I recently read the Uluru Statement From the Heart, issued in 2017. (SBS have it in multiple languages, available everywhere.)

It's very moving.

Some extracts:

"Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs...

"This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or 'mother nature', and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples... This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.

"How could it be otherwise? That peoples possessed a land for sixty millennia and this sacred link disappears from world history in merely the last two hundred years?..."

The statement calls for a First Nations voice to be enshrined in the Constitution, and for a "Makarrata Commission" to "supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history". ("Makarrata" expresses the idea of coming together, conflict resolution, peacemaking, and justice.)


The pictures in this post were taken at Hanging Rock in 2007. Widely known as the location for Joan Lindsay's 1967 novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, filmed by Peter Weir in 1975, the area's real story -- of the colonial oppression experienced by the Wurundjeri people -- is much less familiar, triggering the launch of the Miranda Must Go campaign in 2017.

Some stories from 2021:

8 April: "The deaths in custody of five Indigenous Australians since March highlight the treatment of First Nations peoples as one of the most pressing policy issues facing the Australian government. They also come at a time when recognition of First Nations peoples in the Constitution faces many barriers, including diminishing support from within the government. Despite this, our research reveals substantial public support for a First Nations Voice to parliament, pressing the case for action."

26 May: The Uluru Statement From the Heart was awarded the 2021 Sydney Peace Prize.

6 July: "Four years after the Uluru Statement from the Heart, the time is now to put a referendum to the Australian people."

Earlier this month, NAIDOC week (National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee) featured the theme "Heal Country". The Conversation ran a number of related articles, of which these are just two examples:

"For Indigenous people, Country is more than a landscape. We tell, and retell, stories of how our Country was made, and we continue to rely upon its resources -- food, water, plants and animals -- to sustain our ways of life. Country also holds much of our heritage, including scarred trees, stone arrangements, petroglyphs, rock art, tools and much more. Indigenous people talk of, and to, Country, as they would another person... As cultural and spiritual beings, and with deep and ongoing attachments to lands and waters, the impacts of climate change interrupt and make uncertain our unique ways of life. This increasing reality is shared with Indigenous peoples all over the world."

"Sacred trees ... hold our ancestor stories; they are a direct link to our old people... Sacred trees also stand at the intersection of Aboriginal heritage and environmental protection, activism and politics. Economic- and wildfire-driven deforestation represent omnipresent threats to sacred trees and Indigenous heritage more broadly... Will your grandchildren have the same opportunity to visit and sit with sacred trees on Country -- to listen to them, to speak to them and to appreciate them? The ongoing desecration of Aboriginal heritage and Country, particularly our waterways, directly traumatises Aboriginal people."



I found myself reading all this shortly after watching two movies, both of which feature First Nations people.

The themes of Tudawali (Steve Jodrell, 1987) are sadly reminiscent of those we saw in Charlie's Country.

Robert Tudawali, born somewhere around 1929, was chosen in 1952 by Charles Chauvel and his wife Elsa to play the leading role in a movie called Jedda. Released in 1955, this was not only the first Australian film to feature Aboriginal actors in lead roles (Rosalie Kunoth-Monks played Jedda), but also the first to be made in colour, and the first to show at Cannes.

Tudawali later played a few more, somewhat inferior, acting parts, but he also earned his living as a showground boxer. In the 1960s he emerged as an activist, advocating equality and self-determination for First Nations peoples. His life, though, was quite tough.

Jodrell's film explores a world of alienation, in which proud people with millennia of culture behind them struggle to find a place in a system that has been imposed on them. We see the difficulty of transitioning from rural to urban, from nature to celluloid, from deprivation to sudden wealth. We see poverty, inferior housing, alcohol abuse, imprisonment, marriage breakdown, and tuberculosis. We see the way money filters into communal pockets only to seep away.

So many years later, the Uluru Statement From the Heart notes: "Proportionally, we are the most incarcerated people on the planet. We are not an innately criminal people... These dimensions of our crisis tell plainly the structural nature of our problem. This is the torment of our powerlessness. We seek constitutional reforms to empower our people and take a rightful place in our own country. When we have power over our destiny our children will flourish. They will walk in two worlds and their culture will be a gift to their country."

Tudawali died, at the age of just 38, from severe burns (exactly what happened to cause them is not entirely clear). "His grave," the film tells us, "like that of many Aboriginals buried in Darwin Cemetery, is marked only by a number -- 103."



