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Now locals can paddle their own canoe

Garry Maddox Film Writer

8 September 2008 - FOR five years, the Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer has been drawn back to the stories of a remote Arnhem Land community.

First came the landmark film Ten Canoes, which won acclaim around the world with a comic love story set 1000 years ago during a magpie-goose egg hunt.

Then came a project to train young indigenous filmmakers from the Arafura Swamp community that collaborated with de Heer on the film. It became known as Eleven Canoes.

Now comes Twelve Canoes, a website that celebrates and preserves the culture of a community where people might speak seven or eight languages but not English.

The website features a dozen short films covering such topics as the local creation story, ancestors, the first white contact, languages, seasons, kinship and ceremonies. They will be voiced in English and Yolngu when the website goes live today.

"It seemed important not to just turn up, make a film, then leave - to leave something behind," de Heer said before a screening of the 12 short films in Sydney last night.

"It grew from there because it seemed like an extraordinary thing we were involved in."

De Heer, whose other films have included Bad Boy Bubby, The Tracker and Alexandra's Project, worked closely with the community again on Twelve Canoes.

A key figure was his Ten Canoes co-director, Peter Djigirr, who travelled from remote Ramingining to Sydney with his wife, the painter Gladys Womati, and their six-year-old adopted son, Terence Malibirr, who has grown up without speaking English.

Terence, who had never worn shoes before, needed three layers of socks to keep warm even on a sunny afternoon.

Djigirr, who is considered an expert on catching crocodiles and finding their eggs, said the website would show future generations how the community once lived.
"That's very important for us, not to lose all the connections," he said.

Despite the remoteness of the area, Djigirr said the locals used the internet for banking so they would have no trouble with the Twelve Canoes website.

The executive director of the National Film and Sound Archive, Paolo Cherchi Usai, called the site "a work of pure visual poetry" that would be of interest to the creative community and students around the world.

http://www.12canoes.com.au

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald

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