Sat - March 21, 2009

Two Cultures, One Red Blood 


The tag line from David Gulpilil on the cover of the DVD of Darlene Johnson's film One Red Blood (2002) reads "...my life and how I really live it." And so this promises to be as much autobiography as biography, blending Gulpilil's own telling of his story with commentary and anecdote from a broad range of friends, lovers, and colleagues. These include Rolf de Heer (who directed Gulpilil in The Tracker and Ten Canoes), Philip Noyce (Rabbit-Proof Fence), the brilliant actress Justine Saunders and fellow actor Jack Thompson. The portrait that emerges is multi-faceted, even kaleidoscopic in nature, revolving around a character who almost never seems to surrender his own sense of self to those he has obligated himself to.

Perhaps moregulpilil than any other Aboriginal actor, Gulpilil is truly a man of two worlds, and this is the theme that emerges mostly clearly from the documentary. Johnson sets this dichotomy up early on. In an opening sequence Gulpilil speaks from his bush home near Ramingining about his birthplace across the river. He notes that the river is now too wide for him to cross; he can't drop a tree across the river now, for the tree is too short and he can't swim the river, which is full of crocodiles. Aerial shots of the river in flood provides a sense of verisimilitude to his remarks. But the metaphorical truth of these statements achieves resonance when the film cuts to Gulpilil performing on a television stage, painted up with ochre and adorned with fantastically beautiful dancing belts--and the shot is interrupted by Mike Munro, who announces, to cheers from the television audience, "David Gulpilil, THIS IS YOUR LIFE!" Indeed. And yet what One Red Blood achieves is an integrative vision of how Gulpilil navigates the crossing.

The story of Gulpilil's prowess as a dancer leading to his casting, at the age of 17, as the young Aboriginal who rescues two lost white children from the bush in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout (1971) may be the salient episode in the whitefella biography. Over the next decade he made a dozen more appearance in film and television, ranging from Peter Weir's The Last Wave to four episodes of the series based on Arthur Upfield's Boney novels, one of which is excerpted here in all its embarrassing wretchedness.

Both Justine Saunders and historian Koori Gary Foley speak warmly and with a bit of awe about the impact that Gulpilil's performance in Walkabout had on Aboriginal audiences across the country for its positive presentation of Indigenous culture. (To put the film in some historical perspective, think that Walkabout was made only fifteen years after Jedda.) And yet Johnson doesn't overlook the obstacles that Gulpilil's performance was up against. In Los Angeles, the young star is surrounded by adoring young female fans who want to know why his character killed himself at the end of the film, wondering if there's some hidden "Aboriginal" meaning to the action. In what might be the first filmed record of the trademark Gulpilil cheekiness, he replies "I want to know that too."

The film cuts from footage of Gulpilil whirling about in the mechanical teacups at Disneyland to life back in Ramingining. Gulpilil talks about growing up in country unspoiled, he accuses, until the white man arrived. There's some wonderful documentary footage from the earliest days of the Maningrida settlement included in this section (again, only about fifteen years prior to the production of Walkabout, and thus contemporaneous with Jedda). Gulpilil's responsibilities as head of the family, as member of the larger community with all the obligations that entails are briefly discussed by friends, but it is Gulpilil himself who speaks the most about what joys and hardships his life in bush presents.

In 1986 Gulpilil played Neville Bell, Crocodile Dundee's Abo mate, and the clip included in One Red Blood is, if anything, more embarrassing to watch now than the footage from the early Boney television shows. In the space of perhaps two minutes Gulpilil's character is transformed from a marauding night-creeper with Mick Dundee's knife at his throat into a debtribalized misfit who attends corroboree only because his father makes him. And then when girlfriend Sue wants to take his picture, he tells her that she can't. She tells Neville (doesn't ask, mind you) that he believes it will take away his soul, and he cheekily corrects her, "No, your lens cap is on."

Worse, this role in the most commercially successful film of Gulpilil's career was also his last significant film job for another fifteen years. The work dried up, and no explanation is provided, and the point is passed over rather quickly. But afterwards I wondered how Gulpilil made sense of the change. Did he understand that, like many film stars, he'd had a good run, and it was now ended? Or did he wonder that the whitefella world's appreciation of his talents could be revoked so easily, in ways that his status as a dancer among his Yolngu compatriots would never have changed in such an arbitrary fashion?

The rest of One Red Blood celebrates Gulpilil's achievements in later life both in Arnhem Land and in the cinema. There is footage of him at home in Arnhem Land that proves him to be as ebullient and as wise today as ever. In sharp contrast, there is the film star in the city, in formal wear, still enjoying his celebrity. And there are wonderful sequences from the filming of The Tracker in which we get to watch both spirits, the bushman and the actor, working in tandem, sequences that reveal best of all Gulpilil's unique genius.

gulpilil out bush
gulpilil in adelaide

The documentary concludes with clips from an initiation ceremony in Maningrida, which Gulpilil arranged to be filmed. Although not quite as unprecedented as claimed (there is, after all, much more extensive documentation in Ian Dunlop's masterful Dhapi Ceremony at Yirrkala (1972), this concluding bit does give us a last, and all too rare opportunity to witness Gulpilil's extraordinary skill as a dancer. Indeed, if I have one complaint about One Red Blood, it is that it slights this aspect of Gulpilil's performing viruosity: I would have been grateful for the opportunity to watch him dance that is almost never captured in his feature films.
 
************* 
Included on the DVD of One Red Blood, for reasons that are unexplained is a short feature called Walkabout, edited in 1974 out of two films made in the early 1940s by the anthropologist Charles Mountford. I can only surmise that the similarity in titles between the Mountford documentary and the Roeg feature film is reponsible, but I was nonetheless delighted at the happy accident. Mountford's expeditions through Central Australia were recorded in Walkabout (1940) and Tjurunga (1942); ceremonial footage in both films was cut and the remainder of the two movies was combined to create a 1974 release called Walkabout. It is replete with charming children and Mountford's repetitive if genuine surprise at how clever these "primitives" can be. These films are among the few documentaries of traditional people made prior to 1950, let alone made widely available, and their ethnographic value in documenting both the Central Australians as well as their observers is indisputable. 

Posted at 09:05 AM    

Sun - February 8, 2009

Warlu! 


A few weeks ago while reading Jill Stubington's Singing the Land: the power of performance in Aboriginal life (Currency House, 2007), I set about exploring the catalog of Aboriginal Studies Press, which publishes many of the recordings and films that Stubington discusses in her examination of music and performance in Aboriginal culture. While there, I discovered that the Press offers for sale on DVD Roger Sandall's film of a 1967 Warlpiri ritual, edited by Kim McKenzie, and released in 1977 as A Walbiri Fire Ceremony: Ngatjakula People Making History. Narrated by Nicolas Peterson, the film is a masterpiece of drama, only 21 minutes in length and equal parts mystery and spectacle. Peterson described the events of the film in his article "Bulawandi: a Central Australian ceremony for the resolution of conflict," which was published in Ronald Berndt's critical anthology, Australian Aboriginal Anthropology: modern studies in the social anthropology of the Australian Aborigines (University of Western Australia Press, 1970).


I had first read of this film in Eric Michaels' essay "For a Cultural Future: Francis Jupurrula Makes TV at Yuendumu" (1987, reprinted in Bad Aboriginal Art: tradition, media, and technological horizons, University of Minnesota Press, 1994). Michaels regarded the Sandall-Peterson collaboration as a kind of video ur-text for later Warlpiri experiments in filmmaking. When the nascent Warlpiri Media Association began experimenting with Indigenous television production in the mid-1980s, the old men in the community wrote to Peterson and requested that he send them a copy of the film.

Michaels reports that performance of the Fire Ceremony appeared to have died out completely at Yuendumu in the fifteen years between 1967 and his arrival in the community in the early 1980s.

Remarkably, the ceremony lapsed shortly after this film was made. When I arrived in Yuendumu in 1983, the fire ceremony seemed little more than a memory. Various reasons were offered: one of the owners had died, and a prohibition applied to its performance; it had been traded with another community; and the church had suppressed its performance. These are not competing explanations, but may have in combination discouraged Warlukurlangku. The interdictions by the church (and the state, in some versions) was difficult to substantiate, though it was widely believed. Some of the more dramatic forms of punishment employed in the ceremony contradict Western manners, if not morals. There seemed to be some recognition among the Warlpiri that the fire ceremony was essentially incompatible with the expectations of settlement life and the impotent fantasies of dependency and development they were required to promote. The fire ceremony was an explicit expression of Warlpiri autonomy, and for nearly a generation it was obscured (Michaels, p. 116).

In his commentary to the film Peterson explains that the ceremony involves the traditional division in Warlpiri culture between kirda, or owners, and kurdungurlu, or managers of a ritual. In this particular case, the ceremony is a means for the managers to seek a form of retribution against the owners, whom the managers believe have been lax in controlling the behavior of some of the women in the community, sisters of the owners. By inflicting ritual punishment, a balance or harmony is thought to be restored, although at the film's conclusion, Peterson suggests that this action is part of a larger cycle. In this case, the owners finish up aggrieved at the harshness of the punishment meted out in the course of the ceremony, and there is a suggestion that the balance will be redressed in a future enactment.

Much of the short film is devoted to glimpses of the final two days and nights of the ceremony. After extensive preparations including the erecting of a seven-meter-tall painted pole, singing of ancestral stories by the men, and dancing by the women, the owners are led into a tight circle around the pole. The managers brandish large boomerangs above their heads. And then, one by one, the owners, heavily encrusted with body paint of ochres and down, and with tall ceremonial headdresses topped with emu feathers, dance towards a fire.

