Making Film and Television Histories: Australia and New Zealand 9780755698707, 9781848859432

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Notes on the Contributors Brenda Allen teaches and researches at the University of Auckland. Her current research area is the feature film, and her interests include print media and twentieth-century poetry. A short list of publications can be found at: http://artsfaculty.auckland.ac.nz/staff/?UPI=ball018&Name=Brenda Michelle Arrow is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at Macquarie University. Her research explores Australian history, history on television and the history of popular culture. Her most recent book, Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia Since 1945, was shortlisted for the Australian History prize in the 2010 NSW Premiers’ History Awards. Kathy Butler is currently seconded as a Senior Lecturer, Indigenous Curriculum Design and Development, Centre for Teaching and Learning at the University of Newcastle. Her position in the Faculty of Education and Arts involves teaching responsibilities in Sociology, Anthropology and broader faculty contribution to the Indigenisation of Curriculum process. Jessica Carniel is a Senior Tutor at the Australian Centre, University of Melbourne. Her doctoral work, completed at the Centre in 2006, examined narratives of ethnic identity formation in Italian Australian literature and film. Brooke Collins-Gearing is a Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Science in the discipline of English, University of Newcastle. Her research interests have focused on children’s literature, Indigenous literature and collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous film-makers and writers. Annabel Cooper is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies, University of Otago. She has published on the cultural history of gender in New Zealand, including work on identity, memory, place and war; and is currently working on P¯akeh¯a cultural memory of the New Zealand Wars across several media, including film. Anthony Corones lectures in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. His areas of interest include the history and

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philosophy of science and medicine, public understanding of science and technology, and critical historiography. Nancy Cushing teaches Australian history at the University of Newcastle’s Central Coast Campus and loves to watch the moment when several hundred first-year students realise they have been tricked by Rosie’s Secret. Her research interests are in Australian cultural and environmental history, with a particular focus on human-animal relations. Mark Derby is a Wellington writer and historian. His books include Kiwi Compañeros – New Zealand and the Spanish Civil War and The Prophet and the Policeman – the story of Rua Ke¯nana and John Cullen. He has also researched, written and produced a number of historical films, documentaries and TV series. Trisha Dunleavy specialises in Television Studies, including the study of TV institutions, industries, aesthetics, genres and narrative in the United States, United Kingdom and New Zealand. Dunleavy’s books include Television Drama: Form, Agency, Innovation (Palgrave, 2009) and Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama (Auckland UP, 2005). Lisa Featherstone is a Lecturer in Australian History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has published widely on the history of sexuality, gender history and the history of medicine. Her book, Let’s Talk About Sex: Histories of Sexuality in Australia from Federation to the Pill, will be published in 2011. Margot Ford spent many years in the Northern Territory in Indigenous education and teacher education, working at both the Batchelor Institute of Indigenous Tertiary Education and Charles Darwin University. She completed doctoral studies in race and racism in the NT and currently works in the School of Education, University of Newcastle. Gabrielle A. Fortune, PhD, is a research fellow in the Department of History, University of Auckland. Recent publications include ‘Bride Ship, Brothel Ship: Conflicting Images of War Brides arriving in New Zealand in the 1940s’, in Restaging War in the Western World: Noncombatant Experiences, 1890-Today (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). Bill Garner has just completed his PhD in Australian history at the University of Melbourne. He is a screenwriter and playwright with more than 200 hours of television writing credits. For One Summer Again he received the Australian Writers Guild Award for Original Work for Television.

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Jennifer Gauthier is Chair of the Communication Studies Department and Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Randolph College. Her research areas include the national cinemas of Australia, Canada and New Zealand, with a special focus on Indigenous cinemas. Annie Goldson is a documentary film-maker whose features include Punitive Damage, Georgie Girl, An Island Calling, Sheilas, Elgar’s Enigma, Pacific Solution and Brother Number One (to be released 2011). She has also published widely in academic journals and book collections and is currently completing her second monograph After the Fact (Temple University Press). Emma Hamilton is a previous University Medallist and current doctoral candidate at the University of Newcastle. Her current research examines the intersections of gender, history and the nature of the historical film in the American Western. More broadly, her research interests revolve around the nature of filmic representation. Susan Hardy lectures in the History of Medicine in the School of History and Philosophy at the University of New South Wales. She has published on various aspects of colonial health and was an historical advisor on the ABC production of Outback House. Craig Hight’s research has been based within documentary theory, addressing aspects of the production, construction and reception of documentary hybrids (in particular mockumentary). His current research focuses on the relationships between digital media technologies and documentary practice, especially the variety of factors shaping online documentary cultures. Fincina Hopgood is an Honorary Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and the Book Reviews Editor for the online film journal Senses of Cinema. She is currently writing a book on the portrayal of mental illness in recent films from Australia and New Zealand. Henk Huijser has a background in Film, Media and Cultural Studies. He is currently a Curriculum Development Specialist at Bahrain Polytechnic in the Arabian Gulf. His research interests include technology-enhanced learning and teaching, cross-cultural communication and cultural studies, and Indigeneity, and he has published widely in all these areas.

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Hester Joyce is a Senior Lecturer in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University. She has professional credits in acting, stage directing, script editing and writing, in theatre, film and television. Research interests include national and Indigenous cinema; scriptwriting, policy and practice; screenplay narrative, aesthetics and formal analysis, creative project assessment. Cherie Lacey teaches New Zealand Film in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland. Her research interests include psychoanalysis, history, film and writing. She has recently completed a PhD entitled ‘To Settle the Settler: Pathologies of Colonialism in New Zealand History Films’. Michelle Langford received a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Sydney, and teaches Film Studies at the University of New South Wales. She is author of Allegorical Images: Tableau, Time and Gesture in the Cinema of Werner Schroeter (Intellect, 2006), as well as numerous book chapters and journal articles on German and Iranian cinema. Alfio Leotta teaches film studies at both the University of Auckland and Massey University (New Zealand). His primary research interests focus on the relation between film and landscape, the history of New Zealand cinema, and New Italian Cinema. He has recently completed his PhD thesis on filminduced tourism in New Zealand. Claire Lowrie is a Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle. She specialises in colonial and transnational history with a specific focus on the historical connections between northern Australia and Southeast Asia. Her doctoral thesis explored the history of domestic service and colonialism in Singapore and Darwin from the 1890s to the 1930s. Harriet Margolis has published essays on film, literature, cultural capital, stereotypes and feminism. Author of The Cinema Ideal, editor of Jane Campion’s ‘The Piano’, and co-editor of Studying the Event Film: ‘The Lord of the Rings’, she is currently co-editing Shooting Women, a collection of interviews with camerawomen. Josephine May is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Her research on Australian films about schooling has been published internationally, and she is currently completing a book on the topic. Jo is Book Reviews Editor for the History of Education Review and serves on the executives of the Australian & New Zealand History of Education Society (ANZHES) and International Australian Studies Association (InASA).

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Ann McGrath is the Director of the Australian Centre for Indigenous History at the Australian National University. She has published numerous prize-winning books and articles on Aboriginal history, has been an historical advisor for television and has produced and co-directed historical documentaries including A Frontier Conversation (Ronin Films, 2006). Scott McKinnon is a PhD student at the University of Technology, Sydney. His research investigates the role of the movies in the development of gay male culture, community and identity in Sydney between the years 1950 and 2010. Alec Morgan teaches in the Department of Media, Music and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University. He is a film-maker, writer, researcher and film archivist whose productions include Lousy Little Sixpence, Hunt Angels and the Mornington Island Film Project. Shane Motlap is an Indigenous man whose life experiences include working as a stockman, steelworker, canecutter and doorman. He has qualifications in education and business and has been employed at Charles Darwin University as a lecturer since 1993. He is currently the executive policy officer to the PVC Indigenous Leadership at Charles Darwin University. Stuart Murray is a Professor of Contemporary Literatures and Film in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He is the author of Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema, and the co-editor of both New Zealand Filmmakers and Contemporary New Zealand Cinema: From New Wave to Blockbuster, as well as other books on post-colonial and disability studies. Geraldene Peters is a Senior Lecturer in Media Studies at Auckland University of Technology, Aotearoa/New Zealand. Her research and practical interests lie in documentary studies, community media practices, and moving image history in Aotearoa. She has recently published on the work of filmmaker Merata Mita, and 1940s’ documentary production in New Zealand. Sarah Pinto is a Lecturer in the School of Historical and European Studies at La Trobe University. Her research interests are in the fields of historical representation, emotion, gender and sexuality studies, and she is currently working on a project on the remembrance of British settler colonialism in settler societies. Suneeti Rekhari lectures at the Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University. Her research interests include identity, race and representations.

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She is also interested in Indigenous identities, both Australian and global, and is currently looking at Adivasi identity representations in India. Daniel Reynaud is an Associate Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Theology at Avondale College, NSW. He has published numerous articles, chapters and books on the topic of Australian war cinema, focusing on the First World War. Jill Roe AO is a Professor Emerita in Modern History at Macquarie University, Sydney. Her prize-winning biography Stella Miles Franklin: A Life (HarperCollins, 2008; Harvard University Press, 2009) is now available in paperback. Most recently she has published a new edition of My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters (2010). Yorick Smaal is an Australian historian with particular interests in sex and gender, child abuse, war and society, and the law and criminal justice system. He has authored numerous works on male homosexuality, and has been recently awarded a post-doctoral fellowship at Griffith University. Belinda Smaill teaches in Film and Television Studies at Monash University. She is the co-editor of Youth, Media and Culture in the Asia Pacific (2008) and author of The Documentary: Politics, Emotion, Culture (2010). She is currently involved with a project titled The History of Asian Australian Cinema. Peter Stanley became the inaugural head of the Centre for Historical Research at the National Museum of Australia in 2007. He has published over 20 books, mainly on Australian and British military social history, including Invading Australia, A Stout Pair of Boots, Men of Mont St Quentin, Commando to Colditz and Bad Characters. Kirsten Stevens is completing her PhD in the Department of Film and Television Studies at Monash University. Her thesis considers film exhibition practices in Melbourne and the impact this has on the availability of nonmainstream, international and alternative cinemas to local audiences. Lars Weckbecker is a postgraduate student at the University of Auckland, researching the New Zealand National Film Unit and the Griersonian documentary approach in terms of ‘governmentality’. He received his MA in Media Studies from the University of Trier (Germany) in 2007. Craig Wilcox is an historian and has written on the historical, political and artistic interpretations of the Breaker Morant affair in Australia’s Boer War

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(2002) and published in Zombie Myths of Australian Military History (2010). His article ‘The dubious legacy of Breaker Morant’ (Quadrant, May 2010) examines Bruce Beresford’s film and its influence. Deane Williams is an Associate Professor in Film and Television Studies, Monash University, Melbourne. His books include Mapping the Imaginary (1997), Australian Post-War Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors (2008) and, with Brian McFarlane, Michael Winterbottom (2009). He is also editor of the journal Studies in Documentary Film. Alan Wright teaches for the Department of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of Canterbury and is the director and writer of Scuppered (2005). His research interests include documentary and the essay film, contemporary world cinema, time, memory and exile in film, and doubling and displacement in film.

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Acknowledgments The editors of this volume would like to thank the Humanities Research Institute at the University of Newcastle for funding administrative assistance to support this colossal project. We are indebted to the contributors to this volume for sharing their expertise and time to help put together a compendium on New Zealand and Australian historical film. We would also like to thank Philippa Brewster, commissioning editor at I.B.Tauris, for her support of the project. We also thank Dr Samar Habib for her assistance with preparations of the final manuscript. (James E. Bennett), Lyndall Ryan and Jennifer Frost supported and enthusiastically encouraged my forays into publishing on film and history in the recent past. I also thank Robert Rosenstone at California Institute of Technology for his generosity of spirit, warmth as a host and encouragement of my scholarly adventures in film and history on a study leave visit to Pasadena in 2002 during the very early stages of my discovery of this fascinating scholarly arena. I also wish to thank University of Newcastle students in HIST 3053 History and Film for their interest in, and engagement with, screen texts of the socio-historical world, and for their innovative and high-quality work. One of the fruits of this engagement between staff and students has been the work of Emma Hamilton, one of Josephine May’s students. Emma’s chapter on Smiley is included in this volume. We have been fortunate in the generosity of the following in allowing us to reproduce images for this volume, and extend them many thanks. Thank you to the New Zealand Film Commission and especially Jasmin McSweeney for helping us source images and allowing us to reproduce them. Images from the following films appear courtesy of the New Zealand Film Commission: •

Ngati, Dir Barry Barclay, New Zealand 1987

•

Utu, Dir Geoff Murphy, New Zealand 1983

•

River Queen, Dir Vincent Ward, New Zealand 2005

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•

Heavenly Creatures, Dir Sir Peter Jackson, New Zealand 1994

•

Forgotten Silver, Dir Sir Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, New Zealand 1995

•

Illustrious Energy, Dir Leon Narbey, New Zealand 1987

•

An Angel at My Table, Dir Jane Campion, New Zealand 1990

Images from Pacific Solution appear courtesy of James Frankham, Editor, New Zealand Geographic (with thanks also to Annie Goldson). Images from Lousy Little Sixpence appear courtesy of director Alec Morgan. Images from Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters appear courtesy of director Digby Duncan. Images from The Colony appear courtesy of producer Chris Hilton and Essential Media. Thank you also to Keah Butcher for providing us with digital stills. The image from the set of Revealing Gallipoli appears courtesy of presenter Peter Stanley. Thank you to Suneeti Rekhari, Kirsten Stevens and Craig Hight for providing additional images.

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Introduction ‘… the future of history, the survival of history is going to depend at least as much, if not more on the new media and television as on the printed page’.1 ‘… if historians today neglect audiovisual material, it will exist in spite of them as history through pictures’.2 ‘If you are a historian who dismisses film as a serious teaching tool, think again. If you don’t use films, your students will. Our current students are clearly a film generation. Increasingly, they see more films and read fewer books.’3 ‘… history education should empower people to use the varied media of twenty-first century society critically and creatively to develop their own understanding of the past’.4

The American film and history doyen, Peter C. Rollins, Editor-in-Chief of Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, has described his specialist field as ‘a scholarly frontier for our own time’.5 Making Film and Television Histories is intended as a contribution to that scholarly frontier by bringing together in a single volume a wide-ranging compendium dedicated to the analysis of historically-based visual texts. Although designed with a history education audience foremost in mind, we believe that the interdisciplinary elements framing this volume’s production will also appeal to educators and students alike in a range of other discipline areas: film and television studies, teacher education, media studies, philosophy, sociology, gender and sexuality, Australian studies and New Zealand studies. All of these areas have something to gain from consideration of the liminal space where history meets art and technology. Robert Rosenstone, a pioneering scholar in film and history, has argued that visual histories stand adjacent to traditional written texts as do other forms that deal with the past, such as oral history. Hayden White has even coined the term ‘historiophoty’ to express ‘the representation of history and our thought about it in images and filmic discourse’.6 No form of visual text – even the expository documentary which historians often consider to be the most reliable mimetic visual form of a traditional history text – can deliver essential truths or hope to simply unmask them. ‘Truth’ is always contingent in both

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documentary and fictional film and sits along a continuous spectrum rather than being confined to polar opposites.7 As Tessa Morris Suzuki has argued, each medium of history embeds particular communicative codes and when studied in an integrated way, the possibilities, limitations and biases of each become evident. In turn, this pedagogical approach assists in training students to interpret texts in more critical and imaginative ways.8 Output of historical Australian and New Zealand film and television has increased dramatically in recent years without corresponding scholarly attention to how we should understand visual media in relation to more traditional (written) texts, and how screen texts might be integrated into the serious study of history in our schools and universities. Theorisation of the relationship between film, television and history has continued apace, although Robert Brent Toplin has remarked on the gaping chasm that has long existed between historians on the one hand (with very few exceptions) and cinema/television studies specialists on the other who have, at best, usually talked past each other and, at worst, shown outright hostility to each other’s scholarly enterprise.9 A number of issues underpin this stand-off, including a mutual lack of familiarity with, and appreciation for, the different conventions, questions and debates integral to these different disciplines.10 We also have anecdotal evidence of other external factors such as competitive university funding models based on student numbers that fuel this lack of cooperation between disciplines. But if these often radically opposed approaches can be left to one side in favour of a dialogue, cross-fertilisation of ideas and receptiveness to interdisciplinary approaches, there is potentially a great deal to be gained.11 After all, visual media, like onions, are multilayered and their successful unpeeling requires intellectual dexterity that draws on more than one disciplinary body of knowledge.12 While some modern historians do already integrate screen texts into the classroom as examples or diversions, it is not always with a firm knowledge of filmic practices that would allow a full interrogation of these texts beyond the more obvious questions such as historical veracity. The imperatives of character and narrative engagement present in screen texts, for example, may require journeys into speculation in order to flesh out characters or narratives that would otherwise be sparse and potentially confusing for the viewer. Artefacts are an important part of bringing a three-dimensional shape to history, and so too do sets, props, costumes and other aspects of mise-enscène function in this way in historically-based film. As Claire Lowrie observes in this volume in relation to The Colony, the female historical re-enactors quickly shed their period garb. This is problematic in respect of historical fidelity yet viscerally effective in highlighting for viewers the sheer discomfort and constrictive nature of this apparel, which would have restricted women’s movement and activities, something considered perhaps

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unseemly or unworthy of mention in traditional historical texts.13 Perhaps the true strength of film and television texts in relation to connecting present-day audiences to their past is the use of affect or empathy. The ability of the camera, through acting, shot composition and other means, to create identification with these characters, to feel their victories and their failures, is difficult to achieve outside a fictionalised setting. Such statements do not argue for an abandonment of traditional written texts in learning and teaching histories, but encourage a consideration of the specific features, strengths and weaknesses of each medium, which can lead to utilisation of all available resources to bring history to life for those in the contemporary world. Making Film and Television Histories assembles a diverse and exciting team of scholars and film-makers, who work principally in the fields of history or film and television studies, to illuminate the multifaceted nature of these screen texts, their production, meaning and value for a twenty-first-century audience. In some cases the writers address their own screen production (Alec Morgan, Annie Goldson) or one in which they participated as a screenwriter (Bill Garner) or consultant/‘talking head’ (Peter Stanley). In ten thematically structured sections, each with significant contemporary resonances, the authors offer important insights into how we might revision the past in new and imaginative ways whether it be through documentary film, mockumentary (mock documentary), television drama, reality history television, feature film or even experimental film. The editorial approach of this volume foregrounds issues of concern to historians, screen studies scholars and educators more generally. For the historian, these issues include temporal and spatial context, the audio-visual archive as evidence, and change over time. Also of interest to historians will be the various roles of the screen text including the transmission of propaganda through the documentary form, the creation of counter-histories, and, in some cases, a ‘memorial function’ with implications for the nation’s collective memory. All in all this speaks to the enmeshment of history and screen texts in developing a deeper, more complex understanding of historical process.14 It may surprise some historians to know that similar debates have also taken place in relationship to film studies, specifically within the subdiscipline of documentary, which has long been involved in debates about ontology (the actual existence of objects or what is ‘real’) and representation.15 Ongoing scholarship in the field of documentary demonstrates the ways in which it is important to truly interrogate a screen text to reveal how its point of view, composition, how it addresses its audiences, the demographics it is attempting to appeal to and other factors, all contribute to offering a particular perspective on ‘truth’. Instead of interrogating whether or not a particular text ‘qualifies’ as historical truth, such disciplinary perspectives see

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screen representation, and by extension history, as always mediated by a variety of factors. The question then lies not so much in evaluating veracity, but in a close interrogation of the ways in which these texts present images of the past, or function as an emblem of their time of production, and participate in engaging with and creating popular conceptions of history that then further circulate through cultures and discourses. Indeed, several filmmakers have ‘played’ with history through the mockumentary form, radically undermining the concept of history through raising the possibility of ‘created histories’. For while screen texts can indeed create an unreal image of the past, ‘real’ histories have indeed also offered fantastical visions of history. Examples thereof include the discourse of terra nullius, a ‘history’ of Australia created, disseminated and utilised in order to authorise racist colonialist practices, censorship of unfavourable depictions of Japanese actions during the Second World War in history textbooks,16 and the Israeli depopulation of Palestinian villages and levelling of buildings in order to erase historical evidence of the previous inhabitants.17 An important history education imperative also underlies our motivation to produce this volume. One of us (James E. Bennett) has taught first-year survey courses in Australian and New Zealand history as well as dedicated upper level film and history courses at universities on both sides of the Tasman. However, we are not aware of a single textbook in either country to induct university staff in the interpretation and integration of visual images into history classes. In a valuable discussion on the scholarship of teaching and learning, American historian Michael Coventry and his five colleagues discuss the primacy of the written text for historians at the expense of visual images which are often still relegated to the status of ‘presentational props’ rather than the focus of pedagogy. Whereas historians have very particular ways of reading primary source written documents, the scepticism and neglect of images (especially the moving image) has contributed to a poverty of conventions in reading those visuals as historical sources. As they found, to be successful in ‘thinking visually’ requires the integration of written and visual texts so that visuals are contextualised rather than interpreted merely as freestanding sources.18 There is a further issue at stake with history pedagogy and that is (lack of) student engagement with history in a formal education setting, as Anna Clark has set out clearly in her book, History’s Children. The irony of this situation at a time when some forms of history such as genealogy, Anzacs and public history have so effectively captured the public imagination should not be lost on us. Based on extensive interviews with teachers, students and education officials from across Australia, Clark has shown how disengaged many school students are from the History curriculum. As she makes clear, there are many reasons behind students’ common reception of their national history as a

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sleeping pill, too varied and complex to enumerate in this introduction. However, we draw your attention to Clark’s identification of overemphasis on the textbook and a teacher-centred approach; the remedy is to deploy the full suite of available resources, materials and approaches in an educational setting to convey passion for, and an understanding of, the subject.19 To use historical film and television in an inspired and informed way that integrates this approach with written texts will both train students to think visually and allow them to access a larger and more variegated historical world. Rather than an end point, visual histories should serve as an entry point in accessing the past; an opportunity for interventions to arouse curiosity, stir emotions, provoke questions and debate. After all, that is what Clark found from her candid interviewees is exactly what inspires and motivates students in history teaching and learning. The volume is organised according to themed sections in order to ensure that important issues are engaged with, and to allow for more complex and multiple understandings of a particular theme or period than could be offered by a single chapter. Within each section, screen productions generally range over a period of several decades or more to allow the reader some insight into the changing nature of society over time. Each of these sections includes a brief introduction written by one of the contributors to draw together the threads of the different chapters, thereby making this a more accessible resource for students and teachers alike. Readers will also find recommendations for additional reading (and, in some cases, viewing) within each chapter as well as boxes that elaborate on some of the key ideas discussed by each writer. For much of the twentieth century Aboriginal and M¯aori narratives were marginalised within both historical and screen discourses, despite their importance and centrality to understanding the histories of both Australia and New Zealand. Thus, the first two sections of this text address such historicised representations, ranging from those seen in early New Zealand cinema (1912) to contemporary depictions that engage with and/or overwrite the ‘real’ histories of Indigenous Australians and New Zealanders. Despite official policies of multiculturalism, so too have those from various ethnicities been ‘othered’ in popular discourses: ‘Immigrants, Refugees and Multicultural Narratives’ addresses such discourses through films that both characterise, and speak back to, historical and contemporary conceptions of Antipodean whiteness. War has always been an important feature of historical and filmic narratives, as well as contributing to the national imaginary and how we understand our national identities. We thus have included two sections focused on war narratives, including chapters on the New Zealand Wars, the Boer War, and the First and Second World War. Other ways of engaging with

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issues of nationality and identity can be seen in ‘Imaging the Nation’, which offers chapters on screen productions made over nearly a century from the early twentieth to early twenty-first centuries. Other iconic historical and imagined characterisations that have become emblems of nation are included in ‘Icons, Crime and the Imagination’, which addresses filmic figures well known through a criminal context as well as narratives of the past that have become an identifiable part of the nation’s cinema and culture. National identity has often been understood through the image of iconic heterosexual males (the bushman, the digger); this does not, of course, encapsulate Australianness or New Zealandness for all their respective citizens. And so we have included a section examining aspects of gender and sexuality in relation to national histories and representations, whether these are women’s narratives, historical and fictional homosexuality, or more contemporary models of masculinity. Likewise, many of the chapters in ‘Stories of Adolescence’ address issues of sexuality and gender, as is common in many tales of adolescence from around the world. Making Film and Television Histories includes as its final section ‘Playing with the Past’, which directly engages with many of the issues surrounding historical representation on screen raised throughout the volume. By examining both hoax films and reality television, the potential for using screen texts as part of a process of student engagement in thinking through salient points about historical truth and constructing histories is highlighted. We hope that this volume will enable insights into both the role of history on film and television, and the role of screen texts in history, raising awareness of the importance of such engagements in an increasingly multimedia era. James E. Bennett and Rebecca Beirne

Notes 1 Simon Schama quoted in Ruth Balint, ‘Where are the Historians?’, Inside Story, 30 July 2009, viewed 25 September 2009, http://inside.org.au/where-are-thehistorians/. 2 Pierre Sorlin, ‘How to Look at an “Historical Film” ’, pp.25–49 in Marcia Landy (ed.), The Historical Film: History and Memory in Media, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 2000, p.26. 3 Richard Franaviglia and Jerry Rodnitzky (eds.), Lights, Camera, History: Portraying the Past in Film, Texas A&M University Press, Arlington TX, 2007, p.viii. 4 Tessa Morris Suzuki, The Past Within Us: Media, Memory, History, Verso, London, 2005, p.231. 5 Peter C. Rollins, ‘Introduction’, in Franaviglia and Rodnitzky, p.9.

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6 Robert A. Rosenstone,‘The historical film: looking at the past in a post-literate age’, in Landy, pp.51, 65. 7 See for example Linda Williams, ‘Mirrors without memories: truth, history and the new documentary’ in Marnie Hughes Warrington (ed.), The History on Film Reader, Routledge, London and New York, 2009, pp.220–30. 8 Morris Suzuki, p.232. 9 See Robert Brent Toplin, Reel History: In Defense of Hollywood, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2002, especially pp.160–77. 10 Toplin, pp.174–7. 11 One interesting and valuable example of this approach is evident in William Guynn, Writing History in Film, Routledge, New York, 2006. 12 See Rowena Murray (ed.), The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, McGraw-Hill International, Maidenhead, 2008, especially pp.64–7 for some of the advantages of interdisciplinarity. See also John Ramsden, ‘Teaching and learning through the visual media’ in Alan Booth and Paul Hyland (eds.), History in Higher Education, Blackwell, Cambridge, 1996, especially pp.199 and 202. 13 However, this is in the process of being rectified through the field of feminist history. 14 Guynn, p.168. 15 See for example Bill Nichols’ landmark work Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991. 16 See Kathleen Wood Masalski, ‘Examining the Japanese History Textbook Controversies’, Japan Digest, November 2001, pp.1–2. For examples of school history textbook controversies that range well beyond Japan, see Stuart J. Foster and Keith A. Crawford (eds.), What Shall We Tell the Children? International Perspectives on School History Textbooks, IAP, Greenwich, Conn, 2006. 17 Many examples are documented in Walid Khalidi (ed.), All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Institute of Palestine Studies, Washington DC, 1992. Anecdotally, the town of Kufr Bar’em contains plaques in front of buildings recounting fictional ‘historical’ narratives that overwrite the real history of the town with one that depicts the colonisers as the original inhabitants. 18 Michael Coventry, et al., ‘Ways of seeing: evidence and learning in the history classroom’, Journal of American History, 92:4, March 2006, pp.1372–1402. 19 Anna Clark, History’s Children: History Wars in the Classroom, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2008, see especially pp.113–14, 131.

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Introduction By Suneeti Rekhari •

Jedda (1955)

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Lousy Little Sixpence (1983)

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Buffalo Legends (1997)

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Rabbit Proof Fence (2001)

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Bra Boys (2007)

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Australia (2008)

In any introduction to Indigenous histories in Australia, particularly those of narratives that represent Indigenous people, the impact of colonisation and its subsequent history becomes inevitably interwoven. For Indigenous people, the colonisation of Australia was swift. The immediate consequences of this invasion manifested in the spread of diseases and the forcible destruction of Indigenous spiritual, social and cultural life. This destruction continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, due to the implementation of various programmes and policies put in place by the government. These policies generally followed the Social Darwinist belief that Indigenous people belonged to a ‘doomed race’ and that their ultimate cultural and biological absorption into ‘mainstream society’ would benefit them. All the authors in this section address these assumptions in their discussion of film texts, which not only reflect the diversity of Indigenous experiences in Australia but also the particular time frames in which these films were produced. Mid twentieth century Australia represented a period of history steeped in the assimilationist viewpoint that Indigenous people were an ‘inferior dying race’. The stereotype of Indigenous people being ‘inferior’ was firmly entrenched in the contemporary context of Jedda (1955). Very few Indigenous people were

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in ‘public sight’ at the time of its production. This can be directly contrasted to the change in this relation by the time of the production of Rabbit Proof Fence (2001), which arose out of the public awareness of the Stolen Generations narrative through the publication of the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ (Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, April 1997). This issue is revisited in Ann McGrath’s reading of Baz Luhrmann’s epic, Australia (2008). Arguably, all the discussions in this section touch upon the Stolen Generations’ narratives, as it is such a big part of our current understandings of Indigenous history: none more so than Lousy Little Sixpence (1983) which is a film often credited with bringing this issue to public attention. It, along with the two other documentaries in this section, Buffalo Legends (1997) and Bra Boys (2007), remind audiences of the stark reality of Australia’s colonial past. These real life narratives are not a romanticised version of Indigenous history, but are instead everyday lived experiences. All the authors discuss the sense of belonging, identity and the personal stories explored in these documentaries. Most importantly, the authors in this section also highlight how Indigenous histories have been, and sadly are still, ignored in the historical and political milieu of Australia. It then becomes doubly important to continue to discuss the representational filmic complexes surrounding Indigenous histories and identities if we are to truly move towards reconciliation and change.