It's an interesting film in that it sheds light on attitudes to Australia's First Nations people down the years. We can contrast the 1950s, when Jedda was made, not only with the 1980s, when Tudawali was made, but also with our own era, 30-odd years further on again.

The key characters in Chauvel's movie are Jedda, an Aboriginal who is raised by a white woman on a cattle station as though she were a white child, but who is constantly drawn to Aboriginal culture; "Joe the half-caste", who is head stockman on the station, and in love with Jedda (this role was played by a white actor in blackface...); and Marbuck (played by Tudawali), a traditional Aborigine still very much in touch with the old culture, and exercising a powerful emotional and sexual attraction. Jedda is drawn to Marbuck, but the bond creates tragedy for both of them.

We see several clips from Jedda in Jodrell's Tudawali, but I have not seen the whole thing, so I'm relying here on the opinions of those who have. It is very much a contested classic.

Paul Byrnes: "It’s probably fair to say that Chauvel was a man of his time, with a belief in the separation of the races and the primacy of ‘blood’ as the determiner of behaviour. It’s also true that he had an unusual degree of sympathy for, and interest in, Aboriginal culture."

Kellie Dillon: "The negative representations and stereotypes of Aboriginal people in Jedda are reflective of the reality of policy-making at the time. The 1950s in Australia saw assimilation policies equate to the social typing of Aboriginal people, who were believed to be an inferior, primitive race and better off either being assimilated completely or destroyed."

Chelsea Barnett: "The deaths and failures of the Indigenous characters in the film [Jedda and Marbuck die; Joe fails to protect Jedda] serve to erase Indigeneity from the national image, in turn legitimating radical nationalist masculinity and its engagement with Aboriginality in terms of exploitation, rather than assimilation. Despite its unprecedented use of Indigenous actors in leading roles, Jedda’s representation of masculinities ultimately constituted an Australian ideal in which the project of assimilation was rendered pointless, leaving no space for Indigeneity in the nation’s future."



Yet, despite all this baggage, co-star Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, now an activist and politician, remains relatively positive about Jedda. She describes the casting experience as a bit like a horse-fair, and remarks that no-one really made the effort to explain to the actors what was going on. Nevertheless, not only did the movie open up "a whole world" for her, and kindle in her the first sparks of a desire to push back and not accept subservience, but she also interprets it as an indictment of the white attitudes of the 1950s: "Well, we were declared savages anyway. So what's new about that? As far as I'm concerned people were still being kicked in the ribs at four in the morning in the cattle camps. So it was nothing new..."

Graeme Turner also points out the opinion of Aboriginal author Colin Johnson with regard to Jedda: "Although he initially describes it as a ‘sort of Tarzan in black face’ he goes on to explain that there is an Aboriginal way of viewing this film which contradicts conventional white assumptions of its inherent, if inevitable, racism. Johnson suggests the film has an Aboriginal reading, focussing on ‘the stealing of women, the social problem of wrongway relationships, and ... the fear/attraction of Mission-educated Aboriginal women when confronted by their Aboriginality in the form of an Aboriginal male ... in full control of his being'. Johnson sees Tudawali’s Marbuck ... as ‘the only dignified Aboriginal male lead that has been allowed to exist in films made by white directors in Australia’."

Interesting. Ultimately, we all see through our own eyes, which are influenced by our own times. The best we can do is to be aware of those limitations.



Jodrell's Tudawali has very much moved on from all that. Clearly in evidence is an unambiguous sympathy with the situation that has been thrust on Australia's First Nations people. The main drawback, though, as this critique underlines, is the way that fictional white characters (mostly journalist Harry Wilkins, but also medical practitioner Dr Rayment) are given the job of carrying the story of white guilt and black anger. Inevitably, the political statements "now reveal as much about the 1980s mindset of the white film-makers as they do about Tudawali, Aboriginal people and the issues of the 1950s and 1960s... The film works best when it makes the comments indirectly, as when it presents the Chauvels as a couple true to their times, courteous and kindly, but also very much of the period when it came to representations of Aboriginal people."

The creators of Tudawali were not unaware of this problem of perspective. The Daily News ran a profile in 1987, in which co-producer Julia Overton describes it as "a frustrating film to research because most of the history is oral and what is written down is a white person's account... and it's hard for us trying to portray a black attitude and the struggle Tudawali and his people went through".

