REMEDIATING SPACE

Adaptation and Narrative Geography

The formal characteristics of films, novels, and plays privilege varied expressions of imaginative geography and these cultural narratives, we argue, not only mediate and represent space, place, and location but are themselves mediated representational spaces. Furthermore, films, novels, and plays also open themselves up to further remediation in the form of cross-media adaptation or, to push the point further, in the form of geovisualization and the spatial analysis it enables. Adaptation studies is an exciting, dynamic, and rapidly developing interdisciplinary field, and yet, like narrative theory, it has not fully or directly accounted for the question of space. Adaptation studies has been more concerned with questions of fidelity (or the validity of those questions), lines of influence, and transmediality and with the translation of space, place, and landscape between narrative forms being rarely addressed.

In compiling and constructing our Cultural Atlas of Australia, we encountered many texts in which the geographical setting of the narrative was modified — to greater or lesser degrees — across adaptations. For instance, John Curran's 1998 film adaptation of Andrew McGahan's cult "grunge" novel, Praise (1992), is filmed in Sydney rather than in Brisbane — the city in which the novel is set and with which it is intimately connected. Although McGahan wrote the screenplay for Curran's adaptation, and although the narrative setting of the film version remains, broadly speaking, the same (that is, urban Australia in the early 1990s), the choice of filming location means that the adaptation loses some of the novel's locational and regional specificity — namely, its focus on the then low-rent, inner-city Brisbane suburbs of New Farm and Fortitude Valley. A more dramatic example is Scott Hicks's The Boys Are Back (2009), a film adaptation of British journalist Simon Carr's memoir about his experiences raising his sons in New Zealand following the death of his wife. Hicks's adaptation is neither set nor filmed in New Zealand; instead, it transplants the entire narrative to Australia, from Hawke's Bay on the east coast of New Zealand's north island to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, and its environs — over 2000 miles (3219 km.) and another country away. Film adaptations may also, of course, provide a more heightened sense of location, simply by virtue of the fact they must be filmed somewhere, if they are being filmed on location, and this is particularly the case when the narrative setting of the adapted text is fictional, ambiguous, or only loosely sketched (as in the case of George T. Miller's 1982 film adaptation of A. B. "Banjo" Paterson's 1890 poem "The