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Jedda By Suneeti Rekhari Charles Chauvel’s 1955 epic, Jedda, is often considered a watershed film in Australian cinema. It was the first Australian film to use Gevacolor (which involved laborious and lengthy film processing) and to be both invited to, and receive critical praise at, Cannes International Film Festival. Most significantly, it was the first Australian film to feature two Aboriginal protagonists, Jedda (Rosalie/Ngarla Kunoth) and Marbuk (Bob Wilson/ Tudawali). Feature films with major Aboriginal characters were a scarcity prior to the 1970s. If they were represented at all, it was only in the form of ethnographic artefacts and curiosities. Indeed, Chauvel’s earlier feature film, Uncivilised (1936), played with cultural tensions and a Tarzan-esque ‘tribal’ hero, strikingly redolent with 1930s Hollywood exotica. Hence Jedda’s use of two Aboriginal characters in the main story was a unique departure from previous film conventions. It is all of these pioneering elements which entrench Jedda so firmly in the Australian cinematic psyche. On close viewing, the film can be seen to be split into two sections. The first section begins with aerial shots of the Northern Territory landscape. Sarah McMann (Betty Suttor) at Mongala Buffalo Station suffers the loss of an infant son, while an Aboriginal woman dies giving birth to a baby girl. Sarah decides to adopt the baby girl, Jedda, and raises her as her own child. Jedda receives the material benefits of living with a white family, but her Aboriginality is suppressed. Sarah recoils in horror when Jedda tells her of her dream to go walkabout, and chastises her by responding, ‘whatever would you do out there with all those naked monkeys?’ and goes on to claim that Jedda is no more like the ‘station blacks’ than ‘night is to day’. Sarah dismisses Jedda’s plea that she is Aboriginal and insists, ‘I have other plans for you, Jedda. I want you to go on living like a white girl, like my own daughter.’ The attitudes of the time, well intentioned, yet overtly assimilationist, are clearly seen. The influence of this cultural repression on Jedda is also seen in the film. Chauvel appears to have had an understanding of the nature of cultural isolation through assimilation and attempts to address it in scenes where Jedda is stirred by Aboriginal traditions, which frustrate and attract her at the

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same time. In an early scene when Jedda plays the piano, her gaze is drawn to the Aboriginal weapons and shields on the wall. The piece of western classical music that she is playing is slowly overtaken by the chanting and clicking of clap sticks, until she is seen hammering the piano keys in frustration. Jedda forms the central motif in this shot and we are drawn, both through her eyes and those of the camera, into the longing welling inside her when she looks at the shields. In later scenes we see the increasing attraction that Jedda feels towards another Aboriginal character, Marbuk, and thus by extension her Aboriginal traditions. The introduction of Marbuk into the film defines the start of the second section of the film. The first section follows a fairly straightforward narrative style, whereas the second section is more episodically presented with passion, melodrama and almost operatic undertones. Marbuk (Robert Tudawali) enters the film, dressed in a loincloth and carrying spears. The gaze of the viewer is slowly drawn over his natural dignity and fine physique. Jedda modestly lowers her eyes when he fixes her with an intense stare. In the film’s terms he is unassimilable, and indeed a social outcast, indicated in simplest terms through his scorn for Doug’s request for him to put on trousers, which

Jedda (Ngarla Kunoth/Rosalie Kunoth-Monks) lying on raft with Marbuck (Robert Tudawali) above her.

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he never does, and thus remains ‘uncivilised’ within the discourse of the time. This scorn is carried forward in all his actions through the movie including his ultimate abduction of Jedda, which shows him setting fire to the foliage near a buffalo shoot campsite. The ensuing chaos obscures Jedda’s screams as Marbuk drags her off. Marbuk as the embodiment of the ‘noble savage’ is now allowed to cinematographically dominate the film and the landscape. The shift is seen most evidently when Marbuk stands over Jedda as they pass through a spectacular gorge. He towers over Jedda on their makeshift raft as if representative of a nomadic warrior ‘savage’ who lives in a world of open spaces, red dust plains and impenetrable rock gorges. Marbuk is shown as the man who exercises and satisfies his sexuality, especially through his ‘conquest’ of Jedda. Other characters in the film are shown as having little or no sexuality. Interestingly, Jedda is allowed to have a ‘sexual awakening’ when she comes in contact with Marbuk. The images are now of Jedda as she is harshly introduced to the ‘primitive’ life. She is shown to resist eating a snake, she falls into a creek and her clothes become threadbare, though never to the point of indecency. The images suggest a girl lost in a world outside her reality. The viewer can sympathise with Jedda’s conflict, and at the same time the viewer is given the space to also deride Marbuk for positioning her in it. Chauvel’s treatment of his character as progressively degenerate facilitates this perspective. Marbuk is not even welcomed by his own people when he takes Jedda back to them. The women attack Jedda violently, and he is condemned by his tribal elders for choosing a woman of ‘wrong skin’. He is thus rejected by both white and Aboriginal worlds – further leading to his destruction. Ultimately, Jedda and Marbuk are eliminated – linking the film Jedda distinctly to the notions of a ‘dying’ culture and race. Jedda exudes an underlying pessimism about Aboriginal survival, as represented by its tragic conclusion. Chauvel constructs the representations of Jedda and Marbuk’s race. They are not allowed to live because, as signifiers, they tell the story of a race seen to be doomed to extinction, a race that has no choice but to ‘submit to civilisation’. Jedda is thus a strong statement on the social and cultural influences of its time. Looking at the film in its historical context is of vital importance, as it contextualises the way Aboriginal issues were viewed in 1950s Australia. Many readings of Jedda refer to its cross-cultural interactions and discourses surrounding assimilation. These readings coincide with shifts in discourses over time; in the 1960s and 1970s Jedda was commonly disdained, and was only rehabilitated in the 1980s when its technical qualities were recognised, and from the 1990s onwards saw its resurgence when the film was interpreted from feminist and post-colonial narratives and perspectives. The

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visual codes and conventions in it point to deterministic assumptions, which drive the actions of the film’s Aboriginal characters and lead to their demise in the end. Despite this obvious determinism, Jedda explicitly (and quite uncommonly) balances opposing statements on racial rhetoric and assimilation, primarily via the characters of Sarah (Betty Suttor) and Doug McMann (George SimpsonLyttle). After adopting baby Jedda, Sarah becomes anxious that Jedda will revert to her ‘Aboriginal ways’ and she tries to shield Jedda from the ‘freedom of her tribal life’. This is graphically denoted in a montage in the film: where Sarah tries to teach baby Jedda the alphabet by showing her pictures of animals in a book; when she rolls out animal tracks Jedda has traced out in dough; when she forces a crying Jedda to put on shoes; and when she instructs Jedda on the strains of ‘Little Baby Jesus’, a song connoting the almost missionary zeal of Sarah. Through this montage she provides the film’s clearest statement on assimilation. Her constant fear is that Jedda will become a ‘naked monkey’ again if she does not control what Sarah believes to be Jedda’s instincts. Sarah’s husband Doug, on the other hand, takes a more practical view of his perceived ‘primitiveness’ of Aboriginal people. His belief is that ‘they don’t tame – only on the surface’. His view is more aligned with that of cultural integrity, though it also indicates negative racial attitudes towards Aboriginal people. While this can be conceded as a self-interested response to the need for cheap and reliable labour on his cattle station, Doug McMann is still allowed to exist in the film text as an advocate for a view opposing assimilation. Chauvel provides viewers with the opportunity to engage with both sides of this debate. The other character used by Chauvel to reveal the complexities of assimilation is Joe (Paul Reynall). Audiences are first introduced to Joe in a voice-over during aerial shots of the Australian landscape at the very start of the film. In this opening narration, reminiscent of classic documentary styles, audiences learn that Joe is a ‘half-caste’, with an Afghan father and an Aboriginal mother, and that he is head stockman at the McMann farm. His identity of ‘half-caste stockman’ provides him with a position of authority over Marbuk, as Joe has acquired the ‘ideal’ white aspirations and ambitions and is shown to be ‘alike’ to the McManns. Joe is also Jedda’s intended husband. Sarah McMann approves of the union and sees it as ‘the answer to all her worries about Jedda’s future’ because ‘her one fear has been that Jedda might mate with one of her tribe.’ Joe is shown to be the success story of assimilation, symbolised by his desire to own a ‘little house with four walls and a roof ’ and ‘frilly curtains’. Despite this, and despite being the narrator, Joe always occupies a peripheral space in the film’s narrative. Thus, in many ways similar to Marbuk (despite being shown to be very different from him), Joe exists as diffused and de-centred. Both Aboriginal male characters exist on

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Aboriginal actors as ‘Exotic Others’ The crux of Jedda’s negotiation of difference lies in the representation of Jedda and Marbuk as ‘authentic Aboriginals’. Chauvel realised that he would need to cast people who had been in contact with ‘whites’, while retaining their ‘native exotica’. As part of the film’s negotiation with ‘exotic’ entertainment, a 24-yearold Tiwi man from Darwin was cast and given the tribal name of ‘Tudawali’ instead of Robert Wilson. Similarly Rosalie Kunoth, whom the Chauvels found at an Anglican mission outside Alice Springs, was baptised ‘Ngarla’ for her role as Jedda. Rosalie recounted later in an interview with the Australian Biography Project in 1995 how she objected to her name change. Thus we see that Aboriginality was made to exist in the lead characters and drawn attention to quite glaringly through the use of exotic sounding names – names that would ‘sound’ Aboriginal to largely non-Aboriginal audiences, which is reminiscent of Chauvel’s use of blackface in Uncivilised (1936). Both Robert and Rosalie had made the transition via their name transformations to the ‘exotic other’, a process carried out for them without their consent.

opposite ends of the discursive spectrum of the film, one as ‘savage Marbuk’ and the other as ‘assimilated Joe’. To his credit, Chauvel identified an area in Australian film that he felt had been previously unexplored and perhaps should be shown to Australian audiences, at a time which, unfortunately, had few filmic examinations of Aboriginal life and culture. In the film, questions about assimilation and a ‘clash of cultures’ were presented to audiences in a time known for its lack of such subject matter. This lack of understanding of Aboriginal culture is seen in the cultural ambiguity expressed right at the start of the film in its opening credits. Chauvel wanted the sequence to reflect the ‘authenticity’ of his work and subject matter, making it full of ‘Aboriginal imagery’. However, the credits conform more to a Hollywood Western genre with its wagon wheel motifs, linking it to a Western saga, rather than anything ostensibly Aboriginal. It must also be noted that the analysis in this chapter undoubtedly benefits from a post-Stolen Generations discourse, which was not available to Chauvel at the time that Jedda was made. It is easier for us to understand and critique the unresolved representational complexes that Chauvel presents in Jedda with the benefits of this understanding. If the additional discourses of child separations and social assimilation identified today were available to Chauvel, would the representations in Jedda be different? An answer in part came from Tracey Moffatt in Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy (1990).

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Ultimately, Jedda is laden with powerful symbolism, which it asks its audiences to understand. While it may seem crude to viewers today, it is a film that opens up multiple areas of scrutiny and re-scrutiny, which is why it will retain its groundbreaking place in the annals of Australian film history.

Further Reading Chauvel, Elsa, My Life with Charles Chauvel, Shakespeare Head Press, Sydney, 1973. Creed, Barbara, ‘Breeding out the Black: Jedda and the Stolen Generations in Australia’ in Barbara Creed and Jeanette Hoorn (eds.), Body Trade: Captivity, Cannibalism and Colonialism in the Pacific, Pluto Press, Sydney, 2001. Cunningham, Stuart, Featuring Australia: The Cinema of Charles Chauvel, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1991. Langton, Marcia, Well I Heard it on the Radio and Saw It on the Television, Australian Film Commission, Sydney, 1993.

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The Making of Lousy Little Sixpence By Alec Morgan Lousy Little Sixpence (1983) is now regarded as a seminal documentary about the Stolen Generations. In order to discuss the film’s production, it is necessary to set it in an historical context. In 1980, when I started formulating the film, the fact that Indigenous children of New South Wales had been forcibly removed from their parents and communities for much of the twentieth century due to a state law passed in 1909 remained unknown to the vast majority of non-Indigenous Australians. Those who might have had knowledge of it by being involved in that removal were certainly not speaking about it. Being non-Indigenous, I was also ignorant and stumbled upon this story while interviewing a number of Indigenous Elders in northwest New South Wales as part of an Indigenous community project that involved telling personal stories to local children. Many talked about being ‘taken away’ from their families, often by police, and being sent to work as indentured labour on rural stations. Some were sent to the Cootamundra Girls Home to be trained as domestic servants for white homes in the cities. From that moment on, their lives were totally controlled and governed by white welfare officers. Apart from the trauma of being forcibly removed from their families, many related horrific experiences in the training homes and workplace: beatings, overwork, being molested, even raped. Some were so hurt and shamed that they found it hard to talk about it, but one elderly woman wanted her grandchildren, who were being taught in white schools, to know about how they were forced to live under the so-called ‘Aborigines Protection Act’. Each child was supposed to be paid sixpence a week: most never got it. One person referred to it as ‘that lousy little sixpence that never came along’. This became the title of the film. I began my research by reading all the books and articles I could find dealing with twentieth-century Australia. It became startlingly obvious as to why the great majority of non-Indigenous Australians knew nothing – Indigenous history was virtually a footnote and there was no mention of the forced removal of Indigenous children at all. Today, it is hard to grasp that so little information used to be available about an issue that was later to become

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Domestic training, Port McLeay, South Australia, 1930s. a major focus of race relations in this country, leading to an extensive Royal Commission in the 1990s and a national apology by the Prime Minister in 2008. Back in 1980, this gaping hole in our history made it vitally necessary for a film about this subject to be made in order to raise awareness of these histories. The actual making of the film, however, proved to be immensely difficult. My early attempts at obtaining funding to film the elderly woman who wanted her story told met with a blanket rejection from state and federal arts organisations. One rejection noted that the application had ‘no artistic, cultural or historical value’. While I was trying to find funding, sadly, the elder passed away. That made me even more determined that this history had to be told. I was furious that non-Indigenous Australians were still denying this shameful past and that so many historians had ignored the issue. I was, at least, now forewarned that I would have to battle in order to make this film. Aware that I needed to find ‘hard evidence’ to convince the funding organisations of the importance of this history, I focused my search on archival footage. In those days, the National Film and Sound Archive was a small department in the basement of the National Library in Canberra. The months I spent searching there finally paid off. I discovered old footage in the vaults, not seen for many years, of regimented Indigenous children being trained as domestic servants by white supervisors. I also discovered in the

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NSW State Archives, in dusty old boxes, photographs of the children who had been taken; many posed in their starched, light blue domestic uniforms. Some were minding white children inside the homes of white middle-class professionals in the city. In contrast to their comfortable surroundings, the sadness and misery etched on the faces of these alienated Indigenous girls told their story in a way that words could never express. Despite periods of frustration, making this film was also a journey of remarkably fortuitous meetings. The first was with two young historians, PhD students at the time, who were also investigating the forced removal of children. Both have now gone on to become important historians: Heather Goodall who has since produced major studies in NSW Indigenous history; and Peter Reid who, I only later discovered, was responsible for coining the term ‘Stolen Generations’. Their immense knowledge helped me form a stronger picture of the effects that the protection laws had on Indigenous communities. During this time, a second fortuitous event happened. An Indigenous elder named Margaret Tucker had written her experiences of being forcibly removed from her mother. I was able to find a little money and rushed down to Melbourne with a skeleton film crew, Martha Ansara and John Whitteron. In a tiny pensioner flat we met Margaret for the first time, an extraordinarily charming and graceful woman who had also been a major activist in the early Indigenous political movement that agitated to have the racist laws abolished. After she told her harrowing story of being torn away from her mother on camera, the film crew was in tears. We immediately sensed that Margaret’s story would convince any sceptic that these terrible events had actually taken place. Upon my return to Sydney there was a third synchronistic meeting, this time with the Indigenous playwright Gerry Bostock and his brother Lester, who was prominent in the struggle to have Indigenous studies taught in schools. Both would join me and become invaluable contributors to the making of Lousy Little Sixpence. I began to seriously consider the way in which this story should be told. The options were as either a drama or a documentary. I chose documentary for a specific reason. At this time, most dramas made about Indigenous Australia by non-Indigenous film-makers tended to romanticise the past, thereby distancing audiences from being confronted with the shocking truth of our colonial past. I wanted to strip away any cinematic comfort zone and have audiences confronted with real events that had been denied and hidden for so long, told to them directly by an Indigenous person on camera. The story of the Stolen Generations would be told through the personal stories of just five people. This way, audiences would get to learn about their lives in more depth, and understand both the devastating effects of their removal and why they dedicated their lives to fighting against the so-called protection laws.

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Being non-Indigenous, I was aware of many of the racist attitudes towards Indigenous people prevalent at the time, including dismissive attitudes towards autobiographical Indigenous accounts of their lives and histories. I intended to counter this attitude by placing the strong visual evidence that I had uncovered alongside the eyewitness accounts in the film. If white audiences would be heartless enough to dismiss Margaret’s moving story, they could hardly deny the truth of those sad photographs of domestic servant girls, the archival footage and the newspaper headline that stated: ‘Aboriginal Children Removed from Families – a Heart-Wrenching Scene.’ Gerry Bostock and I continued our search to find four more eyewitnesses and located them very quickly: Bill Reid, who had become a political fighter against the Protection Board in the 1930s; long-time friends Flo Caldwell and Violet Shea; and Margaret Tucker’s younger sister, Geraldine Briggs. Each had extraordinary stories to tell. Based on their accounts, I drafted a script and cut together a short film presentation of Margaret’s interview plus archival footage and photos. This finally convinced the government film-funding bodies that

The Day of Mourning Conference On Wednesday 26 January 1938, a significant event in Indigenous history took place inside a tiny rented hall in central Sydney. On a day non-Indigenous Australians celebrated 150 years of white settlement, a small group of Aboriginal activists met in protest against the forced removal of children from their communities and to demand full citizenship status. This was the first time that representatives from different Aboriginal political organisations throughout the country had gathered together. According to the conference flyer, only ‘Aborigines and persons of Aboriginal blood’ were permitted to attend. Among the handful of delegates from Victoria were Margaret Tucker and Geraldine Briggs, members of the Aborigines Advancement League that had been formed a few years earlier in Melbourne by their uncle, William Cooper. Also present was their cousin, Sir Douglas Nicholls, who later became the first Indigenous Governor of South Australia. At the end of the conference a strongly worded statement was read out by Jack Patten, President of the NSW Aborigines Progressive Association. It called for an end to the callous treatment of Aboriginal peoples and demanded new laws and policies. This was a radical stance taken during a time when Aboriginal people who spoke out against the so-called Aborigines Protection Acts did so under the threat of severe sanctions by state authorities such as banishment from their communities. Today, this meeting is regarded as one of major significance in the fight for Aboriginal rights in Australia.

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Day of Mourning Conference, Sydney, 26 January 1938. this was an important story needing to be told. It had taken over two years just to get to this stage, but, at last, we had the funding to complete the film. Making a film is one battle; getting it seen is another. It was extremely well received throughout the country upon release, playing in small cinemas to full houses, and had a positive critical response from the press. The longest battle was with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). I spent a year trying to get them to screen it on national television and received constant rejections. Again, fortune came our way. After an enthusiastic screening at the Sydney Film Festival, documentary-maker Tom Zubrycki and I organised a petition calling on the ABC to screen the film. This got a lot of press coverage and the result we wanted. Since then, the ABC has screened the documentary a number of times. It is now over 25 years since the film was released. Time does not seem to diminish the impact this film has on audiences. It is still constantly being

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used in educational institutions, by activist groups, in teacher training and is often screened on television. I believe the enduring power of the film lies with the five eyewitnesses – Margaret, Bill, Flo, Violet and Geraldine – and the manner in which they told their incredible stories on camera: at times with sadness, other times with humour, never with bitterness, and always with a remarkable emotional grace and dignity. It is their spirit, I believe, that continues to touch audiences across the generations.

Further Reading and Viewing Tucker, Margaret, If Everyone Cared, Ure Smith, Sydney, 1978. A study guide for Lousy Little Sixpence, produced by Ronin Films, can be obtained on the Internet. This package also contains study information for two other excellent documentaries relating to the Stolen Generations. Darlene Johnson’s Stolen Generations and Land of Little Kings, the story of singer-songwriter, Archie Roach. All three films can be obtained from Ronin Films, Canberra: www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/590.html

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Buffalo Legends By Margot Ford and Shane Motlap Buffalo Legends (1997) is a documentary that tracks the stories of various players and their families in the mixed-race Australian Rules football team, the Buffaloes, in Darwin.1 Produced by Desmond Kootji Raymond, a local Larrakia man, and Paul Roberts, it provides a space for local Aboriginal people to tell their own stories about unjust treatment and inequities under the Aboriginal Ordinances in the Northern Territory. It also tells of ingenuity, resilience and humour in the face of those inequities. This documentary is not well known in Australia as evidenced by its absence from the list of Indigenous documentaries at Australian Screen Online.2 It deserves wider recognition because it foregrounds the multicultural experience 30 years prior to the official policy of multiculturalism that commenced in the 1970s. There are two significant interrelated themes in this documentary – the sporting prowess of Indigenous players and the way sport acted as a catalyst for political activism. Underpinning these themes is the history of racism and prejudice in twentieth century Australia. The power of this documentary lies in the prevalence of Indigenous voices telling personal stories. Bill Dempsey, with Ngalakan/Jingili heritage, is a wellknown Darwin footballer who played for West Perth in the 1960s. He narrates the documentary and infuses it with his own personal experience of being a five-year-old boy, taken from his family and placed in the Retta Dixon Home in Darwin.3 The film also features many older people whose fathers and husbands were part of the Buffaloes football team. The immediacy of experiences of those from the Stolen Generations in this documentary reminds us that it is firmly within living memory that these great injustices were perpetrated, with the effects still being felt today. Oral history plays a critical role in Indigenous knowledge because for Indigenous peoples it is part of a long tradition. The lack of access to secondary and higher education also largely precluded explanations of history from Indigenous perspectives in the Eurocentrically conventional texual mode. In Australia, stories from the Stolen Generations gained legitimacy through the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ and historian Stuart Rintoul.4 It is difficult to ignore stories from many different sources. They can sometimes

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support documented accounts and at other times contradict them. In Buffalo Legends material sourced from local newspapers and national archives, as well as descriptions from well-known Australian writer, Xavier Herbert, helps legitimate claims made in the documentary. The informal style of Buffalo Legends, with people having conversations in their backyards, at a barbecue, or in their living rooms, interspersed with dramatised recreations and archival footage, helps create an authentic realism. It reflects the laid-back style which is famous in Darwin, with stories filled with good humour and peppered with poignancy. Descriptions from the descendants of political activists, such as the McGinness brothers, disrupt notions of a passive Aboriginal population in the face of entrenched colonialism. Prior to the work of historian Henry Reynolds, it was assumed by non-Indigenous Australians that Aboriginal people did not actively fight against the invasion of their country.5 Buffalo Legends contributes to dispelling the myths of Indigenous passivity in the face of injustice. Buffalo Legends tells the story of Reuben Cooper, a Tiwi/Iwaidja man, who brought Australian football to the Northern Territory in 1919. It quickly became a popular local sport and teams were fielded for a local competition. The colour bar operating at the time prevented anyone of Aboriginal, Torres Strait Islander, Chinese, Filipino or mixed race descent from playing in teams other than the Buffaloes. This is the first of many ironies that demonstrate the nonsensical prejudice, especially given that an Aboriginal man first brought the game to the Northern Territory. The football ground provided one of the few opportunities for large groups of mixed-race people to congregate legally. For a brief moment, on the football field, there was a sense from the team that they were treated in the same way as their white counterparts. Bill Dempsey explains: ‘These were people with no human rights, but when it came to Saturday, when they fronted up, they were playing against people who were their bosses, people who had control over their lives. And for once on the football ground they could be equal.’ However, once the team began to win regularly some underhanded tactics were used to put the players off their game. On the field some biased refereeing created a playing field that was less than equal. The men protested by walking off the pitch. According to Kathy Mills, daughter of Jack McGinness, ‘they were not only fighting for a fair go at football – they were also fighting for a fair go at life’. As a result, the Buffaloes football team was created. The name was partly in homage to the number of men who also worked on buffalo hunts. Reuben Cooper was one of those men. Many of the players in those early days had to live in the Kahlin Compound because they came under the Aboriginal Ordinances, restrictive legislation governing every aspect of Aboriginal lives. Conditions in the compound were dire. In the early 1930s the superintendent of the compound was Xavier

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Herbert, the well-known novelist.6 In the HREOC report on the Stolen Generations, Xavier Herbert describes the food at the compound: The porridge, cooked the day before, already was sour and roped from the mould in it, and when doused with the thin milk, gave up the corpses of weevils by the score. The bread was even worse, stringy grey wrapped about congealed glue, the whole cased in charcoal.7

Another injustice discussed in Buffalo Legends was that any wages earned by Indigenous people were held ‘in trust’ by the government, under the control of the Chief Protector. There is a wonderful re-enactment in Buffalo Legends in which Val McGinness, the brother of Jack McGinness, goes cap in hand to ask for some of his money. It is full of humour, as are many moments in the documentary. Humour was a powerful weapon used to cope with the constant challenges. As Bill Dempsey says, ‘Making fun out of our hardships was a tradition. It was the way we survived.’ Sport was regarded as a safe and appropriate activity for local Indigenous people, but instead it acted as a catalyst for political activism, advocacy and unrest. An Aboriginal Half-Caste Association was formed in the 1930s, which lobbied hard for half-caste Aboriginal people to be exempt from the draconian Aboriginal Ordinances. This did happen, but it also led to some very peculiar anomalies. Jack McGinness, who became the first Aboriginal trade union leader, had some of his children still under the ordinances and others, born after exemptions came into force, were outside the control of the Ordinances. This was still the case when he addressed the ACTU in 1951.8 Despite the unjust treatment meted out to Aboriginal people, one of the most enduring messages from Buffalo Legends is the sense of community experienced by the local Darwin families. The experiences of mixed-race families in Darwin, from Kahlin Compound, the Retta Dixon Home, and also at Parap Camp, appeared to pre-empt multiculturalism. According to Kathy Mills in Buffalo Legends, The Buffaloes actually played a role in opening up the doors of multiculturalism, because we had non-Aboriginal people, Chinese, Greeks. We had the lot. So we really were a multiracial team and I think we were the forerunners of multiculturalism here in Darwin.

In his narration, Bill Dempsey also declared, ‘Despite the laws that tried to classify and divide people, the complete opposite happened at Parap Camp. People just treated each other as human beings. People just said “Stuff the bloody laws” and the place really took off. I firmly believe that Parap Camp is the birthplace of multicultural Australia.’

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It is true that what was happening in the 1930s and 1940s in Darwin took another two decades to seep into the Australian consciousness nationally, with the multicultural policy becoming part of the Whitlam platform in the 1970s. By then Darwin was being presented as a multicultural success story. More broadly, up until the 1970s Northern Australia continually challenged racial segregation, especially between Indigenous and ‘Asian’ groups.9 Those families that were part of the Buffaloes football team have gone on to form the character of Darwin today. They hold a pride of place in the history of the city. As Sue Stanton (Jack McGinness’ granddaughter) points out, ‘I believe that Aboriginal or half caste people, or whatever you want to call them in this town, have always had a lot of authority and respect and I really believe that it came from that time when Jack McGinness and all that mob stood up and said, “We aren’t taking this shit anymore”.’ Buffalo Legends balances the stories of hardship with stories of survival and resilience. It tells the story of Aboriginal political activism decades before the most well-known action in the walk off at Wave Hill by Aboriginal pastoral workers in the 1960s. It is a story worth telling.

Further Reading Cummings, Barbara, Take This Child. From Kahlin Compound to the Retta Dixon Children’s Home, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1990. McGinness, Joe, Son of Alyandabu: My Fight for Aboriginal Rights, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1991. Stanton, Sue, ‘The Australian half-caste progressive association: the fight for freedom and rights in the Northern Territory’, Journal of Northern Territory History, 7, 1996, pp.37–46.

Notes 1 2

3

4

Buffalo Legends, Des Kootji Raymond and Paul Roberts, Ronin Films, 1997. See ‘Indigenous Documentary’. Australian Screen for a full list of documentaries made on and by Indigenous people. Viewed 30 October 2010, http://aso.gov.au/ titles/indigenous/documentary/. See Barbara Cummings, Take this Child: from Kahlin Compound to the Retta Dixon Children’s Home, Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra, 1990 for a description of experiences at both Kahlin Compound and Retta Dixon. The ‘Bringing Them Home’ Report was a milestone report that finally prompted the federal government to say ‘Sorry’ in February 2008. Stuart Rintoul’s The Wailing provides comprehensive stories from across Australia.

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Henry Reynolds [1982], The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney, 2006; also see his [1987] Frontier: Aborigines, Settlers and Land, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996. Xavier Herbert based his novels Capricornia (1971) and Poor Fellow, My Country (1975) on his experiences in the Northern Territory. HREOC, ‘Bringing Them Home. Report of the National Enquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families’ (Commissioner Ronald Wilson), Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission, Canberra, 1997. For a full transcript of Jack McGinness’ speech to the ACTU in 1951 go to: http://indigenousrights.net.au/files/f11.pdf as cited in Joe McGinness, Son of Alyandabu: My Fight for Aboriginal Rights, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1991, pp.61–4. See for example Regina Ganter’s Mixed Relations. Asian-Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, with contributions [about Darwin] from Julia Martinez and Gary Lee, University of Western Australia Press, Perth, 2006.

