At last count, the film critic, writer and cinephile David Stratton had seen and critiqued at least 25,000 films, not counting those he watched more than once. His goal was to see one new film every day, a childhood habit that developed into a career spanning six decades that celebrated and advanced the Australian film industry.
Stratton, who has died aged 85, had an incomparable passion for celluloid storytelling. As a seven-year-old boy in England watching his childhood hero Chips Rafferty wrangling cattle in The Overlanders, Stratton had little idea that Australian films would transform his life. He left England in 1963 as a “10-pound Pom” intent on exploring Rafferty’s outback for himself, but, like the protagonist John Grant in Wake in Fright, one of Stratton’s favourite films, he found it menacing and dark.
