On a Wednesday night at the Tropicana, the bar by the pool at the Hollywood Roosevelt, you can usually pick out the Australian accent before you see the face. It travels further than people expect. The vowels are flatter, the cadence drops at the end of a sentence instead of rising, and the volume sits just a hair above the room. Somewhere on Sunset, a casting director is sending a self-tape link to a Sydney number. A few miles east, in a Hollywood Hills rental shared by three actors and a sound mixer, someone is reading scenes off a phone. This is Aussiewood. It is not a neighbourhood you can mark on a map, but it has lived along the same few miles of Sunset Boulevard for fifty years.
The Place
The Australian community in Los Angeles is held together by geography rather than walls. It clusters along the southern slope of the Hollywood Hills, through the leafy residential streets of West Hollywood, and across the line into Beverly Hills. The spine is Sunset Boulevard, the stretch known as the Sunset Strip from Crescent Heights to Doheny.
Below the Strip sit West Hollywood’s bungalow blocks and mid-century apartment courts, the kind of housing that suits a working actor on a one-year visa. Above it, the canyons climb into the hills, where the long-term arrivals eventually buy. The 101 freeway runs north of the area, the 405 west, and the studios are a short drive in three directions: Warner Bros. and Universal over the hill in Burbank, Paramount in Hollywood proper, Sony out in Culver City.
How It Became Australian
Before the Australians
Hollywood had drawn talent from outside the United States since the silent era, but for decades the foreign-born stars came mostly from Europe. Britain sent its leading men, Germany sent its directors, Sweden sent its cinematographers. Australia, until the 1970s, sent very few people to Hollywood at all. The country had no real film industry to speak of, and the actors who left tended to go to London instead.
West Hollywood in that era was a different place too. It was an unincorporated pocket of LA County, known for the Strip’s nightclubs, the music industry, and a large gay community that would push the area to incorporate as its own city in 1984. The hills above had movie stars in them, but mostly American ones. The Australian story really starts with the New Wave.
The Pioneers, 1970s and 1980s
The Australian New Wave began in the early 1970s, helped along by a new government policy of state support for filmmaking. Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong, George Miller and Phillip Noyce all made their first features in that decade. Weir’s Picnic at Hanging Rock in 1975 was the picture that travelled. It was the first Australian film of its era to win serious international praise and a proper theatrical release in the United States.
Hollywood started paying attention. Weir moved to the US in the mid-1980s and made Witness in 1985. Beresford followed, directing Tender Mercies in 1983 and going on to make twenty more films abroad. The cameraman Damien Parer had won Australia’s first Oscar back in 1942 for wartime newsreel work, but it was Weir and Beresford who turned a national cinema into a pipeline.
Actors came in their wake. Mel Gibson, raised in Sydney after his family moved from upstate New York, broke through with Mad Max in 1979 and was working in Hollywood by the middle of the decade. Geoffrey Rush, Judy Davis, and a young Cate Blanchett were all on stage in Australia in this period, all of them trained at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney, the school that would become the spine of the entire migration.
The 1990s Wave
The 1990s was when Aussiewood became a recognisable thing. Nicole Kidman married Tom Cruise and moved between Sydney and Los Angeles. Russell Crowe arrived from New Zealand by way of Sydney and would win the Best Actor Oscar for Gladiator in 2001. Naomi Watts, born in England and raised in Sydney, took years of small roles before David Lynch cast her in Mulholland Drive. Toni Collette, another NIDA graduate, was nominated for The Sixth Sense in 1999.
Cate Blanchett’s Elizabeth arrived in 1998. Heath Ledger moved to Los Angeles around 1998 too, a 19-year-old from Perth. The pattern by the end of the decade was clear. Australian actors arrived, often through their first big international film, rented in West Hollywood, and either went home or moved up into the hills.
The E-3 Visa, 2005
What changed the size of the community was a piece of paper. The E-3 visa was signed into law by George W. Bush on 11 May 2005, created by an act of Congress in the slipstream of the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement. It set aside ten thousand five hundred work visas a year, available only to Australian citizens, for what the law calls specialty occupations.