Each man in turn places the ends of two sheaves of dry grass into the fire, and then beats his head and shoulders with the flaming brands. His relatives gather around with leafy bundles that they use to brush and beat off the sparks and embers that shower upon the owner. After each man has subjected himself to the individual punishment, the managers seize towering columns of bundled leaves--they look to be even taller than the main ceremonial pole--and ignite them in the fire. Soon there is a scene of terrifying pandemonium as literal pillars of fire wave about, collapsing onto one another and sending a firestorm swirling through the night.


For all its brevity, drama, and excitement--Michaels claims that "this ceremony satisfies the most extreme European appetite for savage theater" (ibid.)--the film is extraordinarily rich in information, details that reward repeated viewing. There is the soundtrack of verses that provide a primer in Warlpiri song structure if you listen carefully. There are glorious varieties of painted body designs, not just the spectacular, complex costuming that can be seen in the title shot above, but also those adorning the torsos of the managers as they sing during the days leading up to the fiery complex. There is the fascinating mix of clothing styles, from the women's simple cotton dresses to loincloths and flash cowboy outfits for the men. An old man glistening with fat and ochre smokes a handrolled cigarette while he chants. Corrugated iron sheds in the distance contrast with bough-laden shade shelters on the ceremonial ground. It is a fantastic glimpse into the blended culture of Yuendumu, not far, as Peterson notes, from the spectacle Spencer and Gillen witnessed in 1901, and not far from our own vantage point in the 21st century.

As if this were not a remarkable enough record of Warlpiri culture, there is a companion piece of sorts that enriches our understanding of the context of the ceremony in the Screen Australia film Jardiwarnpa--Warlpiri Fire Ceremony, a 1993 collaboration by Ned Lander, Rachel Perkins, and Marcia Langton. The Sandall-Peterson film presents am overview, thematically and visually, of the ceremony, and allows its audience to grasp the essentials quickly. The later film, originally part of the SBS series Blood Brothers, provides equally dramatic footage of the ceremony's climax, but its expanded length of one hour offers the opportunity to explore more facets of the ritual.

First of all, Jardiwarnpa tells the story behind the ceremony, starting with the serpent Yarrapiri, whose country at Winparrku southwest of Haasts Bluff forms the backdrop for the film's glorious opening sequences. The transgressions of the serpent and the emu and their relation to ancestral fires of the Jukurrpa are threaded through the film's narration (by Kev Carmody) and in the subtitled translations of the songs. (A full treatment of the Yarrapiri story, including numerous photographs of the country, beautiful colored plates of the men's body decorations, and many other details of ceremony can be found in Charles Mountford's astonishing small monograph Winbaraku and the Myth of Jarapiri, Rigby, 1968.)

Another feature of this film, one that warms the heart tremendously, is the starring role played by Darby Jampijinpa Ross, who was nearly 90 years old when he led the filmmakers and his countrymen on this journey. It is not clear whether the activities filmed here are the first revival of the fire ceremony since 1967, but it is clear that some of the participants are being instructed in the sequences for the first time. Midway through the action, some young boys are handed boomerangs to use as clapsticks, a gesture that enables their participation in the ritual for the first time. Throughout, the managers exhort their fellows to perform better, to dance more vigorously, to sing with fervor. And when it is time for old Jampijinpa Ross to dance his way to the fire and shower himself with sparks, there is wild appreciation for his prowess.

Although the ceremonial pole at the center of the dancing ground isn't as impressively tall as the 1967 version, there is a great richness of regalia to be seen here. Women dance with painted coolamons. Iconic representations of snake and emu dangle from hairstring suspended at the end of branches planted diagonally in the ground. As they spin in the desert breezes, they dazzle; men and women approach to touch them affectionately and reverentially.

There is a wonderful, enlightening moment when one of the managers pronounces a verse of the song kumunjayi, as it contains a word that sounds like the name of a recently deceased person. There's a bit of discussion, and the manager tells everyone to move on to another verse: this sort of on-the-fly process contrasts so starkly with our western notion of exact, invariable performance that it offers an opportunity to step back and meditate about the essence of ritual. There are huge paintings organized out of the Warlukurlangu art centre. And in the recording of women's dancing, Jardiwarnpa is especially rich and satisfying. (In fact, Rachel Perkins included brief clips of women's dancing from Jardiwarnpa in the title credits of First Australians.) At the end of the film, the owners present gifts of blankets to the managers in one of the most mundane and yet fascinating sequences of the entire film. There is once again in the record of this ceremony an anthropological richness of detail presented; there is also a storehouse of sacred lore for the yapa themselves.

Taken together, these two films offer a brilliant story about change and survival. They reveal modes of Warlpiri thought, and display their traditional worldview in operation in the modern world. (In addition to blankets, money changes hands at the end of the ceremony as the owners pay the managers with $20 bills.) We are all fortunate to have these performances captured for ourselves and those who come after us.
 
*** 

While I'm thinking about warlu (fire) and blankets and performance, I'll include a totally unrelated spot that I stumbled on last week, of the Warumpi Band playing "Waru," the lead song from their first album, Big Name, No Blankets on the Blackfella/Whitefella tour with Midnight Oil back in the 80's. Despite its Centralian title, the song is sung entirely in Burrarrawanga's native Yolngu dialect except for the chorus cry of "waru." Perhaps that's not a bad introduction for this pan-Australian musical group.

The quality of the clip doesn't get top marks, but if you've never seen these performances, perhaps this will entice you to pick up the 20th anniversary edition of Diesel and Dust, which includes the complete tour video. It's cracking good.

 

Posted at 11:30 AM    

Sun - January 11, 2009

First Australians 


One of the things I enjoy most about the holidays is the extra time off from work and (some years, at least) the chance to poke around at home, catching up on things I have neither time nor energy to do when my day job consumes most of both. I have the opportunity to relax in front of the television set and luxuriate in the best of Australian DVDs. Last year this time it was The Circuit. This yearfirst australians I've devoured First Australians: the untold story of Australia, which my friend Jonathan succinctly described as "television fulfilling the functions it was dreamed up for."

(Before I go any further, props to David Nash for pointing me to the SBS site from which I was actually able to download the individual episodes, allowing me to enjoy them while waiting for the ABC Shop to ship the DVD. I'm also still anticipating the arrival of the companion book, First Australians: an illustrated history (Melbourne University Publishing, 2008), which looks to be a both lavish and useful supplement to the video experience.)

Louis Nowra, scriptwriter for the series, recently bemoaned the fact that only about 300,000 Australians tuned in to watch the series ("Indifference has robbed generations of our history," Sydney Morning Herald, December 27, 2008). If he's right in his figures and in his assessment that this is an abysmally low number, then his complaint about the sorry state of awareness of many aspects of contact history is well justified. While this comes as no surprise, it is a shame that this series was not more widely appreciated. First Australians redefines Horace's dictum that poetry (or more broadly, art, or narrowly, television) should be dulce et utile, sweet and useful. Although, in the case of First Australians, perhaps bittersweet and useful comes closer to the mark.

Director Rachel Perkins has created a masterpiece of visual history. First of all, the stories she tells are beyond riveting, and I suppose Nowra must share in the credit for the emotional affect they generate. Each episode is located in the biography of one or two individuals, with a generous supporting cast; each episode is located in a different part of the country, and at a different period in history. I would have thought that this strategy would result in a fragmented and fitful view of history: the gaps of all sorts that existed in my mind between Bennelong (Episode 1) and Truganini (Episode 2) seemed great, and I feared that too much would be left out.

But herein lies the genius of Rachel Perkins, for in the course of the series' seven episodes, she rings similar changes no matter what the ostensible subject matter, no matter who is the focus of the evening's biographical investigation. There is a correspondence among all the stories that are told here that creates unity out of their diversity, e pluribus unum, if I may be allowed to lapse once more in Latin and to betray my American perspective.

And the theme that she weaves out of this manifold collection of stories is that of the First Australians' repeated, incessant, native desire to engage with the incomers. It's a remarkable thing to witness, to hear in their own voices as recorded in their own letters and diaries or written down by English marines and clerics: to witness the willingness to reach out, to accommodate (vide the OED, "to provide room for, to reconcile") the strangers who came into their land. There is an openness on the part of the First Australians to adopting what was useful or what they judged superior or beneficial. This is seen perhaps mostly strongly in the history of Coranderrk that is heartbreakingly told in Episode 3. There is the desire to communicate the essence of their beliefs as well as their responsiveness to respectful treatment that makes Frank Gillen the whitefella hero of Episode 4's story of Arrernte Law in Central Desert. (And I for one greatly appreciated the appropriate displacement of Baldwin Spencer to the sidelines of this story). Desolation emerges in the refusal on the part of the progress-mad Victorians who came a-colonizing to listen, to see, and to believe.

The richness of the sources brought to bear on each story also helps to sustain connections among them. The story of Bennelong made me want to go back to the pages of Dancing With Strangers, especially after seeing and hearing Inga Clendinnen's contributions to the first episode's narration. Likewise, the story of Truganini and Tasmania was given a deep added resonance by the commentary of photographer Ricky Maynard, and after watching the second episode I went back to watch with renewed appreciation and understanding the superb documentary about him that aired on Message Stick last May. (It has unfortunately disappeared from the ABC website now after six months, but perhaps, if someone at the ABC is listening, they will schedule a repeat during their summer series. The equally excellent two-part set on Michael Riley is now back in the rotation, and shouldn't be missed.)

