home | news l

How a movie about egg-gathering and Aborigines manages to tell a much bigger story

By Proffessor Germaine Greer

29 January 2007 - Even as recently as 20 years ago, the suggestion that the power that drives Australian culture is Aboriginal would have struck most people as extreme. Then there were the Sydney Olympics, and more and more tourists did the Outback pilgrimage and were regaled with various encapsulated versions of Aboriginal culture; they bought their dot paintings in the store-front galleries in Alice Springs and went back to suburbia in America, Europe, Asia and Australia none the wiser for the experience.

The effort the indigenous communities were putting into taking the long step from hunter-gatherers to consumer capitalists continues to cost them dear. A new diplomatic art language was forged for the intercultural transaction; whitefellas saluted it, bought it, sold it, hung it on the walls of their museums - but the object of the whole painful exercise was missed. The whitefellas never got the message. Their disrespect for country was never shaken; the mining companies kept on carting away the blood-red hills. Aboriginal kids kept on sniffing petrol.

The anguish and the genius of Australia's indigenous peoples is personified in the charismatic figure of Gulpilil. His country is Marwuyu, in Arnhem Land, but you will more often find him in Ramingining, where 15 or so Yolngu clans have ended up. Probably because their territory was not the most attractive to the land-grabbers - what with its huge crocodile population and the hordes of stinging flies, ticks and leeches - the Yolngu got left alone longer than most other groups, so in the 1950s there was still a culture for Gulpilil to become expert in. He was a genuine hunter and tracker, a powerful and graceful dancer, and he spoke several Aboriginal languages as well as Kriol (which used to be called pidgin) and, after he went to the mission school in Maningrida, English.

The creativity of the Yolngu people survives. They continue to melt away into the bush for ceremonies that no whitefella has ever seen, sorry business that lasts for weeks, hunting circuits that coincide with tides and phases of the moon rather than the timetables of government officials. They have kept their reticence, a key value for hunter-gatherer peoples, largely intact. They continue to be a law unto themselves. Just.
Gulpilil was seen by Nicolas Roeg in 1967 when he was only 14, and cast in the film Walkabout as the unnamed "Black Boy"; after an indigenous person is cast in such a role, he usually disappears from view. Sudden affluence and dislocation from the intricate web of relationships that is tribal life sets him adrift in a dangerous world, where he capsizes and is lost. But Gulpilil has lasted as the generic indigenous actor longer than most. In The Proposition (2005), he plays a native policeman, a virtually non-speaking bit-part that mostly involves walking through the back of shots. When Gulpilil does it, Nick Cave's rather portentous cod-Victorian dialogue goes unheard: Gulpilil cannot take a step or make a gesture that is not expressive. Nevertheless, in 50 years he has hardly worked at all, and when he works he usually plays a creature that doesn't exist: a generic blackfellow, not a Yolngu man.

He has played endless bit-parts in odd episodes of TV series - Fingerbone in Storm Boy (1976), Chris Lee in The Last Wave (1977), Moodoo the tracker in Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) - always the pawn in someone else's game, often nameless, merely "Aborigine". His huge mental universe remained unglimpsed, unexplored. In 2000, when Rolf De Heer cast Gulpilil in the lead role as the Tracker in the film of that name, he realised that Gulpilil had more films in his head than the whitefella system would ever be able to make - and so he embarked on the collaboration that has resulted in Ten Canoes, out in March. It has been a struggle.

Gulpilil and the other Yolngu survivors were fascinated by the glass-plate photographs taken of their people in the 1930s by anthropologist Donald Thomson, and wanted to recreate "Thomson time" in their movie. Central to the story Gulpilil decided to tell was the gathering of the eggs of the magpie goose in the Arafura swamp south of Ramingining, but none of the available actors had ever done it, nor had they ever built the bark canoes they needed to do it in. Tradition demanded that they not act people of a different skin; people in relationships in the film had to be similarly related in real life. Though inter-clan warfare is a constant element in their history, they didn't want to make their communities seem dysfunctional, and so on.

Thomson time had to be black and white, but the exemplary tale of the distant past had to be in colour.
For "complex reasons", Gulpilil does not actually appear in Ten Canoes, but he tells the story in voiceover, and his huge personality pervades the film. The star of De Heer's film is, as Gulpilil would have wanted, the Arafura swamp, where the reflected blaze of the tropical sun splinters through cycads and paperbarks, against which the naked actors lope with inexpressible grace.

A man I spoke to on the way out of the film said that he didn't find the story particularly compelling; he watched the wrong story. The real story is the struggle to keep Yolngu genius alive, and how, insidiously, inevitably, it is being lost.

Source:The Guardian

related links :

• 10 canoes website

Further information: culture issues page - includes news index and external links