Think of all the Australian films you’ve ever seen. How many of them feature good—that is, lasting, nurturing and mutually satisfying—relationships between Aboriginal and white Australians? I can think of only two.
Reconciliation between black and white Australians is a cultural and artistic, as well as political, process. As director George Miller put it, films in particular are our modern ‘cultural dreamings’. Films are like collective dreams. They bring to light the deeper, often dark and repressed aspects of our culture. Like dreams, they can also give us glimpses of different futures.
Where race relations are concerned, however, screenwriters and film-makers in Australia have been much better at reflecting the often ugly reality than imagining a different future. The problem goes back as far as Charles Chauvel’s Jedda (1955), the first Australian film shot in colour, and a critical and commercial success. Jedda is an orphaned Aboriginal girl who is raised by a white farming family, only to be abducted by Marbuk, a tribal Aboriginal. Chased by the white family and rejected by Marbuk’s tribe for breaking marriage taboos, the deranged and desperate Marbuk clutches Jedda and jumps off a cliff.
Sixteen years later, English director Nicholas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) opens with a white boy and girl stranded in the desert after their father’s botched murder-suicide attempt. Lost and thirsty, the children are befriended by an Aboriginal youth famously played by David Gulpilil. He is attracted to the girl and performs what looks like a mating dance in order to woo her. She, however, rejects him. Next morning he is found hanging from a tree.
Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), based on Thomas Keneally’s book of the same name, drew on real events in the late 19th century. The film tells the story of Jimmie, a half-caste who is taught the ways of whitefellas by a Methodist minister. Jimmie rejects his tribal past and eventually marries a white girl. Betrayed by her and exploited by his boss, he goes on a killing spree before being shot, captured and hanged.
After a lean patch in the 1980s, the past decade has seen a plethora of films exploring black-white relations, beginning with Nick Parsons’s Dead Heart (1996). Set in a remote Central Desert community, this film revolves around the difficulty whites have in understanding Aboriginal law and customs. An Aboriginal teacher’s aide has an affair with the wife of the white