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Rabbit Proof Fence By Kathy Butler Based on the book Follow the Rabbit Proof Fence (1996) by Doris Pilkington Garimara, the film Rabbit Proof Fence (Miramax Films, 2002, 94 mins) traces the extraordinary story of three young girls, Molly, Daisy and Gracie, who were removed from their family in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia and taken to the Moore River Native Settlement. In an epic journey, they attempt to walk more than 1500km ‘home’, with the threat of capture dogging their movements. More broadly, the film can be contextualised in the often-fearful environment engendered by various forms of Aboriginal Protection legislation enacted across Australia, which targeted the removal of ‘mixed-race’ Aboriginal children and facilitated the agenda of assimilation. While the stories of these children, referred to as the Stolen Generations, continue to appear across a range of creative and academic mediums, Rabbit Proof Fence remains one of the most significant and celebrated representations of this period. During the twentieth century, Aboriginal people struggled against racist and oppressive policies of which the removal of Aboriginal children from their families was one of the most damaging. Much of this history was unacknowledged by mainstream Australian history and culture, leading to what anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner characterised as a ‘cult of forgetfulness’. From the 1960s, increased Aboriginal political protest, accompanied by the growth of media coverage, created an upsurge towards full and equal citizenship and land rights nationally. Acknowledgment of the Stolen Generations followed later and during the 1980s and 1990s autobiographies, academic discourses and a Royal Commission into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from the Families (1995–7) headed by Sir Ronald Wilson were having some influence on the national consciousness, culminating in a growing public support for the Australian Prime Minister to issue an apology. A counter discourse denying the extent of removals and downplaying their negative ramifications, reiterated by Prime Minister John Howard, contributed to a bitterly contested debate. The creative arts have always played a central role in the portrayal of Aboriginal histories. The success of the audio-visual medium in current

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Aboriginal representations contributes to this process. While there had been earlier attempts to dramatise the issues of Aboriginal child removal in the groundbreaking four-part series Women of the Sun (1981), documentaries such as Lousy Little Sixpence (1983), discussed by film-maker Alec Morgan in a separate chapter, and music such as Archie Roach’s Took the Children Away (1992), Rabbit Proof Fence was the first significant feature film to tackle the issue. In total, these works also stand as a testament to the power of the creative arts to contribute to consciousness-raising in significant public debates and to mobilise movements for social justice. Rabbit Proof Fence begins with a vignette of the girls’ home life, in the company of female relatives, learning skills from within their own culture as well as participating in the rations economy that existed for many Aboriginal people. It is while receiving rations that the figure of A.O. Neville, Chief Protector of Aborigines and then Commissioner for Native Affairs in Western Australia for 25 years from 1915 to 1940, is first introduced as a potential threat to the girls remaining within their family and community. Dismissed laughingly by Molly and Daisy’s mothers, the threat of removal quickly manifests in the appearance of the policeman and the dawning recognition by Molly’s mother, Maud, of his purpose. In one of the film’s most heartrending sequences, the girls are forcibly placed in the police car by the police officer. The wailing of their female relatives is a potent reminder to audiences of a simple fact – that Aboriginal mothers did feel pain when their children were removed. While this seems absurdly self-evident, there were numerous discourses, beginning in the 1800s, which concluded that Aboriginal mothers had the capacity for only limited connection with their children. While this was challenged by some white advocates of Aboriginal rights, parental rights were ultimately overridden for the oft-quoted reason of being ‘in the best interests of the child’, a phrase which continues to resonate painfully in the current Northern Territory Intervention. Thus, there is both an historical and contemporary tension in examining Rabbit Proof Fence concerning the application of racialised government power to suppress both child and parental rights. In the scenes at the Moore River Native Settlement, the regimentation of the children’s daily lives, physical examination and severe punishments quickly form a compelling portrait of a harsh and particularly loveless place for a child to be raised in. This depiction resonates with the oral testimony given nationally during the Royal Commission into the separation of Aboriginal children from their families. For the audience these opening sequences create a clear vision of the difference in the family and institutional environments. The film then moves into a chase scenario familiar to the film-going audience – that of the underdog pursued by relentless state authorities. The girls’ socialisation within their family and Mardudjara culture has given them skills in

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negotiating the land. This is particularly evident with Molly, the eldest of the girls, who assumes leadership of the group. In showing the girls’ resourcefulness and resilience there is a challenge to representations of Aboriginal passivity and of the gendered stereotypes that characterise girls generally as incapable of the physical endurance shown in this story. What remains omnipresent is the legislative power of A.O. Neville to remove Aboriginal children. In the film, Neville, portrayed by Kenneth Branagh, is relentless in his pursuit of the three girls and implacable in his belief that Aborigines can and should be ‘merged’ into white society. It is difficult to know to what extent this captures the ‘real’ Neville or if indeed in the multiple and conflicting representations of him elsewhere there is one definitive lens through which his depiction could be accurate. In one sense, it is helpful to look at the film character Neville as the mythic embodiment of the burgeoning bureaucracy targeting Aborigines, in both the white and black community consciousness. For much of the white community, Neville’s mission was supported by an intersection of prevailing Christian sentiment and pseudo-Darwinian scientific rationality as shown in the film in his address to a small contingent of white women. To black communities, Neville’s role was more complex in its execution of power through his performance of a range of administrative functions that affected the minutiae of everyday life, approval of marriages as well as certifying documents for the removal of children. In the film, if Neville is the overarching spectre of bureaucratic intervention, the Aboriginal tracker (played by David Gulpilil) is the immediate threat within the girls’ minds. The character of the tracker plays an important function in developing the dramatic tension as well as in alerting the audience to the multifaceted interactions that Aboriginal people had with the state. The tracker is simultaneously an agent of the state as well as a parent dispossessed of a child. While the use of an Aboriginal tracker had been a fairly standard plot device in many previous Australian films, the sometimes tortured and tenuous nature of their relations with white authorities they are ostensibly serving had not previously been highlighted with such significance. Rolf de Heer’s 2002 film, The Tracker, with the tracker role played again by Gulpilil, further explores this aspect of the tracker’s characterisation. The film’s claims to authenticity, and indeed its eventual emotive impact, are enhanced by the film’s opening declaration that it is a ‘true story’ and by the appearance of the real Molly and Daisy in the concluding scenes. However, there has been a range of criticisms levelled at the accuracy of the film, including the invention of the girls evading capture because they followed the wrong line of the fence. Further it has been disparaged for being ‘anti-Australian’, by presenting Australia in an unflattering light both domestically and in an overseas context. While there are some artistic

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liberties taken in adapting Pilkington Garimara’s text, this should be viewed more within the context of the nature of the creative arts to evoke emotion and empathy, rather than devaluing the integrity of the story. Pilkington Garimara was also engaged as a consultant for the film, an important aspect for maintaining the core themes of the story in its translation to film. Such consultation also makes an important contribution to a culturally appropriate depiction, evidenced by Pilkington Garimara vetoing the inclusion of some material in the film. This shift to inclusionary production values is also evident in other recent works such as Ten Canoes (2006); however, both Rabbit Proof Fence and Ten Canoes have been criticised for having nonIndigenous directors. Rabbit Proof Fence is a film with such a wide-ranging impact that it influenced Australian public opinion from the pub to parliament, and also had international appeal. It allowed audiences to have an insight into the experiences of Aboriginal people living under the regime of Aboriginal Protection during the twentieth century. Highly emotive, it challenges those watching to consider whether or not government intervention is ‘in the best interest of the child’.

Further Reading Langton, Marcia, ‘Aboriginal Art and Film: The Politics of Representation’, Rouge, 6, 2005, viewed 30 October 2010, http://www.rouge.com.au/ 6/aboriginal.html. Pilkington, Doris (Nugi Garimara), Follow the Rabbit-Proof Fence, University of Queensland Press, Brisbane, 1996.

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Blood is Thicker than Water: Stains on the Land in Bra Boys By Brooke Collins-Gearing and Henk Huijser We would like to begin this paper by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land on which we work and write: the Pambalong Clan of the Awabakal people and Giabal and Jarowair people of Toowoomba. This chapter is a critique of the way in which the documentary Bra Boys constructs history, memory and identity. The Bra in Bra Boys is short for Marou BRA beach in Sydney. Bra Boys was released in 2007, and is the most commercially successful Australian documentary ever released. It tells the story of the Abberton brothers (Sunny, Koby and Jay) and their extended Bra Boys surfer gang, or ‘tribe’: a band of multi-ethnic males from the suburb of Maroubra. The film’s director, Sunny Abberton, is a Bra Boy himself, and, along with his brothers, offers an overview of Maroubra’s surfing history and culture – which includes claims to place, issues of class and race and violent interactions with authority. The localism of the film is well-defined and constructed by boundaries of colonialism, racism and the physical landscape (the differentiated beaches).The signification of ‘Boy’ in the title immediately establishes the film’s hyper-masculine purpose and approach. In this chapter, we consider how the film attempts to re-narrativise colonialism using an ethnocentrically specified perspective and location. The documentary begins with a very short history of white Australia in broad strokes: in 1770 Captain Cook landed and encountered the Eora people of what was later named Botany Bay. Russell Crowe’s narrative voiceover attempts, from the beginning, to position the protagonists of this story alongside the assailed Indigenous Australians. Initially adhering to the notion of ‘discovery’, the narrative describes the ‘vast and unexplored continent’ and the ‘unexplored land’, ignoring the Indigenous cultures already inhabiting the land for centuries though it subsequently provides a reconsideration of Eurocentric perspectives and acknowledges the local Eora people who named the beach ‘Maroubra’, meaning ‘place of thunder’. From here, the documentary aligns the attacks made on the Eora people with later attacks – physical, cultural and social – made on the Maroubra ‘locals’; that is, the Bra

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Boys. The narrative positions the surfers of Maroubra as almost the inheritors of the racism and injustices experienced by early-contact Eora people. The film constructs a post-colonialist narrative of Maroubra surfing history and culture, displacing peaceful beachside identity with imposed violence on Maroubra male surfers. It positions Bra Boys as having to constantly defend themselves and their beach from attacks by law enforcers and outsiders (those who are not from Maroubra). Surfers are represented as discriminated against and the victims of social injustice within Bra Boys since they were considered to be ‘the scum of the earth, vermin, respected outside of Australia but not within their own country’. The discrimination suffered by the earlycontact Indigenous community is seamlessly equated with the discrimination felt by the boys from Maroubra. Thus, the documentary positions Bra Boys as ‘natives’ of the local landscape, in particular the beach. And it is this nativism that they are continually forced to defend from the attacks of invaders – whether these be the local authorities or other outsiders. The documentary provides another perspective on Australia’s construction of history and national identity that has been developed on notions of peaceful settlement and egalitarianism. It relies on the topography of the local landscape and beaches (each beach is isolated from the next by cliffs and rock faces) to represent the sense of isolation the Bra Boys feel from society. In describing the coastline, the ‘Beach tribes’ and their relationship with their local area becomes a part of their ‘native’ myth; that is, the beach they ‘belong’ to is seen as their mother and father – their family – and when someone attacks the beach, they are attacking the tribe it nurtures and shelters. Those who belong to the Maroubra ‘tribe’ are bordered on one side with a rifle range and on the other side by one of Australia’s largest prisons. The male youth of Maroubra live amongst violence and attacks – stab wounds, being shot at and street fights – as well as the persecution from those in authority that is inherent in being a Bra Boy. ‘The beach, the surf, have been their saviours’ and therefore the Bra Boys protect ‘their’ beach, their surf, in return. Moreover, they have a reputation for doing so, indeed they claim to be ‘infamous and recognised worldwide’ for it. Such notoriety appears to be as much about their surfing achievements as it is about their hell-raising exploits and Kelly Jean Butler has observed that before the documentary was released, the Bra Boys mostly attracted negative media attention.1 This defence of the beach, defence against authority, defence of the brotherhood, is referred to in the film as ‘tribal warfare’ and ‘localism’. The term ‘localism’ derives from territorialisation processes in the surfing community, explaining the way participants from one beach ‘defend their patch’, excluding and competing with surfers from other locales (beaches, geographical areas or even nationalities and cultures).2

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Abberton states in the film that if you take localism away, the whole thing disintegrates. You’re taking away that people are actually proud of where they come from. You just can’t do that.… Surely the local Eora people would agree. Following this quote in the documentary is footage of a beach brawl: two males involved in a fist fight. Is the implication that one of them is protecting their place? Protecting their brotherhood? That violence is the only option for those persecuted and ‘targeted’ by the police, like the Bra Boys? The film attempts to follow a cyclical, as opposed to linear, version of history and memory. From the beginning to the end of the narrative, the stability and security of ‘tribal culture’ is constant, while ludicrous laws, unjust authorities and even tribe names come and go. The idea that ‘tribe names change but their culture survive[s]’ is again reinforced by Crowe’s narration at the end: ‘As time goes on and the tribal names change, the ocean will continue to give solace to the youth of “the place of thunder” and the next generations will fight to keep its culture alive.’ What exactly is this ‘culture’ that the film continuously refers to? It is never made clear whether this reference is to tribal culture, male culture, surfing culture or youth culture. Throughout the documentary the use of the word ‘tribe’ and the easy manner in which the narrative ascribes ‘tribalness’ to groups (mostly groups of men) and their connection to an area of land seeks to establish a sense of belonging – rightful belonging. The Eora people are the traditional custodians of that country and never voluntarily gave up their traditions and links to their land. To attempt to ascribe similar qualities to post-invasion groups in colonised Australia is problematic and borderline misappropriation. Maroubra beach is Eora land and always will be. The changing tribe names, which the narrative speaks of, are part of a construction of history and memory that the film uses to support the attitudes, actions and beliefs of the Bra Boys. To justify their claim to place (Maroubra and the beach), the film both supplements and displaces the history of the traditional custodians of the land: it is no longer Eora people fighting for recognition and survival, but Bra Boys. Throughout the film, the interviewed men use language that excludes women, links landscape to masculinity and purports a defence of multiculturalism. At the very end of the film, each male (no female subjects are interviewed) identifies who they are, whether they are ‘Australian’, ‘partAboriginal’, ‘Lebanese Australian’, ‘Australian Italian’ and so on until the very last person to speak – Koby Abberton – simply identifies himself as ‘Maroubra’, thus implying that the local ‘tribal’ identity subsumes all others and the physical landscape is now embodied by a Bra Boy. The film’s storyline of history and memory is built on insider/outsider, defend or be attacked, egalitarian/authoritarian dichotomies. Violence is depicted not only as a test of masculinity, but as the connection to landscape and the experience of localism. It is both the beach and those who belong to the beach that

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experience adversity, and this experience contributes to the sense of belonging. To be a Bra Boy, certain male characteristics need to be proven and maintained. The physical manifestations of Bra Boy masculinity (shirtless, tattooed, scarred) are linked to the ideology of the ‘tribe’. The scars and tattoos are viewed as badges of honour, the boys are seen as surf warriors, and the riots are classified as tribal warfare. This in turn creates a sense of belonging to, and ownership of, the landscape/beach. In both the film and in interviews, Sunny Abberton links societal and familial struggle to landscape and localism. He believes that growing up in a large housing commission area near a consistent surf beach contributed to the community’s attitude to both the surf movement and authorities, that is, that the beach offered protection and shelter from the hardships the housing community faced: But I saw that this really strong tribal culture right on the beach in one of these poorer areas – Maroubra – was unique. So I knew there was a special story about that, and when I researched all the history and social content that dates right back to the late eighteenth century, then I realised how it was even more connected and that story had to be told.3

He also states that ‘We think the beach should belong to everyone but when people go to a beach, any beach around the world, they need to realise that there might be a whole history and a culture there spanning for generations and that should be respected.’ In his defence of specific and localised culture, Abberton’s comment depends on the deliberate absence of acknowledging traditional Aboriginal custodianship. At the same time, this avoidance has been constructed by the film’s post-colonial attempt to reveal a shared and conflicting history of colonisation and attacks by outsiders. While Bra Boys may centre upon hyper-masculinity, it is a masculinity that celebrates polycentric multiculturalism under the overarching signifier of being a ‘Bra Boy’.4 Hyper-masculinity is embedded in the documentary by Russell Crowe’s narration which represents the Bra Boys as embodying the marginalised, hard-done-by Australian battler icon. Hyper-masculinity is a key element of many representations of iconic Australian identity and the film utilises this imagery and associated sense of national belonging. The hyper-masculinity that characterises the film is supported by the accompanying music CD (simply called Bra Boys: Music from the Film). The CD is a collection of highly-localised rap, punk, metal and electronica. The images in the CD booklet further reinforce the localism and tribalism outlined above. An aerial shot of Maroubra Beach is accompanied by a group photo of MarouBRA Boys; there are black and white ‘nostalgia’ photos of the boys practising boxing, followed by party photos of tattoo-clad and VB swigging Bra Boys ‘on da beach’, finally topped off with the Abberton brothers

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themselves in the surf. These photos are interspersed with the most ‘meaningful’ lyrics lifted from selected songs on the CD, such as: ‘we don’t want drama, we keep to our own, but when you push a man out of his comfort zone’ (from Ready to Brawl), or ‘now hands up in the air if you down with us, if you ain’t it’s ride and collide with us’ (from Bra Boy Warriors). Music works on an emotional level, and is thus a very powerful, and often underestimated, device to reinforce the imagery, themes and narrative structure set-up in films, as the Bra Boys example shows.

Further Reading Andrews, Bruce, ‘Their brothers’ keepers: Bra boys’, Metro Magazine 153, 2007, pp.48–49. Huntsman, Leone, Sand in Our Souls: The Beach in Australian History, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2004. Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, London, 1994.

Notes 1 2 3 4 .

Kelly Jean Butler, ‘Their Culture has survived: Witnessing to (dis)possession in Bra Boys (2007)’, Journal of Australian Studies, 33:4, 2009, pp.391–404. Belinda Wheaton, ‘Identity, Politics, and the Beach: Environmental Activism in Surfers against Sewage’, Leisure Studies 26:3, 2007, pp.279–302. Sonny Abberton in Bruce Andrews, ‘Their Brothers’ Keepers: Bra Boys’, Metro Magazine 153, 2007, pp.48–9 Ella Shohat & Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media, Routledge, London, 1994

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Australia By Ann McGrath The film Australia by Baz Luhrmann (2008) is an epic drama and a romance. Australia grafts the whimsical optimism of the musical classic, Wizard of Oz (1939), onto a romantic outback drama based upon historical experiences and key events. This includes historical content about the Northern Territory cattle industry during the 1930s, the Japanese attacks in and around Darwin in the Second World War and the policy of removing Aboriginal children from their homes. Drawing upon Hollywood and Australian movie archives, Luhrmann’s big-land pastiche contains many allusions to past films. It concludes on a redemptive note that provides a sentimental recipe for potential reconciliation and national unity in the early twenty-first century. The film is narrated through the voice-over of ‘Nullah’, a child of mixed Aboriginal and white descent, played by Brandon Walters, who also stars as a central character in the film. A ‘hybrid’, in between character, Nullah symbolically inhabits the reconciliation narrative that will bring not only the Australian nation together, but also the film’s romantic leads. The adoptive parenting of a supposedly ‘orphan’ child of mixed European and Aboriginal descent becomes Australia’s central device for exploring national history and resolving historical and individual dislocation and emotional trauma. Indeed, the stolen child creates a national family. In the Northern Territory, child removal policies targeted children of mixed descent such as Nullah. So this element of the drama is accurate. The film’s portrayal of Aboriginal women and men as drovers and stockworkers in the Northern Territory cattle industry is a worthwhile history lesson; however, the arrangements by which they negotiated the rights to stay on their own land as community groups are obscured. The film reflects upon the power of story, especially cinematic storytelling. Even after Nullah’s mother has just died, the idea of a good story – as told and awkwardly sung by the lead female character Sarah Ashley (played by Nicole Kidman) – rouses him from grief. The film consciously combines transnational settler–coloniser mythologies from Australia and North America and then interweaves them with Indigenous ‘dreaming’ narratives such as that of the pan-Aboriginal rainbow serpent story.

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The film is inspired by Xavier Herbert’s 1975 novel Poor Fellow, My Country (hereafter PFMC). The film’s multiple layers of storylines and allusions to other visual and race stories have thus been developed by a white Australian novelist interested in nationalism and exposing Australian racism, and a white Australian film-maker, Baz Luhrmann, who has reconciliation and audienceextending agendas. Luhrmann uses his Hollywood film industry experience to expand his imagined audience to Americans (to an Australian audience, this can seem quite laboured.) Yet, while many Hollywood allusions are integrated, the biting, more controversial aspects of PFMC are omitted from Luhrmann’s treatment. While PFMC’s protagonist Jeremy Delacy suffers racism due to his open acknowledgment of an Aboriginal wife, in the filmic storyline, ‘the Drover’s wife’ is deceased. While his past experience of racism (and if we go by history, his defiance of the law) somehow ennobles Drover, it also conveniently frees him up to partner Lady Ashley. Without presenting actual violence, the film presents most other relations of white men with Aboriginal women as cruel and exploitative, which is certainly close to Herbert’s novel, and also fits much of the historical evidence in the archives. The film’s portrayal of Faraway Downs is visually whimsical, but it also distorts the social reality of Northern Territory cattle stations. A 1930s cattle station relied for its survival upon resident Aboriginal communities of 50 or more. Not just loners like King George, played by David Gulpilil, but the whole community – workers and dependants – travelled together or ‘went walkabout’ in the wet season. In the film, there is no Aboriginal community on the station to accompany them on a walkabout, which creates the false binary of magic primitive – the ‘King George’ character – vs. ‘civilised’ modern cattle workers. Yet, by the 1930s, Northern Territory Aboriginal people had made the cattle industry their own, and combined traditional journeys and rituals with cattle industry obligations.1 Some have praised its reconciliation plotline, but in my view, Luhrmann’s Australia has – perhaps unwittingly – presented a narrative that effectively redeems the rights of select white people to adopt a child of Aboriginal/ European parentage. In an epic romance that is hard to resist, Lady Ashley acquires love of the land and thus enters into a ‘dreaming’ story. This storyline, incidentally, brings about a sense of coloniser belonging, and inclusion into country by the Aboriginal elder King George, who proclaims they have all been on a journey and are now heading ‘home’. Their shared trauma during the Second World War leads him to declare that ‘my country’ is now properly ‘our country.’ In the film’s emotional logic, the couple’s worthiness as adoptive parents is proven by their heroic rescue efforts to rescue Nullah. Drover’s superhuman antics in saving him from the Japanese forces were a vital ‘proof ’ of entitlement.

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Now identified as ‘good colonisers’, the white parent-nurturers Drover and Lady Sarah, become Nullah and George’s kin. Bonding with Aboriginality and its ancient land connections, they thus fulfil the colonising desire to truly ‘belong’ to the land. Throughout the film, mood and emotional responses are shaped by complex soundscapes. This is even the case when Nullah and George are about to part ways from them on an imagined ‘walkabout’ towards initiation and manhood. Western classical music is preferred over Indigenous music to heighten the melodrama. In the film’s early scenes, the emotional truth of child removal is presented accurately, with Nullah’s mother so desperate to hide her child from policemen that it causes her own death. Indigenous leaders have heartily approved Australia’s rendition of the stolen children history. Kathy Mills (née McGinness), long-time activist for Territorians of mixed descent, and recently the Senior Territorian of the year, was a special guest at the Darwin Premiere. A woman of Kungarakany, Gurinji and Irish Australian background, she accepted that the film was obviously fiction, but considered it expressed the essence of the child removal story.2 Indigenous intellectual and film expert Marcia Langton, who was engaged as a senior advisor to this film, celebrated and enjoyed Australia as a ‘marvellous hyperbolic’ that had ‘given Australians a new past – a myth of national origin…’.3 If so, this enabling myth sees ‘bastards’, migrant widows and alienated lone rangers coming together to make a family – a fluid, culturally respectful, national family. From Australia’s outset, we learn that ‘half-caste children’ are in peril. In the film they can readily be kidnapped from their mothers by repulsive policemen. They can be thrashed by greasy-faced, mean fathers like Fletcher, who deny their paternity. They can also be removed by pompously-portrayed bureaucrats and kooky, stereotypical priests. Crazed kamikazes could murder them and, finally, they can be lured away by the wizardry of magic men. The heterosexual romance enables the audience heartstrings to be pulled; and of course most viewers would want the delightful young Aboriginal boy, Nullah, to be rescued. Sarah Ashley is a long way from home, infertile and abruptly widowed. Drover has no family. Nullah is endowed with gorgeous, huge ponds for eyes and perfect facial features; he is cute to boot. He is desirable to everyone but his white father. He can muster cattle and work a man’s hours. He can expose the deceit of a thieving cattleman and play a good Boomerang harmonica. Nullah also has strong allure for King George, the black version of the lone ranger or lone bushman, who offers to teach the boy how to fish and how ‘to be a man’. King George appears to have no family and no community. However, if the King had multiple wives – common in Arnhem Land for the most powerful men – this would mean Aboriginal mothers/grandmothers, brothers and sisters, which would stop Nullah being ‘nobody’s child’ and complicate his availability for adoption.

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National identities and mythologies From its title Australia, we know that Luhrmann’s film is about history and nation. Through its plotline, cinematography and other devices, it makes transnational allusions to ‘Eng-land’ and to the American Western, but it always returns to the imagined cinematic land of ‘Oz’/Aus. Its historical setting in the Northern Territory frames a romanticised north – the wild ‘home’ of the lone white (nomadic) bushman that is ‘no place for a white woman’ – as was the case in the iconic federation text We of the Never Never (1901) and the 1982 movie based upon it. Nations demand the invention and recreation of histories, stories and/or mythologies to fire the collective imagination that defines them. As successor to both the Overlanders (1946) and Jedda (1955: see the discussion of Jedda by Suneeti Rekhari in this section), Australia uses the outback as a backdrop against which Australian pioneering mythologies are recreated.The addition of the ‘stolen children’ narrative to the ‘bush legend’ and pioneer legends suggests an updated national narrative has been invented.

King George’s ‘my country’/‘our country’ statement in Australia’s final scenes reveals a national yearning for being granted redemption by Aboriginal elders. At this point, the reconciliation narrative explicitly offers forgiveness to ‘good’ white Australians. As a fanciful pre-cattle industry alternative Land of Oz, destination Arnhem Land does not quite gel. The British took over the land long before the Japanese arrived in the 1940s, yet the epic action almost absolves them of colonising crimes. Their trials and ordeals make it hard for the audience to deny that the romantic leads have done the required work to earn both the country and the right to parent this Aboriginal/European child. As Abrash and Walkowitz have argued, rather than calling for social action, film-makers frequently opt to resolve contradictions with healing metaphors of reconciliation and acceptance.4 Although based upon a novel, this film’s screenplay trades on its historical credentials. Australia is book-ended with inter-titles or rolling references to historical Australian government policy and to the reassuring fact that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd had ‘offered an apology’ to the Stolen Generations in February 2008. From its opening scenes and newsreel style captions and footage, it promises to interweave the documented history of Japanese attacks of the Second World War with that of Aboriginal child removal policies. Yet, like most films, Australia does not offer any guidance on where, for dramatic reasons, it chooses to depart from the historical facts.

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Further Reading Abrash, Barbara and Daniel Walkowitz, ‘Sub/Versions of history: a mediation on film and historical narrative’, History Workshop Journal, 38, 1994, pp.203–214. Burgin, Alice, ‘History goes walkabout in Australia: rethinking indigenous content and the historical film’, Metro Magazine: Media & Education Magazine, 160, March 2009, pp.176–81. Haebich, Anna, Broken Circles: Fragmenting Indigenous Families 1800–2000, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, Fremantle, 2000. Herbert, Xavier, Poor Fellow, My Country, Harper Collins, Sydney, 1975. McGrath, Ann, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987. Powell, Alan [1988] The Shadow’s Edge: Australia’s Northern War, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 2007.

Notes 1 2 3

4

Ann McGrath, Born in the Cattle: Aborigines in Cattle Country, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1987. Mills cited in personal communication, December 2008. Marcia Langton, ‘Faraway downs resonates close to home’, The Age (23 November 2008), viewed 28 January 2010, http://www.theage.com.au/ articles/2008/11/23/1227375027931.html. Barbara Abrash and Daniel Walkowitz, ‘Sub/Versions of History: a mediation on film and historical narrative’, History Workshop Journal, 38, 1994, pp.204–5.

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Introduction By Jennifer Gauthier •

Méliès in Maoriland (1912–13)

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Patu! (1983)

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Ngati (1987)

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Once Were Warriors (1994)

As the Indigenous peoples of New Zealand, M¯aori are an important part of the nation’s history and culture, giving it its distinctive bicultural and bilingual character. While M¯aori have historically been of interest to film-makers in New Zealand and beyond, it was not until the 1980s that they began to step behind the camera. The unique cultural attributes of M¯aori, combined with New Zealand’s promise of ‘something fresh’, attracted one of the founding fathers of cinema, Frenchman Gaston Méliès. Best known for his fantastic film, A Trip to the Moon (1902), Méliès was inspired to travel to New Zealand in search of new and exciting subject matter. Although his first efforts featured white actors in makeup, the director quickly realised that the local M¯aori were amenable to acting for the camera. Méliès’ lost films made in New Zealand set the stage for Indigenous film-making over 70 years later. Barry Barclay was a pioneer in M¯aori cinema. His film Ngati was the first feature film made by an Indigenous person anywhere in the world. Although fictional, Ngati is rooted in a specific moment in New Zealand’s history when M¯aori communities faced post-war and inter-generational challenges. Jennifer Gauthier describes Barclay’s M¯aori film aesthetic as rooted in the values of the community, the act of listening and the focus on specific cultural details. Part of what makes his aesthetic revolutionary is its M¯aori point of view; Barclay turns the traditional hierarchy of the cinematic gaze upside down. Merata Mita, whose untimely death in May 2010 left a void in the M¯aori film-making world, is the inheritor of Barclay’s legacy. First as an actor and

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then as a director, Mita left her mark on global cinema with her unique artistic vision. Her activist documentaries display an interest in cross-cultural dialogue and understanding. Patu! documents the 1981 New Zealand tour of the Springboks, the South African rugby team, but as Geraldene Peters makes clear, the film is about more than just sport. Through the lens of a specific moment in the nation’s sporting history, Mita examines racial politics, national identity and historical memory. Once Were Warriors (1994), a feature film directed by Lee Tamahori, offers another perspective on M¯aori culture. Based on the novel by Alan Duff, the film depicts M¯aori life in a contemporary urban setting and tackles the interconnected issues of family, masculinity and violence. Stuart Murray describes the film’s important place in the history of New Zealand cinema, as it garnered the largest audience of any New Zealand film up to its release date. Moreover, its high production values, distinctive look and eclectic soundtrack demonstrated that M¯aori cinema could attract global viewers. The film’s unflinching depiction of brutal violence caused considerable controversy, prompting national reflection on the status of M¯aori and their relationship with P¯akeh¯a New Zealanders. Tamahori’s success shows how far M¯aori cinema has come since Barclay’s groundbreaking work. While M¯aori have long been an object of fascination for film-makers, these chapters suggest that they now play a vital role in the history of New Zealand cinema in their own right, as actors, film-makers, producers and screenwriters. The work of Barry Barclay, Merata Mita and Lee Tamahori attests to the power and possibilities of M¯aori cinema, setting the stage for a new generation of M¯aori film-makers.

