A Short History of the Australian Accent in Hollywood
AKA an Offensive Mutilation of Vowels
Not long after Warner Bros released The Jazz Singer (1927), the first film with sound, a curious trend began to emerge in Hollywood. In 1936, former Screen Writers Guild Secretary Elsie Bald flagged with the Australian press that Hollywood producers were striving for a neutral, unifying accent on screen. "An Australian accent, when it is not neutral," Bald said, "is even more objectionable in films than an American accent."
Ironically, an early pioneer in the "neutral accents" field was an Australian named William Tilly. Tilly's "World English" system sought to be a way of speaking for the educated person– a bridge between American and British pronunciation styles. While dominating the first half of the century, these pronunciation styles started to slip out of fashion as the curtains shut on World War II. Stars with distinctly American accents, like Humphrey Bogart and Jimmy Stewart, began to break through, and neutral accents began to be shunned as elitist. Yet the Australian accent remained an outcast. In 1954, actor Michael Pate told the Sydney Morning Herald, "Australians hoping to make good in Hollywood should get rid of their accent completely… Directors won't even listen to you, no matter how good your acting, if the Australian drawl shows."
According to Catherine Travis, a professor from the Australian National University, there are a few different elements of Australian speech that could present some challenges for an American; we have different vowel pronunciations, we don't pronounce the R after a vowel (wint-ER vs wint-uh), and we have slightly different speech rhythms. Travis, who has spent a decade tracking changes in the Australian accent, says the Australian accent is typically broken down into three distinct categories: broad, cultivated, and general accents. The broad accent (think Steve Irwin or Chris Hemsworth in Furiosa) is the most "iconic" accent and is associated with more working-class areas, while the general accent has been more commonly found among people on the East Coast or in urban areas. The cultivated accent (think Cate Blanchett or a 1960s newsreel) has declined alongside elocution classes in recent decades but originally had a strong British flavour and was favoured by the upper class and media. Australia is also home to a distinct dialect of English known as Aboriginal English, which has its own structure, words and phenology. However, none of these factors make our voices in any way incomprehensible.
As more Australian filmmakers started to find their feet during the 1970s, even our local directors weren't used to, nor comfortable with, how we sounded on screen. Peter Weir, director of Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), said his early career was defined by cutting dialogue and using the camera expositionally instead. Weir reasoned that "Australian voices are quite light and generally film loves a deeper voice… so everything seemed awkward".
When the British film director Nicolas Roeg visited Maningrida, a tiny mission on the north coast of Arnhem Land, he asked the elders who was the best dancer among their people. A 16-year-old called David Gulpilil was singled out. Roeg was scouting for his film Walkabout, the tale of a nameless Aboriginal boy in the outback who rescues two schoolchildren who have escaped from their father’s attempted murder-suicide. Gulpilil's performance was among the first Aboriginal people to be cast with a proper speaking role in a film, a result of the Australian industry’s persistent use of white actors in blackface. Actor Jack Thompson would later say that it would not have been culturally possible for an Australian director to depict Gulpilil with the affection and interest Roeg had. Released alongside Ted Kotcheff’s Wake in Fright (another Australian story by an international director) at the 24th Cannes Film Festival, what Walkabout lacked at the box office it made up for in global critical acclaim. In the ensuing months, praise of Gulpili’s performance took him across the world to meet Bruce Lee, Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, John Lennon and Bob Marley.
Olivia Newton-John & John Travolta in Grease (1978)
Olivia Newton-John was a rising star in the music industry with a lacklustre film career when Producer Allan Carr requested she star in Grease. Newtown-John knew she couldn't do an American accent, worried about her potential chemistry with the younger John Travolta and now aged 29, felt uncomfortable with the idea of playing a teenager. To Carr, these were no obstacles; Sandy's role was rewritten to that of an Australian transfer student, a chemistry screen test was arranged, and Newton-John received equal billing with John Travolta. Yet, after nearly 50 years of fear-mongering, an Australian accent at the box office was an untested quality. Somehow… audiences managed to understand Newton-John, and the film shot to the top of the charts. The highest-grossing movie of 1978, Grease dominated both the screen and airwaves. Reflecting on the role in 2018, Newton-John said, "I was probably one of the first people to have an Australian accent (on screen)... I would think."
However, Hollywood learned no immediate lessons from Grease’s success. George Miller's debut feature, Mad Max (1979), was a breakout international success for Warner Brothers. However, their American domestic arm was lukewarm about releasing it. Instead, the rights were purchased by Samuel Z. Arkoff's American International Pictures. Arkoff was concerned about how American audiences would understand the Australian cast's voices and chose to have the film redubbed by local actors. Notably, the dub saw the erasure of Hugh Keays-Byrne's accent-changing performance for the villain Toecutter. A trained member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Keays-Byrne believed that the choice to allow his accent to morph from Australian to English to Irish would heighten his sense of erraticism. Unfortunately for the American audience (and allegedly many of Keays-Byrne's friends in the Royal Shakespeare Company), a poorly dubbed southern drawl would be how they first experienced his performance. The decision sparked outrage in Australia, with Miller and the producers facing legal action from Australian Actors Equity.
