Top end tales

Nicholas Thieberger thien at UNIMELB.EDU.AU
Mon May 29 00:04:41 UTC 2006


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19233398-16947,00.html

Top end tales
Three new films from Arnhem Land highlight a remarkable shift in the 
relationship between indigenous people, the cinema and mainstream 
Australia, writes Nicolas Rothwell
May 27, 2006
"FILMING, it's like being speared," exclaims Lofty Bardayal 
Nadjamerrek, ceremonial master of the stone country in west Arnhem 
Land, grimacing at the camera for a new documentary. A few sequences 
later, he is sitting before one of the rock art sites that choke his 
country, smoking a cigarette with great commitment and explaining the 
principles of cinema to the ancestor spirits: "Old people! Are you 
angry that we are here? You don't need to be ... We are showing the 
paintings for these white people to record. They get pictures that 
can capture our likeness: these are like a reflection on water, or a 
shadow that we cast."

Similarly, at the close of Ten Canoes, Rolf de Heer's 
much-anticipated film from the Arafura wetlands, veteran Aboriginal 
actor David Gulpilil's wry, dry narrating voice takes a step back 
from the ancient tale of revenge and law that has just been acted out 
before us by his relatives and seeks to bridge the gap between life 
and screen. "Now you've seen my story," he says, as the camera pans 
and the light plays on the paperbark trees. Then, with 
understatement: "It's a good story. Not like your story, but a good 
story all the same."

And in the climactic scene of the highly praised Yella Fella, a 
lacerating filmed self-portrait, actor Tom E. Lewis breaks the 
propulsive flow of his journey narrative and turns to face the 
audience.

Abruptly, every code of cinematic distance and polite racial 
discretion is pulverised as he glances around the Tennant Creek 
cemetery by nightfall and sums up, in tears, a life of hurts and 
rejections by both sides of his heritage: "I'm not black, I'm not 
white, I'm a yella fella, and I'm gonna stay that way!"

Unusual transactions are taking place between Aborigines and the 
movie camera these days, as these three new films, all from remote 
Arnhem Land, and each in its particular fashion revolutionary, 
indicate.

Indigenous Australians, for so long excluded from the continent's 
history, then, perhaps a generation back, brought cautiously in from 
the margins as colourful bit players, are no longer mere objects, 
gleaming in all their fascinating difference at the centre of the 
visual field. With remarkable rapidity they have become subjects; 
they no longer simply dance or act their lines. They make films or 
shape them; they speak from their own perspectives.

For mainstream audiences, it is no longer a question of invading 
their world; Aboriginal directors and cultural brokers are themselves 
representing it and showing it to us. This trend is connected to the 
fast-paced emergence of indigenous people as the cultural emblems of 
Australian identity, and film is very much the new frontier here.

It has taken barely a generation to go from the first significant, 
sympathetic depiction of an indigenous presence in the movies - the 
young Gulpilil as the elusive desert boy in Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout 
(1971) - to today's ambitious, exploratory, Aboriginal-haunted 
productions. In part, this is because of the breakdown of the 
barriers of geography and the increasing centrality of the cinema and 
the televisual in modern lives. It is also in part because of the 
profound affinity between indigenous cultural patterns and film.

Remote communities in northern and central Australia have a tendency 
always to seem like stage sets, full of beauty and picturesque 
squalors; life there is performative, rich in drama, shimmer, the 
flicker of enacted momentary events.

The marriage between the camera and the indigenous world, first 
explored by pioneer anthropologists and long spiced with eager 
voyeurism, has not been a difficult one to consummate. The 
relationship, though, has undergone rapid political and aesthetic 
change. A glance in time's rearview mirror shows how steep the 
learning curve has been for both sides.

Just 13 years ago, indigenous intellectual Marcia Langton prepared a 
manifesto for the Australian Film Commission, laying bare the habits 
of the time and dissecting the place of black Australians in the 
movies.

"Can we decolonise our minds?" she wondered, as she allowed her 
thoughts to drift over classics of the epoch, such as Crocodile 
Dundee, in which the hero has such intense understanding of the 
natives that he can sneak off for a quick night-time corroborree 
while his American bride-in-waiting slumbers peacefully beside a 
scenic billabong.