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Méliès in Maoriland:The Making of the First New Zealand Feature Films By Mark Derby Only a small proportion of the earliest films made in New Zealand and Australia have survived. The highly inflammable nitrate stock used for prints, the small number of prints made (often only one or two copies of each title) and failure to recognise the historic value of even minor and ephemeral productions have all contributed to their disappearance. For several weeks in late 1912, a French film-maker named Gaston Méliès visited New Zealand as part of a worldwide expedition to shoot films in exotic locations. None of his New Zealand productions appear to have survived and our knowledge of them comes entirely from written records such as newspaper articles and reviews, letters, film catalogues and posters. These provide a fascinating yet tantalising account of New Zealand’s first-ever feature films. Méliès, a dapper cosmopolitan with pointed beard and waxed moustache, had spent the previous two years in the USA where his company churned out western melodramas at the rate of one a week. As the market for these declined, he decided to try and revive the company’s fortunes by making a series of short films in Asia and the Pacific. ‘[T]here is nothing for it to get something fresh’, he announced, ‘but to sail on the Pacific for the land of the sunny south’.1 It was an ambitious venture. Méliès was accompanied by his wife, Hortense, and more than a dozen crew members and actors. They planned to find dramatic outdoor locations (since the film technology of the time made indoor shooting almost impossible), and write their scripts on the spot. The first stop was Tahiti where a sentimental love story was shot using several of Méliès’ actors made up to look like native people. Real Tahitians were employed only as ‘supers’, or extras. The expedition then sailed to Wellington, arriving in September 1912 and finding that New Zealand in early spring was not the ‘sunny south’ they hoped for. ‘We’re in a foul country’, Méliès wrote to his son Paul, ‘cold, rainy, windy, and we can only work between two downpours’.2 The constant rain forced the party to leave after several days for the tourist resort town of Rotorua, where

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they hoped to find better weather and suitably colourful settings. Rotorua, in the centre of the North Island, is a thermal region teeming with bubbling mud pools, steaming geysers and warm lakes. It is home to several large M¯aori tribes who have traditionally used the freely available hot water for cooking, washing and bathing. From the late nineteenth century overseas tourists have also flocked to Rotorua to admire its natural wonders and by 1912 its M¯aori population were already expert performers, guides and hosts to the tourist industry. The New Zealand government was keenly aware of the value of foreign tourism to the economy, and knew that the films Méliès planned to make in Rotorua could spread the town’s reputation worldwide. He was given generous government support including the services of a M¯aori-speaking historian, James Cowan, as his interpreter and cultural advisor.3 Cowan led his unusual tour party to Whakarewarewa, a model M¯aori village on the shore of Lake Rotorua where many M¯aori still lived in the traditionally carved and thatched houses of pre-European times. Here Méliès made another important contact. Reverend Frederick Bennett, whose father was Irish and mother M¯aori, was an Anglican minister and the superintendent of the M¯aori Mission in the Rotorua region. He was fluent in both English and M¯aori. Méliès described him as ‘a half-blood Maori Minister who has a great influence on his fellow creatures’.4 Even better, Reverend Bennett had formed a concert party of local M¯aori to perform their ancient songs and dances for the tourists. Its members had, of course, no film-making experience, but they were all seasoned performers, expert at interpreting M¯aori cultural customs for an international audience and Méliès found they adapted easily to the demands of film-making.5 ‘I’ve hired them for so much a day as I need them’. he wrote, ‘and the minister directs the scenes with me’.6 Méliès used members of Bennett’s group rather than his own professional actors for all three of the features he shot in Rotorua. The results far surpassed the material shot in Tahiti: ‘Seeing the first negatives of the Whites painted coloured, I realised they won’t do and that was one of the main considerations that decided me to get rid of part of the troupe at Rotorua; where in any case I worked almost entirely with the Natives. And that’s what will happen everywhere we go.’7 Even so, his local cast required some retouching to conform to Méliès’ vision of an earlier historical period: ‘There are no more tattooed Maori men, only the women still have their chins tattooed… there are three scenes that we had to re-do because the Natives had forgotten to tattoo themselves with makeup.’8 In this way, and despite continuing bad weather, three narrative films were shot in the space of three weeks. The most ambitious, with a running time of

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over 20 minutes, was Loved by a Maori Chieftess, an interracial historical romance written by Méliès’ Australian scriptwriter, Edward Mitchell. It told the story of a white hunter named Chadwick, played by the only one of Méliès’ European actors to appear in any of his New Zealand films. Chadwick is captured by members of a M¯aori tribe, who threaten to eat him. The chief ’s young daughter falls in love with the captive and helps him escape. Her father recaptures the couple but his daughter’s grief persuades the chief to adopt the white man into the tribe. The second feature, Hinemoa, about 14 minutes long, was also written by Mitchell but based on a famous legend of the Rotorua people. It tells how a young woman, Hinemoa, was forbidden to visit her lover Tutanekai, who lived on an island in the middle of Lake Rotorua. Tutanekai played his flute each night and, guided by its sound, Hinemoa swam across the lake after dark to his side. Méliès noted that ‘All these shots were taken in the very sites where the story took place.’ In both films, the lead female character was played by Maata (Martha) Horomona. Méliès said he ‘only [had] to explain very slowly to Martha what I wanted from her and she would immediately do it with a natural grace…’.9 The third New Zealand feature was shorter still, but no less interesting. How Chief Te Ponga Won His Bride was adapted by Mitchell from another M¯aori legend transplanted from the Auckland region, several hundred kilometres north of Rotorua. It tells of a young chief named Ponga whose tribe is at war with its neighbours. Nevertheless, he visits the main village of the warring tribe and there meets the beautiful maiden Puhuhu (or Puhihuia in the original legend). Despite the angry opposition of her people, the pair flee by canoe to Ponga’s own village. As these ‘dramatic picture stories’ were being shot, a second crew travelled throughout the North Island filming landscapes, towns and local events for ‘educational’ films, another popular cinematic genre of the period. All the exposed footage was sent for processing at Méliès’ own portable laboratory, which had remained in Wellington when the rest of the party travelled to Rotorua. The processed reels were then sent back to the USA for postproduction. Encouraged by their success in New Zealand, Méliès and his team extended their stay before proceeding on to Australia, Java (Indonesia), Siam (Thailand) and Japan. In none of those countries were they able to use local actors to the same extent. An American member of his crew told an Australian newspaper that, ‘The Maoris are born actors. In this respect they knock all the other natives we ever came across endways.’10 Méliès’ New Zealand productions began screening in the USA even before his return there in mid-1913. Loved by a Maori Chieftess appeared in March of that year and the other features and documentaries screened successively

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Ethics and economics of cultural tourism Soon after Méliès arrived in New Zealand, a report on his plans in the New Zealand Herald speculated, correctly, that ‘in all probability particular attention will be paid to Rotorua, which is regarded as an excellent field for exploitation’.1 Rotorua was linked to Auckland by train in 1894, making the town one of the few easily accessible inland communities in New Zealand. Its tourism industry was already well established but grew rapidly from that date. The M¯aori population were able to earn money by demonstrating their traditional performances and customs, and retained much of their tribal land in a period when other tribes were losing theirs.Tourism income supported the retention of traditional skills such as carving, weaving and haka. However, Rotorua M¯aori noted that their sacred ceremonies and sites lost spiritual authority when opened up to uninformed visitors. Artefacts, customary dances and other cultural treasures were altered to conform to the requirements of commercial tourism. Most major tourist attractions were leased to non-M¯aori, and even recently M¯aori themselves worked only in relatively lowpaid guiding, serving and entertaining roles. 1

NZ Herald, 16 September 1912.

until August. The novelty of seeing films acted by ‘native’ people appealed to both reviewers and audiences. The M¯aori were said to ‘all show that singular mimic gift which seems to be a heritage of all primitive peoples and always forms a welcome contrast to the more artful ways of our own white brothers’.11 Yet neither these nor the other films made by Méliès during his bold, globecircling expedition succeeded in rescuing his failing business. Soon after returning to the USA he was forced to sell his studio and equipment, and retired to live in Corsica. Physically exhausted by his travels, he died there two years later, in 1915.12 The New Zealand films of Gaston Méliès were apparently never shown outside the USA, and subsequently disappeared altogether. However, their written traces contain much intriguing and valuable information and it is not impossible that the films themselves may eventually reappear in some form. In recent years parts of a film shot by Méliès at Angkor Wat, in present-day Cambodia, were rediscovered.13 New audiences may yet see his pioneering Rotorua productions showing ‘the customs and character of a people so wholly and strangely different from ourselves’.14

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Further Reading Babington, Bruce, A History of the New Zealand Feature Film, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007. Dennis, Jonathan, Aotearoa and the Sentimental Strine: Making Films in Australia and New Zealand in the Silent Period, Moa Films, Wellington, 1993. Edwards, Sam and Helen Martin, New Zealand Film 1912–1995, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998.

Notes 1 Quoted in Jonathan Dennis, Aotearoa and the Sentimental Strine: Making Films in Australia and New Zealand in the Silent Period, Moa Films, Wellington, 1993, pp. 7–8. 2 Correspondence of Gaston and Hortense Méliès to Paul Méliès, 2 October 1912, Rotorua, ref. no. 2349, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington. 3 Evening Post, 17 September 1912, p.7. 4 Correspondence of Gaston and Hortense Méliès, 26 September 1912, Rotorua. 5 Evening Post, 17 September 1912, p.7. 6 Correspondence of Gaston and Hortense Méliès, Rotorua, 26 September 1912. 7 Correspondence of Gaston and Hortense Méliès, Surabaya, 19 December 1912. 8 Correspondence of Gaston and Hortense Méliès, Sydney, 31 October 1912. 9 Correspondence of Gaston and Hortense Méliès, 12 October 1912. 10 Quoted in Bruce Babington, A History of the New Zealand Feature Film, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007, p.34. 11 Quoted in Sam Edwards and Helen Martin, New Zealand Film 1912–1995, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1998, p.20. 12 Babington, p.32. 13 Introduction to ‘Correspondence of Gaston and Hortense Méliès to Paul Méliès’, ref. no. 2349, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington. 14 Moving Picture World, 8 March 1913, p.10, in ref. no. 2348, ‘Press and publicity: Gaston Méliès’ New Zealand films’, New Zealand Film Archive, Wellington.

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Patu! By Geraldene Peters Patu!, filmed during 1981 and completed in 1983, is an extraordinary record of a pivotal moment for formations of national identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Its form and content as an activist documentary carried the energies of a highly charged period of protest during the two-month New Zealand tour by the South African Springbok rugby team. A point-of-view documentary, part of the narrative skill of Patu! lies in the way the argument builds from a story of protest against racism elsewhere to the experiences of racism ‘at home’. Shot on 16mm film (the activist medium of the time in Aotearoa), production was overtly collaborative with footage shot by numerous camera people from around the country. Nonetheless, more conventional methods of production also had a part and key shaping roles for Patu! can be attributed to director, Merata Mita; editor, Annie Collins; and producer, Gerd Pohlmann (fresh from the Marxist milieu of the Berlin film school). The dual dialectical and whakapapa (genealogical) narrative strands structuring Patu! are an outcome of these cross-cultural collaborations in production that also speak to M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a experiences of history. Patu! reflects a particular historical conjuncture that saw a coincidence of M¯aori political and cultural renaissance, with an emergent middle-class P¯akeh¯a political consciousness and the activist energies of already established social movements. The film also invites visceral engagement of the viewer through the combination of active movement in the frame with the editing of sound and image for contrast. This underscores Patu!’s present-day relevance to what Stephen Turner has termed ‘colonial being’ in Aotearoa/New Zealand, designating an unsettled mode of being in a place which is discontinuous with its past.1 It is significant that Patu! is the first feature-length film solely directed by a M¯aori woman and quite probably the first feature to be directed by any Indigenous woman. The period between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s saw a noticeable resurgence in articulations of political and cultural identity amongst M¯aori in the face of continuing manifestations of settler colonialism. Assertions of tino rangatiratanga (Indigenous sovereignty) informed direct

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action and legislative efforts to redress land alienation and assist with language revitalisation. Women emerged as strong leaders and mana w¯ahine M¯aori (the powers of M¯aori women) was a force within social movements. Patu!’s emphasis on race relations within Aotearoa as well as South Africa needs to be understood against this context of anti-colonialism as there are many ways in which the story of the tour could have been told. The Wellington-based left-wing collective, Vanguard Films, intended to make a documentary about the Springbok Tour with a united front (the coalition of a range of interests) emphasis, and had begun collecting footage of early protest actions in collaboration with other film-makers. In Auckland, Mita and Pohlmann had previously made several documentaries together on themes of race and class and had also started preliminary filming of protest meetings. The two groups decided to pool resources for one film that Mita would direct, implicitly an endorsement of the need for a M¯aori perspective. There are many stories of how the tour split the nation, dividing families, friendships and work colleagues. There was an impasse between people supporting the tour on the grounds that there should be no politics in sport, and people opposing the tour because of racism in South Africa. The community of protestors grew over the course of the tour, as people never previously involved in direct action or activism registered their anger with the NZRFU (New Zealand Rugby Football Union), and the National Government led by Robert Muldoon. In the years subsequent to the tour, a number of documentaries and current affairs items have been made with different perspectives about the events of 1981 and their impact on national identity in New Zealand and South Africa. Patu! has been the most enduring as a record of the times for two key reasons: the articulation of cross-cultural relations between M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a that continues to have contemporary relevance; and the experience of immediacy conveyed through cinematography, sound recording and edit. One aspect of the structure of Patu! can be understood in dialectical terms of underlying forces and contradictions where editing choices for contrast, irony and tension occur not only for dramatic effect, but also for what they reveal of the larger social picture. There is a fit between the process of dialectics that clarifies the relation of human consciousness to historical process and change, and the articulation of structures of feeling of the period so that when we see images of M¯aori protestors juxtaposed for contrast with images of M¯aori tour supporters, we are aware of the complexities of allegiances at the time. Patu! is cinéma-vérité documentary in the provocative sense of the subgenre where grainy observational field footage shot on the fly from begged and borrowed film stock confronts the viewer through a sensate approach to editing image and sound. The film truth thus conveyed enables a visceral

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sense of ‘being there’ in the midst of the action. The commentary of two writers – Bruce Jesson and Peter Wells – who observed and participated in the protests aptly conveys the power of this combination of observational footage and experiential editing as a stimulus for cultural memory. Jesson notes that: Patu! is a courageous film. The camerawork involved personal danger … through hard cutting, we are battered with a montage of images. Events are juxtaposed and contrasted, sometimes in sequence, sometimes occurring roughly at the same time. Violence occurs without warning, as a shock…. The overall impression is of movement, action, and that sense of turmoil that is our lasting memory of 1981.2

Borne out by commentary, reviews and audience responses to screenings, Patu! draws audiences into an experience of events, and invites those who were involved to re-live the times. The documentary had been two years in the making because of funding and security issues. Although the events of 1981 had long-lasting resonance, acts of remembrance were still necessary. As Wells says of Patu! ‘…its real power lies in a persuasion beyond logic: it is memory avenging itself on amnesia of the present’.3 The dialectics of Patu! occur most obviously at the micro-level of montage, but also at the level of overarching narrative structure. The film has a basic chronological organisation, but it is also structured around a tension of opposites, and tracks the working out of certain differences within a united front. The events of 1981 became a measure of the profound shifts occurring within liberal P¯akeh¯a consciousness of the implications of racial inequalities for national identity. Rhetorically, the narrative progression through the documentary strengthens Mita’s argument for coming to terms with racism not only in South Africa but also in New Zealand. This is the key shift among other shifts of emphasis in the course of Patu! The editing is obviously aware of the political implications of these shifts and what drives the changes is the increasing ferocity of the government’s response to the protests. The film thus seems to document the uncovering of some highly unpleasant realities. Any optimistic or idealistic views that New Zealanders might have of their country are quite literally battered into the ground; and what emerges into view are racism and violence, the underlying dynamics of the state that Muldoon heads. Often in Mita’s films, history is invoked so that the past is apparent in the context of the present, a characteristic that Mita refers to as the power of film to make the present eternal.4 This is achieved in part through a layering of cultural references – a process that has its basis in the way in which experiences and stories give shape to the oral tradition of whakapapa. For

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Protests and the 1981 Springbok tour New Zealand had been playing rugby union against the Springboks since 1921, the most played side after the Australian Wallabies. By 1981, the All Blacks were pre-eminent among international rugby sides, but the Springboks were the only team against which they had lost more games than won. Although many New Zealanders wanted to watch the national sport, many were also shocked that Muldoon acceded to NZRFU pressure and allowed the Springboks to tour at a time when New Zealand was party to the international Gleneagles Agreement unanimously endorsed in 1977 by the Commonwealth Heads of Government. The Agreement had put a moratorium on sporting contact until South Africa addressed the worst extremes of apartheid. Following South Africa’s adoption of apartheid policies in 1948, public protest had been building within New Zealand over sporting ties with the nation. Controversy heightened in 1960 when the NZRFU acceded to South African requests that M¯aori not be in the All Black side touring South Africa that year. Anti-tour activists organised around the ‘No M¯aoris, No Tour’ slogan. Over the 56 days of the 1981 tour there were 205 demonstrations in 28 centres, involving more than 150,000 New Zealanders (the total population at the time was approximately 3.2 million).1 Clashes between protestors, police and rugby supporters escalated, and the tour became increasingly violent. During the course of the tour over 2000 people were arrested, 1520 people being charged with offences, and some were maimed for life. One set of polls taken before the tour registered 39 per cent in opposition, and a New Zealand Herald poll taken after the tour indicated that 54 per cent of the population wished that the tour had not gone ahead.2 1 2

Helen Martin, ‘Patu!’, in Helen Martin and Sam Edwards (eds.), New Zealand Film 1912–1996, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1997, p.91. Barry Gustafson, His Way: A Biography of Robert Muldoon, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2000, p.316.

Mita, whakapapa is far more than a linear genealogy – it is about ‘the name of a person, the associations of that name over her history, the area she worked in, the area she walked in, the battles she fought’.5 P¯akeh¯a grassroots and liberal activists are gradually revealed to be travelling alongside the separate paths of rangatahi (young people), kuia (matron/s) and kaum¯atua (elder/s). Although the film focuses rather more on the activist energies of rangatahi, the wisdom of those kuia and kaum¯atua ‘that go before’ is asserted at strategic places in the narrative. The comments of a kuia

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two-thirds of the way through the film are extended a few scenes later by rangatahi present at marae hui (gatherings) and political meetings, calling on the anti-apartheid movement to recognise that racism exists in New Zealand. Their position is backed up by an interview with kaum¯atua Canon, Hone Kaa. His presence fills the frame through a direct address to camera, denoting stature, and underscoring a shift in tenor of the documentary argument. The rhetorical force of a kaum¯atua endorsing the sentiments expressed by rangatahi cannot be underestimated. This shot, like the one of the kuia, is framed according to the conventions of the ‘talking head’ interview. However, set within the overall style of the documentary, it takes on a different significance – one more oriented towards the framing of an orator than an interviewee. Coinciding with the dialectical thread, the sequence constitutes a powerful rhetorical/oratorical turn in the narrative, where a M¯aori perspective takes on a stronger role, and the thematic direction of the documentary argument becomes more apparent. Although a point of view in Patu! is clearly discernible, whai ko¯rero (oratory) also assumes the critical capacity of audiences to recognise and respond in their own way to the various layers and associations that surround the story told. Despite some overseas commentators critiquing Patu! for a lack of structure and inadequate contextualisation, the film’s approach can be strongly justified in terms of Mita’s Indigenous aesthetic and dialectical structure.6

Further Reading Horrocks, Roger and Merata Mita, ‘Patu! Interview with Merata Mita’, Alternative Cinema, 11:2/3, 1983, pp.11–21. Jesson, Bruce, ‘Patu! The truth of what happened’, The Republican, 47, 1983, pp.2–3. Jesson, Bruce and Merata Mita, ‘Bruce Jesson interviews Merata Mita: film and the making of politics’, The Republican, 44, 1982, pp.8–15. Turner, Stephen, ‘Being colonial/colonial being’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 24:1, 2006, pp.39–66.

Notes 1 2

See Stephen Turner, ‘Being colonial/colonial being’, Journal of New Zealand Literature, 24:1, 2006, pp.39–66. Bruce Jesson, ‘Patu! The truth of what happened’, The Republican, 47, 1983, p.3.

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Peter Wells, ‘Looking for truth! Patu!, Race Against Time’, NZ Listener, 9 July 1983, p.29. Mita, Personal correspondence (18 April 2002). Bruce Jesson and Merata Mita, ‘Bruce Jesson interviews Merata Mita: film and the making of politics’, The Republican, 44, 1982, p.15. Pascal Lamche and Merata Mita, ‘Interview with Merata Mita’, Framework, 25, 1984, p.6.

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Ngati By Jennifer Gauthier Ngati (Pacific Films, 1987, 88 mins) is the first dramatic feature film by a M¯aori film-maker, and according to some sources, the first feature film anywhere in the world made by a member of an Indigenous culture living within a majority white culture.1 Directed by Barry Barclay (Ngati Apa) with a semi-autobiographical screenplay by Tama Poata (Ngati Porou), the film won awards for Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Male Film Performance and Best Female Film Performance at the New Zealand Film and Television Awards, Best Film at the Taormina Film Festival in Italy and was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. Veteran television producer John O’Shea produced Ngati, and the film utilised a crew of young M¯aori who were part of a training collective (Te Awa Marama, and a cast of mostly non-actors). The film is set in 1948 and tells the story of a young Australian doctor, Greg Shaw, who returns to the small (fictional) New Zealand town of Kapua on the east coast of the North Island, where his father had worked as an attending physician. The residents of Kapua are dealing with the possible closing of a local freezing works that provides work to the local population, as well as the mysterious illness of one of the village children, Ropata. Greg has been invited to the village by the current doctor, whose daughter Jenny is the local schoolteacher. The historical context of the film is important for documenting many of the changes facing New Zealand society in general and M¯aori culture in particular in the post-war period. At this time many M¯aori were migrating to the cities because of the decline in work available in rural areas due to industrialisation. This migration or heke brought about intergenerational conflicts among M¯aori. Moreover, communities had to adjust to the return of M¯aori soldiers (over 17,000) who had fought in the war. The film’s story is a meandering tale centred on the community and its natural surroundings. Barclay’s cinematic style allows for the slow unfolding of the characters’ lives and their relationships to one another, during which time Greg is forced to confront his mixed heritage. Although entering the community as an outsider, he discovers during his stay that his father was married to a M¯aori woman, so his ties to the community are stronger than he had imagined. The character’s self-reflection and growing respect for M¯aori culture serve

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M¯aori residents of the local fictional town of Kapua.

as a model for P¯akeh¯a audiences. With Ngati, Barclay calls attention to P¯akeh¯a–M¯aori relations, highlights the connections between the past, present and future, and pays homage to the dignity of the M¯aori people. In using the cinema for these ends, Barclay was a pioneer and Ngati a foundational text. Because Barclay is documenting the lives and culture of his own people, his camera work encourages viewers to identify with the M¯aori characters. This revolutionary act is demonstrated in an opening scene when Greg arrives in the village of Kapua on a bus. As he sits alone looking out of the window, a M¯aori character rides up on his horse and stares at Greg through the windows of the bus. In this moment, the M¯aori gaze is turned upon the white character as an exotic outsider. By upsetting the traditional hierarchy of the cinematic gaze, Barclay challenges the whole history of film and its representation of non-white characters. Barclay’s unique film-making style is rooted in the M¯aori emphasis on community. The narrative focuses on a group of people living together, sharing space, and drawing strength from each other and from their participation in the community. While the young doctor is the primary focus, he is not the traditional ‘star’ of the film. Moreover, the film focuses on community values rather than individual success. Barclay documents the M¯aori sense of respect for the elders, the sacred quality of knowledge that is

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passed on from generation to generation, and the practice of communal decision-making and shared power. The male protagonist’s ‘hero’ role in the film is problematised. He is not the all-knowing or powerful man; instead, he is on a journey of discovery and knows very little, as the women of the community remind him.

M¯aori medicine One of the narrative strands in Ngati is the story of Ropata’s struggle with illness and his eventual death. Barclay uses this plot element to highlight the contrast between M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a approaches to medicine and healthcare. This is an important issue today, as many M¯aori struggle to reconcile the often conflicting messages sent by these two systems. M¯aori views of healthcare are generally holistic, focusing not only on the individual, but also on relationships with family and the community (whanau). Important elements that contribute to M¯aori health are sacred cultural practices (tapu), rituals (such as tangi and noa) and prayers (karakia). Some M¯aori use traditional healing practices and herbal remedies (rongoa) rooted in ancient traditions.The notion of spirit (wairua) is an important key to understanding overall physical and spiritual health in the M¯aori culture. Barriers to M¯aori interaction with the P¯akeh¯a healthcare system include the medical profession’s generally narrow approach to treating illness and its focus on the individual patient rather than family and community. Moreover, the M¯aori concept of shyness or shame (whakamaa) may also serve as a barrier to full disclosure about health problems and lifestyle issues. Today, the concept of M¯aori health is encompassed within the individual’s connection to the land, which provides a sense of identity and belonging (te whenua), knowledge of M¯aori language (te reo), connection to the environment (te ao turoa) and relationships with extended family (whanaungatanga).1 According to the New Zealand government, M¯aori have the poorest health of any ethnic group in New Zealand.2 He Korowai Oranga, the Maori Health Strategy created by the Ministry of Health, sets goals for addressing this problem. It is designed to incorporate elements of both M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a approaches to medicine. 1 2

Fiona Cram, Linda Smith and Wayne Johnstone, ‘Mapping the themes of Maori talk about health’, The New Zealand Medical Journal, 1116.1170, 14 March 2003. ‘About Maori Health’, New Zealand Ministry of Health, viewed 30 October 2010, http://www.maorihealth. govt.nz/moh.nsf/menuma/About+Maori+Health.

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Ngati’s narrative unfolds slowly and deliberately and not according to Hollywood’s conception of the five-act story. It does not follow a linear progression; the goal is not to get from one place to another or to create a chain of cause and effect. Instead, Barclay’s storytelling style encourages us to settle into a community and watch what unfolds, even if nothing (in terms of traditional narrative action) does. The structure of the narrative is much like the circularity in conversations that Barclay identifies as a M¯aori characteristic. Ngati refuses to privilege the linear development of a single storyline; Greg’s journey to self-knowledge does not take centre stage, nor does it progress in a straightforward manner. The film focuses equally on Ropata’s condition and his friend Tione’s attempt to come to terms with it, as well as on the economic situation of the village. Another recurring thread throughout the film is the clash between Ropata’s father, Iwi, and his sister Sally, whose urban-inflected ideas contrast with Iwi’s staunch adherence to M¯aori traditions. Ngati weaves these stories and characters together into a kind of visual tapestry, a strategy that Barclay uses to reflect the physical details of the M¯aori community. For Ngati, Barclay wanted to borrow aspects of documentary to capture the community members as they lived their daily lives: Day and night there are always people about. In the middle of an important conversation an aunty might come in carrying a toddler that needs to be put to bed. Somebody in the background might be wiping off the kitchen table, preparing for a couple of young men who have just returned from gathering seafood. A young girl might have dropped by to raid her friend’s collection of T-shirts before taking off for a game of netball. The normal tapestry of life, but how to capture it on the screen?2

Alternating between scenes depicting Greg as he gets to know the villagers and shots of the villagers rallying around Ropata, the film creates a balanced narrative. Moreover, the focus on M¯aori activities such as making horseshoes, catching shellfish, sheep shearing, playing cards and preparing the hangi complement the scenes of conversation that communicate the story. These details are filmed lovingly with attention to detail and they help to fill out the picture of Kapua. The inclusion of rich documentary detail in Barclay’s drama might help to explain the film’s widespread success. M¯aori audiences received the film well, seeing their culture portrayed lovingly on the screen by one of their own. P¯akeh¯a audiences also found its specificity intriguing. Today the film’s hybrid quality might make it difficult for some viewers to enjoy the film, as it focuses more on minutiae than on action.

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Barclay’s documentary aesthetic relies on production practices rooted in M¯aori culture. According to him, ‘To be any sort of a Maori, you have to be a listener. You do not interrupt a person who is talking, no matter how humble that person may be.’3 In order to be better listeners, Barclay and his crew perfected a system that allowed them to be invisible. He utilised zoom lenses and sound rigs, including a slanting microphone that enabled the director and crew to shoot at a distance from the subjects. This distinctive approach to cinema draws upon the traditions of the marae – the gathering place in front of the M¯aori meeting house. In his exterior shots, Barclay used a long lens to film Ngati, rather than a dolly, which is more intrusive and can hinder the action. With this kind of set-up, the cast members are left to talk among themselves as they might normally. For Barclay, the camera should be both a listener and a patient observer, waiting for the right material to emerge. Conversations between people form the bulk of the film’s action; some filmed from a distance, others in the midst of the discussion. The camera’s proximity to the action in interior scenes set in cramped rooms, like Ropata’s bedroom and various kitchens, highlights the tight bonds between community members. To capture larger group gatherings, the camera is generally stationary and positioned off to the side. Occasionally, Barclay positions the camera slightly above the action, as if to let us get a sense of the whole and to underscore the communal nature of the village. With all of Barclay’s work and with Ngati in particular, the film’s formal elements and production style go hand in hand. The spirit of cooperation and shared responsibility that is depicted on screen – the principle of tatau tatau, meaning ‘all together’ – guides the film-making process as well. He uses as many M¯aori crew members as possible, and does not stride onto the set as the all-powerful director, but instead works in close communion with his actors and technicians. He infuses the film-making process with M¯aori values and traditions; although the crew on Ngati was mixed, they all gathered each morning for a prayer. The film grew out of a sense of community and shared history that united its M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a participants. Ngati makes a powerful commentary on the history of cinematic representations of Indigenous peoples and is an important contribution to New Zealand’s national cinema. As the first M¯aori to make a feature film, Barclay symbolises the strength and vitality of New Zealand’s Indigenous population. On the world stage, his work attests to the nation’s bicultural past, present and future. In retrospect, Ngati also highlighted the near-uniformity of New Zealand national cinema at the time by challenging the hegemony of P¯akeh¯a masculinity. Barclay’s work paved the way for other M¯aori film-makers like Merata Mita, whose film Mauri (1988) was also made by a largely M¯aori crew with a M¯aori perspective on issues of identity and culture.

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Further Reading Barclay, Barry, ‘The Control of One’s Own Image’, Illusions, 8, 1988, pp.8–14. Cairns, Barbara and Helen Martin, Shadows on the Wall: A Study of Seven New Zealand Feature Films, Longman Paul, Auckland, 1994. Conrich, Ian and Stuart Murray, New Zealand Filmmakers, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2007. Gauthier, Jennifer, ‘Lest others speak for us’: the neglected roots and uncertain future of Maori cinema in New Zealand’ in Pamela Wilson and Michelle Stewart (eds.), Global Indigenous Media: Cultures, Poetics, and Politics, Duke University Press, Durham, 2008, pp.58–73. Martin, Helen and Sam Edwards, New Zealand Film, 1912–1996, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1997. Murray, Stuart, Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema, Huia Press, Wellington, 2008.

