Whiteout: Blackfella in Aussie films
Time Out charts the journey of Blackfellas on Aussie screens from white ignorance to film bliss
By Alex Chidzey
Ten Canoes is a part of a cinematic renaissance where "Aboriginality has become mainstream"
As early as the 1890s, the French film pioneers the Lumiere brothers, sent agents to take anthropological recordings of Australian Aborigines. "It was basically vanishing tribe stuff," says Sydney University's Dr Catriona Moore, an expert in art history and film studies. Missionaries also used the camera to record their conquest of the indigenous soul, "all cleaned up and going to church on Sundays," says Moore.
In Australia's earliest feature films indigenous people were treated like colourful scenery. The hugely popular bush melodramas of the 1920s and 30s, (such as Trooper O'Brien), saw the introduction of Aboriginal characters, but they were played by white actors in ‘black face', "demonised as the bad things that could happen to a white woman alone in the exotic bush," Moore explains.
Over the next twenty years, the stereotype of marauding savages was counterbalanced by images of the trusty "yes boss, no boss" stockman, culminating in 1955 with Charles Chauvel's Jedda, the first full colour Australian film, featuring indigenous people in dramatic roles.
"Chauvel was a pioneer for billing Aboriginal actors in a major film," says Professor Stephen Muecke of the cultural studies department at UTS. "But he was also a victim of prevailing ideas." In the film, Jedda is a lucky young Aboriginal girl (Ngarla Kunoth) who has been adopted by a white family. The two rivals for her affection are the "wild" Marbuck (Robert Tudawali), and the tame half-caste farm hand Joe (Paul Reynall). The blatantly racist construction of the Aborigine as "somebody who can't let go of his instincts," says Muecke, was exemplified in Jedda's tragic choice.
This sort of mumbo jumbo barely changed until the 1970s, when a new sense of national identity fuelled the renaissance of Australian cinema, and films such as Walkabout in 1972 (made by the English director Nicholas Roeg) and Peter Weir's The Last Wave in 1977, showed Aboriginal people newly romanticised as mystical blackfella shamans.
In 1978, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, directed by Fred Schepisi, shocked the nation with the story of a good half-caste man (Tommy Lewis) who is destroyed by an oppressive white world. "The stereotype of primitivism," says Muecke, "gave way to political victim-hood, " as the Aboriginal Rights movement revved up.
But as long as white fellas were calling the shots, no matter how well intentioned, a true representation of indigenous reality was never going to make it onto the big screen. In 1978, the aboriginal activist/actor Gary Foley made Backroads, a gritty little road movie with a young white director named Philip Noyce. Foley, says Muecke, was "very assertive" during the filmmaking process.
In 1979 Essie Coffey's My Survival as an Aboriginal, kicked off what has been called "a minor social revolution," by indigenous academics such as Marcia Langton. First Australians had begun to tell their own stories, their own way. In 1989 Langton herself starred in Tracey Moffatt's Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy, in which Moffatt deconstructed the whole premise of Jedda.
By the end of the twentieth century, contemporary Aboriginal film-makers such as Moffatt, Rachel Perkins and Ivan Sen, were radically reworking the conventions of cinematic narrative in feature films.
In 2008 we are looking at another renaissance in Australian cinema - but this time, "aboriginality," says Moore, "has become mainstream."