Put it down to the tyranny of distance, but to make a noise in the film world Australians have more often than not had to pick up their talent - and their films - and play away from home.
As a consequence, most movie fans only ever catch a fleeting glance of what's going on - ie Crocodile Dundee, Babe, Priscilla Queen of the Desert. It may seem that the peaks are few and far between, however, the Australian film industry has continued to expand its less populist but equally exciting strands of cinema.
What makes this year's Australian Film Festival of special interest is a programme that charts a course through this expansion over the past 30 years.
Hence we have Richard Roxburgh's gripping Romulus, My Father, from last year, screening alongside a seminal piece of cinematic and dramatic art, 1978's Newsfront.
'We've chosen these films to display not only the outstanding talents of Australian filmmakers, but also the diversity of filmmaking that a healthy film industry like Australia's can produce,' says Gavin McDougall, the director of public affairs of the Australian Consulate in Hong Kong, who had a hand in plotting this year's lineup.
'We've also specifically chosen films that go some way to defining how the Australia of today has come to where it is,' he says.
That's certainly the case with Roxburgh's effort and in Tony Ayres' award-winning The Home Song Stories as they present classic moral dilemmas channelled through the modern Australian family dynamic. How European-Australians (in Roxburgh's) and Asian-Australians (in Ayres') cope with life Down Under is certainly part of the story that the two films tell - but it is only a part.