Notes 1 2 3

Barbara Cairns and Helen Martin, Shadows on the Wall: A Study of Seven New Zealand Feature Films, Longman Paul, Auckland, 1994, p.102. Barry Barclay, ‘The Control of One’s Own Image’, Illusions, 8, 1988, p.14. Barclay, p.11.

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Once Were Warriors By Stuart Murray Once Were Warriors (Communicado Films, 1994, 98 mins) is one of the most significant films in the history of New Zealand cinema, a feature that director Lee Tamahori referred to as a ‘defining document of our nation’.1 Adapted from the 1990 novel by Alan Duff, it depicts New Zealand’s Indigenous M¯aori community as one beset by socio-economic deprivation and consumed by personal and cultural alienation that takes its most destructive form in domestic violence. A film that caused huge controversy, and generated a larger New Zealand audience than any New Zealand-made film up to that point, Once Were Warriors produced profound national introspection about the status of M¯aori even as it also marked a crucial development of the relationship between the New Zealand film industry and international film production culture. By the late 1980s, a series of portrayals in both fiction and film had revolutionised the representation of M¯aori within New Zealand. Where previously there had been little depiction of the nation’s Indigenous population as anything other than peripheral figures, the period from 1978 to 1988 saw a number of narratives that put M¯aori at the centre of new emerging ideas about what constituted New Zealand as a contemporary space. In novels such as Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1983) and Patricia Grace’s Potiki (1986), and in groundbreaking feature films made by Barry Barclay (Ngati, 1987) and Merata Mita (Mauri, 1988), M¯aori communities emerged as appearing to be predominantly holistic and bound together by strong cultural ties that emphasised tolerance, respect and a connection to the positive values of the past. While these narratives suggested real tensions existed in bicultural relations between M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a (New Zealanders of European descent), they also intimated that these could ultimately be overcome by communication and a mutual desire to treat the other as a partner in the evolving nation. In particular, these novels and films created the idea that M¯aori values, especially understood in terms of connections to the land, offered a spiritual core to life in New Zealand, an offer that many P¯akeh¯a were eager to embrace in order to assuage a collective guilt about the abuse that resulted from the country’s history of settlement.

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Duff ’s novel fundamentally rejected the positive nature of such representations. Instead of the community as a harmonious collective, he presented M¯aori as alienated from their past, trapped in unemployment, and practising a variety of forms of self-deception. Tamahori’s film picks up this idea of deception, and of the assertion that M¯aori live in a harmonious relationship with the land, at its very start. The first image on the screen is a beautiful landscape, a depiction of snow-topped mountains and a sheltered lake. But the camera then pans away to reveal that the image is, in fact, an advertising poster for a national energy company, and is located above a busy and noisy urban freeway. As the credits roll, we see that the M¯aori we will encounter in the film do not live in any peaceful rural idyll, but rather are consigned to poverty in inadequate state housing complexes where welfare dependency is the norm. Within such a location, Once Were Warriors unfolds to produce telling commentaries on ideas of masculinity, strength, families, gangs and community, as well as stories and of belonging. One product of the kind of alienation all characters in the film experience, Tamahori makes clear, comes in the resorting to an idealised notion of strength that acts as an indication of masculine worth, and thereby standing in the community. Central character Jake ‘the Muss’ Heke (Temuera Morrison) is respected precisely because of his size and proficiency in the kind of violence that is an everyday occurrence in the pub where much of the film is set. Violence in this context is rarely, if ever, questioned; rather it appears as one of the few ways in which M¯aori men can display skill and achievement. Jake has a troubled relationship with his son Nig (Julian Arahanga), but the disparity between the two generations is expressed by different forms of strength, violence and masculine associations. If Jake rules the masculine community of the pub, Nig’s rejection of his father sees him being initiated into Toa Aotearoa, a M¯aori gang steeped in the language of ‘warrior pride’ and modelled on New Zealand’s real Black Power gang. Toa Aotearoa may represent a warrior ethos that suggests connections of

Masculinity The notion of ‘warrior culture’ that the film explores is one that is deeply bound up with questions of masculinity. This idea of culture promotes pride and selfrespect, but is also seen to be the vehicle for gratuitous violence, especially sexist and domestic violence. Whether there is a real place for the ‘strong’ male role model, as head of the family or any other social unit, is a topic that the film suggests requires urgent discussion. In the wake of the film’s popularity within New Zealand, the character of Jake became celebrated as an anti-hero by some young M¯aori, arguably a troubling outcome.

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a positive view of the M¯aori past, but it is marked by violence and an incapacity for self-expression that mirrors the pub culture ruled by Jake. If the pub and the gang depict two models of dysfunctional community in the film, the third space Once Were Warriors explores is that of the family home. Here, too, violence is common, with Jake regularly committing vicious assaults, depicted in graphic detail, on his wife Beth (Rena Owen). Such actions traumatise his young children, especially son Boogie (Taungaroa Emile) and daughter Grace (Mamaengaroa Kerr-Bell), both at clear risk because of the domestic abuse to which they are exposed. Boogie is already associated with petty crime, and one of the few scenes in the film in which P¯akeh¯a are represented, noticeably as figures of state authority such as court and police officials, sees him sent to a young offenders’ institution. For her part, Grace is the family storyteller and main carer of her younger siblings, a character defined by innocence but also a link to the cultural traditions of the past. It is her rape, by a family friend, and subsequent suicide that is the pivotal moment in the film. Grace’s suicide is the catalyst for the film’s evaluation of the society it has depicted up to this point. Blaming Jake for his adherence to a culture of violence, Beth emerges as the powerful family figure determined to end the cycle of abuse. As she prepares Grace’s tangi (funeral) she draws both Nig and Boogie back into the family fold, each subsuming his own group identity (from the gang and state welfare programme respectively) into the newly redefined domestic unit. The tangi marks a return to the formal processes of traditional culture, with the scene taking place on the family marae (meeting ground) and emphasising a return to personal and historical roots in terms of a commitment to healing. Jake’s absence only underscores his overall alienation, from both family and culture.

Sociology and aesthetics As with Alan Duff ’s novel from which the film was adapted, Once Were Warriors was discussed within New Zealand almost as a social documentary, as if its representations really were accurate portrayals of M¯aori life. This debate neglected the fact that both novel and film are obviously fictions, for all their relationship to a contemporary social reality. In fact, the film’s development of style, its use of music and its careful attention to mise-en-scène all point to a very deliberate crafting of a complex aesthetic, and it is a mistake to forget this when prioritising discussions of the film’s social and cultural impact. In fact, overall Once Were Warriors achieves the fully-rounded form which prompted its success precisely because of the interplay of these different features.

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Once Were Warriors’ high production values are unusual for films made in New Zealand up to the early 1990s, and this – combined with a strategic marketing campaign – gave the film considerable international appeal. In some countries, the marketing emphasis on the film’s style, especially with a concentration on tattoos, clothes, hairstyles and hip hop/rap/reggae music, gave the impression that it was a martial arts or kick-boxing film, and it drew a significant audience from those unaware of the detailed nature of its New Zealand content. These stylistic features were also part of a carefully constructed film aesthetic, a process that included the use of filters to accentuate the skin tones of the characters, and camera positions that emphasised the bulk and size of the male characters. The score added to this aesthetic, especially through the use of traditional M¯aori instruments, such as the koauau (flute) and purerehua (bull-roarer), throughout, creating an often unsettling musical context for the action. The film’s success hastened Tamahori’s move to Hollywood, where he directed Mulholland Falls (1996) and Along Came A Spider (2001), before making the Bond feature Die Another Day in 2002. In New Zealand, Once Were Warriors divided audiences. Some welcomed the ways in which it raised key social issues, topics that many felt were absent from previous representations of M¯aori communal values and experiences. For others, the film simply reinforced stereotypes, especially those surrounding masculinity and violence. Certainly the film attempts to tread a fine line, suggesting that poverty and abuse are endemic in urban M¯aori life but also, through the stress placed on the coming together signalled by the tangi at the story’s end, that a connection to traditional values is still desirable and possible. What is beyond doubt is the power of the film, both visually and in respect to the development of its narrative. As such, it works as a ‘document’ in the way that Tamahori suggests, an assertion borne out by the considerable debate it produced in New Zealand, and also as a marker of technical and production skill and expertise, a factor that would lead to further specialisation within the local film industry in the years that followed.

Further Reading Brown, Ruth, ‘Closing the Gaps: Once Were Warriors from Book to Film and Beyond’, Journal of New Zealand Writing, 17:1, 1999, pp.141–55. Keown, Michelle, ‘He Iwi Kotahi Tatou?: Nationalism and cultural identity in Maori film’ in Ian Conrich and Stuart Murray (eds.), Contemporary New Zealand Cinema: From New Wave to Blockbuster, I.B.Tauris, London, 2008.

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Thompson, Kirsten Moana, ‘Once Were Warriors: New Zealand’s first Indigenous Blockbuster’ in James Stringer (ed.), Movie Blockbusters, Routledge, London, 2003.

Note 1

Quoted in Mark Williams, ‘A waka on the wild side: nationalism and its discontents in some recent New Zealand films’, in Ian Conrich and Stuart Murray (eds.), Contemporary New Zealand Cinema: From New Wave to Blockbuster, I.B.Tauris, London, 2008, p.184.

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Introduction By Annabel Cooper •

The Governor (1977)

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Utu (1983)

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The New Zealand Wars (1998)

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River Queen (2005)

As a ready source of dramatic narratives as well as rich terrain on which the shifting bicultural preoccupations of later eras might be played out, the New Zealand Wars, which flared intermittently between 1843 and 1916, attracted film-makers less than a decade after they ended (see chapter on The New Zealand Wars). Each of the essays in this section points to the capacity of these conflicts to haunt successive presents. Trisha Dunleavy argues that the fuss about the cost overruns of The Governor (1977) was more likely to be a cloaked objection to its subversively revisionist account of colonial conflicts, especially given the sea change in racial politics occurring as it screened. The most ambitious television drama ever undertaken in New Zealand at the time and for decades after, it provoked wide debate and arguably affected ongoing shifts in collective memory of the wars. Even now, Dunleavy notes, the remarkable extent of this series’ archival and oral research marks it out as a landmark event. Six years later, Geoff Murphy’s feature film Utu (1983) belonged to the same cultural climate, and shared a writer and several actors with The Governor. Hester Joyce explores its deployment of the conventions of the Western and its sympathies with revisionist Westerns in particular. Joyce suggests that the film’s narrative interweaves two meanings of ‘utu’: the common translation of ‘revenge’ which links the film to the imported genre; and the more accurate translation of ‘reciprocity’, which opens up a more complex interpretation.

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Ng¯a Pakanga Nunui o¯ Aotearoa/The New Zealand Wars (1998) returned the wars to television in a five-part documentary which challenged the ratings and the public fascination generated by The Governor 20 years earlier. Adapting his own historical work to screen, writer and narrator James Belich contended that the wars had created both M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a and were immensely exciting to boot. Adaptation to screen was also a transition to cross-cultural collaboration, and narration, sound and image contributed to the series’ bicultural resonance. Director Tainui Stephens went on to co-produce River Queen. Unlike Utu which was deliberately non-specific about its reference to historical events, Vincent Ward’s feature film River Queen (2005) drew directly on a specific conflict, Titokowaru’s War, although as Cherie Lacey shows, its main character was a composite and largely fictional figure. Lacey attributes the film’s debts to more recent forms of revisionism that are more open to non-Eurocentric knowledge. She argues that in River Queen, history can be known only partially, through shifting perspectives, and that towards the end of the film a reversal of perspective suggests the viewer’s own involvement in a national story.

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‘Magnificent Failure’ or Subversive Triumph?: The Governor By Trisha Dunleavy New Zealand television in the late 1970s was a striking contrast to that which exists today. There were just two state-owned channels, local television productions could pursue overtly ‘public service’ aims and, in the absence of private television and competition, ratings-anxieties had yet to impact on television schedules and the kinds of programmes that filled them. With television being such a scarce resource, the programmes that aired in primetime slots also stood to gain very high national exposure. Within this context, a New Zealand-made television programme that aimed to subvert existing understandings of pivotal events in the nation’s history held the potential to challenge and change the perceptions of viewers, provoke intense public debate, and make politicians squirm with unease about the possible electoral consequences of both things. These opportunities and outcomes were exemplified, and arguably unsurpassed, by an historical drama series, The Governor (1977), which became one of the most watched and discussed television shows of its decade. Its one shortcoming, for which some dubbed it a ‘magnificent failure’, was that, costing $NZ1.3 million, it overran its production budget. Created for Television One, the more established of the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand’s two-channel pair, The Governor was a six-part drama series about New Zealand’s nineteenth-century colonisation.1 Examining key events from 1840 to 1890, the series was titled after its central character, Sir George Grey, the controversial British Governor who led this process. Within New Zealand-produced television drama, The Governor was a ‘landmark’ production partly because of its unprecedented creative ambition and epic scale. It was this that saw it exceed its budget, a well-publicised error for which it incurred top-level political criticism. The Governor’s ‘landmark’ status attests more emphatically, however, to the revisionist quality of the historical perspectives it provided. To a greater extent than any earlier film or television programme about New Zealand’s colonial history – for which the precedent was Rudall Hayward’s 1940 feature, Rewi’s Last Stand and the

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successor, Geoff Murphy’s 1981 feature, Utu – The Governor challenged a biased traditional historiography and offered an under-documented M¯aori perspective on key contested events. The Governor was conceived by Michael Noonan, written by Keith Aberdein and produced by Tony Isaac, a trio of considerable importance to New Zealand television through the 1970s because of their shared commitment to making drama programmes that sought to explore New Zealand cultural identity, including the bicultural relationships central to it. Before The Governor, Isaac and Noonan had collaborated on New Zealand’s first drama series, Pukemanu (1970–1), whose provincial, working-class setting provided an effective platform for stories about bicultural New Zealand, circa 1970. Whilst Pukemanu’s resounding popularity testified to an audience appetite for television dramas with bicultural themes, The Governor seemed far more risky a concept and project because of its focus on the uneasy origins of New Zealand biculturalism in the nineteenth century. Even though nearly 100 years separated The Governor’s historical events from the contemporary context for which these were dramatised and aired, resounding through New Zealand society in the late 1970s was a simmering resentment over, and protest activity arising from, the Crown’s continued failure to accept liability for land crimes against M¯aori, most of which dated back to New Zealand’s colonisation. The Governor’s epic scale, historical setting, lengthy episodes and high proportion of location scenes offer some indications as to why this series required a relatively high level of production investment. Yet, as a drama which also explored what was then an under-documented period of New Zealand history, this production presented many additional challenges for its makers, beginning with the necessity for extensive primary research (including months of sifting through archives, official records, diaries and letters) and interviews with key tribal elders. Initiated by Noonan, the research was supervised by Isaac, who filtered reading material to Aberdein. Important to producer and scriptwriter alike was the need to redress a perceived historical imbalance and incorporate M¯aori perspectives which, as the series was being researched and scripted, were unavailable in secondary research material. While the subversive aims of the project depended on its historical accuracy, dramatisation did necessitate the fictionalisation of conversations and the fleshing out of some key characterisations in keeping with their historical contribution. Significantly, the research process was hampered by the inadequacy of Grey’s communications, some of which had been carefully doctored to conceal doubts or setbacks, to ‘paint a glorious picture of his successes as Governor and army strategist’2 and to promote the ‘Good Governor Grey’ image which dominated historical records well into the twentieth century.

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Making cultural contributions to the production as its M¯aori adviser (in addition to playing the key role of M¯aori ‘kingmaker’ Wiremu Tamehana), Don Selwyn acknowledged that the series had an important role in educating viewers and challenging historians to explore alternative interpretations of New Zealand’s colonisation process. Research for The Governor incorporated tribal oral histories to develop a M¯aori perspective on key events being depicted. Affirming the pioneering nature of The Governor’s representations and the uniqueness of the oral research that informed it during an on-set interview, Selwyn observed: ‘One of the things that has to be done, and the production is actually doing is that we’re getting a M¯aori point of view which has not been written but has been handed down from generation to generation by our tipuna [ancestors] and by our living elders.’3 Although episodes one and four were equally significant, it was episode five, ‘The Lame Seagull’, that exemplifies the cultural objectives and grand scale of The Governor as a whole. It dramatised four of the key battles of New Zealand’s colonial wars, at Rangiriri, Ngaruawahia, Orakau and Gate Pa, the last two being the most notorious of the North Island campaign. The episode’s title referred to Sir Duncan Cameron, the influential Scottish general on whom the story focused, exploring and foregrounding his personal difficulties in following Grey’s orders to expel M¯aori villagers from their lands. Emphasising land-hunger as the primary cause of war and revealing the settler pressure on Grey to ‘clear the area of natives’ in order to advance its ‘land re-settlement scheme’.4 ‘The Lame Seagull’ alluded to a second cause of conflict. As historian James Belich expressed later, this stemmed from a widespread P¯akeh¯a desire that ‘British administration, law and civilisation’ be imposed on M¯aori.5 Depicting successive battles in the strategic Waikato area, ‘The Lame Seagull’ highlighted the extreme inequity between opposing sides, the meticulous observance of military protocol by so-called ‘M¯aori rebels’, and the inappropriateness of such an aggressive campaign in the absence of concerted resistance. Although it told a nineteenth-century story, The Governor was positioned not only to incite significant public interest but also to become a political hot potato because it was broadcast against the inflammatory backdrop of contemporary M¯aori activism. Quietly smouldering since the nineteenth century, this was reignited in 1975 by the pan-tribal ‘Great Hikoi’, wherein an estimated 6000 people walked down the entire length of New Zealand’s North Island before marching on Wellington’s Parliament Buildings to demand that the Crown protect remaining M¯aori-owned lands. In one of those uncanny historical coincidences that sometimes occurs between the broadcast of a politically-charged television programme and political developments occurring at the time of its broadcast, a protracted and particularly bitter M¯aori land occupation was months into progress when The

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The production process Highly ambitious in its on-set logistics, The Governor easily outweighed the challenges of any earlier New Zealand-produced dramas. Extras arrived by the busload, major battle scenes involved more than a hundred people, and studio scenes could require as many as 30 or 40 actors.There was also the necessary reconstruction of a number of large and complex sets, including Grey’s mansion on Kawau Island, the marae of key M¯aori chiefs, and the sites of the largest colonial battles. Causing some bitterness at Television One because it consumed such a high proportion of available in-house personnel, equipment and facilities, the shooting phase was unusually physically demanding because of the primitive nature of facilities in some of the remote locations (these including some remote rural areas) that were required. Creating something of an organisational nightmare because of its unprecedented scale and the many demands of its period verisimilitude, production difficulties were exacerbated by unexpected bad weather and the destructive effects of a major storm, necessitating the rebuilding of some major sets. The resulting delays rippled through shooting schedules and pressurised deadlines. These problems lay behind the budget overruns for which The Governor would be infamous by the time it premiered on television.

Governor screened on Television One in October 1977. It was the 507-day occupation by Auckland iwi, Ngati Whatua, of its own historically confiscated land at Takaparawha/Bastion Point. This collision of events meant that New Zealanders watched The Governor in the same broadcast context as they processed news coverage of protest activity at Bastion Point and of the government’s repression of this. Helping to explain why The Governor was such compelling viewing when it debuted (its high ratings justifying an ‘encore’ screening of the series in 1978), the juxtaposition made it possible for viewers to find unnerving parallels between the historical land conflicts dramatised by The Governor and the violence of Bastion Point’s final occupation day (28 May 1978), on which 600 baton-wielding policemen forcibly removed the Ngati Whatua protesters and demolished their temporary homes. The Governor provides an exceptional New Zealand example of what John Caughie termed ‘serious drama’, or that whose seriousness of ethical purpose insists that it be ‘taken seriously within public culture’.6 However, this degree of ‘seriousness’ in New Zealand television drama was poised to become a rarity after Prime Minister Robert Muldoon suggested, just weeks before The Governor was due to air, that in spending over a million dollars, its makers had played fast and loose with taxpayers’ money.7 Although The Governor’s error

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was that it did exceed its projected budget, as the first New Zealand drama of anything like its ambition, an overrun might have been expected. Given the politically-charged situation described above, it seems likely that The Governor’s real mistake was not so much its overspending but its airing of a M¯aori perspective on New Zealand’s colonisation in the already politically troublesome context of contemporary M¯aori activism. Reflecting decades later on what he thought was behind the government’s reaction to The Governor’s cost, Don Selwyn commented: My view is that [Muldoon] had a political motive, part of which was that he did not want to see the media begin to expose some historical elements of our country, especially the bicultural ones, that he felt that it would reopen the whole issue of race relations. … There was such a hue and cry about it politically, that it shook the hierarchy of television.8

An important indicator of The Governor’s success and significance is provided by the very high proportion of New Zealand viewers who watched the series – a figure which, albeit mitigated by the higher concentration of audience that New Zealand’s two-channel television system encouraged, remains unrivalled by any New Zealand-produced television drama to this day. Rather than discouraging prospective viewers, the front-page newspaper coverage of its budget blow-out seemed instead to draw a larger volume of viewers to the programme than might otherwise have been expected. Peaking for key episodes at 50 per cent of all viewers,9 The Governor attained a level of audience participation that is today unheard of and was then generally restricted to leading breaking news or major sporting events. The unusual allure of The Governor was affirmed by New Zealand’s head of public broadcasting, Ian Cross, in his annual report of 1977: The series attracted some of the largest audiences ever for a drama programme from either New Zealand or overseas sources. [The Governor] was the major success of the third year of Television One.10

Further Reading Belich, James, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Penguin Books, Auckland, 1988. Blythe, Martin, Naming the Other: Images of the Maori in New Zealand Film and Television, Scarecrow Press, New Jersey, 1994. Dunleavy, Trisha, Ourselves in Primetime: A History of New Zealand Television Drama, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2005.

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Notes 1 Although a Television One production, The Governor did involve a small coproduction arrangement with New Zealand’s National Film Unit, whose staff directed two episodes and assisted with film processing. 2 Neville, Hugh, ‘Good Governor Grey’, New Zealand Listener, 1 October 1977, pp.38–41. 3 Don Selwyn, interviewed in The Making of The Governor, A Television One production for Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand, 1977. 4 Dialogue spoken by George Grey (Corin Redgrave) in this episode. 5 James Belich, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Penguin Books, Auckland, 1988, p.77. 6 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism, and British Culture, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p.3. 7 Prominent examples were: ‘TV One takes Grey Areas out of its $1m splash’, Dominion, 3 September 1977; and ‘Grey Series Faces Cost Probe’, Dominion, 6 September 1977. 8 Don Selwyn, interview with author, 7 April 1996. 9 Barry Shaw, ‘Governor man: how can PM judge without looking?’, Auckland Star, 16 November 1977. 10 Report of the Broadcasting Corporation of New Zealand, AJHR, 5:3, 1978, p.16.

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Making Nation: Utu By Hester Joyce Geoff Murphy’s film Utu (1983) explores military conflict between M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a during nineteenth-century colonisation of New Zealand/Aotearoa. Without direct reference to any particular battle between M¯aori and the British army, Utu becomes a tapestry of concerns facing both the establishment of a nation in the mid-nineteenth century and also the recalibration of a national identity in the 1980s. As Marcia Landy argues: ‘The investment in the past is related to the power to name, to determine what counts as history, and hence to identify differences between dominance and exclusion.’1 Utu tells the story of Te Wheke, a M¯aori conscript to the British army, who seeks to avenge his village when it is razed by his colonel, Elliot, in an act of merciless massacre. Te Wheke’s utu (revenge) is as cruel and complete as he embarks on a destructive path, decapitating a minister, and preaching over the severed head to the minister’s congregation. He then ransacks a farm, inciting utu in its owner, Williamson. Te Wheke’s actions provoke Elliot and his lieutenant Scott, who each pursue him for different reasons. Utu is an example of the ways in which the referencing of a Hollywood genre to explore past and present can collide with the expression of a local voice. The Western, one of the most recognisable Hollywood genres, addressed conflicts that emerged in the colonisation of the American West between white cowboys, settlers and Indigenous Americans.2 The order/disorder binary is a fundamental aspect of Western narratives, used to explore the conquering of lawless elements within race, gender and the landscape. At the same time, the genre celebrates chaos and disorder as a lost or forgotten freedom. Utu’s co-writer, Keith Aberdein, argues that although the film’s historical setting, iconography and characters are reminiscent of a Western, a genre reading of Utu is not applicable: Both of us [Aberdein and Murphy] had some regard for the Leone spaghetti Westerns – at least the dollar series. But at no stage did we try to work the Western genre.… If there was an intellectual underpinning to the development of Utu it was for me entirely local and I believe that the Western is an exclusively American genre.3

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Poster for Utu.

Despite these sentiments, Utu was read in the tradition of revisionist Westerns, like Soldier Blue (Ralph Nelson, 1970) and Little Big Man (Arthur Penn, 1970), that were sympathetic to Indigenous peoples. The film was released in New York not long after the Te M¯aori exhibition had been celebrated at the Metropolitan Museum, signalling a renaissance in M¯aori art and culture. American critic Pauline Kael connected the two events in extensive review where she defined the film’s relationship to the Western genre: ‘Murphy uses the conventions of John Ford’s cavalry – Indians, Westerns, but he uses them as a form of international shorthand – to break the ice and get going, and for allusions and contrasts.’ 4 Utu refers to earlier New Zealand films like Rewi’s Last Stand (Rudall Hayward, 1940) and Broken Barrier (John O’Shea, 1952) revisiting historical bicultural relations. The contemporary context is also significant. Like much

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of New Zealand’s cinema, Utu is both a discussion of M¯aori/P¯akeh¯a relations and an action within that relationship. The film enacts M¯aori/P¯akeh¯a relations, and while being cognisant of M¯aori views, it remains predominantly a P¯akeh¯a vision of those relations. M¯aori advisors were involved throughout the production, and this is apparent in the complexity of issues raised. Utu was produced at a time of increasing consciousness of M¯aori rights; M¯aori Land Rights marches had been taking place throughout the 1970s with protests at Waitangi and Bastion Point, and the formal recognition of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi had occurred in 1975 (Treaty of Waitangi Act, 1975). P¯akeh¯a responsibility for these events was exposed in the civil unrest associated with anti-Springbok rugby tour protests in 1981. Utu’s screenplay was developed immediately before and during the protests and was, Aberdein remembers, informed by the coexisting social upheaval. Aberdein’s personal antagonism towards the rugby tour is deliberately if obliquely referred to: I wrote a line about a wish to be able to put so many thousand [M¯aori] warriors on the streets of Auckland – implying that if that were possible then Te Wheke and his people would have beaten the white man.5

The classical Western has a familiar tale of a cowboy/lawman/settler journeying towards the conquering of new territory and subjugation of its Indigenous inhabitants. David Bordwell defines the forward progress of civilisation as a central theme: As the genre developed, it adhered to a social ideology implicit in its conventions. White population’s progress westward was considered a historic mission, while the conquered indigenous [sic] cultures were usually treated as primitive and savage.6

The white man’s providence over new territories and the notion that colonisation is an advancement are fundamental aspects of the genre. Later revisionist Westerns became sympathetic to Indigenous peoples and attempted to explore more complex colonial interactions, giving voice to these concerns through representations of less rigid binaries. In Utu the conventions are used to explore the tension between military order and a spirit of lawlessness within the army’s ranks, expressing itself in conflicts with settlers and with M¯aori. M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a characters are often represented as contradictory and conflicted. The film is set loosely during the New Zealand Wars, approximately 30 years after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Helen Martin and Sam Edwards note that reference to actual people and events is avoided and that Te Wheke is a composite character based on several past M¯aori leaders

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Men with guns The early Westerns were heroic tales of exploration and domination of new land with depictions of male protagonists as courageous, romantic and idealistic. As the genre developed, these characters become morally ambivalent; for example, the conflicted Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (John Ford, 1956). Guns are a central symbol in the iconography of the Western and there is a significant body of literature linking representations of guns and masculinity. These include analyses of shoot-outs at the climax and ‘greenhorns’ learning the ways of men on shooting ranges. In Utu Murphy uses these generic aspects to contest constructions of masculinity, both historical and contemporary.1 In particular he is questioning various aspects of P¯akeh¯a masculinity in the divergent white characters he portrays. None of these characters are heroic, and each is depicted in relation to his ‘weapon’ in a way that comments on his masculinity. Colonel Elliot’s immorality is expressed in his ruthless use of army firepower to massacre defenceless women and children. Lieutenant Scott’s potency is questioned when Kura teases him about his gun while seducing then outwitting him, and Williamson constructs a ‘special’ gun out of double-barrelled shotguns in a sardonic view of excess. In contrast, Wiremu, as an idealised M¯aori portrayal, shoots only twice.The first time is his colonel, Elliot, and the second is his brother, Te Wheke, perhaps expressing a central dilemma of colonial justice. 1

For a more comprehensive discussion see Bruce Babington, ‘Living white males’ in A History of New Zealand Fiction Feature Film, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007, pp.113–79; and Jonathan Raynor, ‘Embodying the Commercial: Genre and Cultural Affect in the Films of Geoff Murphy’ in Ian Conrich and Stuart Murray (eds.), New Zealand Filmmakers, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2007, pp.152–68.

including Te Kooti Arikirangi, Wiremu Tamihana and Te Rauparaha, each (in)famous in his own way.7 The usefulness of Murphy’s fictional approach is also noted by the cultural advisor, Joe Malcolm, in Gaylene Preston’s documentary, Making Utu (1983),8 where he suggests that the film is better for not being prescribed by history. Given the contemporaneous social and political climes, the telling of this story is inevitably characterised by inherent tensions. Jane Tompkins suggests that ‘…life in the frontier is a way of imagining the self in a boundary situation – a place that will put you to some kind of ultimate test’.9 This helps us to understand the complex network of binaries the film uses to express the concept of utu. The commonly used translation of utu is ‘revenge’. However,

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Malcolm’s definition is ‘to reciprocate, to give back what has been given. If I give you something you are obliged to reciprocate.’10 This allows for greater flexibility in terms of the dualities Murphy explores: insider/outsider, M¯aori/P¯akeh¯a, settler/military, rebellion/subordination, past/present, savage/ civilised. Each binary is an expression of the tensions within nineteenthcentury colonisation and the turbulent 1980s period of post-colonial revision. The story is chaotic and embraces, as well as mimics, the rambling disorder of early settlement within New Zealand/Aotearoa. The traditional narrative of transformation towards British sensibility is subverted in favour of the superior M¯aori warrior. While an audience would normally identify with the main protagonist, here Te Wheke is the narrative disturbance; from the outset he is ‘outlawed’ both within the story and for the audience. He is depicted as both educated and savage. For example, he orates while holding the minister’s bloodied head in his hands, and reads passages from Macbeth yet brutalises a woman he believes to be traitorous. A number of other characters and subplots are set up to contrast with Te Wheke’s utu. His duality is mirrored in two P¯akeh¯a characters with revenge motives. Settler Williamson is set on a path of retribution when his wife is killed and his home is destroyed. Lieutenant Scott, a P¯akeh¯a and New Zealander by birth, is in contrast to the racist and sexually ambivalent British Colonel, Elliot. Elliot bullies Scott into a sexual liaison with a M¯aori woman prisoner, Kura, which Scott is unable to fulfil.11 When Te Wheke later bludgeons Kura to death, Scott takes up utu on him. Wiremu, Scott’s army scout, although considered ‘savage’, is fluent in French and English and is better than Elliot at chess and more ‘civilised’ than the colonel. The civilisation or destruction of Te Wheke is an inevitable consequence of his journey. When it is revealed that Wiremu is Te Wheke’s brother, another Western trope is evoked; the blurring of good and evil within one character or within one family. The film ends with a ‘bush’ trial of the captured Te Wheke. Each character here has both a personal and political motive for utu and the scene is used to reconstruct the central questions of the film. To reassert order and the path of colonisation and civilisation, the primary function of the narrative, Te Wheke has to die. Here he has a heroic death in which his brother, Wiremu, who is without utu, executes him. Aberdein believes this resolution showed that the M¯aori way of dealing with Te Wheke’s death was ‘vastly more sophisticated and culturally intelligent than any of the white characters had shown’.12 Utu is a complex text, weaving elements of artistic expression with political concerns about bicultural relations that can be read both as a historical view and as a contemporary commentary. Manipulation and reinvention of a Hollywood genre is used to explore issues relevant to a particular culture; here, colonial and post-colonial interactions between M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a.

