate? Have a fight, mate? Have some dust and sweat, mate? There's nothing else out here."

When we first see Grant, he is in a tense stare-down with a cast of kids dying to get out of their sweltering classroom and into the sunshine - little do we know at this point that Grant is perhaps more eager than them for the school year to wrap up. After a mindless, booze-fuelled gambling spree, Grant finds himself with a dollar to his name, indefinitely stranded in the desert, and with Sydney - let alone London - impossibly far away. The local community picks him up and dusts him off with the proverbial "she'll be right, mate" wink and nudge, but there is nothing but spiritual desolation on offer when Grant strikes up a temporary friendship with Doc Tydon (an unforgettable Donald Pleasance). Per his Christian name, Tydon is indeed a doctor who has forsaken his career for a rusted-over sand shack, so that he might booze himself at all hours of the day, answering to no-one. With not a single card up his sleeve to play, Grant gets hauled into a world of beer sculling, hunting and bleary-eyed "mateship" led by the nihilistic Doc, that will ultimately tear his soul apart.

Though Wake In Fright stunned audiences when first released, what's exhilarating is that it still packs a mighty thump to the solar plexus almost forty years after being created. The nighttime kangaroo-hunting sequence will still leave jaws agape, not just because of its images of casual killing (attained during real kangaroo culling season), but because of the savagely syncopated editing and dizzying sonic flights. There are other subtler delights to be had for mature audiences, including the sight of local icon Jack Thompson, as outback wrangler Dick, in his first major film role.

If you're a fan of Australian cinema, or would even like to fancy yourself as one around the water cooler, then don't miss this one on the big screen. That would be close to criminal.