When Australian New age movies burst on to world cinema screens in the 1970s, sceptical audiences were at first baffled by the broad accents and strange colloquialisms.

Sunday Too Far, an iconic tale about male culture and loyalty in a 1950s shearing shed, was the very first success of Australia's golden age of cinema but Americans were particularly bewildered by it, producer Matt Carroll keeps in mind.

"They identified that Sunday was a fantastic movie but they didn't understand it," he states.

"It was quite incomprehensible to anybody who wasn't an Australian. At American screenings, you may too have had it in Dutch."

But French audiences were far more welcoming of the movie at Cannes Directors Fortnight, thanks to the better half of an Adelaide automobile dealership who had actually offered Carroll a Peugeot.

"She stated, 'oh yes beloved, I understand Parisian street slang, I'll equate everything for you (into subtitles)'," Carroll continues.

"I remember being in the cinema and the first thing that shows up is someone in the shearing shed states about the squatter, 'his shit does not stink'. When it was translated, the Parisian slang for that is 'he farts above his asshole'."

In the huge screening room, "the entire audience simply went insane, definitely crazy, and we got a substantial sale to France", Carroll laughs.

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

"There's a fantastic camaraderie expressed in that movie. Sunday says something much more profound about the Australian character than a number of other movies that examined our triumphes and failures."

Thompson, who left home at 14 to work as a jackaroo in the NT, says "it was like a diary, it was just how people acted - I keep in mind, since as a teen, I was in those sheds.

"Sunday Too Far has a truly essential part in my profession and in my memory; I 'd worked on that wool press, I 'd picked up that wool. I knew how hard it was ... it was the world of working guys."

Thompson was a star of a variety of other New age movies, including Breaker Morant, Mad Dog Morgan, The Club and The Man From Snowy River.

Carroll remembers also feeling well qualified to be associated with Sunday Too Far Away, which was filmed at Carriewerloo Station, near Port Augusta, and Quorn.

"I matured on a sheep residential or commercial property so I found out how to class wool. My honours thesis remained in Australian shearing sheds. So when we needed to find a shearing shed, I understood precisely where they were," he says.

"And Jack and I were sharing a home together, and I understood that he was a shearer, and I was there when the director said, 'I don't understand where we're going to find shearers from'. And I said, 'Well, I know'.

Thompson and Carroll just recently checked out Adelaide for a 50th anniversary screening of Sunday Too Far Away, staged by SA Film Corporation, which played a crucial function in the era.

"The SAFC was a crucial beacon in the development of the Australian film industry," states Thompson.

"Tale after tale essential to our understanding of ourselves was told and funded by that entity."

The New York Times explained Australian New Wave as "capturing a moment of liberty and abundance that was over almost before we understood it" and "possessing a vitality, a love of open area and a tendency for abrupt violence and languorous sexuality".

"That's me," states Thompson, now aged 84, deadpan.

"Used to be, mate," chuckles Carroll, 80.

As a young star, it resembled "riding the crest of a wave, it was sensational", states Thompson.

"There was certainly a very focused vitality, a special beauty, unlike anything else at the time."

Carroll, who also produced Breaker Morant and Storm Boy for SAFC, states the 1970s was an exceptional period for Australian movies.

"More than 220 movies, that's more than 20 films a year. And when you read the titles, it's simply incredible," he states.

"We never had another duration like that, with the ingenuity and the imagination."

The SAFC's second function, the enigmatic and menacing Picnic at Hanging Rock, which likewise turns 50 this year, became an icon of Australian cinema.

"The fantastic thing that happened after that is that Margaret Fink made My Brilliant Career, and the Americans comprehended it," says Carroll.

"And After That Breaker Morant occurred and they clicked with it and it had substantial results, and after that the 2nd Mad Max was a giant hit. So those three movies were crucial to opening the American market."

Thompson notes that Australia made the world's very first feature-length narrative movie, The Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, "and we had a vital Australian movie industry in the silent period up to 1927".

"Hollywood and the American financial investment in theatre chains here was able to control the Australian movie market, and basically, between 1930 and the 70s, absolutely nothing much taken place in Australian movie theater," he states.

While Sunday Too Far was New age's very first commercial success, 1971's Wake In Fright is commonly considered as the period's opening film.

It was Thompson's very first film and the last for veteran character actor Chips Rafferty, who died of a cardiac arrest before it was released.

It screened at Cannes and got beneficial responses in France and the UK however had a hard time at the Australian ticket office.

It's the story of a teacher waylaid in a mining town where a gaming spree leaves him broke. Amid a haze of alcohol, he takes part in a gruesome kangaroo hunt and is likewise subjected to moral degradation.

It ran for just 10 days in Sydney, and 14 in Melbourne, Thompson recalls, "and individuals were saying 'that's not us', in spite of the reality the book was written by an Australian".

"Because when we were seen on screen (previously), we were seen as these pleasant caricatures, we weren't utilized to seeing it and we didn't wish to see it," he states.

During an early Australian screening, when a male stood up, pointed at the screen and objected "that's not us!", Thompson famously screamed back "sit down, mate. It is us".