Halfyard/The Music of Fantasy Cinema, 2. Numinous Ambience: Spirituality, Dreamtimes and Fantastic Aboriginality

This chapter deals with the musical construction of the Other, the Australian Aboriginal Otherness in Peter Weir’s The Last Wave (1977), a film that Hayward concludes could probably not have been made in a later, more politically correct, time, because of the way it constructs a fantasy around Aboriginal spirituality. The film represents a significant point in fantastic music, with a move away from the orchestral timbres of classical Hollywood practice into soundtracks characterized by synthesized, atmospheric and ambient sound.