[CINEMA) BACK TRACKING

BRIAN MCfARLANJO CONSIDERS RACIAL MKrfERS AND THEIR HISTORICAL REPRESENTATION IN RECENT AUSTRALIAN CINEMA

ONE of the criticisms levelled at new Australian cinema in the 1970s was its dependence for'cultural capital' (and, up to a point, for economic capital as well) on films set securely in the past. Once they'd got the vulgar popular successes of Alvin Purple and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie out of their way, it seemed our film-makers turned to the past as a more aesthetically respectable means of breaking the decades of semi-drought in local film-making. As the discerning noted, such films as Sunday Too Far Away, Picnic at Hanging Rock and My Bril­ liant Career, set variously twenty or sixty or more years earlier, were nevertheless able to comment on the contemporary scene and dramatise continuing cultural complexities and conflicts in the national psyche. Another, ongoing criticism of Australian cinema has been its general unwill­ ingness, in mainstream cinema at least, to engage with matters of social or political significance. It hasn't, for instance, had much in common with postwar Italian neo-realism, which so poignantly explored the pressures on ordinary lives; equally, it hasn't had much truck with the American habit, from the late 1940s through the late 1960s, of encapsulating social concern in powerfully orchestrated melodramatic scenarios-or with the British 'new wave' of the late 1950s and

ls91 BRIAN McFARLANE early 1960s, in which working lives were taken seriously in low-key, realist dramas, stressing character rather than incident. There has been, that is, no antipodean tradition of the kind represented by the likes of Umberto D (1951, Italy), Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960, UK) or, closer to my purposes here,Jn the Heat of the Night (1967, USA), There have been clear, discrete successes, like the two discussed in Meanjin ('Local/Global', l/2002), the character-driven ensemble piece Lantana and the genre thriller The Bank (2001), but there has been no tradition of films growing out of social commitment. There has been the odd film that has focused on, say, drug abuse, on the treatment of disability, on gender issues, on the unemployed, on radical political commitment or youthful alienation, but these have rarely exhibited a courageous grappling with the issues at stake. Too often such films have been inconclusive melodramas, lacking the aesthetic guts to pursue the mode in full cry, as if that would somehow vitiate the importance of the matter. Racism is one of the subjects that has hardly had a serious treatment in new Australian cinema, except in the small-budget 'art cinema' in which directors such as Tracey Moffat have worked, finding critical acclaim sometimes but not audi­ ences of a size to make serious impact. Perhaps the commercial failure of Fred Schepisi's fine film version of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksfnith (1978) helps explain film-makers' unwillingness to address this most appalling stain on the national conscience. Further, for much of the preceding century, when Aborigi­ nals had any kind of presence in Australian films, they were there, as often as not, as exotics, as Nature-oriented counterpoints to 'civilised' white man, and in stories in which 'a progatonist is privileged and the character is psychologised ... in keeping with the imperatives of classical Hollywood cinema'. 1 That is, these were not films explicitly addressing social ills; they were films about individuals, rather than about a race. In 2002 there was an unexpected rash of films whose ostensible subject is racial bigotry in one or other form. I will look briefly at four of them here: The Tracker, Australian Rules, Black and White and Rabbit-Proof Fence. What is beyond doubt is that all have their hearts in the right place; they are all made by white film-makers; they are all more or less absorbing; and they are all set in the past. There is nothing remarkable about these aspects, though they involve some related concerns and issues that are worth raising. It is difficult to imagine a film on such sensitive issues that didn't have its heart located in the right place (a sort of outback Triumph of the Will?). Black film­ makers have continued to operate at the fringes of the industry, not in the

