STONE

d. Sandy Harbutt (1974)

The wide, wild and slightly lawless open country of Australia would appear to be the perfect environment for outlaw biker gangs and, indeed, some preliminary research on an obscure new thing called ‘Wikipedia’ would indicate that there are currently around a dozen such groups operating down under at the moment, the largest comprising around 2,000 members. Mainly concerned with drugs, guns and beating each other to death with clubs, I’ll bet that every single one of them has seen Stone, the first Aussie biker film, a labour of low budget love that combines a loose documentary feel with a somewhat undeveloped crime story to create a fascinating document of a previously hidden lifestyle.

When The Gravediggers, a Sydney based biker gang, witness the bloody assassination of an environmental campaigner, they find themselves under attack from an unknown assailant. Members of the gang are killed by explosion, by being forced off the road into the sea and by being decapitated by a taut wire strung across the highway. Stone, a long haired undercover cop, is assigned to the gang, initially receiving a rough welcome. As he learns more about the group he begins to understand that their lifestyle, for all its violence and anarchy, is a family that provides a home for misfits, rejects and outsiders, and that their motivations and ambitions mirror Stone’s own hitherto unexplored non-conformism (what other Aussie cop owns leather trousers?).

The film jumps from one vignette to the next, only picking up the plot with twenty minutes to go. It doesn’t matter, as what we see is engaging and thought provoking and the protagonists, although not likeable in any conventional sense, have character and realism. My main concern was the inequality between the members of the gang and their molls, a band of attractive young women who, inexplicably, are entirely besotted by the grizzly, greasy, toothless and generally quite elderly bikers. Cliché would have it that good girls love a bad boy, but these antiquated hobos haven’t been boys for quite some time. Also, they’re not particularly good girls.

There’s a great scene where Stone gets to know the gang, learning a little more about who they are, where they came from, how they ended up together. Everybody is smoking a joint, and the camera goes in and out of focus with each inhalation, a queasy but effective way of involving the audience in an intimate, intoxicated moment of relative peace before the bloody climax. Actually, there are two bloody climaxes, the second of which ends the film in a surprising but entirely satisfactory way. The final message is quite clear: you don’t ‘sort of’ belong to a biker gang, mate: you’re either in or you’re out.