Another Country Read online

  The same Marcia Langton who once critiqued the place Aboriginal figures held in Australian film has come to see a more nuanced picture, a decade on. Even in the liberal ’70s, in Langton’s view, there was a kindly tone of “romantic racism” about the way Aboriginal characters were shown on screen. They were “limited in their capacity to adjust to civilisation, but they had special traits, particularly mystical ones such as extrasensory perception, magical and psychic powers, and a supposedly spiritual relationship with nature.” Now, a more realistic picture has taken hold. The indigenous actor we know may be familiar as a well-rounded character in an urban TV series, or may be playing a film part written to reflect both history and social context, with “no limitations to their humanity.” Above all, the film audience feels with them, and is often even encouraged to identify with them in the progress of their stories. Langton is tempted to say that Aboriginal involvement in the scripts of the new cinema has been the critical factor.

  How much is all this true of the three striking, path-breaking films that have just emerged from the one corner of Australia where life is still lived on indigenous terms – the Top End’s remote Arnhem Land!

  Ten Canoes is far and away the most ambitious of these ventures. Director Rolf de Heer’s heroic dream was to make a film in collaboration with the Yolngu people of Ramingining, home to his friend David Gulpilil. The finished movie, precise in form, spare in content, has a deceptive simplicity about it. In fact, the path to its completion involved Fitzcarraldo-like filming exploits on location deep in a mosquito-infested swamp, and intense efforts at communication across the frail bridge between the Western and the Yolngu worlds. A tent city was thrown up at remote Murwangi, an old, decayed cattle station: cast and crew lived there in close intimacy all through the shoot. Mainstream Australians may wonder at the result: an austere Aboriginal morality tale, unfolding on two time-scales from the far past, and set within a lush and overwhelming landscape. The actors speak in Ganalpingu and other Yolngu languages: David Gulpilil, whose son, Jamie, is the central figure on screen, provides the English narration. Casting was decided by family affinities; the actors are near-naked, as they would have been in far-off times; the humour, much of it involved with bodily functions, is distinctly Yolngu, as are the plot’s key mechanisms, which focus tightly on superstition and pay-back revenge. Yet the core scenes of the story, the goose-hunt by canoe in the watered grasslands of the swamp, descend from a famous photographic image, taken by the anthropologist Donald Thomson in the 1930s: and this Yolngu fascination with, and co-option of, the images others make of them is also entirely characteristic of the world of Arnhem Land.

  One has the strong sense, watching de Heer’s film, that it is a loving tribute to a vanishing belief-system. The director’s diary of the making of Ten Canoes concludes, in telling fashion: “There were tinges of regret all round that this great, glorious, and difficult adventure was over, and that the like of it would probably never again be experienced by anyone, ever, anywhere.” For the locals, it was an experience of exaltation: senior Ramingining man Bobby Bununngurr recalls being in the canoes, on location, as more than acting, as being “full of life, the spirits are round me, the old people they with me, and I feel it, out there I was inside by myself, and I was crying.” Cinema is working here not just as art, and strange entertainment, but as intercultural membrane. Urban Australians will not find a more faithful window into the old world of the Aboriginal North than Ten Canoes – even if the film can provide only a surface glimpse of the Yolngu’s poetic, custom-laden realm.

  By their plot choice and time setting, de Heer and the Ramingining cast exclude, of course, all mention of the present-day. And, as is well known, social conditions in Arnhem Land are poor – so this decision might seem at first somewhat like making a film about a beautiful German cathedral during the allied bombing campaign in the last days of World War II. But Ten Canoes is framed as a deliberate morality tale, a saga to teach the wayward younger generation about the strong law of the bush. “Everything is changing,” says the female lead, Frances Djulibing. “Everything is going going gone now, the only thing [young people] know is some ceremony. Maybe they’re going to keep this film with them so they can put it in their head.”