A third device that lends continuity to the series is the chorus of scholars, writers, and (in later episodes) participants who comment on the historical narrative. Three of these commentators appear in almost every episode, and I came to think of them as the Moirae (or the Fates, switching here to the Greek for a moment), each of whom embodied a different aspect of the Aboriginal repsonse; together their perspectives informed one another's and enriched the story: another example of how First Australians ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. Gordon Briscoe (Research School of Social Sciences at ANU) is the almost dispassionate voice of historical narration, who nonetheless imparts a sense of the grand injustices that the First Australians have suffered. Marcia Langton (University of Melbourne) incarnates righteous anger and speaks uncomfortable truth, verging at times on bitterness. Bruce Pascoe, a prolific author of novels and non-fiction, articulates the sadness inherent in all these stories in a voice that evokes Indigenous understanding in the face of the occupiers' incomprehension.

And finally, there is extraordinary photography by Kim Batterham and Warwick Thornton. Perkins and Nowra made the wise decision not to stage re-enactments of historical events, the kind of pseudo-documentary filmmaking that only serves to make an audience aware of how unrealistic and downright stagey the storytelling is. Instead they chose to rely on 1,500 still images supplemented by voiceovers of actors reading the words of the historical figures involved from the days before the technologies of the 20th century allowed the First Australians to speak for themselves. In adopting the techniques perfected by the American documentarian Ken Burns they availed themselves of an impeccable pedigree.

But beyond that the footage that was shot especially for this series is a wonder to behold. Many times the cinematography serves to re-inforce the fundamental connection of the First Australians to country and in such a way that these twice-told tales are given life in ways unseen until now. There have been many documentaries that have tried to capture the Dreaming, but none has done so as effectively as the opening sequences of the first episode.


Quick cuts between footage of Central Desert women dancing and European etchings of ceremony give way to a pre-creation view of the continent represented by the flat wastes of the southwest coast, featureless clouds, and undulating waters. The evocative and original score that gently underlies these initial visuals begins to pulse with drums as the Dreaming ancestors' stories are quickly glossed, and mountains and forests emerge. The story of Itikiwara's transgression against the marriage laws is embodied in stunning photographs of Chambers Pillar (below left). Creation in the north is evoked by a painting of the Djangka'wu Sisters that fades in from an aerial view of an Arnhem Land waterfall. By the time the scene shifts to the eastern coasts and the green mountains of New South Wales and we are told how, his work of creation done, "Baiame stepped off a mountain and back into the sky" (below right), the visceral, sensual impact of the Dreaming has been conveyed with a power and economy never before seen on the screen. Like a novel whose entire action is foretold in an exquisitely crafted opening paragraph, First Australians has made its mark and told its story before we barely register that it has begun. The country has spoken.

But in the end it is history, not pre-history, that First Australians teaches, the history that is almost by definition bound up with European colonizers. (Indeed, there is little in the series that touches on the First Australians' contact with their Macassan neighbors or their shared history with Chinese in the Victorian goldfields or with Japanese pearlers.) Six years in the making, the series likewise remains silent about current affairs but instead allows us to reflect on events from the Harbour Bridge walk to the Apology, assessing their origins and their significance in the light of the stories that are revealed so movingly in the seven chapters of this remarkable investigation into the lives of the First Australians. 

Posted at 12:21 PM    

Sat - December 27, 2008

Redemption and Exile 


When the story-telling arts attempt to explore how the difficulties of relations between races are propagated, they often turn to examining the lives of adolescents. The trope of black and white children confronting the prejudice and dysfunction of adult society as their youthful friendships are torn apart resonates in the novels of Americans like William Faulkner but seem curiously absent from film.

Director Peter Carstairs's recent Australian meditation on the subject, September (2007) is a modest, low-key affair, although it did receive international attention at film festivals in Toronto and Berlin in addition to its premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August 2007. The blurb on the DVD's cover describes the "unraveling" of the friendship, rather than a more savage rupture, and the description is apt. There is little is the way of high drama; emotions are muted and often more intimated than expressed. The dialogue is sparse, fragmented, and seemingly directionless, recalling the early parts of Ivan Sen's Beneath Clouds (2001) in this as well as in its gorgeous depictions of the endless spaces of rural Australia.

Set in the Western Australian wheat belt in 1968 as wages for Aboriginal workers are legislated, the film mirrors the changes induced in the economy of pastoralism and farming in the changes that occur in the friendship of Ed, son of the white farming family, and Paddy, son of the Aboriginal couple who share the labor of the land. Ed and Paddy's fathers were boyhood friends who grew up together on this land. The grown men now work it, side by side in the fields though not as equal partners. It is clear early on that both the economic and social patterns of the fathers will not survive the next generation.

There are no surprises to the story line; history already revealed the outcome to us. But the treatment that the story receives is compelling and engaging, in part because it is told in such an understated manner. There is no grand narrative arc, just an accumulation of incident and detail. The shifts in the characters' relationships are often characterized by the choice of a single word. Early on, Ed repeatedly responds to Paddy's question "What did you learn in school today?" with a simple "Nothing." Later, when they have begun to drift apart, Ed talks to Paddy about "entomology," and then has to explain: "insects."

All of this plays out in a vast landscape that is comprised of two dominant visual elements: the vast, golden wheatfields that are the locus of an implied equally golden and innocent childhood, and the narrow roads that stretch through them. These are roads that let the outside world into the edenic land, and roads that lead the boys away from the stasis of that idyll.

The film's other informing metaphor is the boxing ring. The boys' shared enthusiasm for the ring is the narrative element that Carstairs uses to make us understand from the first what binds them--as they anticipate the arrival of a touring boxing troupe and build a practice ring out in the farm's fields--and what separates them--when they watch newsreel footage of Lionel Rose in a segregated movie theater during a fraught excursion into town.

And it is to the boxing ring that the action of the film unrelentingly leads. The slow dissolution of the bond between the boys, brought on as events in the outside world intrude on them, accelerates into the film's only moment of sharp and therefore all the more shocking violence as their playful sparring turns abruptly real. In the wake of this instant of blooding and bruising, Ed and his father cut down the ropes of the boys' ring (and in doing so invert the metaphor of repairing fences that serves as the persistent visual image of the relationship of the two fathers and their work on the farm). Paddy knows that there is no place for him any longer in the wheatfields, and takes off down the dusty road to join the traveling boxing troupe.

Although this departure is meant to be seen as inevitable, it also serves to resolve the tensions of the story and to hold out the olive branch of reconciliation. At the start of the film, Ed's return from school is a daily ritual of reunion for the two boys, each released from his labors to share in the pleasure of friendship again. On this final day, they pass each other silently, heading in opposite directions along the dirt road that was the scene of that quotidian encounter.

But Ed is unable to leave his friend so bluntly and leaps into the ute he has had so much difficulty learning to drive. He overtakes Paddy; with few words between them, the two boys share common purpose one last time as Ed persuades Paddy to get in the truck and, with some coaching from the Aboriginal boy on how to ease out the clutch and move on without stalling, drives him the rest of the way into town. The boys part with a hug outside the boxing tent; Ed's face fills with incipient tears as he throws his arms around Paddy's back.

Although there is clearly an intent to provide the film with an ending that is uplifting and that leaves the viewer in a "feel-good" mood, I find that I'm ambivalent; indeed, I wonder whether there might be a subversive desire to induce that ambivalence in me. History tells us the ending is inevitable: blacks were forced out of farms and stations by the requirement that they be paid equal wages. (This element of the story is fully developed in parts of the plot line I've elided here--along with other crucial elements--in my attempt to spoil as little as possible of the exquisite storytelling that September contains.)

Do we rejoice in the endurance of the friendship, knowing that affection still burns in the boys' hearts despite the pressures of history? Do we understand that both boys have lost something in the process of growing up, and yet retain something from their childhoods as well? Surely, the answer to both those questions is yes.

But their fates are ultimately unequal. For Ed there is this final moment of redemption, in which he learns that Paddy has been his true friend, and one who deserves his support, however he is able to give it. But in the end, Paddy's lot is exile and homelessness, by far the harsher outcome.

To give Castairs his due, I think we are meant to come to this realization in the end. No matter how touching our final view of Ed is, Paddy's extended leave-taking is ultimately more heart-rending: his mother's silent farewell, his reluctant leave-taking from his baby brother, his departure without seeing his father one last time. On that last count, Carstairs's habitual indirection and oblique narration do not disguise the fact that it is Ed's father who keeps Paddy's father out in the fields as the boy leaves home, just as it is the farmer's inability to afford the wages he ought to pay that breaks the families apart.

Ed's parents deal with the problem of legislated wages and their inability to change the economics of work on the farm with a stoic refrain: "That's just the way it is." And so it was, and to some extent, so it remains today. September may try to disguise the fact for the modern moviegoer, but in the end the film recognizes that black people, finally and repeatedly, bear the heavier burden of change, even that which ostensibly benefits them. 

Posted at 01:40 PM    

Sun - December 14, 2008

The Heart of the Heart of the Country 


In another essay exploring the boundaries of traditional beliefs and the modern world, Nicolas Rothwell has written an epitaph of mystery and magic for Yulparija artist Spider Kalbybidi, who took up the brush in Bidyadanga a few years ago to paint for Emily Rohr ("In the Shadow of Modernity," The Australian, December 13, 2008). Kalbybidi was a maparn, a "clever man" who was in touch with the spirits that stalked the ancestral country of the Yulparija. Despite having left that land decades ago, the Yulparija have not lost their fundamental beliefs and their connection to the animating force of the landscape (see my post, "Strong Law in the Desert," April 16, 2006).