Attitudes to Aborigines, though changing fast, were still weighed 
down by stereotypes. Above all, indigenous ways of being and thinking 
were constantly judged from the mainstream perspective.

Radical anthropologist John von Sturmer wrote a celebrated essay in 
those days, Aborigines, Representation, Necrophilia. He argued that 
Aboriginal societies were seen as beyond the pale because of their 
alarming excessiveness, their appetites, their mesmerising refusal to 
accept limits. He felt a destructiveness was still being directed at 
indigenous people: they were treated as spectacle, as tableau. Ideal, 
in fact, for film.

Hence the crucial importance of the reversal in recent years that has 
shifted the tone of Australian films about Aboriginal themes and even 
the control of the camera. For in just 1 1/2 decades, the 
intellectual and creative landscape surrounding indigenous 
Australians and the style and content of movies about Aborigines have 
been transformed.

Many factors have gone into this, some trite, some profound. The 
coming of native title has required an exhaustive public discussion 
of the roots of Aboriginal identity; inter-marriage has been a 
striking social trend, the Sydney Olympics canonised Cathy Freeman as 
popular Australia's sporting star, Aboriginal art has become the 
nation's favourite investment vehicle and international badge of 
culture. All this has meant a vast infiltration of the Aboriginal, an 
increase in visibility, leading to familiarity. Indigenous actors, 
dancers, sportspeople and performers all fill the public space.

Above all, an urban Aboriginal creative class exists and has begun 
its own momentous investigation of the traditional world of the 
remote centre and north. This has resulted in a new current of art 
and film, drenched in longing and in deep, sundered sadness.

Thus, in the blink of an eye, Aboriginal Australians have walked from 
the realm of myth and legends; they have gone from the gloomy 
surveillance of anthropology into the sunshine of story. It is an 
epic journey that can be traced best in the cinema and seen in 
several strands.

* * *

FIRST, after Walkabout, came a series of indigenous-accented films 
looking back into Australian history or recapturing the Aboriginal 
presence in modern life.

Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, which starred young 
Arnhem Lander Lewis, and Peter Weir's The Last Wave, another 
production in which Gulpilil played a cryptic, cameo role incarnating 
difference, appeared in the late 1970s and unleashed a cascade of 
successors.

The first overtly political black films, made by partisans of the 
land rights movement, were shown in the same era, while a current of 
gritty realist films with Aboriginal themes was inaugurated by 
Phillip Noyce's Backroads.

This involvement of the country's best mainstream directors, then 
early in their careers, suggests the ferment of the scene in those 
times.

The next wave came in the '90s: native title and the social crisis 
unfolding in remote communities were filling the headlines when the 
desert thriller Dead Heart, set in an ultra-

dysfunctional remote community, and starring Bryan Brown and Ernie 
Dingo, was released in 1996. Indigenous film-makers were also making 
landmark works: by the millennium, Rachel Perkins and Ivan Sen were 
well into their careers. In this way, a twin pressure was changing 
the image of the Aborigine on screen.

For young Aboriginal directors had their own way of seeing the 
indigenous world. Artist Tracey Moffatt offered a critical remake of 
Jedda, the old Charles Chauvel Aboriginal melodrama, as early as 
1990; Sen began a series of atmospheric road movies; and Perkins made 
One Night the Moon, an evocative ballad-musical exploring ideas of 
race.

As the Dreamtime stereotype died and Australia's murky frontier 
history came more vividly alive, mainstream film-makers also began 
finding high drama in indigenous stories and started to take great 
pains to ensure correct consultations with Aboriginal actors and 
communities that had custodianship of the tales they wished to treat.

Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002), a stolen generations drama from 
the Pilbara, was widely seen and praised; de Heer's Tracker, also a 
hunt drama made in the same year, told the story of a native tracker 
aiding in the brutal pursuit of an Aboriginal fugitive.

These were poignant, understated films, in which the depth of the 
lead indigenous character tracking his quarry through the landscape 
(Gulpilil in both movies) was as striking as his unknowable 
remoteness.

And these films, by their acceptance of a central role for their 
Aboriginal actors, by their love for the indigenous face and way of 
being in country, and even by the simple way this was conveyed and 
admired, said much about the new cultural climate.

