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key indigenous australian issues
| home | news lMan who lives in two worldsBy Steve Meacham 11 December 2002 - You can imagine the controversy if Nicole Kidman or Russell Crowe was shown smoking marijuana on the national broadcaster. But this week one of Australia's best-known actors will be seen smoking a bong on an ABC documentary - and no one will turn a hair.
Since 1971, when he became an overnight sensation in Walkabout, Nicholas Roeg's classic about a clash of cultures, David Gulpilil has been the world's favourite Aboriginal star. His credits include some of the greatest movies made in this country: Storm Boy (1976), The Last Wave (1977), Crocodile Dundee (1986) and, this year, both The Tracker and Rabbit-Proof Fence (for which he received AFI nominations for best actor and best supporting actor respectively). There have been moments of glitz and glamour. He learned to drink alcohol with John Mellion and Dennis Hopper. He has partied with Bob Dylan and joined John Lennon on the roof as the Beatles recorded 'Get Back'. He's been nominated for more awards than most actors dream of and has been honoured with an Order of Australia medal. Yet here he is, half naked on the dirt floor of a humpy, slowly getting stoned. For filmmaker Darlene Johnson, it was pretty amazing that Gulpilil allowed her to shoot the dope scene. Even more startling was the fact he had the chance to cut it from her documentary, Gulpilil - One Red Blood, but chose to leave it in. "What's amazing about David is his candidness," she says. "I have more respect for him because he chose to show that side. As he says, he wanted 'No bullshit'." The two met "in a bar, as you do" on the set of Rabbit-Proof Fence. The Aboriginal filmmaker had been shooting a documentary about the making of Phillip Noyce's epic and was about to fly to New York because Stolen Generation, her best-known work, had been nominated for an Emmy Award. Gulpilil told her how much he had enjoyed Stolen Generations and suggested she make a documentary about his own life. Johnson, 32, was both amazed and flattered. Amazed no one had thought of documenting Gulpilil's life before, flattered because, as she puts it: "I'm a Koori. Here's an Aborigine based on tribal land in Arnhem Land asking me, a white-skinned young woman from an urban setting, to make a film for posterity, something he could pass down to his family." What makes Gulpilil unique is his ability, as he says, "to live in two worlds". There's the world of movies, premieres, airline tickets.And then there's his traditional life - hunting kangaroos and crocodiles as his ancestors did for centuries before him in his tribal homelands. "That's the real me on screen," Gulpilil said. "I walk on red carpets and eat caviar but this is where my paradise is, where I was born. I'm the same person in both worlds. I wanted the documentary to show how I live and where I hunt." As soon as the documentary begins, you realise Gulpilil is different. "I don't know how old I am," he says. "I think I'm 48 ... maybe 50." Many of his Aboriginal contemporaries are dead and Johnson believes that's why Gulpilil was so keen to see the documentary made; as if he felt time was running out to record his contribution to Australian culture and the rebuffing of racial stereotypes. In the documentary Jack Thompson recalls the impact of Walkabout: "No Australian director would have made an Aboriginal man so sexily attractive to a western woman." Only four years earlier, in Journey out of Darkness, the key Aboriginal roles had been played by a blacked-up white actor and an Asian, Kamal. Gulpilil's career nose-dived in the 1990s, partly because he asked for "a million dollars" to appear in Crocodile Dundee 2. It was a tough time, with petrol sniffing and alcohol getting a grip on Ramingining, where he lives. But Gulpilil and other elders have now made it a dry community and the petrol sniffing has been conquered. Gulpilil is pleased with Johnson's warts-and-all portrait. "It tells my missing story," he says. Gulpilil: One Red Blood airs on the ABC today at 8.30pm. Source: The Sydney Morning Herald David Gulpilil Interview Rhianna Patrick talked to legendary Australian actor David Gulpilil about his life and about his work. As a fifteen year old who starred in Nicholas Roeg’s 1971 film, Walkabout, David Gulpilil has seen a lot in his 49 years.
He has been experiencing a renaissance in his career with The Tracker and it’s obvious during our interview that David is enjoying the attention. It’s been a long road for the actor who was plucked from obscurity and there have been many obstacles along the way including his well publicised jailing for drink driving and his long battle with alcoholism. But it all seems to be behind him now and he’s frank about the message he now wants to send to indige - nous youth on the experiences he’s had with the bottle. He admits that you need to control the substance and not let the substance control you as has been his experience. But where has the actor been hiding out in what seems a while since we last saw him on our screens in 1996? David lives in a tent shed in Ramingining in the Northern Territory and is quite open about the lack of facilities in his abode and the exploitation he’s experienced during his career. He talks strongly about his home in Ramingining and the luxuries that you and I take for granted that he is yet to have. But the exploitation he faced during his rise to fame is quite real and he has not profited as much as others who have worked on the same films. The most disturbing is his $10,000 payment for his work on Crocodile Dundee that went on to earn millions for the producers. Even though he acknowledges now that he was ripped off, he also talks fondly of the famous people he met while working the marketing campaign for Walkabout. The movie that shot him to stardom and kick started his career. Along the way he met Jimi Hendrix (“I meet Jimi Hendrix when we had to perform down in Central Park in New York”), John Lennon (“…at a party on the top of a roof and that where I meet him. We got picture somewhere there.”) While in Rome for the premiere of Walkabout, David met and had a picture taken with Bruce Lee whose film Enter the Dragon was playing in the cinema next door on the same night. And while in Waikiki he met Bob Marley.