Eight months ago, Kalbybidi disappeared from Bidyadanga without apparent warning. His tracks and those of his two dogs petered out quickly, and there was much consternation about what might have happened to the old man. Our western sensibilities would worry about an old man subject to exposure in the harshness of the desert, but the Yulparija had other concerns. Rothwell's recounting of the tale is a fine exposition of the physical and metaphysical search for Spider's fate, compounded of equal parts of Indigenous logic and Rothwellian romanticism.

The story of the Yilparija's exile and return to their country around the Perceval Lakes was exquisitely documented recently in the film Desert Heart (Rebel Films, 2007), which premiered on ABC in March, 2008. Like Painting Country, the 2000 documentary about the return of artists from Balgo to country they had not seen for many years, Desert Heart records an extraordinarily emotional odyssey. What gives Desert Heart extra poignancy is the fact that the journey was organized and the film is narrated by the equally extraordinary young painter Daniel Walbidi: the desert heart of the title is not simply that of the Great Sandy; it is also Walbidi's.

Walbidi was born in coastal Bidyadanga many years after the old people walked away from the desert to settle in the LaGrange Catholic mission. Having learned the stories of his country from these old people, he became determined to preserve them and thus took himself to Broome and to Rohr's Short St Gallery, ushering in a new school of Aboriginal artwork, unique in its visual imagery that combines the stories of the desert with a saltwater aesthetic (see "Matters of Representation", April 2, 2006). But Walbidi had never seen the country himself, and painted it only from hearing the stories the oldies told him.

The old people themselves, including Kalbybidi and the more well known women painters like Weaver Jack and Alma Webou, had spent forty years in LaGrange, not knowing what had become of the land the drought forced them away from. For them, knowing that their fathers were gone, never to return, the sense of time slipping away was acute, a compounding sense of loss and sorrow.

So when the caravan of vehicles sets out from Bidyandanga for the four-day journey back to Wirnpa, the ladies are glowing with excitement, especially after they reach Punmu and take on Mukki and Wooka Taylor, the last two old men who lived at Wirnpa, who can now guide the party past the end of the road to the waterholes where these artists played as children.

The arrival at Wirnpa is a marvelous homecoming. The artists cut branches to help them announce their approach to the waterhole where Wirnpa, the great snake, still lives. Striding single file across the grassy landscape, they arrive at the waterhole itself, sheltering under a copse. There is great agitation as the women sit at the edges of the depression in the ground, softly keening and wiping away their tears. One of the Taylor brothers walks down into the waterhole and confirms that Wirnpa is still there. "He's woken up," the old man reports, "Wirnpa stuck his head up, he's crying." Weaver Jack replies, "My country. I have come back here alive." It's an exquisite moment.

After their first day in country, and after overcoming the strong emotions of the return, the artists sit down to paint, and the black-primed canvases are soon a riot of color, dominated now by the white of the salt lakes. But soon another expedition is launched, as a helicopter arrives to take Weaver Jack and her son Wokka and grandson Terence out to Lungarung. They walk through the scrub, near the edge of a large saltpan, until Weaver is overcome and sits down, weeping. "I've been worried about this water of mine." Back at Wirnpa and at work on another painting of the lake at Lungarung she judges "Now I'm happy, no more worrying about these waterholes. I've got to sit down now. That's good I saw it, all the jila. ... I've become satisfied for all my countries." And though it is a moment of peace, resolution, and some joy, there is also an inescapable undercurrent of sadness, of finality, of a life and a work completed.

Apart daniel walbidifrom this extraordinary exercise in storytelling, the DVD of Desert Heart features a gallery of extras that is actually worth watching. Still photographs of the journey itself and a gallery of paintings by all the artists involved (including Walbidi's spectacular new works based on his first-hand encounter with the country) are fine additions to the feature. Emily Rohr speaks briefly in an on-camera interview about the artists and their work, but the two most moving extras provide a fascinating historical perspective.

"Contact Stories (Before Whitefellas)" offers a blend of archival footage from Film Australia with first person reminiscences, largely by Mukki and Wooka Taylor. The stories are somewhat familiar--the first encounter with airplanes, the lure of the mission and the fear of being trapped there--but the subtle warmth of the storytellers makes them engaging, and the the archival footage in skillfully integrated. Towards the end of "Contact Stories" Margaret Baker is introduced.

Baker was a nurse who worked at Bidyadanga for over a decade, starting in 1963 at around the time the Yulparija walked in from the desert. It is she who narrates the second historical short, "Mission Life." Her delight in having worked at the mission, her obvious affection for the people she met as they came out of the desert, and her good, common sense are a winning combination that effectively complements the story the Taylors tell.

Desert Heart brings a freshness, immediacy, and vigor to a story that has been told many times in many ways in recent years as filmmakers have attempted to peer into the origins and meaning of Aboriginal art. What makes this film unique is its narration by one of the artists: Walbidi's gentle, understated voice gives the film its sense of authenticity and sincerity. Walbidi has been an ardent and articulate spokesman for his people for nearly a decade now. In one of the central scenes of the film, there is a young boy who is perhaps eight years old painting with all the other artists in the camp at Wirnpa following their encounter with the old snake. With luck Walbidi will be the link between the old people of this film and those, like that young boy, who can carry the tradition forward. 

Posted at 04:05 PM    

Sat - July 19, 2008

Kanyini: Connections 


Melanie Hogan's recent documentary, Kanyini (Reverb Films, 2006) is not so much Bob Randall's story as it is Bob Randall's story of the breaking of the ties that cemented his people's culture. Randall achieved national fame in the 1970s when his song, "My Brown Skin Baby (They Took Him Away)" became a country hit and the inspiration for an ABC documentary. Randall is a Yankunytjatjara man, now in his 70s, who was himself taken away from his mother and raised on a mission on Croker Island. His working career spans stints as carpenter and stockman, educator (at Adelaide Community College, ANU, and the Universities of Canberra and Wollongong) and director of the Northern Australia Legal Aid Service. He's an inductee of the NT Music Hall of Fame and the author of an autobiography (Songman)

.

Kanyini (literally to keep, or to have, figuratively a sense of connectedness) take the form of an extended monologue by Randall. His voice as captured in the film is even, reasonable, humorous, patient. You can tell there is sadness and anger flowing beneath this calm exterior, but those emotions never dominate. Randall wants to inform his audience, and he wants them to listen to what he has to say, and so he modulates his delivery. He is a steely, smiling survivor, and he is an educator who knows he has something important to say, something that although you may think you've heard it all before, he knows that you have never quite understood the message. Or as another folk song from forty years ago and half a world away put it, "You know all the words and you've sung all the notes, but you never quite learned the song you sang."

Hogan's visual language in the film attempts to create the same unthreatening and familiar tone. While first watching the film, I couldn't decide how effective a strategy this was. Randall's gentle voice is easy to listen to; he is a good storyteller, and an accomplished rhetorician who can captivate. The visuals, however, tend toward the cliched, and risked losing me, and in the process losing the whole first half of the film.

Randall lives today at Mutitjulu Community next to Uluru, and the film makes ample use of the iconic Rock, the spinifex plains, the spectacular sunsets. The trouble is, we've seen it all before in countless documentaries and advertisements. Worse are long, slow shots of Randall staring past the camera's eye into the countryside and the hackneyed fades and dissolves. At one point early in the film, Randall pushes himself up from a sitting position on the ground and walks away towards Uluru and damn it if he doesn't literally vanish into thin air after twenty paces! Too trite, I thought, but perhaps if you're from an Adelaide suburb or Scotland or San Francisco, you haven't seen all this a hundred times before, and the lyrical beauty of it all can be seductive.

There is liberal use of archival footage from decades gone by that is similarly handled in the most conventional ways. Much of this old black-and-white camerawork takes smiling, enthusiastic, carefree children as its subject, watching them run across those unchanging spinifex plains, jumping across scattered boulders, grinning and mugging for the camera. Meant to capture the insouciant spirit of Randall's own youth in the APY lands, these scenes again flirt with banality. There's even a moment when the moving-picture postcard views of Uluru are inset with a sepia colored oval within which the dusky, unclothed natives gambol along a path.

Gradually, though, Randall's narrative took over, and I began to listen to his words, to anticipate his on-screen appearances, and to pay less mind to the pictures of the desert plains. For Randall has a very particular argument to develop around the theme of kanyini, and that argument involves four orienting compass points: tjukurpa (law), ngura (country); walytja (family); and kurunpa (spirit).

Randall introduces these four principles as the essential elements of the Aboriginal experience prior to contact with Europeans, and demonstrates how each of them in turn was diminished, broken, and taken away.

Tjukurpa was the first to go. It was not so much that Indigenous people lost their law as the white people who came in brought their own law and imposed that alien set of principles on the anangu, the people of Randall's country. White law rode over tjukurpa like white men's horses and cattle rode over the land, and in any contest between the two prevailed. And so the first thread was cut, the first connection severed, kanyini first broken.

The second cut was the connection to ngura as people were moved off their homelands, away from the places that defined their identity. Shifted away, they were made strangers in a strange land, doubly dispossessed, interlopers in someone else's country. But at the very least, these mass relocations meant that they still kept the company of their own people, still had family surrounding them.

But walytja, that sense of family and kin, was the next bond to be broken as children like Randall himself were taken away (Randall's father was an immigrant Scot). Generations were stolen, and Randall is perhaps saddest and at his most moving as he tells of the sense of abandonment he felt as a child in a mission a thousand miles and more from his mother, and as he imagines her own bewilderment as grief.

