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New films shine spotlight on the humanity of Aborigines

By Cary Darling

15 December 2002 - They're one of the globe's invisible people.

Most know them only from tourist ads, in which they appear almost as totems, evoking Outback exotica. A smaller number know some of their art, the colorful dot paintings of a strange, sunburned landscape.

American poster for Rabbit-Proof Fence

Yet there are few images that convey the humanity of Australia's struggling Aboriginal population, who - numbering just under 400,000 out of the country's 19.7 million people - can seem invisible even at home.

But that may be starting to change, thanks to the movies. One of the heavily anticipated films of the holiday season is Rabbit-Proof Fence, a labor of love for Australian director Phillip Noyce (Patriot Games) that tells the heartbreaking story of three Aboriginal girls in the '30s forcibly removed from their homes to be raised with white families. It brings to light the plight of ''the Stolen Generation,'' the name for the children put in foster care as art of the Australian government's now discarded plan to dilute Aboriginality through intermarriage.

The film, opening Christmas Day in South Florida, just took the Best Picture prize at Australia's equivalent of the Academy Awards, the Australian Film Institute Awards, and American Oscar buzz is growing as well.

On the indie-film circuit, Aboriginal director Ivan Sen has been making waves with Beneath Clouds, a road movie of sorts about an Aboriginal boy and half-Aboriginal girl on the lam. It recently won two awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, and Sen was named best Director at the Australian Film Institute Awards. Another Aboriginal-themed film, Australian Rules, nabbed the screenplay honors at the awards.

Through these images -- as well as those of sprinter Cathy Freeman winning at the 2000 Olympics and the 16-city U.S. tour from the ultra-contemporary Bangarra Dance Theater in 2001 -- those outside Australia are getting a glimpse of a 40,000-60,000-year-old culture and its modern-day lineage. For a people whom the original British colonists thought would slouch into extinction through neglect and slaughter within a few generations --some in the Australian government felt it was their duty to smooth ''the pillow for a dying race'' -- these movies are symptomatic of a tough, survivor's spirit.

PREDECESSORS

Rabbit-Proof Fence and Beneath Clouds undoubtedly will elevate the Aboriginal profile on a global scale, but these aren't the first films to deal with such issues. Walkabout, the 1971 movie from British director Nicolas Roeg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, Bad Timing) stranded two British children in the hostile Outback whose salvation rested with an Aboriginal man on a ''walkabout,'' an Aboriginal custom in which a boy on the cusp of manhood has to leave his tribe and survive on his own.

Yet the film, often brilliant and full of haunting imagery, is very impressionistic, and viewers leave knowing little more about Aboriginal culture and attitudes than when they started. Better in this regard are The Last Wave, the breakthrough 1976 film from Peter Weir (Witness, Dead Poets Society), and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, a blast of acetelyne celluloid by Fred Schepisi (Six Degrees of Separation) and based on a novel by Thomas Kenneally (Schindler's List).

Both deal with vengeance. In The Last Wave, an Aboriginal apocalypse of a world under water comes true in modern-day Sydney, where a white yuppie lawyer (Richard Chamberlain) is beset by visions of the end of time. In Jimmie Blacksmith, based on a true story, revenge is less metaphoric and more personal: A 19th century Aboriginal man snaps and slaughters a white family.

TAKING CONTROL

It wasn't until the '80s, though, that Aboriginal filmmakers began to craft their own images, and they're often startling. Whereas so many white stories about Aborigines deal with them as people of the past - even Rabbit-Proof Fence is set 70 years ago - it's up to Aborigines themselves to remind us that they are very much people of the present.

The most lauded of this new generation is Tracey Moffatt, a visual artist and photographer whose work has been shown widely in the United States and Europe. She has garnered attention with her video-music clips (INXS) and, especially, her films.

The short subject Nice Coloured Girls, which posits three Aboriginal women who cruise Sydney's red-light district searching to pick up a white man, earned some international acclaim. But her most impressive work is her first feature, Bedevil, from 1993. Though flawed, this surreal triptych of stories lets us see Aborigines as three-dimensional modern people who aren't just victims. Along with Sen, Moffatt is the best hope for a particularly black Australian filmmaking sensibility.

COMEDY, TOO

Being able to laugh is part of being human, of course, but so much of Aboriginal film imagery is serious and severe. There were some comedic moments in Crocodile Dundee but the best example is The Life of Harry Dare, a 1994 caper-comedy from Aleski Vellis about a young guy on the hunt for his stolen van.

Set among middle-class, urban Aborigines, Dare still manages to skewer Australian racial attitudes. When our two heroes talk their way into a dance club and are fawned over by posing as black Americans - but get thrown out when it's found out who they really are - it points out the hypocrisy of those who celebrate the exotic and the foreign but denigrate the homegrown.

What all these movies prove is that, despite the Australian government's attempts to remove it from the continent, Aboriginal culture has survived. Their numbers today are estimated to be more than when the Europeans landed just over 200 years ago. And many Aborigines are now calling themselves ''Kooris'' -- meaning ''people'' in an Aboriginal language -- instead of ''Aborigine,'' an English word that can be used for any native peoples.

There's even an Aboriginal flag -- featuring red for the Australian land, black for the Aboriginal skin and a yellow sun in the middle.

If Rabbit-Proof Fence is successful here, perhaps distributors will take a chance on other Aboriginal-themed films. And Aborigines can stop being a forgotten people and take their place on the world stage.

Source: The Miami Herald

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