  During the same year’s filming season, high in the stone country plateau of West Arnhem Land, observational documentary film-maker Kim McKenzie was putting the finishing touches to another collaborative jewel, Fragments of the Owl’s Egg. Subtle in structure, understated, full of grace and gentle laughter, this film tells several related stories: how the celebrated indigenous artist Lofty Bardayal Nadjamerrek is directing a fire management project from his home at Kabulwarnamyo; how rock art surrounds him at every turn; and how he quests far and wide, by helicopter, to find once more a lost art site he remembers from his youth. The entire story is told in Lofty’s beautiful, endangered language, Kundedjnjenghmi: it is narrated by linguist Murray Garde, and the strange words we hear seem to mingle with the wondrous splendour of the plateau: its rocks, its streams and paperbarks, its cave-walls and overhangs filled with ancient art. There are moments of sweet intercultural closeness, as when Lofty presents the veteran pilot of West Arnhem Land, Ian Munro, with a beeswax rock painting of a helicopter; there are moments when the old world of Arnhem Land seems to live again, and near-forgotten clan estates and boundaries are recalled in detail. Fragments, much like Ten Canoes, is film made on Aboriginal terms, and dealing with traditional preoccupations, yet it is very much an artistic hybrid of two ways of seeing. It marks the glorious climax, and also perhaps the end, of the classical ethnographic film tradition in Australia. The pathos of the story is extreme: a movie narrated in a dying language, paying tribute to the last traditional master of a near-emptied country, discovers at last a style of film that crosses fluidly between worlds.

  Not far south, in those same late dry season days, on the pastoral fringes of Arnhem Land, Aboriginal actor Tom E. Lewis was just beginning a quest journey of his own, which would have startling cinematic results. Lewis, the son of the Ngukurr artist Angelina George, wanted to rediscover something of his biological father, a white stockman. As a child, Lewis was raised at Roper River mission in a full-blood family, but questions of culture, race and identity have always dogged him, and ever since Fred Schepisi came up to him at an airport and recruited him for Jimmie Blacksmith, his half-caste being has branded his life. Restless spirit that he was, it seemed almost natural for him to turn to film when the time came for his self-analysis. With him in his four-wheel-drive he took not just his tranquil mother but the prominent young indigenous director Ivan Sen.

  Yella Fella, the product of their trip, is raw, wild, immediately human and communicative. Taboos fall: the pain of being between cultures, belonging fully to neither, is squarely confronted: the grief and helpless rage spill out. Lewis goes deep into himself as he travels out to his birthplace on the Barkly Tableland, and up and down the Roper Highway, remembering the various stages of his young life in the last days of the old frontier: how he came face to face with his father at Borroloola, in the Gulf country; how they fought, and at last embraced – all the slights and torments of his upbringing are passed in view. “It’s film as medicine,” Lewis muses now. “We did it as medicine for the family.” He ends his performance in a twilit cemetery, seeking desperately, unsuccessfully, to close the drama, and bring the curtain of peace and silence down. But for Lewis, as actor, and as subject, the drama of Aboriginality – of being watched, and seen, and different, and seeing oneself through others’ eyes, is never done.

  Perhaps it is not complete accident that these three films, which do so much to extend the scope and reach of Australian cinema, all stem from Arnhem Land, at once one of the least disturbed and most contested areas of the indigenous continent, where memories are strong, and the consequences of contact still loom in the mind. Each of these productions carefully gives pride of place to the indigenous voice, and imagining eye, and shaping hand. And when one
leaves the cinema, and steps back into the urgent flow of modern life, the shift of emphasis seems to linger: for over a few short years, the indigenous way of seeing has begun to mingle subtly with the broader perspectives of Australian life. The new cinema of the Aboriginal world, in its many forms, has a hybrid, open-ended feel, as if a tidal exchange were under way. Indigenous film-makers may be reshaping the wider image of their own people and cultures – but at the same time mainstream writers and directors are coming to regard the nation’s Aboriginal story as a treasure-trove that lies entwined with their own traditions, illuminating a common world.