(6o] Back Tracking mainstream where these four films essentially, if none too securely, belong. If none of the four is ever actually tedious, equally none of them offers a really sustained, passionate attack on prejudice, nor does any exhibit the unambigu­ ously melodramatic power that infused Hollywood's social-conscience pieces such as Crossfire (1948) or The Defiant Ones (1958). And though the fact that they are all 'safely' set in the past need not imply irrelevance today, it does make one wonder why, like the seventies period-pieces, they choose not to tackle the indocile present directly. Are these matters too raw? Would film-makers get funding to expose contemporary scars on Australia's reputation? However committed one may be to the idea that a film is a film and each new work must be judged on its merits as a film, I think it is impossible to take this line unreservedly in relation to this batch of films. Their subject-the ways in which white society has sought to keep Australia's Aboriginal population subor­ dinated to the mores of European culture-is too important for such an easy way out. Part of the value of these films is tied up with the kind and quality of the contribution they make to an ongoing dialectic about a matter central to the national conscience. Aesthetic judgement is therefore not enough. While writing as a film critic here, I am aware that my views are likely to be less important than those who come at the films from different professional directions. Those who have sought to administer laws humanely, whether from black or white commu­ nity standpoints, have more serious rights to assess the wider cultural and social value of these films. Having said that, l would also suggest that the better a film on such themes is made the more likely it is to have socially beneficial results; the most potent cinematic documents have always been the product of passionate involvement, imagination and dexterity in exercising the tools of trade. From this point of view all these films have value, more substantial in some than others. They all draw on different cinematic genres: The Tracker has obvious affiliations with the Western; Australian Rules mixes social bigotry with family melodrama; Black and White, the most contentious of the four, uneasily blends courtroom drama with social document; and the narrative of Rabbit-Proof Fence belongs to the long tradition of the quest motif. Part of the interest of the films is in considering the sort of stylistic and generic hybridity on offer in them, and how far this serves the issues at stake. Rolf de Heer's The Tracker, for much of its length, recalls the Western in its narrative, its iconography, the characters who enact its conflicts, and its ideology. In narrative terms, it involves a 1922 search (for a black man alleged to have murdered a white woman) through difficult country, which recalls such classic

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Westerns as John Ford's The Searchers (1956); in both ftlms, the action focuses on a search party that feels it is being observed by those who know the landscape better than it does. Visually, The Tracker opens on a wide shot of the outback, then moves to a medium shot of three men riding, before cutting to a series of close-ups. The first of these close-ups is on David Gulpilil, as the tracker, walking, and this small film-making decision stresses both his centrality to the film's drama and the actor's iconic status. The look of the film in terms of place, of characters in the frame and in their relation to the landscape, echoes not just The Searchers but such other Westerns as Anthony Mann's The Naked Spur (small character group against the wilderness) and Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller, especially the scene in which the party rides through soaking rain. The film aurally evokes Altman, as well, with the use of ballads on the soundtrack to fill in the narrative gaps and intensify the mood. The range of characters keeps suggesting the Western: there is the tough leader of the search party, the neophyte who queries the leader's decisions, the weathered older man who recalls any number of those wise seniors who do their best to restrain the hard man's hardness and to temper the boy's impetuous youth-and the indigenous tracker himself. The fact that none of these is given a name, but is just known by his character function (the Fanatic, the Recruit, the Veteran and the Tracker), underlines the kind of mythic status they are meant to embody. Ideologically, too, it reminds one of those revisionist Westerns of the 1970s that were intended to direct our sympathies away from the white settlers/adventurers and onto the displaced 'natives: But despite aU these echoes, The Tracker is not a Western. However resonantly it begins as a transplanting of a familiar genre, it ends, perhaps not wholly in its own interests from the point of view of taut drama, as a meditation on racism. It may be set in 1922, but its preoccupations are contemporary, most tellingly in that sense of somehow rendering Gulpilil's tracker invisible to white conversa­ tions. As drama, the film hinges on how far Gulpilil can be trusted by the white men, who implicitly claim superiority (a comparison with his role in Rabbit-Proof Fence); the shock of the climax is not when he kills the rapist, who also assaulted black women, but when, acting as judge and jury, he strings up the Fanatic, played by TV star Gary Sweet. It is at this point we know we are not watching a Western but a film that has startled us out of generic expectations. Certainly, the use of the paintings by Peter Coad to 'freeze' the violent moments, as if to insist on their tenacity rather than to exploit them for conventionally modern 'graphic' blood­ letting, ought to have alerted us to the fact that an unusually reflective cast of