Good already. But still... You do get sick of white people driving the action all the time.

As Turner remarks: "Even a film as aware of its constituent politics as Steve Jodrell's recent Tudawali still implied that while whites can cross the divide between the cultures, the Aborigines can't."

Nevertheless, the movie has its poignancy and its resonance. As this critic testifies, "Tudawali is a powerful and important story: we're now over fifty years on since Jedda, and many attitudes toward Aboriginal people -- particularly in the Northern Territory and Queensland -- have not changed."

The real Tudawali reportedly said: "I hunted, fought, sang like all my people. No clothes. No worries. The country I ran in was my own -- every rock, tree meant something to me."

Which reminded me very much of the comments on "Country" that I opened with.



Jasper Jones (Rachel Perkins, 2017) is based on the 2009 novel by Craig Silvey. The movie is set in Corrigan, Western Australia, in 1969.

This is a very different product, but it touches on many similar themes.

Jasper's girlfriend, Laura, has been murdered. But none of the "usual suspects" is to blame. The outsiders -- Jasper, the half-Aborigine boy; Jack, the reclusive war veteran to whom strange stories cling; Jeffrey, the Vietnamese migrant; Charlie, the bookish kid -- all turn out to be good guys. The villains, on the other hand, are the supposedly respectable folk, who hide all sorts of secrets behind their small-town curtains.

As well as being a detective story (Charlie and Jasper set out to find the real murderer), and a love story (Charlie has a crush on Laura's sister, a smart young woman obsessed with Truman Capote's Holly Golightly), this is also a portrait of the small town of the 1960s. Ruth, Charlie's mum, just can't hack it any more. She bails. No doubt that would make her the town's persona non grata at least for a while.

Racism shows itself in many guises. Jasper, having discovered Laura's body, invokes Charlie's help because he can't believe he has any chance of receiving justice; Jeffrey is acceptable to the community only when he proves to be good at cricket; his parents, on the other hand, are taunted; "Mad Jack" admits to rejecting his son's relationship with an Aborigine woman.

Nothing is laboured. We're just shown these things, and we draw our own conclusions.

At the heart of the story is Charlie's inspirational willingness to put himself in someone else's shoes. Perkins comments: "Charlie, the main character, has a lot of empathy for Jasper who literally drags him into another world that he didn’t realise existed. Charlie’s ability to empathise with the character of Jasper and befriend him and seek justice is special."



The film-maker is a woman of the Arrernte and Kalkadoon nations. She was born in Canberra in 1970, the daughter of Indigenous activists. In 1993, "frustrated by the passive portrayals of Indigenous culture she encountered in textbooks and on television written by non-Indigenous people", Perkins founded Blackfella Films. Driven by the goal of self-representation, the production company focused on "culturally significant stories, told by and with Indigenous media practitioners".

This move, though, was prefaced by a decision in 1988 to relocate to her ancestral homelands. As she explains, "I wanted to learn more about my own culture because I didn't really feel that I could get that at University. I wanted to learn it from my own people." She's still learning, she says: "There's been some hurdles that we've had to overcome in piecing back together our culture. The process of colonisation does -- interrupt is a polite way of putting it -- interrupt the traditions that normally you would be brought up through in your Arrernte education. So it's not necessarily an easy path but it's a very satisfying one if you can get there."

Encouragingly, she feels that much has changed in terms of the Indigenous stories that make it to the screen. The assumption that no-one would want to watch such movies has been well and truly exploded, as various productions have proved successful at the box office. Similarly, as she says, "We've also got the National Indigenous Television (NITV) service. You can turn on the television any day of the week and see Indigenous content. When I was growing up, I didn't see anything."

One of her major projects was the First Australians series, which came out in 2008. She describes its genesis as fortuitous. Gordon Briscoe, an Indigenous professor, was asked by Nigel Milan, then the general manager of Austrlian broadcaster SBS, what Milan could best do for Indigenous people. Briscoe's answer was: "Give them back their history." Perkins sees this series as probably the most important thing she will ever do, "because it really was an opportunity to try and tell the Indigenous story in a comprehensive manner from an Indigenous perspective, over a span of 200 years. It had never been done before. You know, we had very big ambitions for that project -- nothing less than actually changing the way a new generation of Australians see their country."

Clearly there's a long, long way to go still, but I love her positivity.