The same Langton, who once critiqued the place Aboriginal figures 
held in Australian film, sees a more nuanced picture a decade on. In 
a subtle essay for Meanjin magazine she explores the role of the 
Aboriginal tracker figure in these recent movies. It chronicles a 
dramatic change.

Even in the liberal '70s, in Langton's view, there was a kindly tone 
of "romantic racism" about the way Aboriginal characters were shown 
on screen. They were "limited in their capacity to adjust to 
civilisation but they had special traits, particularly mystical ones 
such as extrasensory perception, magical and psychic powers, and a 
supposedly spiritual relationship with nature".

Now a more realistic picture has taken hold. The indigenous actor we 
know may be familiar as a well-rounded character in an urban 
television series or playing a film part written to reflect history 
and social context, with "no limitations to their humanity". Above 
all, the film audience feels with them and is often even encouraged 
to identify with them in the progress of their stories.

Langton is tempted to say that Aboriginal involvement in the scripts 
of the new cinema has been the critical factor.

How much is all this true of the three striking, path-breaking films 
that have just emerged from the corner of Australia where life is 
still lived on indigenous terms: the Top End's remote Arnhem Land?

* * *

TEN Canoes, which opens next month and was shown last week at Cannes, 
is far and away the most ambitious of these ventures. De Heer's 
heroic dream was to make a film in collaboration with the Yolngu 
people of Ramingining, home to his friend Gulpilil.

The finished movie, precise in form, spare in content, has a 
deceptive simplicity about it. In fact, the path to its completion 
involved Fitzcarraldo-like filming exploits on set deep in a 
mosquito-infested swamp and intense efforts at communication across 
the frail bridge between the Western and the Yolngu worlds. A tent 
city was thrown up at remote Murwangi, an old, decayed station. Cast 
and crew lived there in close proximity throughout the shoot.

Mainstream Australians may wonder at the result, an austere 
Aboriginal morality tale unfolding on two time scales from the far 
past and set within a lush and overwhelming landscape. The actors 
speak in Ganalpingu and other Yolngu languages: Gulpilil, whose son 
Jamie is the central figure on screen, provides the English narration.

Casting was decided by family affinities; the actors are near-naked, 
as they would have been in far-off times; the humour, much of it 
involved with bodily functions, is distinctly Yolngu, as are the 
plot's key mechanisms, which focus tightly on superstition and 
revenge. Yet the core scenes of the story, the goose hunt by canoe in 
the watered grasslands of the swamp, descend from a famous 
photographic image taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson in the 
'30s, and this Yolngu fascination with, and co-option of, the images 
others make of them is also entirely characteristic of the world of 
Arnhem Land.

One has the strong sense, watching de Heer's film, that it is a 
loving tribute to a vanishing belief system.

The director's diary of the making of Ten Canoes concludes, in 
telling fashion: "There were tinges of regret all round that this 
great, glorious and difficult adventure was over and that the like of 
it would probably never again be experienced by anyone, ever, 
anywhere."

For the locals, it was an experience of exaltation. Senior 
Ramingining man Bobby Bununngurr recalls being in the canoes on set 
as more than acting, as being "full of life, the spirits are round 
me, the old people they with me, and I feel it, out there I was 
inside by myself, and I was crying".

Cinema is working here not just as art and strange entertainment but 
as inter-cultural membrane. Urban Australians will not find a more 
faithful window into the old world of the Aboriginal north than Ten 
Canoes, even if the film can provide only a surface glimpse of the 
Yolngu's poetic, custom-laden realm.

By their plot choice and time setting, de Heer and the Ramingining 
cast exclude all mention of the present. As is well known, social 
conditions in Arnhem Land are poor, so this decision may seem at 
first somewhat like making a film about a beautiful German cathedral 
during the Allied bombing campaign in the last days of World War II.

But Ten Canoes is framed as a deliberate morality tale, a saga to 
teach the wayward younger generation about the strong law of the 
bush. "Everything is changing," says the female lead, Frances 
Djulibing. "Everything is going, going, gone now, the only thing 
[young people] know is some ceremony. Maybe they're going to keep 
this film with them so they can put it in their head."