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Further Reading and Viewing Babington, Bruce, ‘Living White Males’, A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007, pp.113– 79. Harris, Kenneth Marc, ‘American Film Genres and Non-American Films: A Case Study of Utu’, Cinema Journal, 29:2, Winter 1990, pp.40–6. Landy, Marcia, Cinematic Uses of the Past, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1996. Making Utu, Gaylene Preston, 1983. Pramaggiore, Maria and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction, Lawrence King Publishing, London, 2006. Raynor, Jonathan, ‘Embodying the Commercial: Genre and Cultural Affect in the Films of Geoff Murphy’ in Ian Conrich and Stuart Murray (eds.), New Zealand Filmmakers, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 2007, pp.152–68.

Notes 1 Marcia Landy, Cinematic Uses of the Past, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1996, p.67. 2 Maria Pramaggiore and Tom Wallis, Film: A Critical Introduction, Lawrence King Publishing, London, 2006, p.347. 3 Aberdein, email interview, 22 February 2000. 4 Pauline Kael, ‘Mirrors’, State of the Art, Dutton, New York, 1985, pp.240–6. 5 Aberdein, email interview. 6 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, 5th edn, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1997, p.56. 7 Helen Martin and Sam Edwards, New Zealand Film 1912–1996, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1997, p.89. Te Rauparaha (meaning convolvulus, entwining plant) has a similar linguistic resonance as Te Wheke (meaning octopus [n], to squeeze, crush [v]). 8 Making Utu, Gaylene Preston, 1983. 9 Jane Tompkins, West of Everything, Oxford University Press, New York, 1992, p.14. 10 Making Utu, Gaylene Preston, 1983. 11 Kenneth Marc Harris offers a complex psychoanalytic reading of the significance of Scott’s impotence with regard to Kura in ‘American film genres and nonAmerican films: a case study of Utu’, Cinema Journal, 29:2, Winter 1990, pp.40–6. 12 Aberdein, email interview.

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Ng¯a Pakanga Nunui o¯ Aotearoa/ The New Zealand Wars By Annabel Cooper The New Zealand Wars, a five-part documentary series presented by historian James Belich, first screened on Television One in 1998. There had been several attempts to translate Belich’s revisionist history The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict (1986) to screen, but earlier efforts had failed to interest television executives. The final, successful, attempt initiated by Belich and producer Colin McRae followed the triumph of Ken Burns’ Civil War (1990) in the United States, and finally coincided with a receptive Television New Zealand board, which allocated $1.1 million in funding.1 The series’ first screening garnered a cumulative audience of two million viewers from a population of less than four million,2 far outstripping The Civil War’s ratings relative to population. Audience receptiveness was compounded by the timing of the production: in 1998, before the proliferation of channels and Internet viewing, Television One still reigned, as Belich puts it, as ‘the national marae’ (meeting place).3 The series re-screened several times in following years, currently circulates on DVD, and continues to screen in schools and settings such as galleries. The New Zealand Wars were a series of interlinked colonial wars fought initially between M¯aori and British troops with some M¯aori allies, and later between M¯aori and the colonial Armed Constabulary, again with M¯aori allies. They first erupted in the 1840s in engagements from the Nelson region to Northland, resumed in a more extensive series of conflicts across the centre of the North Island from 1861 to 1872, and flickered again in the Urewera in the early twentieth century. Through much of the twentieth century, however, they were accorded only a limited place in public memory. Although historians and creative artists had long engaged with the ‘M¯aori Wars’, the First World War reigned as the site of nation-formation, leaving the preferred national narrative of racial harmony untroubled. The imperative of The New Zealand Wars was an argument against such historical amnesia. In the first episode, Belich propounded the claim of the New Zealand Wars to be nation-forming events: ‘The Wars helped make

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M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a, lumping M¯aori tribes into a people, and splitting P¯akeh¯a settlers off from the old British. They were New Zealand’s great civil wars, the grand clash of its two peoples.’ Starting his narrative at the end of the wars, Belich lined up two key events of 1916: the government invasion of Rua K¯enana’s settlement at Maungap¯ohatu, which took place ‘while New Zealand focused on a great world war 12,000 miles away’. The first episode went on to deal with the Northern War of 1845–6, ‘The War that Britain Lost’. Here Belich opened his core arguments: that resistant M¯aori often gained their objectives in battles they were said to have lost; that they were highly innovative military strategists, developing a form of modern trench warfare to defend against European firepower; and that they had successfully maintained regions of political independence for many decades after 1840. Episode two of the series, ‘Kings and Empires’, unsettled public memory by instating the Ng¯ati Toa rangatira (chief) Te Rauparaha as creator of the country’s first empire, with Governor George Grey in the role of jealous usurper. It unpicked the unscrupulous dealings by both the Crown and landselling M¯aori which sparked the First Taranaki War. Episode three charted the ‘direct assault’ on M¯aori independence in the invasion of the Waikato. This episode debunked the legend of the best-known battle of the Wars, Or¯akau, in which Rewi Maniapoto’s heroism in defeat had long stood in public memory as a symbol of the New Zealand Wars in general. Episode four on ‘The Taranaki Prophets’ introduced the ruthless ‘bush-scouring’ tactics of the Second Taranaki War and the rise of new religious movements. The subject of Belich’s second book, the Nga¯ ti Ruanui chief and master strategist Rı¯ wha Titokowaru, is the focus of the second half of this episode. The final episode, ‘The East Coast Wars’, revisited the ominous reputation of Te Kooti Arikirangi and, in line with the historical work of Judith Binney, resituated him as a prophetic leader as well as a warrior with a legitimate cause. This episode concluded an ongoing theme of the series: the conflicts among and within iwi (tribes), and especially the role of M¯aori allied with the Crown. Despite the objections of some trenchant conservatives who lamented that the series was biased in favour of M¯aori, the series restored reputations on all sides of the conflicts. Combating the dominant nineteenth-century explanation for British and colonial failures – that British and colonial commanders were often bunglers who ran bad campaigns – Belich asserts that most were competent strategists and soldiers: it was just that the M¯aori were often better. Herein lay, for many other viewers, the pleasures of the series’ revisionism: as Kawiti, Hapurona and Titokowaru unexpectedly routed the redcoats, underdogs triumphed to the sound of national applause. Who knew, asked reviewers, that we had so many ripping yarns to our national name?4 The New Zealand Wars is one of the few examples in New Zealand historical television of the use of an historian-narrator. Belich’s onscreen

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Film and television texts of the New Zealand Wars Two of New Zealand’s early feature film classics fictionalise events from the New Zealand Wars: Rudall Hayward’s Rewi’s Last Stand (1925, re-made with sound in 1940) and The Te Kooti Trail (1927). Both drew on James Cowan’s magisterial The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering Period (1922–3). Hayward made his films at the historical locations, employing members of local iwi as actors, who were therefore sometimes portraying their relatives at a time when the wars had not lapsed from living memory. The films drew large appreciative audiences and helped to instantiate mythologies around the historical figures of Rewi Maniapoto and Te Kooti Arikirangi. Like Cowan, they promoted the ideology of mutual respect between M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a and the vision of a mixed-race future. Following other, more critical historical studies through the mid-century, the next screen rendering of wars history, the television docudrama The Killing of Kane (1971) situated Rı¯wha Titokowaru’s war as a defence of land and normalised M¯aori society through a contrast between two P¯akeh¯a-M¯aori characters, one willing to acculturate, the other not. A television drama series, The Governor, and a feature film, Utu, followed in 1977 and 1983; both are discussed further in this volume. The Governor indirectly precipitated the next wave of screen renderings of the wars by provoking history student James Belich, employed on the sets digging trenches, to think about M¯aori and trench warfare and make The New Zealand Wars. Michael Black’s Pictures (1981) was also set against the backdrop of the wars, as was Greenstone (1999), River Queen (2005) and Rain of the Children (2008).

persona anchors and unites the series: he wrote the script, and delivered it directly to camera and in voice-over. The script in itself lifts the series out of the ordinary: dramatic, deft and witty, it pulls off the trick of being at once clever, informative and entertaining. The presence of an historian-narrator meant, also unusually for New Zealand historical television, that the series was driven by a perspective and an argument. Belich’s flamboyant hand gestures generated a rash of imitations, but his new public history created broad engagement through letters to the editor and in many a pub and workplace conversation.5 Belich’s assertive presence to some extent disguises the process of translation from a single-author book by a P¯akeh¯a historian to a television production by a bicultural team. The credits included a M¯aori director, Tainui Stephens, and both M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a advisors, crew and production team. The decision to film the account of each conflict on its historical location

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resulted in marae meetings and iwi consultation at each site as the small core crew visited each location for filming. The cross-cultural process was reflected on screen. Belich’s narration dominates, but is counterpointed regularly with interviews or direct-to-camera speech by descendants or relatives of M¯aori combatants speaking about each conflict. Archival images, including photographic and painted images of participants, and voice-acting by M¯aori, P¯akeh¯a and British voices, render the perspectives of historical figures from all sides of the conflicts. The M¯aori ‘feel’ of the series is sustained through its soundscape and visual design. Stephen Ellis’ design uses M¯aori artefacts to mark section breaks. Archival material alternates between M¯aori and colonial images, and the frequent use of photographs or footage of significant landscapes such as Mount Taranaki or the Waikato River acknowledges the whenua (land) of different iwi. Landscape forms a persisting visual reference in The New Zealand Wars. Location filming in ‘ordinary’ rural and urban landscapes brings the past to the present, and functions as a repeated reminder of the eventual outcomes of the conflicts and especially the resulting dispossessions. The soundscape, designed by director Tainui Stephens, gives the programme a M¯aori resonance through M¯aori instrumentation and waiata (songs), although it also makes use of colonial ballads. Waiata were performed and composed for the series,6 and shape some of its most moving sequences. The technical expertise of M¯aori military engineers and strategists was reflected in The New Zealand Wars’ means of displaying the ‘modern pa system’ on screen: the digital representations of military engineering were themselves innovative at the time.7 The graphics allowed a highly mobile point of view, circling around the successive pa system to show their engineering, but also to situate viewers first on one side of a battle, then on the other. The series’ visual representation of the past drew on a massive collection of images gathered by producer Colin McRae, enabling a rich montage of paintings, historical photographs and other archival materials. A similarly broad archive of letters and diaries as well as newspaper and official reports facilitated the interpolation of individual stories into the public events. The script brought historical figures to life in brisk characterisations: Colonel Gold ‘was arguably a better painter than a soldier, and he was not a very good painter’; and in a deft comparison of governors, ‘Fitzroy was scrupulous, but not brilliant. Grey was brilliant, but not scrupulous.’ The extensive archival research and the use of evocative sound and music reflect the influence of documentary film-maker Ken Burns, as does the technique of panning and zooming across historical photographs or paintings and editing the footage to create ‘scenes’ from static archival images.8 The New Zealand Wars applies this technique to historical

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paintings, using quick cuts to suggest the sense of being in the midst of battle, preventing the viewer from standing back to survey; and extends it to footage shot on the present-day sites, again using disorienting angles to place the viewer in the uncertain, panicky context of battle, sharpening the effect with accompanying sound. Despite Burns’ technical influence,9 the fast-paced, lively look and feel and contagiously enthusiastic revisionism of The New Zealand Wars could hardly have been more different from the slow, elegiac national lament of The Civil War. In contrast to the American series, which screened to an audience already imbued with the historical significance of the American Civil War, The New Zealand Wars contended against a loss of public memory: it did so by persuading audiences that we had a dramatic legacy of our own as well as a duty to remember. While it is still too soon to assess the long-term contribution of The New Zealand Wars to public memory, it remains the most substantial public commemoration of New Zealand’s colonial wars, and one that continues actively to constitute public memory through re-screenings and its use in school history curricula.

Further Reading and Viewing Babington, Bruce, A History of the New Zealand Fiction Feature Film, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2007. Belich, James, The New Zealand Wars and the Victorian Interpretation of Racial Conflict, Penguin Books, Auckland, 1988. Belich, James, I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War, New Zealand, 1868–9, Allen & Unwin, Wellington, 1989. Binney, Judith, Gillian Chaplin and Craig Wallace, Mihaia: The Prophet Rua Ke¯nana and his Community at Maungapo¯hatu, Oxford University Press, Wellington, 1979. Cowan, James, The New Zealand Wars and the Pioneering Period, P.O. Hasselberg, Government Printers, Wellington, 1922–3. The Civil War, Ken Burns, American Documentaries, 1990

Notes 1 2 3 4

Annabel Cooper, interview with James Belich, 23 April 2009. TVNZ. Annabel Cooper, interview with James Belich. D.Witchel, ‘Great Guns! It’s our history – and we’re hooked’, New Zealand Listener,11 July 1998, p.71.

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Making Film and Television Histories P. Diamond, ‘Potshots fired over Belich’s wars’, Evening Post, 8 July 1998; M. Revington, ‘War of words’, New Zealand Listener, 18 July 1998, p.24. Annabel Cooper, interview with Tainui Stephens, 3 July 2009. The graphics were created by Animation Research. Gary Edgerton, ‘Ken Burns’s rebirth of a nation: television, narrative, and popular history’, Film & History, 22, 1992, pp.118–33; Robert Brent Toplin (ed.), Ken Burns’s The Civil War: Historians Respond, Oxford University Press, New York, 1996. Of the three major figures in the production team, two had seen The Civil War: it had inspired McRae to think of making a programme on the New Zealand Wars; Stephens had seen it but was determined not to create a ‘New Zealand version’ of a US production; and Belich decided against viewing it before The New Zealand Wars was made.

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Reconciling History in Vincent Ward’s River Queen By Cherie Lacey Vincent Ward’s River Queen (2005) is the latest example in what has been called New Zealand’s ‘most culturally resonant film genre’, the New Zealand Wars epic.1 Like its predecessors (Rudall Hayward’s Rewi’s Last Stand [1925, 1940] and The Te Kooti Trail [1927], as well as Geoff Murphy’s Utu [1983]), River Queen operates as a privileged site for the exploration of bicultural relations at the time of the film’s making. Set in 1860s New Zealand, the film follows Sarah O’Brien, an Irish woman, as she searches for her kidnapped ‘half-caste’ son along the Whanganui River. Crossing between the M¯aori and British sides, Sarah is forced to navigate her own cultural identity, emerging, finally, as an ideal settler for the P¯akeh¯a imaginary: reconciling her Irish heritage with her new M¯aori family. Thematically, as well as formally, the film presents a ‘complex fantasy of bicultural adjustment’, using cinema to explore the reconciliation of M¯aori oral history and P¯akeh¯a written history in an age of settler decolonisation.2 The story of River Queen is grounded in a number of historical accounts. The central character, Sarah O’Brien, is a composite of two figures from New Zealand’s history: Caroline Perrett and Ann Evans. Caroline ‘Queenie’ Perrett was one of 15 P¯akeh¯a girls and women who entered nineteenth-century M¯aori communities as captives. She was one of three women who refused European rescue, choosing instead to remain among her M¯aori captors.3 Ann Evans was a trained nurse who, according to popular legend, was taken blindfolded to heal the ailing M¯aori chief, Rı¯wha Titokowaru. The other significant historical influence is Titokowaru, who becomes Chief Te Kai P¯o in the film. The story of Titokowaru remains one of the most enigmatic in New Zealand’s history. According to historian James Belich, Titokowaru was ‘perhaps the greatest war leader either of New Zealand’s peoples have ever produced’.4 Taking place near the end of the official period of the wars (1868–9), Titokowaru’s campaign against the British was the closest the settlers came to being evicted from New Zealand soil. On the eve of the great battle, however, Titokowaru and his followers deserted their fortified p¯a, leaving only a lone dog to hold fort. The reason behind the hasty departure has never been known; as Belich writes:

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Rawiri Pene (boy) in boat.

Some Ngarauru and Ngati Ruanui elders, now living, may know, but they are not telling, and their reticence is in itself instructive. We are left with the conventional historian’s tools of probability, shreds of evidence, and speculation.5

In its approach to the past, River Queen owes much to revisionist histories of the 1980s and 1990s. While firmly grounded in real-life historical events and people, the film also draws heavily on ‘herstory’, M¯aori oral history traditions, myth, superstition and prophesy, whereby traditional Eurocentric historiography is imbued with a dreamlike sense. From the very first image where Sarah O’Brien is presented, her back to the camera, flinging diary pages into the ocean, it becomes clear that the narrative we are following is, in fact, a re-enactment from the pages of her diary. Her personal story intersects with the history of Titokowaru, and the viewer is invited to revise what we already know about New Zealand’s colonial history through the perspective of one woman. As the image is repeated in the final moments of the film, the story moves from the realm of ‘history’ to ‘our story’ (as the story of all New Zealanders); as Sarah comments, this is the ‘story of your life’. Likewise, the film’s visuals remind the viewer of the reconciliation of traditional history with the non-traditional. Mist constantly enshrouds the river, blocking out particular objects from view and lending it a sense of

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mystery. In so doing, the film suggests that history is not accessible to full ‘sight’ or comprehension; that there are always blind spots in the narrative which invite us to fill in the blanks. Indeed, Chief Te Kai P¯o is shown to be blind in one eye, a detail that shows fidelity to his historical predecessor, and highlights the co-implication of subjective perspective with the writing of history. In this way, and like the historical revisionism of the academies, River Queen questions, and indeed frustrates, the viewer’s attempt to gain a full understanding of history, suggesting instead that history is about the perspective of the person or people writing it. In its retrospective gaze, the film places official history on the same plane as unofficial history, offering a model for national reconciliation at a narrative level. There is, however, one point in the film that reverses this retrospective gaze, and actively presents to the viewer the manner in which they are personally implicated in history. This is the point in the film that addresses the central mystery, the question of Titokowaru/Te Kai P¯o’s abandonment of Tauranga Ika Pa¯. Leading up to the battle, Te Kai P¯o and Sarah share the same prophetic dream. The viewer is presented with fragments of images, connected aurally by an aria: a woman submerged in water; the flag of Te Kai P¯o’s people underwater; Te Kai P¯o making love to a woman; Te Kai P¯o welcoming another Chief; blood in the water; a beautiful M¯aori woman looking over her shoulder; women skipping in the forest. As the narrative progresses, these images become re-integrated into the story, suggesting the fulfilment of the dream-prophecy. On the eve of the battle, Te Kai P¯o witnesses the approach of the dreamwoman, the wife of another Chief, and tells his cousin Wiremu: ‘My dream foretold of this woman.’ As prophesised, Te Kai P¯o makes love to the woman, his face assuming an odd visage, as though he is both inside the dream and outside of it. Following this sequence, and as his allied forces prepare to leave, Wiremu scorns Te Kai P¯o’s actions, telling him, ‘we could have won this day’. Te Kai P¯o replies: ‘The battle? Yes. But winning the war? Never… We adapt or we die.’ Sarah’s voice narrates the explanation, providing an interpretation of the mystery of Titokowaru. She says: ‘Did his desire for the comfort of women get the better of him, or did his dream warn him that he must provoke his people into retreat, and that way avoid a river of blood?’ Of course, it is not simply the fact of his lust, but, as the film suggests, that Te Kai P¯o could foresee the future of New Zealand: that M¯aori may win this battle, and the next, but eventually, P¯akeh¯a would be the victors. This point in the film operates as an historic anamorphosis. Rather than looking backwards at history, as most of the film does, at this point, the film reverses its gaze, looking forward to the viewer in the present. According to anamorphic logic, it is at this point that the viewer becomes personally implicated in the film-text, as we are invited to enter into the film’s historical narrative. Here, the film’s suggestion that history is all about one’s own

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A deployment of soldiers makes its way upstream.

Revisionist history During the 1980s and 1990s in New Zealand, academic historians such as Judith Binney and James Belich re-described New Zealand history from a perspective that was critical of traditional Eurocentric historiography, as well as sensitive to M¯aori oral history. These revisionist histories have since become hegemonic in recurrent debates about New Zealand’s nineteenth-century history. This period also gave rise to the Land Rights Movement in New Zealand, and the creation of the Waitangi Tribunal, both of which resulted in new understandings of New Zealand history. Particularly from 1985 onwards, when the Tribunal was granted retrospective powers, New Zealand’s colonial history came well and truly into question. In the words of historian Alan Ward: ‘When the jurisdiction of the Waitangi Tribunal was extended in 1985 to hear M¯aori claims concerning actions of the Crown since 1840, the government, rather unwittingly, had charged it with nothing less than a comprehensive review of New Zealand’s colonial history.’1 1

Alan Ward, ‘Foreword’, in Janine Hayward and Nicola R. Wheen (eds.), The Waitangi Tribunal:Te Roopu Whakaman i te Tiriti o Waitangi, Bridget Williams Books, Wellington, 2004, p.ix.

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perspective becomes enacted in the very relationship between viewer and text, as we are invited to become aware of the part we all play in constructing the nation’s history. As the film’s denouement tells us, this is not simply history, but the story of the lives of all New Zealanders. As I have suggested, River Queen operates imaginarily as an ideal model of reconciliation between M¯aori and P¯akeh¯a at a thematic as well as technical level. It suggests ways in which oral history can interact with written history, thus forging a new, reconciled, history for all New Zealanders. Like the tradition of revisionist history that emerged in the 1980s, the film also suggests that history is as much about subjective perspective as any official record. In fact, it demonstrates this for the viewer by personally implicating him or her into the film’s historical narrative, enacting the process whereby history is written according to one’s own perspective. In so doing, the film reconciles the New Zealand spectator with their own history so that it becomes – not history per se – but something far more intimate: our story.

Further Reading Babington, Bruce, ‘What streams may come: navigating Vincent Ward’s River Queen’, Illusions, 39, 2007, pp.9–14. Belich, James, I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War, New Zealand, 1868–9, Allen & Unwin, Wellington, 1989. Bentley, Trevor, P¯akeh¯a M¯aori: The Extraordinary Story of the Europeans who lived as M¯aori in Early New Zealand, Penguin, Auckland, 1999. Lacan, Jacques, ‘Anamorphosis’ in Jacques-Alain Miller (ed.), and Alan Sheridan (trans.), The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London, 1998. Neumann, Klaus, Nicholas Thomas and Hilary Ericksen (eds.), Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, UNSW Press, Sydney, 1999.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Bruce Babington, ‘What streams may come’: navigating Vincent Ward’s River Queen’, Illusions, 39, 2007, p.9. Babington, p.9. Trevor Bentley, P¯akeh¯a M¯aori: The Extraordinary Story of the Europeans who lived as M¯aori in Early New Zealand, Penguin, Auckland, 1999, pp.191–2. James Belich, I Shall Not Die: Titokowaru’s War, New Zealand 1868–9, Allen & Unwin, Wellington, 1989, p.2. Belich, pp.242–3.

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Introduction By Mark Derby •

Romantic New Zealand (1934)

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One Hundred Crowded Years (1938–40)

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Camera Natura (1984)

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Cinema of Unease (1995)

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Seeing Red (1995)

Cinema has been described as a ‘collective dream’ and is a particularly powerful means of representing and reflecting concerns of national identity. The troubled, disorderly and relatively recent colonial pasts of the nations of Australia and New Zealand have generated a large and intriguing component of their cinematic heritage. Each of the essays in this section deals with specific examples of that heritage, revealing a spectrum of critical engagement from wholly patriotic government propaganda, through to questioning of such cultural assumptions, to oppositional cinema. Lars Weckbecker examines ‘the most ambitious film project realised under the auspice of the [New Zealand] State to date’. One Hundred Crowded Years (1938–40) celebrates New Zealand nation-making and the centennial anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840. Alfio Leotta examines a 1934 government-funded travelogue in the context of state control of the representation of the nation. Romantic New Zealand acknowledged its twin intentions as ‘creating a New Zealand national spirit’ while promoting tourism. Its production by a government agency charged primarily with developing the tourist industry, during a worldwide economic depression that had eroded national confidence, is seen as central to understanding the film’s implicit as well as explicit meanings. Brenda Allen analyses a range of responses – from viewers, critics and judging panels – to a 1995 history of New Zealand film presented and

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co-directed by Sam Neill. She finds it a culturally nationalist account, embodying a desire to locate a cinematic history within a larger narrative of national becoming. Neill’s main argument, that New Zealand cinema has been historically characterised by themes of darkness and unease, is regarded as simplistic and selective. The choice of Neill himself as the documentary’s presenter and, presumably, selector of its very individualist choice of titles, inadvertently reveals another limitation to the nature of film-making in a small settler economy. By 1995 Neill was based abroad and working on international productions. The notion of a ‘national cinema’ is itself questionable if funding, distribution and audience expectations are derived largely from overseas film-making industries, and if local success is a pathway to expatriation. The sole Australian production considered in this section is a formally experimental documentary that draws on European models and employs a variety of anti-conventional techniques to force a re-examination of iconic images and traditions in the Australian cinema. In particular, Camera Natura (1984) challenges a preoccupation with the ‘bush’, wilderness and the natural environment, a trope shared with and undoubtedly influenced by US cinema. In this paradoxical project, a nostalgic cinematic tradition of the frontier and the ‘Australian Western’ is exposed through an assertively modernist, urbanoriented and European-derived cinematic language. Deane Williams argues that the film-maker, Ross Gibson, achieves not only a radical reconsideration of some of Australia’s most popular films, but also a novel and rewarding perspective on the study of history itself. An obscure but dramatic incident from New Zealand’s Cold War history is the framing device for this other 1995 documentary. Cecil Holmes, a young and dashing documentary maker, was targeted in an anti-union smear campaign in 1948 by shadowy figures operating illegally but with the backing of the government. Seeing Red’s director Annie Goldson calls on the visual conventions of the 1940s spy thriller to recreate the incident but, as Goldson explains, her film incorporates interviews and archival footage to address much wider and lasting questions. The politics of state-funded cultural production and the partisan role of the historical documentary are explored through a multivalent film-making style spanning multiple genres and cinema audiences.

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Romantic New Zealand: 1920s and 1930s’ NZ Government Publicity Office Travelogues By Alfio Leotta Romantic New Zealand (Filmcraft Studios, 1934, 47 mins) is a governmentfunded travelogue and also New Zealand’s first feature-length sound film. During the first half of the twentieth century the travelogue as a film genre gained vast popularity in New Zealand, particularly because of the investment of local governments that were interested in the use of film as a means of national publicity. Since 1917 tourist promotions, including moving pictures, were produced by the Department of Tourism and Health Resources and targeted tourists from America, Britain and other British colonies.1 The establishment of the Publicity Office in 1921 corresponded with the commencement of regular government film production, mainly scenic shorts and travelogues. During the mid-1920s the government approach to cinema began to be marked by the creation of national propaganda. The transfer in June 1930 of the Publicity Office from the Department of Internal Affairs to the Department of Tourism and Health Resorts clearly indicated the establishment of a stricter relationship between national propaganda and the country’s tourist promotion. The production of Romantic New Zealand has to be placed in this context of governmental control over the representation of the nation. In Romantic New Zealand the country is described as ‘a fully established outpost of the great British Empire’. The film takes spectators on a tour of New Zealand’s major cities and popular tourist spots, such as the Southern Alps and the fjords. The travelogue includes re-enactments of settlement activities, such as early road construction, clearing of bush and surveying, but also the depiction of native flora and fauna: from the tuatara to the iconic kiwi. Two sections of the film also include use of the, then new, colour process named Truecolor, a two-colour technology developed simultaneously in different areas of the world such as the USA, France and New Zealand.2 The film makes clear from the outset the connection between travel and national identity, as it opens with the discovery of Aotearoa/New Zealand. A group of M¯aori on a waka (a traditional canoe) rejoice as they see the distant

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silhouette of land appearing on the horizon. The male voice-over provides an historical context for the film: Though one of the parts of the earth best fitted for man, it was about the last of such lands occupied by human beings, the M¯aori people. The first European to find it was a Dutch sea captain, who was looking for something else […]. Indeed, it might never have been part of the British empire, as England did not want it, and annexed it only to keep it from the French, who did.