The E-3 is meant for engineers, lawyers, doctors, software developers. Actors and directors use the O-1 visa for extraordinary ability, not the E-3. But the E-3 created a pipeline of Australian editors, producers, agents, lawyers, marketing executives and tech workers who could move to LA for two years at a time with a relatively simple application. The film industry absorbed many of them. The post-2005 generation of Aussiewood is much larger and more spread out across crew, business, and creative roles than the actors-only generation that came before.
The Aussiewood Generation
Margot Robbie arrived from the Gold Coast in 2011 after a few seasons on Neighbours, the long-running Melbourne soap that has launched almost every young Australian export. Chris Hemsworth came through the same show before Thor. Rose Byrne, Isla Fisher, Sam Worthington, Eric Bana and Hugh Jackman all moved between Sydney, Melbourne and Los Angeles in the same period.
So did the cinematographers. Don McAlpine, born in Quandialla in country New South Wales, shot Moulin Rouge! and was nominated for an Oscar in 2002. Andrew Lesnie won for The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring the same year. Dion Beebe won for Memoirs of a Geisha in 2006. By the late 2000s, an Australian cinematographer behind the camera on a major American film was unremarkable rather than novel.
The Landmarks
Charlie’s at The Lot Studios, 1041 N Formosa Avenue, West Hollywood. The clubhouse of Australians in Film, opened in 2016 inside the historic Writers Building at The Lot. It is a working hub for Australian writers, directors and producers in town, with desks, screening space, and the institutional address that hosts visiting NIDA graduates and screen-agency fellows from New South Wales and Victoria.
The Tropicana Bar at the Hollywood Roosevelt, 7000 Hollywood Boulevard. The pool bar at the 1927 hotel that hosted the first Academy Awards. The pool itself has a David Hockney painting under the water. The Tropicana is not Australian-owned, but it has been a default meeting point for visiting Australians for thirty years, partly because it sits a block from the Walk of Fame and partly because the canvas chaises and palms feel a little like Bondi.
Bluestone Lane, 8100 W 3rd Street, West Hollywood. An Australian-style cafe in a converted flower shop on the corner of 3rd and Crescent Heights. The exterior carries Australian flora artwork by Madeline Simson. Bluestone Lane was founded by Nicholas Stone, a Melbourne expat, and has grown into a chain of more than fifty cafes across the United States. The West Hollywood location is the Aussie morning office for half the entertainment lawyers in the area.
The G’Day USA Black Tie Gala, rotating Los Angeles venues. The headline event of Australia Week, organised by the Australian government to promote business, film and culture in the United States. The Los Angeles gala began under Australian Consul-General John Olsen and honours Australians who have built careers in the US. Past honourees include Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett and Margot Robbie.
Australians in Film, founded May 2001. The Los Angeles non-profit that supports Australian screen talent in the United States. It started as the Los Angeles Australian Film and Television Association and took its current name in 2004. In 2008 it established the annual Heath Ledger Scholarship, named for the actor who had been an ambassador for the group and who died that January at 28. The scholarship is now considered the most prestigious early-career prize for Australian screen actors.
The American Australian Association West Coast, Los Angeles. The Los Angeles arm of the older New York-based association, founded in 1948. The West Coast Business Council runs a regular series of events for Australian executives, founders and investors based in LA, with a particular focus on the technology and entertainment industries.
Two Hands Los Angeles, multiple locations. A Sydney-style cafe brand that began in New York and crossed the country. Avocado on sourdough, flat whites, the kind of bright daytime food that signals you are in a room run by Australians. The Los Angeles outposts have become reliable casting-call breakfast spots.
Where They Came From
Most of LA’s Australians are Sydneysiders. The reason is structural. Sydney is the home of the National Institute of Dramatic Art, founded in 1958, the school that has trained Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchett, Judy Davis, Toni Collette, Sarah Snook and Baz Luhrmann, among many others. NIDA’s audition system feeds graduates straight into theatre and screen work in Sydney, which feeds them into Los Angeles.
