Philosopher Raimond Gaita's acclaimed and much-loved memoir of his childhood in 1950s rural Victoria, 'Romulus, My Father' (1998), was adapted for a feature film in 2007, starring Eric Bana and Franka Potente. Gaita worked closely with the film's director, Australian actor Richard Roxburgh, and scriptwriter, English poet Nick Drake, throughout the scripting process, and wrote an extended introduction to the published screenplay. While speaking highly of the film's production team and admiring the finished film in this introduction, Gaita's subsequent writing in 'After Romulus', a collection of essays published in 2011, reveals his unease with the film's portrayal of the character Christina, based on his mother who suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness and committed suicide at the age of 29. This article examines the dialogic relationship between the three texts of memoir, film, and essay and their attempts to empathetically imagine the life of Christine Gaita.

Baz Luhrmann is a fascinating figure for scholars working across a range of fields, from Australian film studies and theories of transnational cinema, to the study of adaptations and the musical genre, to conceptualizations of the contemporary post-auteur. The diversity of these fields of inquiry is reflected in the scope of Pam Cook's detailed and thorough investigation of the cinematic works of this iconoclastic director who began his career in theatre in Sydney in the 1980s. Luhrmann's 1992 screen adaptation of his play 'Strictly Ballroom' caused a sensation at the Cannes Film Festival, propelling him into the international market and a first-look deal with 20th Century-Fox.