Bruce Beresford’s feature film, Paradise Road, announces itself in large print to be "based on a true story". The preview, as previews often do, goes further, and claims it as "the extraordinary true story". The "media information kit" for the film asserts that "Beresford and producer Sue Milliken researched the story over more than two years". They interviewed survivors, read books and consulted unpublished diaries. Beresford is acknowledged as writer/director, but elsewhere David Giles and Martin Meader are also credited as writers. The film is said to be centred on a group of women who are on a ship fleeing Singapore. Having survived the bombing and sinking of the ship they think that "the worst is over", but they find that the tough times are in the prison camp, and that is when they face their harshest test of survival. The women who gather in the camp are the ones who meet in Muntok and later in Sumatra: Australian nurses, Dutch women from the East Indies, English women from Singapore and Malaya, Protestant missionaries and Catholic nuns, and other women-diverse in nationality, race and social status.
When introducing viewers to setting and characters, and getting the characters into a prison camp, Paradise Road makes an obvious change from "true incidents": the killing of eighty people on the beach is completely omitted.
Problems arise because of the power of the media: the "based on" history becomes the history for most people. Even reflective film-goers have few readily available alternative perceptions of events exploited on film. The conclusion seems inescapable: historians must involve themselves in the screen world. They have an obligation to write about films, to make sure that films and writing intersect, and beyond that they should do research for what goes on to the screens and express their own findings on screens. They cannot assume that what they write will eventually have its impact on screens: page and screen may never meet.
The author
Hank Nelson is with the research School of Pacific Studies at the Australian National University.
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