Melbourne sends a quieter but constant stream. The actors arrive through the Victorian College of the Arts or through Neighbours, the soap that has been a launchpad for half the country. Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide send fewer people but still send some. Heath Ledger was a Perth boy. Hugh Jackman grew up in Sydney’s north. Russell Crowe spent his childhood between New Zealand and Sydney. Geoffrey Rush is from Toowoomba. The map of Australian Los Angeles is mostly the eastern seaboard, with a few coastal western and northern cities mixed in.
West Hollywood Today
Aussiewood today is bigger and looser than it was. The first generation of director-pioneers like Weir and Beresford have largely retired or returned home. The 1990s wave of stars has aged into mid-career, with many keeping primary residences in Sydney and only working out of Los Angeles for projects. Nicole Kidman is mostly in Nashville with Keith Urban. Cate Blanchett lives in England. Margot Robbie has a production company based in LA but a house in Byron Bay.
The day-to-day community now is younger. It is the E-3 visa holders, the NIDA graduates a year or two out of school, the cinematographers and editors and producers who came on a project and stayed. They meet at Charlie’s, they drink at the Tropicana, they take meetings at Bluestone Lane, they fly home for Christmas and come back in January for pilot season. The community is unusually tight for a city this big, partly because Los Angeles is so spread out that any shared accent works as a connecting tissue, and partly because Australians in Film and the consulate work at it.
The honest picture is that many of the people called LA Australians do not really live in LA full time. They split their year between Sydney or Melbourne and the hills above Sunset, working when the work is there and going home when it isn’t. The Pacific is a long way to travel, but a generation of Australian actors and filmmakers have made the commute look routine. The neighbourhood you can hear them in, when they are in town, is still the same few square miles between Crescent Heights and Doheny.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Australians settle in West Hollywood and the Hollywood Hills?
West Hollywood sits at the centre of the entertainment industry’s working geography. The Sunset Strip’s clubs, the proximity to the major studios, and the supply of one- and two-bedroom rentals made it the natural landing pad for Australian actors and crew arriving for a project. The Hollywood Hills above became the long-term destination once careers stabilised.
Is there still an Australian community in West Hollywood today?
Yes, and it is larger than it has ever been. The E-3 visa created in 2005 brought a generation of Australian crew, producers and business people who joined the long-established actor and director community. The community now meets at Charlie’s, the Australians in Film clubhouse in West Hollywood, and at Australian-owned cafes like Bluestone Lane and Two Hands.
What are the most famous Australian landmarks in West Hollywood?
Charlie’s at The Lot Studios on Formosa Avenue is the Australians in Film clubhouse and the institutional heart of Aussiewood. Bluestone Lane on 3rd Street is the best-known Australian cafe in the area. The annual G’Day USA Black Tie Gala is the largest Australian event of the LA calendar.
Where in Australia did the West Hollywood Australian community come from?
Mostly Sydney, where the National Institute of Dramatic Art has trained a striking share of the country’s screen exports since 1958. Melbourne is the second-largest source, through the Victorian College of the Arts and the soap Neighbours. Smaller numbers come from Perth, Brisbane and the rest of the eastern seaboard.
When did Australians first arrive in Hollywood in significant numbers?
The pioneers were the New Wave directors of the 1970s, led by Peter Weir and Bruce Beresford, who moved to Hollywood through the early 1980s. The first generation of A-list actors followed in the 1990s, including Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, Cate Blanchett, Naomi Watts and Heath Ledger. The community then expanded sharply after the E-3 visa was signed into law in 2005.
What organisation represents Australians in the LA film industry?
Australians in Film, founded in Los Angeles in May 2001 as the Los Angeles Australian Film and Television Association and renamed in 2004. The non-profit runs the Heath Ledger Scholarship for Australian actors, established in 2008, and the Charlie’s working space in West Hollywood, opened in 2016.
If your family’s story passed through Sydney, Melbourne, Perth or any of the Australian cities that fed the Hollywood Hills, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a country town in New South Wales to the canyons above Sunset, to wherever you are now.