Before his career took off, David was an accomplished hunter, tracker and ceremonial dancer having been taught by his uncle before going to a mission school in Maningrida in North East Arnhem Land. By the time he was fluent in English, he could already speak half a dozen or so traditional languages from around the region and was already an initiated Mandipingu man of the Yolngu culture. He has never forgotten his dancing and has taken out the prestigious Australia Day eisteddfod in Darwin four times and been made an Order of Australia for his dedication to the arts. He was also nominated for an Australian Film Institute (AFI) award for Best Leading Actor for his role as Fingerbone in Storm Boy (1977) but missed out. With the growing popularity of the internet, information is now only a keyboard away and the same goes for David, who has a website devoted to him www.gulpilil.com that is maintained by a fan in Santa Cruz, California in the United States. When you get a website, you must be big. Source: ABC Message Stick Gulpilil method: not acting, just being By Peter Munro 11 July 2002 - David Gulpilil slowly moved his long, thin frame, all stick legs and no bum, and said that dancing had taken him around the world, from a tin humpy in Arnhem Land to Hollywood and back to his home on the banks of Australia's largest swamp.
"I belong to the song and dance," he said. "I feel with my body, my foot and my step ... the movements of the song and the animals ... I am dancing." With his still face and stooped shoulders he looks more the actor than dancer. But the 15-year-old dancer who was discovered by British director Nicolas Roeg to star in his 1971 film Walkabout and who went on to play roles in films such as Storm Boy and Rabbit-Proof Fence, all screening at the fourth Sydney Indigenous Film Festival, said he does not act. "I don't pretend to be someone. I want to be the person, who they are, how they sit and how they look even when they move outside the angle of the camera." Gulpilil, 49, in Sydney recently for the filming of a documentary on his life, travelled with Roeg to promote Walkabout in Cannes and Hollywood. He played only minor roles over the next 30 years, including a part in the hit Crocodile Dundee (for which he said he is still unhappy about being paid only $10,000). "I thought I was going to be a big movie star like John Wayne but I was left out," he said. "The acting is easy. The hard thing was getting offered the jobs." He described his career and the Aboriginal film industry as "starting to come up now". In the past two years he has appeared in three films, including the lead role, his first since Walkabout, in The Tracker, which opens the Melbourne International Film Festival later this month. His character is employed to hunt down an Aboriginal fugitive, a similarity to his character in Rabbit-Proof Fence, who is used to track three girls fleeing from a mission home. In that film he steals scenes with his silences (he has only two lines) and the slightest flicker of his glassy eyes or the movement of his craggy face. He can be as quiet in real life, often passing off questions to his minder and companion, Wayne O'Donovan. At other times, erratically, he springs out of his chair and laughs, waving his arms and legs as he talks about the two worlds of the indigenous actor, one where neither his fame nor even his films reach. "I live in one world with a knife, fork and beer and I go back to the billy can boiling and a camp fire," he said. "Sydney is my Hollywood. But I go back home and stay in the bush in a tent shed and it all disappears." Source: The Sydney Morning Herald HOW TO SEE THE TRACKER Please note that ENIAR is not responsible for external links content and does not endorse a particular website The Tracker is not distributed for sale in Europe. ENIAR supporter Steve Lowman says that a double CD pack of The Tracker/Walkabout (another classic movie starring David Gulpilil) is now not on the list of the major online CD seller, CD-Wow - infact The Tracker is now on no UK list. However, it is possible to import the double pack from Australian DVD
sellers, and probably for a very reasonable price. The best search I have
found for this is at the following URL: I believe that, whatever the listings say about it being Region 4, all copies are actually Region 0, and will play on PAL Region 2 machines. This search result page can take you to any of a number of Australian DVD sellers, which generally confirm that this is a multi-region DVD pack, and perhaps it is up to individual purchasers to decide who they want to buy from. The search result page says that prices include delivery, but one cannot be 100% sure of that until the appropriate stage of the purchasing process at each individual seller site. Obviously, delivery from Australia will take a little more time than from UK. relate links :
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From his promotional tour for his first movie, he seems to be the only one still alive … except for Mohammed Ali, who he also mentions. 