And finally, living in that mission dormitory, Randall was taught about Christianity, taught the new creed that was to replace his sense of kurunpa, the spirituality that was the last surviving link to the old way of life. And it is at this point in the film that his anger comes closest to the surface as he tells how he absorbed the lessons of the missionaries and came to understand the hypocrisy, the disconnect between the teachings of the Bible and the actions of the white men who professed them.

It is after Randall has finally laid out his argument, detailed the four principles that informed his anangu way and expounded on their systematic destruction, that Hogan strips away the romantic vision of Uluru to show us, bluntly and brazenly, the other face of Uluru, the black face concealed by the tin of petrol. A white tin-can mask, one side of its diameter squeezed to a point to accommodate its being place over the nose and mouth while retaining the best possible seal and ensuring the most effective delivery of the intoxicating fumes, carried casually along the streets of Mutitjulu. This is the moment to which all of Hogan's landscapes and all of Randall's histories have been leading, and it is devastatingly effective.

Kanyini is caring and responsibility based on tjukurpa, ngura, walytja, and kurunpa. Its opposite is kawalinanyi, to lose sight of an obligation. Loss of those four compass points has left Randall's community adrift, and he will not rest at that point. The film Kanyini is his attempt to reach out beyond Mutitjulu, to bring a message about devastation to a broader audience. I don't think he and Hogan are doling out blame: they are articulating a sense of history and making visible its results.

Kanyini is in some ways a subterfuge, a "lovin' spoonful" of honey to make the medicine go down smoothly; you won't know what's hit you until it's all over and done. My initial skepticism about the film's romanticizing tendencies was in the end completely blown away by the time I finished watching it. The DVD (Australian format, but playable on any computer or on a region-free DVD player) can be had for $34.95 from the Kanyini website. There's also a book Nyuntu Ninti (What You Should Know), based on the film at $29.95. There's plenty more information available there, including a forum for feedback and commentary by the film's viewers, a study guide for teachers who may wish to use the film in the classroom, and links to the YouTube video of an SBS interview with Randall and Hogan that gives you a preview of the film. (The trailer is also up on YouTube.) Have a look for yourself, and buy a few copies for your friends.

 

Posted at 01:30 PM    

Sun - July 6, 2008

Bangarra: Urban Clan 


I recently came across Urban Clan (Ronin Films),a portrait of Bangarra Dance Theatre and the three Page brothers, Stephen, storyteller/choreographer, David, songman/composer, and Russell, dancer, who were at its heart for the first decade of its life. (Russell died in 2002.) The film was made and released in 1997, at the time when the second of the Pages' major productions for Bangarra, Fish, was taking life and taking the stage.

The film opens with a shot of songman and Bangarra collaborator Djakapurra Munyarryun's feet as they stride across a dried, cracked mudflat in Arnhem Land. As David Page's music fades in the scene shifts and travels down a tropical river before giving way first to shots of the brothers mugging in a photographer's studio. Next come glimpses of Stephen and Russell dancing, and then home movies of the Page clan in suburban Brisbane (the brothers are three of twelve siblings). In a nutshell, that is the story of Bangarra: the melding of contemporary urban aesthetics and traditional Yolngu ceremony to create a new choreographic tradition, all born out of the dynamic of a close-knit family.

I once asked someone to explain to me what makes "modern dance" "modern." Part of the answer was that, unlike ballet with its pirouettes and lifts and illusion of weightlessness, modern dance is about the floor: the connection of the dancer to the ground, to weight, to gravity. How apt this is for the Page brothers, who speak repeatedly in these interviews about rootedness, about a physical connection to the ground. Even in the watery illusions of Fish, this close connectedness of the dancer to the floor seems never to be lost.


Connectedness as a major theme of Urban Clan finds expression in many ways. For starters, there is the connection forged between the brothers and Djakapurra Munyarryun that binds the boys from the city, brought up without language and culture, to the traditions of Anrhem Land. There are several scenes in the movie where this collobaration is brilliantly demonstrated. In one, Djakapurra begins to sing, then as the camera pulls back, he begins to move in the simple, walking style of Yolngu ceremony; the camera pulls back farther to reveal a line of dancers from Bangarra moving in step with him, slowly replicating, learning, absorbing.

Later on comes another shot of Djakapurra singing, unaccompanied, but this time wearing headphones. There's a cut to David Page in the sound booth, smiling as he listens. Djakapurra completes the verse; he pauses. David cues a clanking, electronic, urban beat, and Djakapurra begins to sing the same song again. The two blend into a single, coherent soundscape, and one might almost think that the vocal line was written especially for David's electronic score, had it not been performed solo just a moment before.

And it's a two way education. Djapkapurra smiles and sways to the beat of David's music. And a bit later on, we see him dancing a pas de deux from Fish that owes its beauty to Stephen's skills as a modern dance choreographer.


Both Russell and Stephen talk about the impact of discovering traditional dance. First exposed to it at the National Aboriginal and Islander Skills Development Association's (NAISDA) Dance College in Sydney in the mid 1980s, the brothers found liberating inspiration on an expedition to the Top End with the College. Stephen was adopted by Mungajay Yunupingu and began his education in the selfless art of communal, ceremonial dance.

Each of the three brothers is profiled in turn. Early on, the most extended sequence of pure dance is a solo piece featuring Russell, followed by a number of rehearsal clips in which he performs with other members of the company. The middle of the movie focuses on David, who had a short but brilliant career as a child singing star (including an appearance on Paul Hogan's television show unfortunately not documented here). Interestingly, a great part of this segment is as much about the Page family as it is about David and it includes affecting interviews with parents Doreen and Roy. Footage from Stephen's early days at the NAISDA Dance College, of his apprenticeship in Yirrkala, and of his success as a mature choreographer leading a major Sydney arts endeavor round out the family portrait.

Yet the connectedness of the three brothers is never lost in these individual profiles. They weave in and out of each other's stories. Stephen shows Russell a new set of movements or talks with David as he tries to assemble the score for Fish, who jokes that he's "getting bad skin from going back and forth between salt water and fresh." The three of them are seen shooting pool in Sydney with Djakapurra, and cheering David on at one of his performances in drag.

Each of them comments on the importance of family; for them Bangarra seems to be a way of enriching their sense of relatedness as brothers and as family with the larger sense of belonging to an Indigenous tradition that was not part of their childhood but will clearly be part of the next generation of Pages. Near the end, before a performance outside the Sydney Opera House, Stephen holds his young son Hunter in his arms, and introduces him to the audience. A few years later, Hunter would perform with Bangarra at the opening ceremonies of the Sydney Olympics and in 2005 create an important role in Boomerang.

Beyond these insights into the lives and characters of the three brothers, the final glory of Urban Clan, throughout, is the superb performances exquisitely captured by director of photography Jane Castle and editor Emma Hay. Capturing dance on video is a notoriously difficult art, and one that fails more often than it succeeds. To meet the challenge of capturing the breadth of movement across the stage, of giving equal attention to the solo performer and the troupe as a whole, of defining detail while preserving the fluidity of the whole requires a special talent that the crew here seems to have been especially blessed with.

In the solo that appears early in the film, Russell's gaze is locked in on the camera, which zooms in and out, gracefully, almost imperceptibly, so that his entire body fills the frame, whether he is twisting on the floor or standing up and spinning, arms extended. Occasionally when he is standing full height, the camera will zoom in for a close-up of his head and torso, then pan quickly down to his feet, anticipating a return to the ground.

In other sequences, such as the one in which Djakapurra instructs the company in traditional Yolngu footwork, the shifting focus of the camera and its distance from the dancers is used as a revelatory device. There is a lovely sequence late in the film in which a line of men is photographed from an angle near or below the floor of the stage in which the glare of the stage lighting adds dramatic effect without obscuring the dancers.


Throughout, cuts in the framing seem miraculously dictated by the movements of the dancers' limbs rather than by some arbitrary desire to change an angle or move in for a close-up. Although the overall aesthetic is obviously worlds away, the artistry of the camera recalls the stunning facility with which classic Fred Astaire's performances were filmed half a century ago.

Even the fades between dancers on stage and shots of the stringybark forests or the rivers of Arnhem Land, so often a distracting device that increases the "artiness" of the production values while obscuring the beauty of the dance, seem to work here. The technique is used most effectively in the final moments of the film, which depict an outdoor performance on the CIrcular Quay below the steps of the Sydney Opera House. Vast clouds of smoke from iron drums on the shore and barges in the harbor shroud the dancers at night. In the background the lights of the Sydney high rises wink through like the eyes of enormous nocturnal spirits. Spotlights give the smoke a red and sulfurous glow, and the fades to the tropical forest look like vast bushfires through which the spirits of the dancers travel. As with the best of art, the cinematography enhances the themes of the movies, visually uniting cityscape and bushland, reconciling the brothers, the dancers, and their worlds.

Bangarra will be performing their latest work, Mathinna, in which the theme of a journey between two cultures is based on events drawn from Tasmanian history in Newcastle on July 11-12 before opening for a month's run at the Sydney Opera House on July 22. A series of international dates follow in in September and October. The company will join again with the Australian Ballet to present Rites in Paris at the Theatre du Chatelet on September 29-30 and in London at Sadler's Wells October 7-11. Bangarra will then return to North America with Awakenings at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC (October 16-17), the Brooklyn Academy of Music (October 21, 23-25), and Ottawa's National Arts Centre (October 28).


Update: Bangarra toured Awakenings to North America in October 2008; I caught their performance at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. 