[62] Back Tracking thought was at work behind this haunting evocation of a cruel past with intima­ tions of a far-from-lilywhite present. There is, in fact, a Brechtian distancing effect at work here, breaking the cinematic illusion in the interest of making the audience think about the issues at stake. Philip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence was undervalued locally in my view, but it has subsequently won the AFI best film award for 2002, and been praised overseas. Its appearance at the Edinburgh Film Festival was hailed as 'a popular and critical triumph, moving many to tears' (Daily Telegraph, London, 20 August 2002), and even the more qualified account in the Independent claimed that 'it has real beauty and feeling' (8 November 2002). Based on the remarkable real­ life journey undertaken in 1931 by three part-Aboriginal girls ('half-caste' in the diction of the time), it tells a story that is both exhilarating and heart-breaking. The film is at pains to spell out its real-world referents in a series of opening captions, one of which informs us: 'Mr A. Neville, the Chief Protector of Aborig­ ines, is the legal guardian of every Aborigine in the State of Western Australia', invested with the power 'to remove every half-caste child' from its family and from anywhere in the state. These captions are followed by a further one stating 'This is a true story of me [Molly] and my sister Daisy and my cousin Gracie', and the film is based on a book by Molly's daughter, Doris Pilkington. In Perth, Neville (Kenneth Branagh) orders the removal of the three girls to the Moore River Native Settlement, and there are wracking scenes of police rounding them up and of family members grieving. The eponymous fence (rabbits on one side, farming on the other-emblem of a divided society?) will be the girls' lifeline for getting back to their homes. The film is intelligent enough not to make a heartless brute of Neville; as played, aptly enough by a British actor, emphasising the ultimate origins of such a policy as he administers, he is a misguided man of principle ('We're here to help and encourage you in this new world'). The girls are not treated unkindly at the settlement: ironically, and very poignantly, it is the senior Aboriginal girl barking out orders in the dormitory to which the three are consigned who is most overtly unsympathetic; yet, in the insistence on their speaking English or in the bizarre inappropriateness of the children's singing 'Swanee River', the real cruelty of misguided principles is made obliquely clear. As Molly leads the girls off into the difficult terrain, the fence acting as a path to their Jigalong home, they are tracked at Neville's orders by Constable Riggs (Jason Clarke) and Moodoo, the enigmatic black tracker, again played by David Gulpilil. As in The Tracker, Gulpilil suggests the ambiguity of his position in the BRIAN McFARLANE search party: here, his own daughter is kept at the settlement and will stay there even if Moodoo returns to the Kimberley as he wishes. His work is at the service of the oppressors, which, however benignly intentioned, is what they are, but his sympathies are with the girls. He speaks only once in the film, to say'She's pretty clever, that girl; she wants to go home'; for the rest of the time, Gulpilil acts chiefly with his eyes, and totally rivets the attention. The theme of the epic journey recalls such adventures as the British Sammy Going South (1963), in which a ten-year­ old boy walks from Port Said to Durban, but that was fiction; we are talking here of a historically documented case of deliberately separating children from their mothers, a cruelty by no means expiated seventy years later. If the film skimps on some of the sheer physical arduousness of the journey (one of the girls is caught, the other two are reunited with their family), it makes its central point with clarity and passion, a passion not undermined by Noyce's refusal to settle for the easy binarisms of melodrama and its preference for tidy conclusions. Instead, we are left with the voice-over's recounting the later history of the girls, and Molly and Daisy as old women, recalling that use of real-life commentators at the end of such varied films as Reds (1981), Strikebound (1984) and Schindler's List ( 1993). The film doesn't in fact need the concluding captions that spell out the contemporary significance of the two-way journey; the film's plot and the old women have made this abundantly dear. Based on a novel for young adults, Deadly, Unna by Phillip Gwynne, who co-authored the screenplay with first-time director Paul Goldman, Australian Rules was the subject of protest from Aboriginal and community groups, claiming that its portrayal of Aboriginals was racist and that the film-makers failed to secure the cooperation of the indigenous population of the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia. The claim seems hard to sustain. The small South Australian coastal town of Prospect Bay is unflinchingly depicted as bigoted in its treatment of its Aboriginals, most of whom live on a reservation at a remove from the town but who are crucial to the success of the local football team. Football is metaphorically used: it is at once a site for potential reconciliation, epitomised in the genuine friendship between white Gary 'Biacky' Black (Nathan Phillips) and black Dum by Red (Luke Carroll) and a further instance of white exploitation of black abilities, the black boys being used in the inter­ ests of the team's victory and passed over in the handing out of accolades. When the coach (Kevin Harrington, of Sea Change) warns Dumby to 'make sure your blokes don't go walkabout on Saturday', we are aware of the limits of interra­ cial understanding. Back Tracking