Yet the tide began to turn; in 1981, the sequel Mad Max 2 was released in the US by Warner Brothers with the title The Road Warrior, and all accents were intact. Low budget Ozploitation films began to appear on American screens and a surge of Australian cinema began. Yet, it wasn’t horror and action films that would pave the way to wide spread Australian screen representation, it was a comedy-come-clever-tax-scheme named Crocodile Dundee. Already a domestic household name in Australia, Paul Hogan first appeared on American screens when he invited audiences to "put a shrimp on the Barbie" and come to say G'Day. While neither Hogan nor the film's director, Peter Faiman, had made a feature film before, they felt more than qualified to do so after years of working in television. Hogan reckoned that if he could write television sketches, he might just be able to keep churning them out in sequence until he had a movie.
Hogan's character was the titular Mick Dundee, a charismatic crocodile hunter with a broad Australian accent. After surviving a crocodile attack, Dundee is interviewed by a travelling American journalist, played by Linda Kozlowski, who is so enraptured that she invites him to visit New York City. They go travelling, she leaves her partner, they fall in love, etc.; all the standard romantic comedy beats.
To say Crocodile Dundee's 1986 release was a success would be an understatement. Adjusted for inflation, Dundee grossed similar amounts of money globally to Oppenheimer and was #1 at the US box office for nine weeks (David Gulpilil would later voice his frustration at only being paid $10,000 for his role). Agents began asking Australian actors if they "could speak like Dundee," and a sequel was quickly greenlit. Paul Hogan's exaggerated Australian accent was being heard all across America, and began redefining the Australian sound. Even in 2025, the film continues to make an impact on the big screen with an Encore Cut scheduled to release in cinemas this May.
Other actors also began to find success with their natural voices. Bryan Brown retained it when he starred alongside Tom Cruise in Cocktail (1988). When asked if he would ever adopt an American accent, Brown responded, "Just as people like Michael Caine or Sean Connery or Roger Moore, any of those fellows who retained their essence were able to work internationally, I'll be able to do the same." Brown believed that if a production badly needed a strong American accent, they were better off getting a local actor (somehow he managed to keep it Age of Treason set in 69AD). In 1999, Heath Ledger repped the accent in 10 Things I Hate About You, after being cast only three weeks before production. Slowly and surely Hollywood’s stars began to reflect back their globalised world of migration.
Robert Downey Jr. attempted an Australia accent in Natural Born Killers (1994)
While Hollywood attempts at Australian accents, largely piss-poor Crocodile Dundee impressions, are notorious in their own right, recent years have seen a range of far more accurate performances. Dev Patel in Lion, Sean Harris in The Stranger, Caleb Landy Jones in Nitram and Kate Winslet in Holy Smoke and The Dressmaker have all garnered critical acclaim. According to Australian dialect coach Gabrielle Rogers, the Australian accent isn't more complicated to learn than any other accent. Like going to the gym, Rogers says it requires a singularity of focus, attention to detail, and practice over time. Instead of looking at performances in films, Rogers recommends that actors should look to the internet for more natural sources, like radio stations or home videos, where people might be less conscious of their accents and reveal their natural patterns of speech. It's just a matter of figuring out which Australian accent you want and breaking it into sounds and rhythm.
Scott Ryan in FX’s dark comedy Mr Inbetween
Netflix's ONEFOUR: Against the Odds contended with the Australian accent in a different medium. The Western Sydney drill group ONEFOUR shot to international fame in 2019 when their song, In the Beginning, received one million views on YouTube in 24 hours. While their viral breakout was a shock, it also profoundly impacted the international rap community. "The world hadn't seen people of colour rapping with an Australian accent", Journalist Mahmood Fazal says over a montage of Steve Irwin, blond surfers and Home and Away, "they didn't know many of us existed."
Despite these successes, America's alleged preferences for their local accents pervade even our shores. In films like Triangle (2009) and Predestination (2014), casts of predominantly Australian actors adopt phony American accents. Predestination, starring Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook, was partly funded by Screen Australia and shot in Melbourne. However, Brisbane directing duo the Spierig Brothers told SBS, "It is an American story… The reality of these things is you want to sell it to an international market, especially America, and it can be hard to sell an Australian accent to the American market." It was not the first time the brothers had grappled with the choice; when trying to sell a previous film, Undead (2003), they were told, "We love your movie, but we need to dub it into English."
Yet, Americans now annually consume 43.9 billion minutes of Bluey, Danny & Michael Philippou's horror film Talk to Me has become A24's highest-grossing horror movie of all time, Will Gluck's Sydney-based romantic comedy Anyone But You grossed $220 million worldwide and Mr Inbetween continues to generate articles years after it finished. While many Australian actors still eskew their native dialectic for American or British tones in their international work, it's about time we start questioning the beliefs that Americans can't understand our accent or that it makes a project feel unprofessional. Because let’s face it, there’s plenty of contrary evidence.
A version of this article originally appeared in Booker Magazine
