There's a shot at the start of Ted Kotcheff's 1971 movie Wake In Fright that almost singlehandedly sums up Australian New Wave cinema in the 1970s.

The camera rises above the two-shack outback town of Tiboonda and, in one complete 360-degree pan, takes in the burnt orange desert, the far-off flat line of the horizon and the single-track railway that cuts dead-straight through the centre. There's barely a sign of life anywhere in this vast, hot space. Enter me unprepared, the landscape seems to dare, and I will swallow you whole and not leave a corpse.

A lot of Australian cinema in that particular decade was concerned with fear of the outback - Walkabout (1971) and Picnic At Hanging Rock (1975) at the arty end, The Cars That Ate Paris (1974) and Mad Max (1979) for the popcorn brigade. That sense of internal terrors amplified by external landscapes - often benefitting from the sheer scale of the widescreen frame - has continued as a seam in Australian cinema ever since. You can see it in Razorback (1984) and Wolf Creek (2005), in The Piano (1993) and The Proposition (2005).

There are three Australian films screening at this year's Glasgow Film Festival (GFF) that, in their different ways, feed on that essential theme. First there's the aforementioned Wake In Fright. A box-office flop in its homeland on initial release - its depiction of boorish Australian masculinity was probably too close to the bone for that era - it became something of a cult item in the intervening years and was recently restored to its full unsettling glory.

Gary Bond stars as schoolteacher John Grant, whose attempt to get to Sydney for the Christmas holidays - a scorched, white-light Christmas in this hemisphere - is thwarted when he loses all his money in a drunken gambling session in the mining town of Bundayabba. Here he discovers that hospitality has an edge, that refusal to have a beer with another man is perceived as a personal insult.

Grant's quick descent into squalid violence - actual footage of a kangaroo hunt, sanctioned for film use by animal rights groups, is particularly vicious - continues apace. Like Straw Dogs, released the same year, Wake In Fright presents a brutal environment and a closed community that can strip a civilised man of his humanity when he's confronted by a more powerful primal force.

Kotcheff's film is often bracketed with other 'Ozploitation' genre movies of the period, but it contains more depth and social comment than most. For an easily entertaining spin through the outback frontier, GFF is also screening Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior. Here Mel Gibson's apocalyptic hero travels the opposite direction to John Grant in Wake In Fright, rediscovering his humanity in a wasteland where bands of marauders fight over dwindling oil supplies.

The third film on this loose theme is bang up to date. Fell, directed by Kasimir Burgess, again has the relationship between man and nature at its centre, but visually the film is very different from those dry desert scenes. Here it's the lush, dense, dark forests of Victoria that swallow up the human figures. Effectively this is a dual portrait of internalised grief and guilt as a bereaved father joins a logging crew to stalk the truck driver who killed his daughter in a hit-and-run accident. It's an intense viewing experience, heightened by brilliant sound design.

Films such as Wake In Fright questioned the macho behaviour that was sometimes proudly held up as a national trait. Again, if you're looking for themes in Australian cinema, you'll find this back-slapping character stretching all the way from The Adventures Of Barry Mackenzie (1972) to Crocodile Dundee (1986). He's also present in Stunt Rock, made in 1980 and another of GFF 2015's Australian strand, in which legendary stunt coordinator Grant Page plays himself, merely as an excuse to perform crazy action tricks to a heavy rock soundtrack.

The scab covering macho culture is picked away in another new movie, The Mule, in which gormless mummy's boy Ray reluctantly agrees to swallow 20 condoms filled with heroin while on a football team trip to Thailand. Detained on arrival back home, he tries to keep himself constipated for over a week while he's held by the police in a hotel room. The comedy can be a bit gross but the depiction of the Aussie male in the early 1980s (as seen retrospectively by a film made in 2014) is more interesting, particularly when it comes to the corrupt throwback cop played by Hugo Weaving.

The cinematic style of Baz Luhrmann certainly challenged Australian macho stereotypes, so it's good to note that his 1992 debut, Strictly Ballroom, will receive a one-off GFF screening in the grand hall of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, complete with some live dancing by Scottish champions.

The remaining three films in GFF's strand each prove that, while the Australian film industry did well for a while by attracting blockbuster productions to its studios (The Matrix trilogy and Star Wars prequels were partly shot here), its independent cinema arm is currently its true strength.

The Little Death, by writer-director-actor Josh Lawson, weaves together a multi-character, multi-story narrative about sexual fantasies and off-centre romantic relationships that lurk beneath respectable suburban exteriors. Because the film was made outside the mainstream, Lawson can be funny one minute, controversial with a rape fantasy the next.

An award-winner at Berlin and Sundance (where Sophie Hyde took the World Cinema Best Director - Dramatic prize), 52 Tuesdays pushes the barriers of sexuality and gender even further, as teenager Billie begins her own camcorder-documented experiments in threesome sex during the year that her mother is undergoing a female-to-male gender transition. It's a mature portrait of what some would dismiss as a dysfunctional family unit, but centred on a mother-daughter relationship that's truly loving and complex and honest. Hyde directs with real indie vigour, contextualising this personal story with brief glimpses of 52 weeks of world news and capitalising on the modern-day confessional that is the self-shot video journal.

Most affecting of all, though, is Tender, a documentary about a community group in the rundown steel town of Port Kembla who are trying to set up their own non-profit funeral service. The belching factory chimneys and post-crash world of high unemployment and clinical depression are set against the humanity of the people on screen, who tackle every setback - including the unexpected death of one of their own - with heart and humour. It's a compassionate film about compassionate people, a local story with global dimensions. Australia is no longer an insular cinema; its stories and filmmaking styles speak to the world.

52 Tuesdays, CCA, February 22 & 23; Fell, CCA, February 21 & 22; The Little Death, CCA, February 20 & 21; Mad Max 2, IMAX at Glasgow Science Centre, February 24; The Mule, CCA, February 19 & 20; Strictly Ballroom, Kelvingrove, February 20; Stunt Rock, Old Hairdressers, February 19; Tender, CCA, February 23 & 24; Wake In Fright, Mackintosh Queen's Cross, February 27