As the film purports to traverse the nation, and ‘discover’ sites and sights, it places the spectator in the position of a voy(ag)eur or a modern-day explorer. Romantic New Zealand provided local and international audiences with a double ‘discovery’. On the one hand, due to its ability to mobilise the spectator gaze, it brought a series of New Zealand ‘scenic gems’ closer. On the other hand, the film allowed for the discovery of a spirit of nationhood. The national New Zealand spirit was meant to be shaped, according to the Tourist and Publicity Department, through the very consumption of the country’s scenic views. The creation of a national community is strictly intermingled with its promotion as a tourist destination, both at home and overseas. That the government chose to use cinema as a forum for advertising is particularly significant for two reasons. Firstly, film enables the creation of a national public sphere through the production of images of national ‘communion’. The gregarious conditions of movie-going activity and the mobilisation of sociability that it engenders account for the ability of cinema to create and mobilise public spaces. The local reception of government travelogues such as Romantic New Zealand or its predecessor, Glorious New Zealand (1925),3 served to stimulate a sense of community. A review of Glorious New Zealand in the Wellington newspaper The Post described the film as ‘the best moving picture yet produced, illustrative of the Dominion, and may well be described as our first National picture. Being so, it is a duty as well as a privilege for all New Zealanders to see it.’4 In a similar press release, the Tourist and Publicity Department, the commissioner of both films, claimed that: The big scenic film which has just been released under the title ‘Glorious New Zealand’ is the forerunner of a campaign calculated to stimulate tourist traffic within the Dominion, thus fulfilling dual objects of creating a national New Zealand spirit and a keener appreciation of the beauties contained in the Dominion.5

The release of Romantic New Zealand was accompanied by a very similar campaign that could be summarised as ‘Know New Zealand First and

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Advertise it to your Friends Abroad’. The communal experience of the consumption of scenic views of the southern Alps or the fjords contributed to the creation of New Zealand’s imagined community.6 In this sense, films such as Glorious New Zealand or Romantic New Zealand are not to be read as merely historical documents but also as crucial players in the construction of the New Zealand national imaginary. Secondly, film technology is a spectatorial means of transportation; the inscription of motion in the language of film leads the (im)mobile spectator across an imaginary path that connects sites and moments distant in space and time. Eventually, the film spectator embraces the persona of the explorer/traveller. The film opens with the re-enactment of Abel Tasman’s ‘discovery’ of New Zealand and the representation of his vessels. In the rest of the film, virtually every shot is characterised by the presence of a means of transport. The scenic views of the country are punctuated by stagecoaches, steamships, planes, trains, ferries, kayaks, sailboats, cars or motorboats. The omnipresence of mobility technologies in the travelogue is emblematic of the strict connection between tourism and the modern experience of rapid mobility across long distances. Romantic New Zealand offers a ‘travel glance’ of the country and in doing so the film hyperbolises the affinity between modern tourism and cinematic experience: speed, mobile visual perception, bodily immobility and the promise of a pleasurable journey.

New Zealand versus Maoriland M¯aori were, from the origins of New Zealand tourism, an essential part of the package. Maoriland was on display in the very popular thermal resort of Rotorua, on riverboat tours and museums. Travelogues and tourist romances juxtaposed two separate and spatially defined worlds: Maoriland and the modern P¯akeh¯a (European) New Zealand. M¯aori were represented firmly alongside the scenic environment existing unchanged in a timeless, natural world. In early tourism romances such as Whakarewarewa (1927), the narrative structure juxtaposes the ‘primitive’ past of the M¯aori world with modern New Zealand. In the film a group of tourists, led by a M¯aori guide dressed in traditional costume, can jump into Maoriland to see how ‘primitive’ men live in this eternal past. The tourists enter the traditional M¯aori world, comprised of steam cooking, geysers and canoe travel, only to return to the present a few minutes later in the hotel or the golf course nearby. Rotorua, with its mix of thermal resorts, M¯aori villages and modern accommodation, embodied the ideal tourist destination at the border between Maoriland and modern New Zealand.

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Furthermore, the proliferation of mobile technologies alongside empty tourist landscapes in the film epitomises the government authorities’ aspirations to modernity. The message is clear: the penetration of industrial progress has tamed the land, making it a safe place for prospective tourists/settlers. Modern technology allows for the colonial exploitation of New Zealand’s huge reservoir of natural resources. This is absolutely consistent with the threefold strategy of the Publicity Office that aimed to increase tourist traffic value, attract the potential settlement of Europeans and boost national goodwill in general. In his history of New Zealand cinema in the silent period, Jonathan Dennis points out how, during the 1920s, the directive to the Publicity Office was to empty the films of people in order to prevent ‘them from being dated by changes in fashion’.7 The depopulated narratives of the travelogues produced by the Publicity Office allowed only the representation of empty landscapes, occasional tourists or a supposedly timeless Maoriland.8 The New Zealand landscape in particular is represented as raw material that can be imaginatively and materially processed and consumed by the tourist/spectator or the settler. The mobile vehicles that cross the filmic landscapes of Romantic New Zealand simply reinforce the fact that the land is subject to the process of visual and physical appropriation typical of western culture. In this sense, scenic views of the fjords or the Southern Alps are timeless and literally interchangeable. The very same footage of alpine landscape is used in Romantic New Zealand, Happy Altitudes in New Zealand Southern Alps (1933) and New Zealand Charm: A Romantic Outpost of the Empire (1935). The representation of empty landscapes implies that the natural and social environment is subject to the colonial enterprise; in fact, New Zealand governments targeted colonial clubs and wealthy planters longing for more temperate climates and encouraged the diffusion of their films to Australia, India and other British colonies. Government films, such as Glorious New Zealand and Romantic New Zealand, produced, simultaneously, New Zealanders, tourists and settlers. Referring to the role played by the above-mentioned movies in shaping New Zealand national identity, Minette Hillyer points out that: ‘our institutional memory is created through a series of dehistoricised present moments – a view, a product, a holiday “snapshot”.’9 The few white New Zealanders depicted in Romantic New Zealand are presented as either responsible for the ‘civilising’ improvements made to the land, or at play on ski slopes and rivers. They first tamed the land, making it a safe and pleasurable tourist playground that they can now finally enjoy. Both film and tourist promotion played a crucial role in shaping the myth of New Zealand as a scenic wonderland and constructing white New Zealanders as eternal tourist-pioneers. The history of the relationship between film and tourism, and in particular the analysis of texts such as

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Romantic New Zealand within its wider social and political context, is critical to an understanding of the more contemporary emphasis of local tourist authorities on the film-induced tourism generated by movies such as The Piano (1993), Whale Rider (2003) or The Lord of the Rings (2001–3).

Further Reading Dennis, Jonathan, Making Films in Australia and New Zealand in the Silent Period, Moa Films, Wellington, 1993. Hillyer, Minette, ‘We calmly and adventurously go travelling: New Zealand Film, 1925–35’, University of Auckland, Masters Thesis, 1997. Martin, Helen and Sam Edwards, New Zealand Film: 1912–1996, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1997.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7 8

9

New Zealand Official Yearbook, Tourism: the Invisible Export, Department of Statistics, Wellington, 1976, p.1030. Helen Martin and Sam Edwards, New Zealand Film: 1912–1996, Oxford University Press, Auckland, 1997, p.44. Directed and produced under the supervision of Tourist Department officer, Arthur Messenger, Glorious New Zealand was one of the first enterprises of the Publicity Office. The ten minutes of the surviving film show images of lakes, fjords and alpine landscapes. Realised with the explicit aim of attracting both tourists and new settlers, Glorious New Zealand ‘confirms the myths of empty landscapes ripe for the plough’. Martin and Edwards, p.36. Minette Hillyer, ‘We calmly and adventurously go travelling: New Zealand film, 1925–35’, University of Auckland, Masters Thesis, 1997, p.22. Hillyer, p.22. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, Verso, London, 1991. Jonathan Dennis, Making Films in Australia and New Zealand in the Silent Period, Moa Films, Wellington, 1993, p.9. This attitude provoked the reaction of the popular English documentary-maker John Grierson who visited New Zealand in 1940. According to Grierson, the human factor is essential for the construction of a truly national spirit detached from colonial allegiances. Thus, he suggests that ‘when you send us your films never send merely the scenic ones. Put in something about the real things you do.’ Jonathan Grierson, ‘The Face of a New Zealander’ in Jonathan Dennis (ed.), The Tin Shed, Clive Sowry Editions, Wellington, 1981, p.22. Hillyer, p.20.

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From Colony to Nation in One Hundred Crowded Years: A Narrative on Civilisation, Progress and Modernity By Lars Weckbecker One Hundred Crowded Years was produced by the New Zealand Government Film Studios in 1938–40 and became the most ambitious film project realised under the auspices of the State to this date. It was made on the occasion of the centennial celebrations of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840, which legitimised the concerted colonisation of New Zealand. One Hundred Crowded Years marked a significant step in New Zealand factual film production towards the documentary film school envisioned and propagated by John Grierson. Grierson advocated a deliberate ‘creative treatment of actuality’ in the service of ‘social progress’. An intention of the film-makers and State officials involved in the film’s production was to produce a film that would be ‘a sincere and exact representation of the various important aspects of New Zealand’s history as far as it relates to European colonization’.1 This aspiration towards a ‘sincere and exact representation’ was frequently expressed throughout and after the production of the film, and much work went into the research of historical facts and details. The past had to be truthfully reconstructed and brought alive on New Zealand’s screens as well as for overseas audiences: As this film was to be a sincere record of the pioneers, considerable trouble was taken in checking every historical detail, and we hope that it will not bear any accusation that some semi-fictional films have earned that it is a distortion of history.2

Interestingly, this film can today be seen as one of the most controversial films that has been produced in New Zealand’s early film history, particularly in the way in which it appropriates and selects historical facts into a highly reductive and coherent narrative framed around the concepts of civilisation, progress and modernity. This narrative crucially relies on and exploits New Zealand’s institutionalised ‘Other’, M¯aori. More than the first half of the film sets out to

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reconstruct main developments of New Zealand’s past in re-enacted and dramatised scenes. Its opening shots utilise the authority of a book that reads: ‘Dedication. To New Zealand’s pioneers who came forth from Britain’s ordered ways to the wildness of an untouched land.’3 Right from the beginning the dominant perspective of the film is thereby made implicitly clear: New Zealand’s pioneers came from ‘Britain’s ordered ways’ which by definition excluded M¯aori and who by implication did not tame and civilise the land (‘untouched land’). Throughout the first part of the film M¯aori consistently function as the binary other to the notion of civilisation brought about by colonisation. What follows are scenes of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, the realisation of colonisation, the hardships and deeds of a prototypical settler couple in taming the ‘wilderness’, followed by the beginning of the New Zealand Wars and the gold rush in the 1860s. Throughout, the past is appropriated and represented within an historiographical framework that is based on an evolutionary model of linear progress from ‘savagery’ to ‘modern civilisation’, attained through the successful colonisation of Aotearoa. The first significant act that the film depicts is the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. The scene is set up to reinforce the myth of an unambiguous and free Treaty that was followed by a legitimate and humanitarian colonisation which respected M¯aori as equal partners. The information given to the audience is condensed to the point of abstraction in which crucial details and contradictions of the Treaty as well as its context are evaded. In later scenes, which deal with the New Zealand Wars, M¯aori are represented as irrational, savage aggressors who seemingly, without any reason, attack innocent settlers. Reid Perkins has pointed out that: No attempt is made to set these events within any sort of social or political context, let alone acknowledge any kind of M¯aori perspective on them. Instead they are reduced to the status of just one more natural hazard to be coped with by the intrepid enterprise of the pioneers.4

Again, the representation of M¯aori is confined to the imagination of a history that supported the hegemonic political and social forces and in particular the State (itself an embodiment of ‘modern civilisation’ and legitimised by the Treaty of Waitangi). The narration of the past in One Hundred Crowded Years is free from contradictions and ambiguities. Strangely, midway through, the film breaks with its romanticised colonial narrative and focuses on a socio-economic and cultural report on the present state of the nation.5 The mode of presentation changes from fictionalised reenactments of historical events to a series of shots that seemingly have an evidential documentary character through their indexicality with actuality (as

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‘The creative treatment of actuality’ John Grierson, who at one stage advised on the production of One Hundred Crowded Years, termed his approach to film production ‘documentary’ and demanded it be a ‘creative treatment of actuality’, implying an interrelationship between real-life situations (actuality) and their ‘creative adjustment’ through techniques of framing, selection and montage.This deliberate organisation of film material brought factual film closer to fictionalising techniques of feature film production and this approach legitimised the blurring of the established boundaries between fact and fiction, reality and imagination. Such a treatment was not demanded for the sake of mirroring society or producing works of art, but for functional, ‘educational’, ends, in order to mould the future of societies through the shaping of ways of perception. He and others believed that an homogenising, typifying, dramatising and symbolic treatment of worldly events and perceived problems could make ‘democracy’ work in an increasingly alienated, complex and abstract world in which the ideal of the rational, enlightened and factually informed citizen could presumably no longer prevail. ‘Democracy’ had to be made to work through the ‘engineering of consent’ of ‘the masses’, using techniques of public relations that were employed by political, intellectual and economic élites. Film, particularly documentary, was seen to be one of the most powerful means to this end that allegedly justified the means.

opposed to staged events). Where the first part of the film mostly followed feature film conventions of continuity and story development, the second part of One Hundred Crowded Years consists visually of shots and sequences that are largely disjointed. These function as visual evidence and provide fidelity for the commentary that sets the images in a logical cohesion. Nevertheless, the commentator’s expositions frequently go far beyond the conclusiveness of the images and some scenes are obviously arranged for the camera, if not even fully staged, in keeping with Grierson’s perspectives on documentary prevalent at the time. The film continues to provide overviews of the state of agriculture, industry, education, science, health and social welfare services. In one sequence the narrator sums up the triumph of progress and civilisation, embodied by modern New Zealand: We would have been more than human to have made no mistakes during this stupendous task of rushing forward a country from savagery to civilisation in one hundred crowded years. We have built and equipped modern cities where before there was nothing, say perhaps a few huts of leaves and rushes.… With

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airports and aircraft we have brought twentieth century speed to a stone-age land, telescoping centuries together in a few short years.

Again M¯aori are evoked in implicit opposition to ‘civilisation’ (vs. ‘savagery’), ‘modern cities’ (vs. ‘nothing, say perhaps a few huts of leaves and rushes’) and ‘twentieth-century speed’ (vs. ‘stone-age land’). A few minutes later M¯aori are introduced as part of modern New Zealand in the following way: ‘Another of New Zealand’s problems has special reference to our M¯aori people.’ The problem is the adaption to the ‘ways of life brought by Europeans’, while seemingly random pictures of M¯aori are shown in close takes. Then the audience gets to see an unnamed M¯aori authority whose surface appearance is fully ‘Europeanised’. The authority sits in an office and directly addresses the camera. What is not disclosed to the audience is that he worked for the Native Affairs Department. He claims: The impact of Western civilisation a hundred years ago caused drastic and imperative adjustment in the economic life of the M¯aori people, and in consequence a transitional period had to be endured. My forbears discarded some of their tribal customs. In this period differences and disputes arose. Happily, those days are past and our two races now live together in harmony.

Again, any contextualisation or differentiation remains absent, and he continues: Further, in some matters we must retain our individuality: our carving and weaving, our music and dances. These are an expression of something deep within us. But music and dancing and art are not enough for this modern world. We need also such things as our Native Land Development Scheme and the adaptation of modern farming to the community instincts of the M¯aori.

This claim encapsulates what was becoming official state policy regarding the perceived ‘M¯aori problem’. Further, at this point the fundamental failure of One Hundred Crowded Years has become fully obvious: while it was produced on the occasion of the centenary of New Zealand, throughout most of the film M¯aori function in opposition to the nation’s alleged defining foundations and are only introduced into the narration of modern New Zealand as a problem. Hence, it assigns M¯aori a place in modern New Zealand as at once insignificant (in relation to its foundations) and deviant (in relation to its hegemonic cultural, social and economic norms), and continuously evaluates M¯aori culture according to standards that were imposed upon it. One Hundred Crowded Years has been described as ‘a newsreel-style documentary with dramatised sequences’ which is ‘in fact a stilted, disjointed

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and embarrassingly inept bit of work’ and ‘one long panegyric glorifying Civilisation’s conquest of Nature, as represented by the Indigenous landscape and its inhabitants’.6 This remark emphasises the problematic nature of reconstructions of the past that necessarily take place within historically and culturally specific modes of perception and expression. These are subject to change, difference and contestation. What was accepted as a successful and truthful representation of the past in the 1940s – and there seems to have been no contemporaneous public critique of the general accuracy and truthfulness of the film – nowadays seems rather to be the expression of a way of seeing that was still deeply enmeshed within an ethnocentric and evolutionistic understanding of history and a desire for ‘totalising representation’ along national and racial/ethnic lines. This mode of representation functioned within a State apparatus that controlled and patronised what and how people could see in order to facilitate further ‘progress’ of the nation towards ‘a better tomorrow’.

Further Reading Blythe, Martin, Naming the Other: Images of the Ma¯ori in New Zealand Film and Television, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen, NJ, 1994). Perkins, Reid, ‘Imag(in)ing our past: colonial New Zealand on film from the birth of New Zealand to The Piano’, Part I, Illusions, 25, 1996, pp.4–10.

Notes 1

2 3 4 5 6

L.J.Schmitt, General Manager of Tourist and Publicity Dept. in a letter to Mr Connelly of the Roman Catholic Church, 31 March 1939, Archives New Zealand TO 1 28/27/3. Notes on Centennial Film, Archives New Zealand TO 1 28/27/3. All emphases in film quotes are placed by the author. Reid Perkins, ‘Imag(in)ing our past’, Part I, Illusions, 25, 1996, p.9. For a more detailed discussion see Martin Blythe, Naming the Other, Scarecrow Press, Metuchen NJ, 1994, pp.73–7. Perkins, pp.8–9.

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Camera Natura By Deane Williams Ross Gibson’s Camera Natura (1984) is a 32-minute essay/compilation documentary film that tells a history of the non-Aboriginal representation of the Australian landscape in writing, painting, still photography, silent and sound film, television advertising and satellite imaging. Ross Gibson, Sydney film-maker, writer, teacher and multimedia artist, employs a documentary mode made famous by French film-maker Chris Marker as a departure from traditional expository documentary film-making. This essay/compilation mode emphasises an approach whereby the questions posed are as pertinent to Gibson’s practice as any answers. The film borrows widely from Australian cinema from On Our Selection (1920) and The Squatter’s Daughter (1933) to Mad Max II (1981) and We of the Never Never (1982). It includes a convict, Thomas Watling, as a character, and maps, paintings and still photographs to advance the film’s proposal. Camera Natura has four parts: ‘An Ignored Character Attains a History’, ‘An Ignored History Attains a Character’, ‘A History Attains a Mythology’ and ‘The End’. These parts represent a fractured narrative in an otherwise linear argument about the development of the landscape imagery of this continent. The film’s style of narration is also dispersed with numerous masculine and feminine voices employing poetics, repetition and irony to undercut what can be seen as a traditional documentary form in documentary film. This mode also provides for a kind of history-making that has seen the film enter debates about history, in particular a proposal by Robert Rosenstone in 1990 that saw him consider the film as an example of postmodern history films that ‘expand our sense of history by allowing us to see our relationship to the past in new and interesting ways’.1 The film has its origins in Gibson’s early writings, the book The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia and his essays ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’ and ‘Geography and Gender’ that appeared in On The Beach, a short-lived cultural studies journal that Gibson edited and co-founded in 1983. Both of these essays were reconsidered and rewritten over a number of years, finally appearing in his book South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of

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Australia.2 Gibson employed images from films such as Sons of Matthew, Gallipoli, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max II in Camera Natura to answer the question he set for himself in the initial article: ‘What can the preoccupation [with the landscape] tell us about Australian culture, both cinematic and general.’3 Camera Natura also emerged out of a particularly fervent moment in Australian film culture, alongside the feature film revival of the mid-1970s where Australian experimental and short film-making thrived. Gibson’s experimental essay/compilation film was funded by the Australian Film Commission’s Creative Development Fund, which also helped realise Helen Grace’s Serious Undertakings (1983), Laleen Jayamanne’s Song of Ceylon (1985), Sarah Gibson and Susan Lambert’s Landslides (1986), Gillian Leahy’s My Life Without Steve (1986) and Tracey Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls (1987). Together, My Life Without Steve and Camera Natura were given a small cinema release, touring Australia’s capital cities as a double. Both films employed an elliptical image-voice relationship that is evident in the seminal role model for this mode: the French essay film best known in the work of Chris Marker, Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda. While My Life Without Steve owes much to Roland Barthes, Camera Natura exerts a critical poesis informed by a post-colonial and deconstructionist examination of Australian film culture evident in several of these independent films of the early to mid 1980s. One distinguishing aspect of Gibson’s film is its extensive use of found footage and sound from the diaries, maps, still photographs, silent and sound cinema, television advertisements and satellite imagery. In its critically poetic approach, Camera Natura employs images and sound from some of Australia’s best-known films such as Sons of Matthew (1949), The Overlanders (1946), Gallipoli (1981), Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), Sunday Too Far Away (1975) and Mad Max II (1981). Large-scale feature films are redeployed in a 32-minute low-budget film. In compiling a film from extant sound and image from within national cinema history, Gibson creates a linear argument at the same time as he recontextualises Australian national cinema. This metaphorical approach invites audiences to see Australian cinema differently, critically. The cinematic world of Camera Natura alters the way we see every film that is employed within Gibson’s film; we begin to see each film in relation to the other. This kind of criticism is, in the broadest sense, cultural, and depends upon a metaphorical, analogical sense of truth, radically opposed to dominant modes of analysis. In this way it is possible to consider Camera Natura a postmodern and post-colonial film. Although Camera Natura involves a bricolage of images, voices and sounds, it contains a distinct line of argument; that is, the dominance of landscape

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images in Australian feature films of the 1970s and early 1980s can be linked to a re-emergent nationalism at the time and the landscape was seen as a delimited, manageable source of ‘Australianness’. Gibson has called Camera Natura an ‘essay in futility’,4 and the film contains many images of inutility including the girls disappearing into the rock in Picnic at Hanging Rock, footage of Donald Campbell’s failed attempt at the world land speed record and of Jack Thompson crashing his car from Sunday Too Far Away. The idea of futility that these images denote implies that Australian film culture was being taken up a dead-end street and that Australians must look to places other than the land for definition. But the film also points beyond itself to some other, little seen and little heard of place. Robert Rosenstone, in his enthusiasm for the role film could play for historians, included Camera Natura amongst a litany of films that he understood to be telling history in a manner ‘[t]hat problematizes the entire notion of historical knowledge. That foregrounds the usually concealed attitude of historians toward their material’ [italics in original].5 Jill Godmilow’s Far From Poland (1984), Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory (1991), Camera Natura, Juan Downey’s Hard Times and Culture (1990), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet, Given Name Nam (1989), Mitzi Goldman’s and Trish Fitzsimon’s Snakes and Ladders (1987), Kevin Duggan’s Paterson (1988), Raoul Peck’s Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (1992), Terese Svoboboda’s and Steve Bull’s Margaret Sanger: a Public Nuisance (1992) and John Hughes’s One Way Street: Fragments for Walter Benjamin (1992) are the films that Rosenstone proposes as examples of an international shift towards postmodern history making in film. In this way Rosenstone, again recontextualising Gibson’s film, takes it out of the relative specificity of Australian cultural and filmic history into a consideration less of its topical object of address, Australian national cinema, into a championing of its formal, rhetorical, mode of history telling.

Further Reading Gibson, Ross, ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’, On The Beach, 1, Autumn 1983, pp.5–10. Gibson, Ross, ‘Geography and Gender’, On The Beach, 2, Winter 1983, pp. 9–12. Gibson, Ross, The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia, Sirius-Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1984. Gibson, Ross, South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1992. Rosenstone, Robert, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1996.

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Williams, Deane, Mapping the Imaginary: Ross Gibson’s Camera Natura, Australian Teachers of Media, Melbourne, 1996.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5

Robert Rosenstone, ‘The Future of the Past: Film and the beginnings of Postmodern History’ in Vivian Sobchack (ed.), The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television and the Historical Event, Routledge, New York, 1996. Rpt in Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass. and London, 1996, p.198. Ross Gibson, ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’, On The Beach, 1, Autumn 1983, pp.5–10; ‘Geography and Gender’, On The Beach, 2, Winter 1983, pp.9–12; The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia, Sirius-Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1984; South of the West: Postcolonialism and the Narrative Construction of Australia, Indiana University Press, Bloomington Indiana, 1992. Gibson, ‘Camera Natura: Landscape in Australian Feature Films’, On the Beach, 1, Autumn 1983, p.5. Personal Interview, 9 June 1992. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, p.201.

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Cinema of Unease By Brenda Allen The documentary Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill (1995) was written and directed by Sam Neill and Judy Rymer and presented by Sam Neill. Cinema of Unease, as it is popularly called, is part of the British Film Institute’s series, A Century of Cinema, commissioned to commemorate a century of public movie exhibition. Each documentary is presented by a film celebrity from that country, usually a director, and each presenter was asked to give a personal overview of their national cinema between 1895 and 1995. In Cinema of Unease, no other person is interviewed and the film is shaped around Neill’s own experiences. Although Neill and Rymer carried out research, in general the audience is not aware of this work because Neill seamlessly combines the personal with the historical. For instance, he frequently intersperses extracts from selected films with his own memories and shots of contemporary landscapes. This, along with his appearances as a character in some of the film segments and anecdotes of his working life, foregrounds his involvement in the New Zealand cinema industry. In a way, Neill is his own interviewee and some of his information has the credibility of eye-witness testimony. Like the term ‘nation’, the term ‘national cinema’ (and which films should be included) remains a matter of debate. But there is general agreement that Cinema of Unease raised the profile of New Zealand film both at home and abroad. In New Zealand, the documentary was broadcast on television and won an award for Best Documentary at the TV Guide Television Awards (1996). Film clips were not readily available at that time, so Neill’s selection provided a rich teaching resource for the relatively new discipline of film studies. The film was also chosen to screen at the Cannes Film Festival, and several overseas screenings followed. The overall effect was to challenge the widely held notion that there were too few feature films, or that New Zealand was too young to have a cinema. New Zealand audiences in general were enthusiastic about the documentary, but some noted that Neill’s account is based on an ‘outmoded national perspective’. Overseas this went unnoticed. A New York Times review calls Cinema of Unease the ‘highlight of the series’ and uncritically reiterates Neill’s main argument: that New Zealand film is strongly characterised by darkness,

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unease and the trope of the ‘man alone’, and that this indicates a colonial style of cultural cringe. In fact, films that did not fit the trope were simply omitted. Furthermore, Cinema of Unease has been criticised for the brevity of its treatment of film before 1950. It is possible that this omission has fed the notion, current among film scholars, that New Zealand cinema has only recently ‘come of age’. But some of the very early archival footage that Neill includes existed only as fragments and some films he mentions have faded from popular memory. Locally, general audiences found the material, along with the idea that film might be worth preserving, new and exciting. Most were surprised to learn that in the early 1900s New Zealanders were making and exhibiting films. New Zealanders were unaware of their cinema’s lineage because there had been a gap in continuity of production from the late 1930s to 1970, and because they did not see themselves as film-makers with stories worthy of the big screen. Many sections of the documentary are biased. For instance, Neill worked at the National Film Unit (NFU) for a time. That unit was formed in 1941, during the Second World War, in order to ‘provide film publicity of New Zealand’s war effort’, but this work was criticised as ‘politically biased’ and ceased in 1950.1 By the 1970s, when Neill was old enough to work there, NFU films were characterised by the picturesque. Neill shows film clips to support his recollection that the main agenda was to depict landscapes as pristine and impressive and to depict New Zealand life as healthy, happy and privileged. Ordinary New Zealanders, however, were notably absent from the screen. Nevertheless, many of the NFU films were popular with local audiences. It is likely that the clips along with knowledge that Neill had directed at the NFU combined to give a sense of veracity to his next claim: that film-makers, some of whom had been his colleagues at the NFU, thought the style of representation narrow and false. Once free of those restrictions, he says, they ‘saw the land as a metaphor for a psychological interior and looked at the darker heart of the menacing land’. He then goes on to argue that darkness and unease culminated in the trope of the ‘man alone’, and that the trope is an ongoing and overriding feature of New Zealand cinema. Lawrence McDonald, however, is clear in his counterclaim that the four men who Neill could have been referring to as colleagues at the NFU made works in a variety of genres, including romance and comedy.2 Furthermore, as Deborah Shepard points out, works by women, both those that do not fit Neill’s thesis as well as films that would, are missing from the documentary.3 Films by women that are included in the Cinema of Unease also feature, or have resonance for, Sam Neill. This highlights the partiality, perhaps the idiosyncrasy, of the selection and accounts for the strength of Neill’s argument that New Zealand cinema is one of darkness and unease populated by protagonists that fit the trope of the ‘man alone’.

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While ‘the darker heart of the menacing land’ is not as pervasive as Neill contends, this has been a feature of some New Zealand literature and films. Throughout the expansionist era of the British empire, explorers and settlers did face danger, and that may be the germ of truth behind the mythology. Tales of such explorations frequently use or imply darkness, unease and the lone man who sallies forth into the dangerous unknown. But those texts are at best ambiguous. One shared implication is that the land is, somehow, malevolent towards whites. Another is that, like the natives, the land has to be subdued, ‘civilised’ and made wholesome to enable settlement. On the one hand Neill speaks as if the unease is in the land and the land visits darkness on settlers; on the other he explains that it arises out of the settler/P¯akeh¯a psyche, as if the settlers bring darkness to the land. Audiences are left to note and account for the slippage between colonial notions of darkness that posit Indigenous populations as ‘Other’ and the psychological darkness and/or the uncanny (often portrayed through shots of land and buildings) commonly used to create tension in fictional narratives. The evidence Neill uses to set up his argument is overburdened. For instance, he takes the audience to a house in which he lived briefly in Christchurch, quite near where the murder depicted in the 1994 film Heavenly Creatures (discussed in this volume by James E. Bennett) took place. Neill intercuts footage of himself in the area with shots from the film (it was filmed on location). He segues in and out of the film as his commentary interweaves the murder, the film and the place, leading to the conclusion that New Zealand locations, identity and cinema are characterised by darkness, unease and foul deeds. Neill also conflates two historical periods: the time of the murder and his own childhood in Christchurch (both in the 1950s), with the re-enactment of the murder in Jackson’s film and the contemporary period of Cinema of Unease (both 1994–5). Every example Neill gives from then on demonstrates this theme in some way. Cinema of Unease: A Personal Journey by Sam Neill gives a partial and slanted view of twentieth-century New Zealand film, but it stands as one resource alongside many and circulates among audiences who are likely to be aware of the technical, historical, social and political nature of film. This writer has suggested that the careful study of Cinema of Unease as a cosmopolitan gloss on a local art form reveals the kind of cultural cringe the returning expatriate experienced in the 1990s. Thus the film not only gives facts and examples, but also enables the reader to gain insights into issues of colonialism, post-colonialism and tensions between the local and the global in 1990s New Zealand. We should remember, too, that the film played an important part in demonstrating New Zealand cinema’s substance and long, if broken, history at a time when many still doubted the validity and importance of film.

