When New Wave movies burst on to world movie theater screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were initially baffled by the broad accents and peculiar colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far Away, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the first big hit of Australia's golden age of cinema but Americans were specifically bewildered by it, manufacturer Matt Carroll remembers.
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"They recognised that Sunday was a great movie however they didn't understand it," he states.

"It was quite incomprehensible to anyone who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you might as well have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were far more welcoming of the movie at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the other half of an Adelaide cars and truck dealership who had actually sold Carroll a Peugeot.

"She stated, 'oh yes darling, I understand Parisian street slang, I'll translate all of it for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I remember sitting in the cinema and the very first thing that comes up is somebody in the shearing shed says about the squatter, 'his shit doesn't stink'. When it was equated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the substantial screening space, "the entire audience simply went nuts, absolutely crazy, and we got a substantial sale to France", Carroll chuckles.

"It's the language of the bush," discusses famous Australian actor Jack Thompson, who represented the hard-drinking weapon shearer, Foley.

"There's a terrific sociability revealed in that movie. Sunday says something a lot more profound about the Australian character than a variety of other motion pictures that analyzed our triumphes and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, states "it resembled a journal, it was simply how people acted - I remember, due to the fact that as a teenager, I was in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far has a really essential part in my profession and in my memory