At the same time that de Heer was making Ten Canoes, in the stone 
country plateau of west Arnhem Land, observational documentary 
film-maker Kim McKenzie was putting the finishing touches to another 
collaborative jewel, Fragments of the Owl's Egg. Subtle in structure, 
understated, full of grace and gentle laughter, this film tells 
several related stories: how Nadjamerrek, a celebrated indigenous 
artist, is directing a fire management project from his home at 
Kabulwarnamyo; how rock art surrounds him at every turn; and how he 
quests far and wide by helicopter to find a lost art site he 
remembers from his youth.

The story is told in Lofty's beautiful, endangered language, 
Kundedjnjenghmi; it is narrated by linguist Murray Garde and the 
strange words we hear seem to mingle with the splendour of the 
plateau, its rocks, streams and paperbarks, its cave walls and 
overhangs filled with ancient art.

There are moments of sweet inter-cultural closeness, as when Lofty 
presents the veteran pilot of west Arnhem Land, Ian Munro, with a 
beeswax rock painting of a helicopter; there are moments when the old 
world of Arnhem Land seems to live again and near-forgotten clan 
estates and boundaries are recalled in detail.

Fragments, much like Ten Canoes, is a film made on Aboriginal terms 
dealing with traditional preoccupations, yet it is very much an 
artistic hybrid of two ways of seeing. It marks the glorious climax, 
and also perhaps the end, of the classical ethnographic film 
tradition in Australia. The pathos of the story is extreme: a movie 
narrated in a dying language, paying tribute to the last traditional 
master of a near-emptied country, discovers at last a style of film 
that crosses fluidly between worlds.

Not far south, in those same late dry season days on the pastoral 
fringes of Arnhem Land, Lewis was just beginning a journey of his own 
that would have startling cinematic results. Lewis, the son of the 
Ngukurr artist Angelina George, wanted to rediscover his biological 
father, a white stockman.

As a child, Lewis was reared at Roper River mission in a full-blood 
family, but questions of culture, race and identity have always 
dogged him and, ever since Schepisi came up to him at an airport and 
recruited him for Jimmie Blacksmith, his half-caste being has branded 
his life.

Restless spirit that he was, it seemed almost natural for him to turn 
to film when the time came for his self-analysis. With him in his 
four-wheel-drive he took not just his tranquil mother but also 
prominent young indigenous director Sen.

Yella Fella, the product of their trip (it was shown on SBS earlier 
this month) is raw, wild, immediately human and communicative. Taboos 
fall: the pain of being between cultures, belonging fully to neither, 
is squarely confronted, the grief and helpless rage spills out.

Lewis goes deep into himself as he travels to his birthplace on the 
Barkly tableland and up and down the Roper Highway, remembering the 
stages of his young life in the last days of the old frontier, how he 
came face to face with his father at Borroloola, in the Gulf country; 
how they fought and at last embraced; all the slights and torments of 
his upbringing surface.

"It's film as medicine," Lewis says. "We did it as medicine for the 
family." He ends his performance in a cemetery at twilight, seeking 
desperately, unsuccessfully, to close the drama and bring down the 
curtain of peace and silence. But for Lewis, as actor and subject, 
the drama of Aboriginality, of being watched and seen and different, 
and seeing oneself through the eyes of others, is never done.

Perhaps it is not a complete accident that these three films, which 
do so much to extend the scope and reach of Australian cinema, all 
stem from Arnhem Land, one of the least disturbed and most contested 
areas of the indigenous continent, where memories are strong and the 
consequences of contact still loom in the mind.

Each of these productions carefully gives pride of place to the 
indigenous voice, imagining eye and shaping hand. And when one leaves 
the cinema and steps back into the urgent flow of modern life the 
shift of emphasis seems to linger, for through a few short years the 
indigenous way of seeing has begun to mingle subtly with the broader 
perspectives of Australian life. The new cinema of the Aboriginal 
world, in its many forms, has a hybrid, open-ended feel, as if a 
tidal exchange were under way.

Indigenous film-makers may be reshaping the wider image of their 
people and cultures but at the same time mainstream writers and 
directors are coming to regard the nation's Aboriginal story as a 
treasure trove that lies entwined with their own traditions, 
illuminating a common world.

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