Posted at 12:40 PM    

Sun - March 16, 2008

Blackfella (stories)/Whitefella (television) 


The lead essay in the current (March 2008) issue of The Monthly, "Sorry Business: the road to the Apology" by Robert Manne, opens with a startling admission. Manne authored the first Quarterly Essay in 2001, In Denial: the Stolen Generations and the Right, described on Black Ink's website as "a brilliant polemical essay which doubles as succinct history of how the Aborigines were mistreated, and an exposure of the ignorance of those who want to deny that history." Since then he has been perhaps the major voice writing and debating the sad story of the Stolen Generations.

Given the ardor with which Manne has championed the cause, I had to read the first paragraph of his new piece twice to make sure I had understood him correctly.

In a recent conversation the novelist Alex Miller told me he thought people who claimed that they hadn't known, until relatively recently, that Aboriginal children had been forcibly removed from their families were lying. I didn't have the heart to tell him that, until the publication of Bringing Them Home in 1997, my own ignorance about Aboriginal-child removal had not been feigned but real. Like very many Australians, I was shocked, moved and ashamed when I read its account of the systematic decades-long practice of separating Aboriginal children of mixed descent from their mothers, families and communities, and of the physical and psychic suffering so many had endured, as a consequence, for the remainder of their lives. This was a chapter of recent Australian history I had not taken the trouble to understand.

Manne's essay is well worth a trip to your public library to peruse, if you don't already subscribe to The Monthly. It recapitulates the politics of the past ten years, and charts Manne's actions and motives in opposing the rise of the Howard historians; it also illuminates the personal reasons that Manne has so vigorously asserted the charge of genocide. (I am inclined to agree with my friend Jonathan when he quotes Godwin's Law of Internet Discussion, to wit, that as soon as someone mentions the Nazis in a discussion, that discussion has come to the end of its useful life.)

However, my purpose today is not to analyze Manne's essay, but to speculate that he might have tumbled to the story sooner if he'd simply watched more television.

I'm joking, of course, but I recently finished watching Heartland, a thirteen-part ABC mini-series filmed in 1994 starring Ernie Dingo and Cate Blanchett. (In the United States it's been released under the title Burned Bridge, and is available from the DVD rental service Netflix.) Among the many subplots that swirl through the series is a very affecting treatment of a family that was torn apart by well-intentioned social services.

But let me back up and provide an overview of the series first. Dingo plays Vincent Burunga, a policeman who's fled WA and taken up work as the Aboriginal police liaison officer in a fictional town in coastal NSW called Brooklyn Waters, next door to the Aboriginal mission community of Binbilla. Blanchett's character, Beth Ashton, has similarly fled Sydney and a failed marriage to take up temporary residence in the house that she has inherited as the only known surviving descendant of her grandfather, Jock.

Much of the action is driven by the murder of a young girl from the mission. Her boyfriend Ricky is charged with the crime and can not exonerate himself: he was passing out drunk at the time after being fired from his job after a run-in with a set of the town's redneck racists. In the face of Ricky's silence and confusion, the police engineer a statement that amounts to a confession; whether or not Ricky is guilty of the crime, he is seen as having failed his duty to the young girl, and that fact alone is enough to divide the mission families against one another.

As with any good television serial of driven by desire and hatred, subplots abound, and not all of them fit nicely into the overall structure of the story. Some are left hanging by the barest threads, others are introduced primarily (it seems) as vehicles for raising perennial themes of dysfunction, disillusionment, and disappointment. Though the individual pieces don't always lock together in the tightest of jigsaw puzzles, each element is individually well handled, and the acting throughout is excellent. Some of the writing in the early episodes is awkward, and occasionally there are scenes that seem to function only to move characters from one location to another. But the quality improves from week to week, and by the concluding episodes the suspense is high and the emotions are powerful. The climax in the final episode is surprising, pulse-pounding, and ultimately satisfying.

The Stolen Generations subplot shares the highs and lows of the series overall. It bobs to the surface for a few episodes, and then its characters disappear without a trace, their ephemeral connections to the rest of the cast forgotten. But for the moments that it holds center stage in the drama, it is a fine piece of work. It centers on the story of Eddie, who was raised by a white family (under the name of Ben) after being removed from the mission as a very young child. It turns out that Eddie was Jock's illegitimate son, and as such, he is Beth's only living relative.

Beth helps the boy's mother and half-sister track him down, and reveals to him the true story of his birth. His transformation from a suited-up real estate agent to a flag-wearing activist on behalf of the mission comes too quickly and easily, but the psychic cost of that metamorphosis is given surprising nuance. His drive to mastery and success, clearly the product of his middle-class white upbringing, is the source of eventual heartbreak, as he fails to comprehend the pride of the Indigenous community in its own rules and resourcefulness.

Meanwhile, his desire to reconnect with his roots alienates him from his adopted community and breaks the bonds he forged as a whitefella. He finds himself irrevocably changed and belonging to neither community rather than to both. The confusion, the loneliness, and the sense of all futures suddenly aborted are all depicted with sympathy and with a surprisingly unflinching lack of sentimentality, given that this is a television melodrama. If the rest of Heartland had been a failure, it would still be worth watching for these few hours. Happily, Heartland is a delight, in part thanks to the fine performances by Dingo and Blanchett, whose on-screen relationship is handled with affection and trust, but more because it does justice to the complexities of the ways in which Indigenous people must strive to be seen and heard in the fog of an alien culture.

(Two notes on the casting of minor characters: a very young Luke Carroll, recently seen as Michael in The Alice, and as Dumby Red in Aboriginal Rules, plays grandson to Bob Maza, the mish's elder uncle, and a not quite so young, but still remarkably boyish Aaron Pederson, lately the hero of The Circuit on SBS, had a very small role as the brother of the murdered girl.)

Heartland shares with The Circuit the distinction of being mainstream television in which (I'd estimate) more than 90 per cent of the cast members are Aboriginal. In both cases, the success of the drama relies largely on the inherent conflicts between black law and white law, and both ask their white audiences to enter imaginatively into the logic of black law, to see beyond the invisible cultural assumptions that lead politicians and (all too often) ordinary people with a profound lack of sympathy for the Indigenous perspective.

My current fascination with Australian television series began this Christmas, when we received the DVD version of The Circuit and spent a wonderful holiday week watching its six episodes over as many evenings. (Unlike Heartland/Burned Bridge, The Circuit is only available in an Australian edition, which means US and European viewers will need a region-free DVD player in order to enjoy it; the US$50 I spent to procure such a device was well worth it.)

If you come from overseas like me or missed The Circuit on SBS in mid-2007, you owe it to yourself to catch up. Aaron Pederson plays a big-city lawyer out of Perth who returns to his country of the Kimberley for a short tour as an Aboriginal Legal Services defense lawyer. He hopes the duty will further his career and his political aspirations; instead, like Eddie/Ben in Heartland, he finds himself connecting with family and country in ways that set him adrift and put him at odds with both the whitefella and blackfella worlds.

Also like Heartland, The Circuit is over-packed with subplots and thematic twists, and as with Heartland, I enjoyed following every minute of every one of them. Once again, it is the inability of whitefellas to sympathetically enter into the country of blackfellas--and I mean "country" metaphorically here--that is at the root of so much confusion, distrust, and tragedy. And once again, there's a minor subplot that conveys this inability to connect in the most telling and heartrending fashion.

The love story of Archie and Clarrie, one a white man, the other one black, one from the city and one from the bush, doesn't get a great deal of play in the series' six hours until the very end. Again, there's a fair amount left unstated (or on the cutting room floor), but Archie and Clarrie have come back to Broome, where Clarrie has to hide the truth of the relationship from his family.

Archie has no such compunctions: he's rootless and except for Clarrie alone. He also has problems with alcohol, anger, and jealousy, although the show doesn't do a very good job or explaining where these trouble come from or offering any insight into the mix of Archie's motives. (Whether this is the fault of editing or a deliberate attempt to make Archie's character an inscrutable blank is something I haven't yet decided.)

The tragedy erupts during a festival in Broome after Archie urges a hit of the designer drug Ecstasy on Clarrie. It's an interesting and telling twist on the theme of substance abuse that otherwise plays a major role in the series' histories of cases on the country courthouse circuit. Clarrie is at first unwilling to take the drug; he knows it's part of the trouble he and Archie have had before. But more importantly, it's a part of their life that belonged to their days in Melbourne. It doesn't fit into the world of the Kimberley.

Archie has no restraint and no restraints. Free of almost all connections, he's careless of the connection with Clarrie, and heedless of Clarrie's ties to family and country. For him, the drug would be liberating if he had anything left to be liberated from other than a veneer of social inhibitions. And so, when exhilaration turns ugly and the two men turn violent, bones get broken, and love get battered. But Clarrie is the one who lands in jail, trapped and desperate. Archie is bereft and beaten, but deals with it by escaping from the Kimberley. Clarrie is left in the cell, and the specter of death in custody looms over the cliff-hanger conclusion to The Circuit.

The investigations into deaths in custody and the Stolen Generations framed the 1990s start and finish. That they have made their way into the popular imagination via the medium of the television drama ought to be an encouraging sign. That someone like Robert Manne missed that infusion into the mainstream, though, still warns me that the message was getting lost. The greatest value of Rudd's Apology may still lie in the fact that it garnered worldwide attention. Sadly, the challenge remains to bring home not just the news but the painful truth. Perhaps dramas like Heartland and The Circuit can help to achieve the goal of humanizing the headlines, and ABC and SBS can continue to pursue the transmutation of rhetoric into art for the good of us all. 