The peaceful beauty of Prospect Bay, the 'Tidy Town', established in tranquil long shots, is contrasted with the festering racism that exists just beneath its surface-and not just racism but the malfunctioning family life presided over by Gary's macho father, Bob (an uncompromising performance from Simon Westaway). (Racism and family dysfunction seem intended to be viewed here as the result of two related forms of brutal intolerance.) When the police arrest one of the black players, Gary has to go on in his place as ruck, though his heart is not reaJiy in it. Blacky is thoughtful, a reader, called 'gutless' by his father, and attracted to Dumby's sister Clarence (Lisa Flanagan). Urged on by his mother (Celia Ireland) in a tea-table demonstration of tactics, and, less credibly, a half-time visit to the locker room, Blacky seems about to sabotage the team's chances of a crucial goal, in a manner recalling Tom Courtenay's moment of rebellion in The Loneli­ ness of the Wng Distance Runner (1962). The plot becomes overcrowded and underdeveloped from here on. Blacky's burgeoning romance with Clarence attracts racist slurs from the town's youthful thugs and his father calls her a 'black slut' when he finds them in bed together. There is a robbery at the pub in which two young blacks are shot (said to be suggested by an actual incident of 1977) and Blacky, in a gesture of solidarity, attends the funeral. His family cracks under the strain of his father's abusiveness. And so on.lt dilutes its melodrama with 'sensitive young man' sentimentalities and an overfondness for pictorially striking but dramatically unhelpful vistas. It smacks sometimes of those 1970s coming-of-age films like The Mango Tree (1977), in which youthful protagonists come to terms with the cruelties of the world but emerge stronger and wiser. It is not that the film is in any sense 'racist', as has been alleged, but that it blurs its case in the ways suggested. We do not need to have an anti racist message spelt out: those who behave in deplorably racist ways are sometimes too crudely drawn for dramatic subtlety but it is not possible to confuse the film's attitude to them. The film works best as a family melodrama, but that fact in itself tends to distract from its overt purpose-the social inequity implied in its ambiguous title-and to weaken its power as polemic. Craig Lahiff's Black and White focuses on the famous trial of Max Stuart, an Aboriginal accused of the rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl in the South Australian coastal town of Ceduna in December 1958. The title obviously captures the racial resonances of the film's story but just as obviously, if inadver­ tently, signals the story's simplification of the issues in the interest of melodramatic courtroom confrontation. (Virtually all reviewers have been quick to note and to pun on this effect.) The film draws its chief characters in starkly

[65] BRIAN McfARLANE binary terms and, while this may be in the interest of a certain kind of narrative power, it can also have the effect, as I have suggested in relation to Australian Rules, of reducing the complexity of important issues. And, as has so often been the case in Australian cinema, the film seems to lose even its melodramatic nerve. It might have succeeded as either full-blown melodrama or as drama documen­ tary, but the two modes seem immiscible. The former might have been at the service of compelling cinema entertainment, even as it failed to grapple with the network of racial, social, national and judicial motifs and motives imbricated in the conduct of the Stuart case; the latter mode might have permitted a more responsible laying out and assessing of the known, the guessed-at and the merely speculative in a case that divided Australia at the time. Louis Nowra's screenplay for Black and White is based on K.S. Inglis's remark­ ably fine chronicling of the affair, The Stuart Case, first published by Melbourne University Press in 1961 and republished by Black Inc., with an eighty-page epilogue, in 2002. Inglis painstakingly tracks Stuart's dealings with the South Australian police, legal and judicial systems; with that proper concern for detail, for the dispassionate withholding of judgement when the evidence is inadequate, and with an admirable lucidity throughout, he exemplifies the best of academic writing. Further, his book, though it must often deal with matter not intrinsically dramatic (for example, technicalities of law), and though it often has to repeat information from just slightly different points of view or with only minor addi­ tions of detail, makes enthralling as well as enlightening reading. Through the harrowing reprieves, when Stuart's life hung alarmingly in the balance as his lawyers and other supporters, including the priest Father Tom Dixon, Theodor Strehlow, specialist in the language and customs of Stuart's Arrernte tribe, 2 and newspapermen Rupert Murdoch and Rohan Rivett (depicted in the film as fearless crusaders and enemies of the Adelaide establishment), fought to estab­ lish his innocence, a major slice of Australian social history is documented with a complexity that may well be outside the scope of a film. It is not that films cannot deal with any sort of complexity-the intricacies of the emotional life have frequently been rendered through the interaction of mise en scene, editing and soundtrack-but it is hard to think of one where the pressure of ideas and argument, in detailed intellectual juxtapositions and contra­ rieties, can be set before us with the sort of clarity and vividness that mark Inglis's book. (This is not just a matter of the necessary compressions and deletions one accepts in the adaptation of fictional works.) Certainly Black and White has not done so, and is often stiffly stagy and didactic. For one thing, it has been forced