  The Call of the Yidaki

  The first time he heard Yothu Yindi, New Zealander and didgeridoo player Jeremy Cloake was thunderstruck. How clear it was: he knew nothing about his chosen instrument, he would have to leave inner-city Sydney and the dance music scene, and move his whole life to Yirrkala, at the north-east extremity of the Northern Territory. After years of playing and rhythm mixing, the young man had at last heard the call of the yidaki – for so the instrument is known by the Yolngu people of north-east Arnhem Land.

  “There’s a few people,” says dreadlocked Cloake, sitting cross-legged on the floor of the Yirrkala Arts Centre, “who actually liken the yidaki to a roving diplomat. A yidaki is definitely from this land. It takes possession of you. Wherever you are, if you’re playing it, it will eventually bring you back here.”

  A similar transformation was dawning at much the same time inside Frank Thill, a solemn, artistically minded thirtysomething intellectual from Cologne who, after long immersion in yidaki playing, also moved to nearby Nhulunbuy on the Gove Peninsula, and now devotes himself to the promotion of Yolngu culture over the internet.

  Both these men are part of the latest stage in the yidaki’s long cultural journey: a journey that at first led outwards, across the Top End’s plains and stringybark forests, to the great cities of southern Australia and even beyond, into the wider world of new-age beliefs and spiritual fashions; then back in a slow, returning arc towards Yirrkala, as its Western enthusiasts gradually learned how much of the instrument’s strength remains bound up with the secrets and the depths of Arnhem Land.

  The two men share another link: both were adopted by the yidaki’s ceremonial custodian and master-performer, Djalu Gurru-wiwi, one of the chief leaders of the potent Galpu clan.

  “It’s a reciprocal relationship between us,” says Cloake. “A connection quite free from sentiment. You become part of a family: Djalu’s my father, he sees me as his son. The adoption’s a feeling thing. Djalu picked me after the third day I’d spent with him because he has that instinct, he knew the kind of person that I am.”

  At first encounter, Djalu, soft-voiced, unassuming, his eyes almost permanently veiled by wraparound reflector sunglasses, seems an unlikely focus for an international music cult. His days are spent crafting yidakis in a workshop at Ski Beach community, or driving through the forests of the Gove Peninsula in search of suitably termite-hollowed trunks of stringybark. With him on these missions travel not only his immediate family but also an ever-changing nimbus of Western devotees: Japanese yidaki collectors, French actors in search of higher meaning, American documentary-makers clutching their sound equipment and digicams.

  At intervals, Djalu will pause in his labours and run through elements of his philosophy. As soon becomes clear, it’s an intriguing amalgam. Even more than other well-known Yolngu artists and musicians, he regards his culture as a means for communication between the Aboriginal and the wider worlds.

  According to Thill, “Djalu is one of the few people in Arnhem Land who would like to open up more about the instrument’s hidden meanings and its importance, to invite people into his culture, to explain it to outsiders.” The master himself is more specific: “Yolngu must share with balanda [Europeans], because we have citizenship of Australia. I welcome balanda. I can’t reject friends. I’m standing in the doorway. Your people can’t see; you’re blind. We have always welcomed you: Macassans, Australians. We welcome you. Different cultures; heart the same; mind the same.”

  Much in this ecumenical approach may reflect the patterns of Djalu’s eventful life. Now in his mid-seventies, he was born at Milingimbi Mission, on a small island just off the coast of Arnhem Land, and witnessed the fierce bombing raids on the local airstrip during the war years. His father, Monyu, a leader of the Galpu clan, was a central figure in one of the stranger episodes of Yolngu history – the so-called “Adjustment Movement” of the 1950s, which saw the raising of a memorial on Elcho Island and the public display of secret objects that had never been seen by women or by uninitiated men. From his father, Djalu received ceremonial rights over the yidaki, and the sacred materials passed down the ancestral line.

  He inherited a certain inclination towards religion as well. Djalu and his family are committed Christians; his sister, business manager and occasional translator Dhangal Gurruwiwi is a theologian. “Ritual expert, Christian leader, spiritual guide for his clanspeople,” sums up Djalu’s anthropologist biographer, Guan Lim. “These roles and attributes overshadow his yidaki stardom, but they also helped shape it.”