Posted at 02:12 PM    

Fri - November 10, 2006

Ten Canoes 


When I was a youngster in the 1950s, I longed for movies that would turn my bookish worlds of superheroes and dinosaurs into "living" adventures that would transport me with color and sound and action.  By the time Star Wars and Jurassic Park hit the cinema screens, it was a little too late for the boy in me.

So I was surprised to find that boyish excitement reborn a couple of weeks ago at the Virginia Film Festival when I had the chance to see Ten Canoes for the first time.  "Superman or Green Lantern ain't got nothing on me," sang Donovan in "Sunshine Superman."  And Steven Spielberg ain't got nothing on the cast and crew of this film.

Before I begin, let me lay out for those who may not have seen the film yet the dramatis personae, at least those who will figure in my remarks below. Given the parallel stories, one taking place in "Thomson time" and the other in ancestral time, the business of who's who can be a little confusing to follow.

The Narrator (David Gulpilil) tells both stories in voiceover. During "Thomson time," the part shot in black and white and representing events that may have occurred in the 1930's, the two major characters are Minygululu, the elder brother, and Dayindi, the younger, who has eyes for Minygululu's third wife. The corresponding pair of brothers in ancestral times, the part of the film shot in color, are Ridjimiraril and Yeeralparil. Ridjimiraril has a close friend and ally named Birrinbirrin, the honey lover. Ridjimiraril, like Minygululu, has three wives. Although it is the youngest one that Yeeralparil lusts after, it is the second wife, Nowalingu, who is crucial to the plot's unfolding. In ancient times, there's also a Sorcerer, and a mysterious Stranger.

With those preliminaries done, here is my critical assessment of the film: Wow! 

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but somehow seeing Donald Thomson's photographs come to life in this manner was more than I had bargained for.  In a review of the film in the Sydney Morning Herald, director Rolf de Heer is quoted on the experience of community members in Ramingining watching television: "A cop show set in New York is just as likely to be thought to be happening in real time as looking out the window. As far as I can tell, the notion of fiction in their culture - and language - is either not the same as ours or doesn't exist."  Somehow, de Heer managed to make me feel much the same way, as though I were looking out a window and seeing something that partook of magic and realism at one and the same time, looking into a world that was both familiar and unknown.  

Perhaps I was expecting a neat, Aesopian fable about jealousy and covetousness, waiting for a younger brother to run off with an older brother's wife and suffer the consequences.  And perhaps there was a little bit of a fable's twist at the end when Yeeralparil does indeed get the girl--and much more than he bargained for.  But the moral of the story wasn't what I had been expecting in that sense, although I should have understood that learning patience would be a far more important life lesson for a young man to master than overcoming his lust might be.  

And maybe I was misled by people who saw the movie and who said it moved slowly, that it was told like a true Aboriginal tale, not to be hurried along, much as the narrator explains that Dayindi must listen to the tale as it grows like the branches of a tree, turning this way and that, demanding that you follow the path its very nature dictates.  Because, honestly, I was on the edge of my seat almost from the first frame. Every turn of the plot was unexpected and engrossing.  Rather than the younger brother's lust being the engine of the narrative, the disappearance of Nowalingu and its aftereffects moved the plot along, and made for a much more nuanced tale than the reviews had led me to expect.  

Similarly, the reviews tipped me off to the real-life continuity between Thomson time and the filming, that descendants of the men photographed in the ten canoes in the 1930s were starring in the modern film, and that the necessity of preserving proper skin relationships among characters in the two eras had posed some logistical difficulties in the casting and performance of the roles in the film.  But that proved to be only a pair of the layers than comprise the experience of this story.  

If I reconstruct the layers somewhat chronologically, the temporal sequence goes like this.  There is the ancestral time, Dreamtime perhaps, of Yeeralparil and Ridjimiraril.  That is mirrored in the story of Dayindi and Minygululu.  Then there is Thomson time of the 1903s, and the goose hunt that was captured in photographs.  That in turn is mirrored by the members of the movie's cast taking on the roles of their fathers or grandfathers in the Arafura Swamp.  Minygululu tells a story to his younger brother much as David Gulpilil as the film's narrator tells the story to contemporary film audiences.  As the story crosses generations, so too now it crosses from Yolngu to balanda.  And much of the delight of making the film for the people of Ramingining was the preservation of this old time story and the depiction of a way of life that it is in danger of vanishing.  I'm told that the younger actors learned the skill of making bark canoes from the older members of the community, and that those lessons are preserved in the early sequences of Ten Canoes.  They can in turn now be passed down to a younger generation.  And in fact, there are actually three different versions of the film: the one I saw, with Gulpilil's English narration, another with Ganalpingu narration, and a third with no narrative voice at all, in which the story is presented only through the actions and dialog of those on screen.  

One frequently reads in the anthropological literature of the multiple levels of meaning in Dreaming stories and their progressive revelation over time.  The more I ponder this movie, the more I begin to realize how that multi-threaded structure works.  That's another way in which the child in me watches heroes and monsters take life in the movie house after years of waiting.  At one level, there is simply the "public" story that is accessible to anyone who comes to the theater: the dangers of covetousness, or a warning to be careful what you wish for. With an appreciation for history, and a knowledge of Thomson's work in the Top End, one begins to appreciate the continuity of Aboriginal culture through time, the way in which social norms and fundamental survival skills are handed down through the generations, how instruction proceeds from both observation (the building of the canoes) and from participation (the goose hunt, in which Dayindi is at first unsuccessful).  The parallels between the modern and the ancient stories give a more sophisticated viewer an insight into the unchanging nature of the Law, or the Dreaming.  

Many reviewers have commented on the humor of the movie.  Certainly the broad physical jokes, ranging from Birrinbirrin's gluttony to the problems of having to walk last in a single file in the footsteps of a flatulent kinsman to the impotence jokes provoked belly laughs in the theater.  I think the audience was prepared for a serious "art house" film and was delighted to discover the Aboriginal sense of humor, which helped to create a sense of shared experience even across such obviously different cultures and life experiences and the separation of time.

But one of the things that impressed me was the contrasting subtlety of the story's development, which gave just as much human interest.  The development of Birrinbirrin's character over the course of the story is perhaps the best example of this that I can give.  At first, he is seen as a somewhat harmless figure of fun, with his passion for honey and the big belly that comes of his hunger.  Early on, Birrinbirrin's laziness is seen as part and parcel of his gluttony, but it also means that he frequently stays in the camp while the other men are away.  When he's not eating honey, he's usually seen making spear points, which activity becomes significant in the second half of the film.  Chastened by the experience of participating with Ridjimiraril in the wrong spearing, he is seen back at the camp a short while later for the first time sharing his honey with the child who brings it to him.  And finally, when Nowalingu returns and the community learns the truth of her disappearance and the awful final irony of Ridjimiraril's death, it is Birrinbirrin who is the force of conciliation and who prevents the other men from undertaking a revenge mission against the mob from across the river.  In his growth from hapless sidekick to leader, his presence provides an understated counterpoint to the growth in understanding that is Dayindi's story, and the main thematic element in the film.

One element of the story that I haven't seen commented on is the sorcery.  As I think back on the film (and memory can play tricks, of course), I remember that the action of the story of Ridjimiraril’s lost wife really seems to get underway after the introduction of the Sorcerer.  After the long close-up of the Sorcerer’s face, accompanied by Gulpilil’s introduction of the character, there is a sharp noise, and the camera cuts away from the Sorcerer and races across the landscape. The next event in the film is the unexplained appearance of the stranger, the moment from which the rest of the film depends. Is it possible to read a “deep story” into this initial sequence: that the entire plot of the long-ago story is really one of the Sorcerer’s revenge, so to speak? If it’s true that in the indigenous worldview, all deaths are ultimately the result of sorcery, does Ridjimiraril’s demise perhaps begin with a mysterious curse? The arrival of the stranger is certainly unexplained: he doesn’t announce his presence in the area by conventionally lighting a fire; he appears to be alone, but is in fact accompanied at least early on by another man (the eventual victim of the spearing) and later by a horde of avenging warriors, all of whom appear equally without warning. At the end of the film, when the Sorcerer cannot save Ridjimiraril, are we seeing a failure of his skill, or the completion of a process begun long before, and taking its slow path to fulfillment, much as the story of Yeeralparil’s education itself does?

At least one person to whom I’ve put forward this interpretation of events has rebuffed it. But I’m not ready to put it entirely to rest, at least until the film is released on DVD (coming in late January 2007) and I have the chance to see it a few more times. One reason I have a fondness for my theory is that in a way it makes me a participant in the unraveling of events, in the search for meaning that is part and parcel of the story itself. This quest for explanations of the uncanny finds its best expression in the wonderful scene in which the five men are seated in a circle testing out theories of what might have happened to cause Nowalingu to disappear. The camera swings (the technical term may be “pans” but that doesn’t quite capture the effect) from man to man, focusing on each in close-up as he proposes an explanation.

It’s a thoroughly delightful moment in the movie. In part, I like it because it captures a quintessential vision of the Aboriginal process of discussion. The first attempts are not even attempts at all; pressed for an explanation, the men just shrug. Finally, a theory is proposed. Then another. Then the first explanation is considered, rejected, returned to. As the camera moves from face to face, the consensus builds until the fateful moment when all can agree that the stranger is at fault. The other reason that I like this scene so much is that it’s a superb example of the use of the camera in telling the tale, and as such represents the blending of yolngu and balanda techniques of creating a story. I think everyone agrees that this blending of the two worlds is what makes the film such a spectacular success.