[66] Back Tracking to jettison many of the large cast of characters involved in Stuart's vicissitudes, and in focusing its attention on counsel for the defence and prosecution, played, respectively and in the interests of international distribution, by the charismatic British actors Robert Carlyle (as David O'Sullivan, unpaid and unsure of himself) and Charles Dance (as Roderic Chamberlain, snootily clubbish and malign), it reduces Stuart's story to the status of courtroom melodrama. (O'Sullivan's off­ sider, played by Kerry Fox, looks and sounds like a refugee from TV's Perry Mason.) By removing many important players from the drama, including J.W. Shand QC and the politician Don Dunstan, later premier of South Australia, it simplifies Stuart's story to the point where one wonders if it was worth doing at all if it was to be so crudely done. There are matters at stake here so important that to render them crudely, however entertaining that may be (only moderately so, in my view), is to trivi­ alise them. Stuart (eloquently played by David Ngoombujarra) may or may not have been guilty; both the film and Inglis's book refrain from a dear-cut assess­ ment, though Inglis (p. 308) thinks he was 'probably guilty'. There are other important questions. How far did his colour influence the outcome of the case against him? (The historian Mark Finnane has stated confidently in a recent 1 paper: 'Colour made a difference to Stuart's fate.' ) Would Stuart perhaps have been summarily hanged if he had been white for a crime that produced a proper sense of outrage? Did the failure to establish his guilt beyond doubt heighten the anxieties about capital punishment? How adept was a deeply conservative judi­ ciary, epitomising an equally conservative middle-class society, in understanding the acts and testimonies of one such as Stuart? What role should the press be allowed to play in a democratic society? How could any of the bodies before which Stuart's case was exposed be expected to be seriously representative of the people from whom he came? I began by wondering whether films set in a past that historians have chron­ icled can provide any insight into or instructive commentary on the present In this respect, Rabbit-Proof Fence is the most obvious example, drawing poignant attention to the issue of the 'stolen generations', a harsh phenomenon about which the Australian government has been notoriously reluctant to make concil­ iatory gestures. Such issues are not the business of a film review in the usual sense. Of course, a film reviewer is free to consider how a film rates as a film, but I have found myself increasingly concerned with-and by-some of those wider issues the films have raised, and how they have gone about doing so. How far do these films, all set in the past, qualify as 'historical', and on what sort of terms? How BRIAN McFARLANE important is their historical veracity to their status as films? How far can 'history', essentially here the writings of white men, however liberal, serve the interests of authenticating the experiences of people who have been subjugated by them, or at very least regarded by them with benevolent paternalism? What film has most valuably to offer in the cause of such sensitive and morally central issues is not the skilled weighing of evidence and argument that Inglis so memorably assembles but, rather, acts of passionate dramatisation, born equally of courage and of a sure grasp of how the film medium can best and most distinc­ tively go about its business. It is not certain that any of these films quite measures up to these demands. A11 of them are dependent on prior texts in other media. Is film just too expensive for its makers, in Australia at any rate, to take major creative risks?

NOTES I. Karen Jennings, 'Aboriginality and film', in The Oxford Companion to Australian Film (Melbourne, 1999), p. 2. 2. A review essay on Barry Hill's study of Strehlow, Broken Song (Sydney, 2002), will appear in the next Meanjin. 3. In a lecture to the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Canberra, 17 November 2002.

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