  One of the stranger aspects of this stardom is its self-sustaining quality. Djalu’s website, set up with funds from a yidaki-loving Italian businessman, is a distinctly low-key, indeed sometimes inactive, affair, offering cultural information, brief snapshots of the Gurruwiwi circle and a “gallery” of hand-carved instruments crafted by him, which are yours for anything between $us500 ($916) and $us1,000 apiece.

  But the internet pullulates with more lavish didgeridoo and yidaki sites, with information exchanges and discussion groups, many of them near obsessionally centred on Djalu, the splendour of his instruments and the lure of north-east Arnhem Land. Germany has a particularly strong yidaki-playing community, whose members turn up regularly for spiritual chats at his workshop, or for the masterclasses held each August during the Garma Cultural Festival, just down the track from Yirrkala.

  These musical pilgrims are only the most visible element of an international diaspora many thousands strong – the children, we might say, of the yidaki’s furthest outward flight. How much, though, do these seekers hear in the yidaki’s voice? How close do they come to the deep, well-masked roots of the Yolngu universe?

  Aboriginal people in Arnhem Land are well aware of the yidaki’s worldwide prominence and, it must be said, they find it somewhat puzzling. Western, new-age styles of playing, with their long, droning passages and their abrupt vocalisations, are frequently described, with some amusement, as “balanda aircraft noise”.

  “People have to be aware the yidaki is a traditional instrument,” says Dhangal Gurruwiwi. “If a person knows the value of the yidaki he should play it in a way that’s respected by the Yolngu. Some yidaki are played in the rock’n’roll world, and so on. To us, that’s like a wind passing through, it doesn’t really touch the hearts of people. The way we’ve heard people playing it, the faster it’s played, the faster your heart beats – and that’s no good for us.”

  Dhangal does concede that, with proper instruction from her brother, and with great patience, skilled outsiders can begin to learn the ways of the yidaki. Djalu’s star pupil of recent years, Jeremy Cloake, is also mildly optimistic: “There’s much more interest now in the traditional, technically difficult style of playing. You could say the yidaki’s journey out from Arnhem Land into the wider world reached its pinnacle when contemporary players began making plastic slide-didgeridoos, and using seismometers in their mouths to amplify the rhythms of the voicebox. That was the turning point, and now the circle’s closing: more and more, musicians are seeking out information from the Yolngu masters – there’s a desire among elite yidaki players to go back to old ways: to use the instrument to investigate themselves.”

  Thill believes this resurgence of traditional playing has already begun to lead Western musicians to startling discoveries. “We receive letters from yidaki players overseas, and read them
to Djalu, and he finds them quite astonishing: some of the writers gain insights from their instruments, and tell us little parts of the Yolngu sacred stories.”

  There are, though, a few basic limits to even the most brilliant outsider’s capacity actually to become Yolngu through the medium of music. The yidaki is only a small fragment of the ritual world of east Arnhem Land. It is an ensemble instrument, used to support vocal chant. The sound-picture it helps create at dances and ceremonies is only a partial, surface representation of a complex, interlocking domain of songs and ancestral tales.

  Even playing the instrument in a technically correct fashion may be beyond most of its foreign devotees: and not merely because of the arduous techniques of “circular breathing” required, or the recondite “second modes”, in which the musician breathes across the mouth of the instrument, favoured in some parts of Arnhem Land.

  Rather, the problem lies in language. When Djalu blows into his yidaki, he shapes his mouth into positions natural to a speaker of Yolngu dialects. “His is the most old-fashioned style of all,” says Thill. “Djalu is talking into the wood; and modern Western players cannot play this way, because they don’t speak perfect language, and so they don’t know the mouth and tongue positions.”

  They can, of course, get close, by tuition, by imitation. Close, though, to what? The key assumption underpinning the international yidaki cult is that the instrument’s haunting, humming drone comes to us from prehistoric tradition and the murk of time; that 40,000 years of unchanging belief are encoded in its rhythms; that to speak into the hollowed tube of stringybark is to travel back to a purer, more authentic mode of being: a mode the Yolngu are somehow closer to than commodified and alienated Westerners.