So in the end, I’m not just a boy entranced by the vision of a supernatural world, but I’ve become a part of it. I went to see this film fully expecting to be delighted by it, but it surpassed even my wildest dreams.

 

Posted at 08:24 PM    

Sat - September 23, 2006

Green Bush 


Serendipity has always seemed to play a large part in my experiences as a collector and blogger of Aboriginal art. At the opening of the exhibition Dreaming Their Way in Washington DC, I met Faye Ginsburg, who has written extensively on Aboriginal film and media. When I returned from my travels, I discovered that the fellow who’s converted dozens of PAL videotapes for me over the years had closed up shop. Of course, most everything’s released on DVD these days, and this approach was getting expensive, so I did what I should have done years ago, and bought an inexpensive multi-region code-free DVD player that lets me play Australian-made DVDs without the bother and expense of converting them. And finally, I discovered that the CAAMA shop was back online, and that Skinnyfish was carrying videos as well as music CDs. A new chapter in viewing videos was beginning.

So now I have a new stack of videos to watch and maybe write about. Most of them are not quite new releases, but I’m excited about catching up on some good films. Most Australian movies take a very long time to make it to America anyway: Ten Canoes is showing at festivals over here now, but I know I’m going to have to wait for DVD until I have a chance to see it. In the meantime, I can delight in the back catalogs of Rachel Perkins, Ivan Sen, and Warwick Thornton.

Thornton’s Green Bush was the first title on the stack, and I can only hope everything will turn out to be as wonderful as this short film. Less than half an hour in length, set entirely in a demountable trailer out in the bush, and featuring a small cast, most of whom have only the simplest of dialog to speak, it still manages to pack multiple layers of story into its short span. In that way, it immediately reminded me of--indeed it is--an Aboriginal work of art. There is a simple, public story, about a man doing his work and learning his place in a community, and beneath that narrative, the story of cultures in contact and confrontation, black and white, and traditional and modern.

David Page plays Kenny, the DJ for at a radio station modeled on 8KIN-FM, which CAAMA operated out of Alice Springs. "Green Bush" is the request show: families and friends send out songs to young men in jail. Kenny pedals up to the station one night, with a pot of stew and a loaf of bread strapped into the baby-carrier seat on his bike. He sets up his playlists and begins to announce the requests. A knock at the door turns out to be a tjilpi, an old man, played by Ted Egan Jangala, who comes in and asks for a cuppa tea. The old man takes a seat while Kenny goes off to play another song and boil the water. When Kenny returns with the tea in a mug imprinted with an upside down Aboriginal flag, two more tjilpi and an aunty are seated around table, asking for tea.

The scene is played humorously, and with warmth. Kenny is bemused, but accepting, though he doesn't really know why these people are seeking shelter in the station. Things become chaotic quickly, as the tape cartridge player chews up tapes, more people appear around the table looking for tea...but all the cups have gone missing. In his frustration, Kenny sends everyone off to make their own tea, and then another knock comes at the door. Enter Rose, an older woman, holding her hand to a bloodied scalp. Kenny calls the ambulance, and when the tape player malfunctions again, he vents his anger by ripping it from its plugs and throwing it out onto the dirt in front of the trailer. As he stands at the door, breathily heavily in his anger and frustration, the tjilpi appears behind him, and says "Cuppa tea." Kenny shouts "I said you could make your own cuppa tea" before turning around to realize that Tjilpi is holding out a steaming cuppa for Kenny to take. It's a funny, wonderful, touching moment of peace, and an important lesson for Kenny as well.

Kenny heads for the back door and a quick smoko. He throws the butt out on the ground, and closes the door. But hearing a noise outside, he opens up again and finds a young man in a hoodie picking up the butt. Kenny quickly shuts the doors. The young fella outside bangs on the door, but Kenny refuses to open it again, refuses the shouted request for another cigarette. When the rapping recurs at the front door moments later, he shouts to the mob not to open the door, but it turns out to be the ambulance drivers, who take Rose away to have her stitched up.

As soon as she leaves, the rapping comes at the door again. It's the young man in the hoodie, now revealed to be Rose's son Stephen. Kenny' accuses of having bashed his mother. Stephen is silent, and then demands another cigarette. Kenny loses his temper, and tells the fellow he's not a man, but a boy: men take care of their families, they don't hurt them. A few heated words, and Kenny is ready to throw a punch through the door, but a sharp command from the tjilpi stops him. Kenny insists that someone has to do something, but the old man counsels that sometimes it's better to do nothing. When Kenny retorts "But I am a part of this!", the old man simply says, "You're a good part of it," quietly acknowledging the service that Kenny provides in the safe harbor of the studio.

Kenny calms down, goes outside and retrieves the tape player he'd chucked out earlier, and begins to close down the station for the evening. The mob gets up and leaves while Kenny goes back on the air, apologizes to his listeners for not playing all their requests, and grimly muses, "There's always tomorrow night. And the next. And the next. And when you think about it, you mob have been a captive audience. Just like me." His last act before locking up is to tip the tjilpi's mug upside down on the sink to drain, thus leaving it with the Aboriginal flag displayed right-side up. Outside with is bike, he lights a cigarette, and is then startled by the presence of the tjilpi sitting on the verandah. The old man mimes smoking, and Kenny reaches into his pack to give the man a smoke. They nod silently to one another and Kenny pedals off into the darkness, turning on his twin headlamps as he goes.

It's a simple, economical story: the box for the DVD sums it up by saying that "DJ Kenny realizes that his job at an Aboriginal community radio station is about more than playing music." The dialog is mostly a monolog for Kenny; the other characters' lines are barely more than monosyllabic. But there is an amazing richness to the production, even though it takes place almost entirely in the three rooms of the trailer radio station. Much of this is achieved through superb set decoration. The door into the broadcast room is painted, like those at the Yuendumu school, with simple but vibrant ancestral designs, as is the exterior of the trailer itself. And the walls within are covered with an array of posters that document the last 25 years of Aboriginal history, community, and social action: music festivals, health initiatives, Land Rights marches, even a print of a painting by Trevor Nickolls showing an incarcerated and howling young man, which hangs in the background whenever Kenny is shown broadcasting his request songs to the inmates far away in their cells. The persistent and subtle humor that characterizes much of the film's action (the running gag about a cuppa tea, for instance) finds voice even in the scene where Kenny first confronts young Stephen: on rear door where that scene takes place is large, prominent poster for Rachel Perkins' 1998 film Radiance, for which director Warwick Thornton was the director of photography. (Thornton was also the host of the eponymous Green Bush radio show at CAAMA when he was in his late teens.)

The stereo and broadcasting equipment is old and out of date and half broken down, but as Kenny proves, not to be thrown away. In an interview published in Meanjin in March 2006, Thornton describes this as a deliberate choice as well*. "I didn't want it to look like it had too much money. The radio station was a survival thing in its own right and it was only just living day to day, like Indigenous people in the community were. And surviving because of people like Kenny, who work for free. Volunteers." The teacups are like that too. At first Kenny can find only the one that he gives to the tjilpi, but later the mob manages to come up with enough for all of them...a bit of magic that is never explained. But Kenny as one man can't find enough to go around. When the mob takes on making the tea and dishing out the stew, though, there's enough to share. That lone mug of Kenny's, with its Aboriginal flag motif, carries more than its own weight as well, for when Kenny, in a final, tiny act of kitchen responsibility flips it over to drain, he sets the flag's design aright for the moment, just as he has helped set things straight for these few people on this one night. The image echoes his closing message to his radio audience: there's always tomorrow.

And then there's the music itself. The soundtrack is critical to the film's message, but brilliantly underplayed for the most part. It often seems to be used as background music--Kenny sets up a song on tape or vinyl, and the volume drops as he talks on the phone, works in the kitchen, or deals with a crisis. But every song helps to reinforce the message of the moment and I'll select just a few highlights. The first tune sets up a central theme of the story--the troubles of young men--with the Tableland Drifters' "Wasting Your Life." Later, after calling the ambulance for Rose and venting his frustrations on the malfunctioning tape deck, he works off the rage with a tape of Gary Foley's angry address on land rights and oppression at a 1982 concert; the Clash play "Armagideon Time" behind him. Then, to give himself some time to have a smoke and wait for the medics, he puts on an LP of the Mutitjulu community singing traditional songs. This brief, pivotal moment in the film, right before his confrontation with Rose's basher son, swings from righteous anger to traditional strength. Its message in mirrored in one lovely little moment as Kenny, pacing from room to room, speaks along with Foley's words; as he echoes the demand for land rights, one of the old aunties at the table gives the briefest warm and indulgent smile as Kenny strides past her. And at the very end, Kenny closes the show down with Frank Yamma's call for a return to the old ways, "Make More Spear."

Long time ago we used to have no beer and wine We used to have good fun in those olden days, oh yeah Let's make more spear Don't you know yourself? We are the people of the land We better hold on Stop hanging round in town Please go back to your home, oh yeah While you kept on drinking You be losing in the cell, oh yeah. Lets make more spear Don't you know yourself? We are the people of the land We better hold on

Yamma's simple lament for responsibility to self and community, sung over a solo acoustic guitar, echoes the simplicity, the difficulty, and the hope of the film itself as it plays out over the credits.

Green Bush is available from the online CAAMA shop in Alice Springs. At less than half the price you'd pay for a similar product from Film Australia, it's a bargain.

*"Making whites obsolete: Lisa Stefanoff talks to Aboriginal film-maker Warwick Thornton," Meanjin 65:1 (March 2006) p. 114ff.
 

Posted at 04:32 PM    
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Published On: Mar 22, 2009 09:10 AM
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