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The New Zealand talkies In 1934, the ‘talkies’ as they were called arrived in New Zealand cinemas. Exhibitors used cinemas as collateral to raise loans for the expensive sound equipment, but film-makers could not raise money on unmade films (this is still difficult).Within a few years silent films could no longer draw large audiences and the high cost of sound equipment meant that few local film-makers could continue production. Although six sound films were made prior to 1940,1 it was very costly to outfit cinemas for sound and therefore difficult to gain exhibition in a theatre for a local film. Many of the films that were made in New Zealand in the 1950s and 1960s featured overseas stars in an effort to attract audiences both at home and abroad. Overseas stars hid the New Zealand accent, which was its own cultural cringe. New Zealand media required personnel who spoke on their broadcasts to speak with British pronunciation. This lack of local New Zealand voice, both literal and metaphorical, was coupled with the notion that local stories were not worthy of the big screen. 1

Roger Horrocks, ‘Creating a Feature Film Industry’, Journal of Popular Culture, 19:2, 1985, p.149.

Further Reading ‘Cinema of Unease’, New Zealand On Screen, http://www.nzonscreen.com/ title/cinema-of-unease-1995 Horrocks, Roger, ‘Creating a Feature-Film Industry’, Journal of Popular Culture, 19:2, 1985, pp.149–58. McDonald, Lawrence, ‘A Road to Erewhon: A Consideration of Cinema of Unease’, Illusions, 25, Winter 1996, pp.20–5. National Film Unit, http://audiovisual.archives.govt.nz/nationalfilmunit/

Notes 1

2 3

The homepage of the National Film Unit includes a brief overview of the Unit’s history and changing imperatives. Viewed 28 February 2010, http://audiovisual. archives.govt.nz/nationalfilmunit/. Lawrence McDonald, ‘A Road to Erewhon: A consideration of Cinema of Unease’, Illusions, 25, Winter 1996, p.23. Deborah Shepard, Reframing Women: A History of New Zealand Film, Harper Collins, Auckland, 2000, p.178.

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Seeing Red in 1949 and 1995 By Alan Wright Seeing Red (Goldson, 1995) deals primarily with a forgotten incident in New Zealand’s post-war history. In November 1948, Cecil Holmes, a young documentary film-maker who worked at the National Film Unit, was implicated in a political scandal designed to expose ‘union agitators’ and ‘Communist sympathisers’. Holmes was committed to the ideals of social justice and workers’ rights and was an active member of the Communist Party and delegate for the PSA (Public Service Association) at the National Film Unit. While drinking after work with mates in Parliament Buildings, his satchel was stolen from his car by a government snoop. Its contents, including a letter containing a few subversive comments about a planned stop-work meeting, were leaked to the press, the Prime Minister and the Vice President of the Federation of Labour, Fintan Patrick Walsh, a fierce adversary of his excomrades in the Communist Party. Discontent had been growing amongst workers over the government’s economic policies, which sought to limit wage increases and industrial action, a conflict that would culminate ultimately in the bitter Waterfront Dispute of 1951. The ‘satchel snatch’ incident provided the Government with a chance to stir up popular sentiment against militant unionism by targeting a handy scapegoat. Holmes was fired and, despite winning a legal case that cleared his name, left New Zealand for good to pursue an illustrious career as a film-maker in Australia. Annie Goldson uses this episode from New Zealand’s Cold War past to comment upon the way that historical events are represented and received. Seeing Red not only serves as a work of revisionist history that celebrates the important role played by the radical left in the political life of New Zealand; it also affirms the cultural significance of the tradition of documentary film in New Zealand. A sorely neglected aspect of New Zealand’s cinematic heritage is recovered and made relevant and accessible for a contemporary audience. Goldson returns to an earlier period of film production in New Zealand in order to establish a direct connection between her own work and the pioneering efforts of her predecessors. In the decade from 1985 to 1995, the New Zealand Film Archive had established itself as an active cultural force in maintaining the nation’s moving picture heritage. Government policy

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increasingly supported the role of the arts in public life. On the other hand, the political and economic reforms of successive Labour and National governments, keen to adopt the model of privatisation and free market capitalism instituted by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, threatened to dismantle the culture of resistance and dissent that Cecil Holmes belonged to. Seeing Red is a gesture of solidarity with the past, politically and artistically, and a critical reflection upon the place and purpose of documentary in the present. The case of Cecil Holmes, therefore, acts as a myth for the institution of a new chapter in the development of a national film culture. The shenanigans at the National Film Unit do not just provide the context for Seeing Red’s story. The politics of documentary film production is a major focus of the film. Goldson shows how film itself, aside from acting as a medium for recording history, has a vital history of its own that can reveal much about the projection of a national image and identity. Through a skilful mix of archival material and reconstructed scenes, Seeing Red demonstrates how the newsreels and shorts made by Holmes and his NFU buddies display the principles of documentary realism and state ideology promulgated by John Grierson and the British Documentary Movement. Seeing Red, however, challenges the customary distinction between factual and fictional representation that has grounded documentary practice since Grierson. Goldson subtly combines evidence and testimony gathered from interviews and found footage with clearly staged re-enactments of imagined events. She employs a number of reflexive devices to reveal the degree to which truth and objectivity, the prime values of documentary reportage, are a product of ideological choices and cinematic techniques. Such breaches in the codes of documentary realism serve a variety of functions in Seeing Red and the differences in their strategic intent offer an insight into the dilemmas facing a politically motivated film-maker like Annie Goldson in reaching a popular audience and in working within the confines of the media industry. The film opens with a reconstruction of the infamous ‘satchel snatch’ incident. Stylistically, the scene evokes the atmosphere of entrapment and suspense that defines film noir or the gangster film: a handsome man in a wide-brimmed hat steps out of a car, a cigarette butt thrown in the gutter, jazz on the soundtrack, a briefcase left abandoned on a leather seat. Goldson deploys the period details of setting and costume as cinematic signs in order to hang her story on a popular set of images and to hook her audience with an instantly recognisable narrative line. History makes a more striking entrance when dressed in the garb of fiction. On the other hand, an appreciation of film as historical document does not preclude an acknowledgment of its status as an artificial production. A clip from The Coaster, a film directed by Holmes in 1948 about a cargo ship and

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Cecil Holmes in Australia On the final page of his autobiography, One Man’s Way, Cecil Holmes recalls the advice that Stan Andrews, his boss at the National Film Unit, gave him on his departure from New Zealand: ‘I would need to make a choice between being a film-maker or a politician.’1 Andrews and Holmes responded to this dilemma in different ways. As a result, the history of New Zealand film suffered a great loss. Cecil Holmes’ contribution to Australian film was indeed marked by a strong streak of political activism, independence and spirit of adventure. He retained his lifelong commitment to the principles of the radical left, although he parted ways with the Communist Party in 1957. Holmes saw that the same forces of capitalism responsible for the exploitation of the working class were also directly responsible for the destruction of the natural environment and the demise of Indigenous communities. He was a staunch advocate for Aboriginal land rights and made many films in collaboration with the peoples of Arnhem Land, the Torres Strait, Portuguese Timor (now East Timor) and New Guinea. Holmes waged a long struggle against government control over permits and publication that limited access to film on Aboriginal reserves. In conjunction with the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, he shot a series of ethnographic films that recorded traditional ceremonies and rituals. He also produced documentaries for television on tribal life, art and work in Yirrkali and other local communities. He assisted young Aboriginals in making their own films and getting them screened and sold. 1

Cecil Holmes, One Man’s Way, Penguin, Ringwood Victoria, 1986, p.256.

its crew, shifts seamlessly to a sequence that recreates the recording process for the film. Selwyn Toogood’s original narration merges with the voice of an actor reading the same lines in the studio. Holmes’s character, unsatisfied with the rhythm and delivery of the speech, requests another take. The crew checks the equipment, Holmes calls ‘action’, and the narration continues, once more accompanied by imagery from The Coaster. The imaginary sequence in the film studio provides a working example of Grierson’s dictum that documentary involves ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, an issue also addressed in Lars Weckbecker’s chapter on One Hundred Crowded Years. Goldson draws attention to the poetic effect achieved by cutting word to image. The cadences and vernacular expressions of Denis Glover’s verse, a local take on W.H. Auden’s text for Nightmail (Watt, Wright, 1936), is matched to the observational modesty of Holmes’ camera.

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Style serves to express content. The aesthetic of The Coaster, in true Griersonian fashion, bears a political message: the strength of the nation lies in the cooperative efforts of industry and labour, the dignity and resourcefulness of the worker placed at the service of the machinery and capital of the modern state. The role of documentary is to support this public image. The recreated sequence in the studio, rather than purely illustrating the method and ideals of the Griersonian tradition, reveals the ideological contradictions at work both on screen and behind the scenes in a film like The Coaster. Goldson adopts a more critical use of reflexivity in a scene where the tea lady at the film studio delivers a monologue directly addressed to the audience. Here the effect is interruptive and interrogative. Cinematically, the scene is artificial as opposed to realistic. It breaks with the standard procedures of documentary practice that have informed Seeing Red. Against a backdrop of footage from the Spanish Civil War, more reminiscent of Joris Ivens than John Grierson, the anonymous woman calmly analyses her experience as a committed supporter of the Republican cause and active participant in the fight against fascism. Her words stress the crucial role that film plays in arousing political action and solidarity: ‘it was the pictures that drove me on’. Images of war and suffering fill the screen, confirming her confession that, upon returning home, the pictures in her mind continue to haunt her. With fierce irony, she observes that now she works in a place which ‘makes pictures … while I make tea’. In one stroke, Goldson exposes the political inadequacy of the Griersonian model of documentary film-making, its impotence in the face of power, and its inability to represent those who lack a voice, particularly women. The gender politics and the social project of New Zealand’s nascent documentary movement are seriously compromised by a limited focus on the task of nation building and shoring up public opinion. These three examples indicate the degree to which Goldson’s own film charts an ambivalent course through the shoals of cultural nationalism. Seeing Red appeared on national television at a moment that coincided with a resurgence of interest in New Zealand’s film culture and issues of national identity in general. The mainstream media and the general public are unlikely to accommodate significant departures from the norms of popular broadcasting or the standard versions of New Zealand’s past. Goldson’s strategic use of re-enactment and reflexivity caters to the need to present a palatable vision of Holmes as rebel hero while also maintaining a sharp critical perspective upon the political and cultural institutions that he fought against. Seeing Red holds open the possibility of multiple viewing positions. The film responds to the strongly felt desire to reclaim the past at the same time as it participates in a broad cultural agenda to re-imagine New Zealand

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as a nation. It is both progressive in its intent to recover an oppositional narrative voice in the figure of Cecil Holmes and conformist in its recuperation of the tradition of New Zealand documentary as an article for cultural consumption.

Further Reading Campbell, Russell, ‘Plain hazardous work: Cecil Holmes at the NFU’, Illusions, 7, March 1998, pp.9–13. Goldson, Annie, ‘Home and away: national identity and documentary in the 1940s’, English in Aotearoa, 41, September 2000, pp.51–60. Grierson, John, Grierson on Documentary, Faber and Faber, London, 1979. Holmes, Cecil, One Man’s Way, Penguin, Ringwood Victoria, 1986. Parker, Dean, ‘Scoundrel times at the film unit’, Illusions, 7, March 1998, pp.4–8. Williams, Deane, Australian Post-war Documentary Film: An Arc of Mirrors, Intellect, Bristol and Chicago, 2008.

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Introduction By Daniel Reynaud •

Breaker Morant (1979)

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Gallipoli (1981)

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The Cowra Breakout (1984)

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War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us (1995)

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Revealing Gallipoli (2005)

The centrality of the Anzac legend to Australian and New Zealand national consciousness makes it no surprise to find that war films form an important part of the historical screen narratives we have told ourselves, especially as the conflict which is inherent to war is an essential ingredient in cinema. Spanning the various degrees of fictional and documentary form, these interpretations have sprung from, and in turn shaped, our understanding of war. The relationship between our cinema and our war history is a crucial one to examine, as it is the medium of choice through which perhaps a majority of people now draw their understanding of the past. Breaker Morant, although based on an incident from the Boer War, speaks directly to the Anzac legend of the late twentieth century. Craig Wilcox’s discussion of the film, which is perhaps the most potent influence on the modern conception of Morant’s life, shows how it successfully both challenges and promotes stock ideas of the Anzac legend: its staunchly antiBritish stand fits perfectly with the legend, while at the same time its depth and complexity resist simplistic interpretations. Its capacity to address the legacy of the recently-concluded Vietnam War made it topical on its release. Anzac mythology has its own history of development, which is briefly summarised, before Daniel Reynaud outlines the factors that have made Gallipoli the most successful evocation of the Anzac legend in Antipodean cinema history. It combines artistic achievement with a perfectly articulated

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version of the legend that has maintained a currency into the twenty-first century. Peter Stanley’s chapter on the making of Revealing Gallipoli is a fascinating and revealing look at the processes of making a documentary film. A military historian experienced in the written word, Stanley demonstrates the complexities that face traditional historians engaged in the film-making process, as well as setting an example of how historians and film-makers can cooperate to produce cinema that is faithful to the disciplines of its varied creators. Gabrielle Fortune highlights a double marginalisation in the Anzac story with her discussion of War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us. While New Zealand accounts of Anzac often demonstrate awareness of the Australians, the reverse is seldom true. Hence the centring of a New Zealand perspective is invaluable. Even more marginalised are the perspectives of women whose stories of their war experiences remind us that it is more than just fighting men who are affected by war. The complex layering of the film cleverly foregrounds myth and memory as tools of historical transmission. In her review of The Cowra Breakout, Belinda Smaill shows how its construction of history reflects the genre characteristics of its time without limiting its effectiveness as cinema history nor its ability to push audiences beyond comfortable clichés, as they are forced to consider the humanity of an enemy often stereotyped in subhuman terms. In its capacity to address contemporary Australian concerns through a story set half a century earlier, it demonstrates the ability, indeed the imperative, of cinema histories to speak to the present through the recasting of the past.

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Breaker Morant By Craig Wilcox Breaker Morant (South Australian Film Corporation, 1979, 104 mins) is a lament for three Australian soldiers court-martialled for a war crime – not to see justice done, the film suggests, but to help the British army manage a controversially brutal war. One of several films from the 1970s and 1980s to re-invent Australia’s colonial past as both daydream and nightmare, it taught a popular history lesson about Australia’s relationship with Britain in a way that also made comforting sense of a recent war in Vietnam. Breaker Morant interpreted a folk tale that distorted a real event. In 1902, volunteers from around the British empire were helping the British army conquer two ‘Boer’ or rural settler republics in South Africa. The army praised these men and protected them from military discipline – until it courtmartialled six volunteers for the murder of Boer prisoners and a pastor of German descent. One man, George Witton from Gippsland, was imprisoned, and two others, Harry Morant from Renmark and Peter Handcock from Bathurst, were shot by firing squad. Some Australians reacted angrily to news of the punishments, especially those with fond memories of Morant, an English-born drinker and drifter who raised hell in a dozen towns before the war, and who wrote jaunty verse under the pen-name The Breaker. The anger quickly faded, but it returned in the 1960s as Australia evolved into a nation and reflected on its colonial past and its soldiers’ experience in British imperial wars and a new war in Vietnam. After the Vietnam war proved as brutal as the Boer war, a popular 1978 stage play portrayed Morant and the others as victims of generals cynical enough to punish a few of their soldiers for breaking rules that, the play insisted, are always broken in war.1 A crime against the Boers had become a folk tale about a crime against Australians. As he began to make his film, Bruce Beresford rejected early scripts that made a cardboard hero out of Morant. A decision to focus on the court martial, just as the play had done, encouraged occasional use of dialogue from the original trial. David Copping, the film’s designer, carefully replicated clothing, music, buildings and interiors from the period. But Beresford deployed snippets of a real past not to re-enact the war crime of 1902 – the details of which were in any case largely forgotten – but to give depth and

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credibility to the folk tale. English actor Edward Woodward’s characterisation of Morant created a complex, compromised hero – but a hero nonetheless. Australian actor Jack Thompson followed a convention of courtroom drama to transform Major Thomas, the emotionally unbalanced solicitor who defended Morant and the others, into a brave voice speaking the truth against power. In the deft hands of actors like these and of Beresford and his crew, a classic film emerged that taught an unforgettable, if unfounded, history lesson. Breaker Morant identifies and undermines its target in the first minute or two. As the audience sees a British army band playing a flippant tune to sceptical locals, and then an absurdly pink soldier bathing to the sounds of a grand march, it suspects the British presence in South Africa to be pompous and hollow. That suspicion is reinforced throughout the film by the army’s smallness amid the vast skies and empty landscapes filmed by cinematographer Don McAlpine. The handsome faces and honest demeanours of a world-weary Morant, a sarcastic Peter Handcock (Bryan Brown) and a frightened George Witton (Lewis Fitz-James) contrast favourably with sneaky, snobbish, pith-helmeted British officers, and help suggest the Australians have done nothing worse in killing a prisoner or two than many other soldiers have done. But a hidebound and hypocritical British army court-martials them anyway. An initially bumbling Major Thomas falters when claiming the court has no right to try Australians, and again when arguing the defendants must be

How could the British army have punished Australian soldiers in 1902? Australia was part of the British empire at the close of the nineteenth century. Australian soldiers fought in the Boer war of 1899–1902 under British generals and British military law. Most belonged to units raised in Australia, but thousands joined units raised in South Africa. Among them were Harry Morant, Peter Handcock and George Witton.That made them temporary British soldiers with no legal ties to Australia and few emotional ones either. That they were junior officers made their crimes all the more shameful for the British army, which became determined to punish them. Australia federated during the war, and many of its politicians wanted to build an independent nation within the British empire.They decided that next time they sent troops to fight, they would serve within the British army again but under Australian officers and free of the harshest aspects of British military law. That decision reflected growing national pride, not anger at the execution of Morant and Handcock.

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The campaign to pardon Morant, Handcock and Witton The second edition of Shoot Straight,You Bastards!, a biography of Harry Morant first published in 2002, included an appendix claiming that Morant’s court martial a century earlier had been marred by procedural irregularities and tainted by political interference. The book’s author, Nick Bleszynski, had little interest in changing how historians thought about the matter. He wanted the Australian government to respond by formally inquiring into the trial. No inquiry came, but in 2006 the British government retrospectively pardoned all 300 British soldiers executed by the British army during the First World War. This precedent encouraged an Australian navy lawyer called James Unkles to look for legal irregularities in the Morant trial and in 2009 put a petition to the Australian parliament that Morant, Handcock and Witton should be retrospectively pardoned. Unkles’s petition aroused some ridicule.The men concerned were long dead, and their crimes were clear. But the parliament treated the matter seriously. As one politician said:‘The story of Breaker Morant … is a story many Australians know something of, mostly as a result of the movie made many years ago.’ At the time of writing (August 2010) the petition was still under consideration.

released after bravely fighting off a Boer attack in a skirmish that releases both cast and viewers momentarily from the cramped, grimy court room and prison cells where much of Breaker Morant takes place. But Thomas finds his feet – or rather follows the footsteps of Colonel Dax, hero of Stanley Kubrick’s military courtroom drama Paths of Glory (1957) – in exposing the jealousies and foibles of witnesses and the hypocrisy of comfortable officers judging soldiers who do not follow a rule book. Morant also makes this last point in one of the film’s most famous scenes, though the audience understands his to be an extreme, almost sinister view. ‘I’ll tell you what rule we applied, sir’, Morant lectures the court martial’s president: ‘We applied Rule 303’, a reference to the calibre of his rifle. ‘We caught [the Boers], and we shot them, under Rule 303.’ And perhaps on orders, the film whispers. Thomas reminds the court that Kitchener has ordered the shooting of any Boers caught wearing British uniform, and in any case has set the army to waging war without mercy. ‘Before I was asked to defend these men’, Thomas says with jaw boldly in the air and blue eyes shining, ‘I spent some nights burning Boer farmhouses, destroying their crops, herding their women and children into stinking refugee camps’. A shifty staff officer nervously denies to the court ever issuing orders not to take prisoners. But Handcock lies too, saying he was conducting affairs with two Boer women on the day he shot the pastor. The women support his claim, as apparently does a now-dated

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flashback suggesting jaunty sex. The Australians are exonerated of the pastor’s death. ‘But we’ve always told the truth’, Witton objects in private. ‘We’re lying!’, Handcock explodes in reply: ‘What about them!’ They – the British army, its generals, perhaps its politicians too – have their reasons, the audience understands. Kitchener must secure a guilty verdict and punish a few expendable colonials so that Germany, enraged by the pastor’s death, will not join the war on the Boer side. Better to sacrifice a couple of colonials than risk a whole empire. ‘We won’t be missed’, Morant predicts. Apart from its caricatured English officers, Breaker Morant has so far unfolded with a restraint that moves the audience all the more. But the film switches to high drama for its famous final scene, heralded by a mockingly glorious dawn. ‘They have to apologise for their damned war George’, Morant croaks at Witton: ‘They’re trying to end it now, so they need scapegoats! Scapegoats of the bloody empire!’ A shot of an empty rotunda, with no band playing flippant tunes now. ‘There is an epitaph I’d like’, Morant tells a chaplain: ‘Matthew 10:36.’ The chaplain’s bible reveals Morant’s message: ‘And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.’ The foes shoot the brave pair in another empty field after Morant has spurned the customary blindfold and yelled to his executioners, ‘Shoot straight you bastards! Don’t make a mess of it!’ The bodies are callously crammed into coffins as some Australian soldiers watch, sure to be thinking mutinously against the British. Likewise the audience, sure by now that however much Morant and the others followed or exceeded their mysterious orders, the war, the British empire, perhaps even British justice, were hollow, bankrupt, a con job. Although critical reaction to Breaker Morant was mixed, audiences loved it. It had the right look and feel of a half-remembered and sometimes longed-for colonial past, and it retold a popular folk tale beautifully and intelligently, offering a welcome and sometimes witty indictment of the executioners of two brave Australians. Like Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981), Breaker Morant subversively identified the real enemy of Australia’s soldiers from the 1880s to the 1940s. ‘Next time I go to a cricket match’, one viewer muttered, ‘I’m not going to throw empty beer cans at the Poms’.2 But the film moved British and American audiences too with its attack on old-style British officers – figures of fun in Britain almost as much as Australia – and its reassuring message, particularly popular with American audiences in the wake of Vietnam, that the barbarities of war can be blamed on the generals rather than ordinary soldiers. Breaker Morant lost some of its impact as the pain of Vietnam passed and a new, multiracial Australia had little or no emotional connection with Britain. But the film has remained the bedrock for popular understanding of the Morant affair. Its anchoring of an agreeable folk tale with apparently authentic detail has planted vivid images of the affair – and a warped

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understanding of Australia’s part in British imperial wars – in the minds of journalists, politicians and many others. ‘Get the facts’, invited the home page of Breakermorant.com, a website devoted to petitioning for a very belated pardon for a very dead Morant and Handcock, in July 2010. The words were placed not beneath an image from 1902, but a still from Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant.

Further Reading Coleman, Peter, Bruce Beresford: Instincts of the Heart, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1992. Connolly, Keith, ‘The films of Bruce Beresford’, Cinema Papers, 28, August–September 1980, special insert with individual numbering. Wilcox, Craig, ‘The dubious legacy of Breaker Morant’, Quadrant, 466, May 2010, pp.102–7.

Notes 1 2

Kenneth G. Ross, Breaker Morant, Edward Arnold, Melbourne, 1979. Susan Gardner, ‘From murder to martyr: the legend of Breaker Morant’, Critical Arts, 1, July 1981, p.5

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Gallipoli By Daniel Reynaud It is difficult to underestimate the significance of the movie Gallipoli (Peter Weir, 1981). It is the most complete realisation of the Anzac legend in Australian cinema, and perhaps the single most influential text of any kind on the topic as well as being considered by some to be the Australian movie of all time.1 As history, it is a better indicator of what Australians from the 1980s to the present believe to be true, rather than strictly what happened, for its mythic reading, which is close enough to history, is an interpretation that perfectly articulates contemporary popular attitudes towards the event. The Anzac legend, while based on historical events, has moved beyond history to the point of myth. Myth should not be understood as meaning ‘untrue’; myth is a belief which explains the nature of reality, the purpose of being or the ideal of a society. The Anzac legend takes real events and characters and mythologises them so that they stand for what is best and truest about Australia and Australians. Gallipoli captures popular belief about Anzac so well that nearly 30 years later it still stands as the embodiment of the modern Anzac legend. Yet the Anzac legend is not an immutable received truth, for it has its own history of development. The evolving Anzac legend was for many years a contested theme in Australian nationalism. During the Great War (1914–18) it was largely a tool of the Australian and New Zealand governments to foster support for the Imperial war effort and to boost recruiting. Between the wars its legacy was subject to a bitter and protracted battle between radical larrikin republicans and conservative empire loyalists. With government support, the conservatives won the battle, fashioning a triumphalist, imperial version, while largely suppressing competing stories. Both during and after the Second World War, Anzac stories were largely eclipsed in the public consciousness by heroic British and American war films. Nevertheless, for the first half of the twentieth century the Anzac legend was couched within a broader British imperial identity. In the 1960s and 1970s a new generation rediscovered Australian nationalism, and broke with its British past, refashioning the Anzac legend to suit its independent temper. With the original Anzacs fast disappearing, their story evolved into an increasingly sentimental, uncontested (outside of

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academic circles), unifying mythology of Anzac. In the tough economic times of the 1980s, a national cinema which broadcast populist nationalistic themes was a suitable recipient of government subsidies. Gallipoli emerged at the beginning of the decade with a broad, receptive audience for its message. Gallipoli’s success owed much to its careful craftsmanship as a film: David Williamson’s screenplay was a solid foundation, Peter Weir’s direction was at its fluent best, the acting largely impressive (despite Mel Gibson’s tendency to overact), Russell Boyd and John Seale provided outstanding visuals, and the music was particularly effective, especially the haunting Albinoni’s Adagio which powerfully communicated the sense of futility Weir was striving for. The result is a handsome and emotionally engaging film that won plaudits, placing it among the very best of Australian films. However, its cinematic artistry fails to account fully for its triumph and enduring reputation. What the film achieves is a rich and polysemic texture of mythological significance. It can be read as the ultimate popular text on the Anzac legend, or as a celebration of male friendship, or about what is ‘intrinsically Australian’.2 These are of course overlapping categories, but they offer different entry points for audiences, thus widening its appeal. The film engages the Australian landscape, and connects Egypt and Gallipoli with Australia, the latter quite literally since the Gallipoli scenes were shot on the Port Lincoln coast of South Australia. Even so, the alien landscapes of Egypt and ‘Gallipoli’ are no stranger than the Australian outback, particularly the sequences set on the salt pan. The use of iconic landscapes makes the film’s themes more accessible and familiar to Australian audiences. It badges the story as truly Australian, even if key events happen overseas. In the Australian legend the landscape is one of the formative influences on the bushman, and the continuity of landscapes suggests that the bushman Anzacs would be equally adept at survival in their new-butfamiliar environment. At the heart of the movie is the friendship of Archy Hamilton (Mark Lee) and Frank Dunne (Mel Gibson), surrounded by several other mates: Les, Billy, Barney and Snowy. While international audiences can read it in the broad conventions of a buddy movie, for Australian audiences it holds special significance, as mateship is popularly held to be a characteristically, even uniquely, Australian quality (although in fact it exists in other armies under different names like ‘Kamerad’, ‘pal’ or ‘chum’), and is one of the core attributes of the Anzac. The virtual absence of women from the film conforms to the overwhelmingly male quality of Australian mythology. The power of the Anzac legend partly lies in the way it draws together previous characters of Australian national mythology such as the convict, bushranger, digger and bushman, and rolls them into a single character: the Anzac. He is a rough, unsophisticated, practical bushman, unsentimental and

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The Anzac cinema tradition There is quite a history of film-making on Anzac themes in Australia, with over 40 big and small screen representations of the First World War. It is worth exploring the way in which the war has been represented in Australian films over time, because it highlights both continuity and change in the nature of the Anzac legend. Two relatively readily available older films are worth comparing to Gallipoli. The Hero of the Dardanelles (available in partial reconstruction from the National Film and Sound Archive) was the first ever Gallipoli movie, released in July 1915 while the campaign was still being fought. It presents a very upper-class English-style Australian as its ideal Anzac. Forty Thousand Horsemen, made by great director Charles Chauvel (the nephew of General Harry Chauvel who commanded troops in Palestine), presents a story set at the Battle of Beersheba in 1917. It represents the Australians as different from, but still sympathetic to, the British soldier. Later Anzac representations – for example, Chunuk Bair (1992) or Beneath Hill 60 (2010) – differ in constructing the Anzac, as is discussed in Celluloid Anzacs:The Great War through Australian Cinema.

undemonstrative, yet with a tender heart, honest and hardworking when it is needed. Further, he has a laconic sense of humour, a tendency to drink and larrikin attributes. He is an underdog, always battling an incompetent and corrupt hierarchy, either winning through his essential virtues, or becoming a martyr through the folly of others’ mistakes. As such, he is the quintessential Australian. The main characters of Gallipoli collectively express all the facets of the Anzac/Australian archetype. The actions of the men in Cairo encapsulate this, with their boorish and racist Ocker attitudes humorously portrayed as the behaviour of fundamentally honest, decent men. Peter Weir was moved to make a film about the Great War because of his desire to give Australians ‘a view of themselves that they’ve never had before, a feeling of context and of special separateness.’ He felt that Anzac history was a likely way to do this.3 His initial intention to make a film about the Western Front was deflected by the observation that Gallipoli was the obvious subject, given its centrality to the Anzac legend. Weir visited the peninsula, collecting relics from the battlefield which prior to the mass invasion of Antipodean tourists was liberally littered with the debris of war. Inspired by the tangibility of history, he worked with playwright David Williamson, fashioning several scripts until they had, in his words, ‘come as close to touching the source of the myth as we could.’4 Semi-documentary screenplays were abandoned because they were too literal, thus failing to capture the

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emotional meaning of Gallipoli. In the end, they created two fictional friends, inspired by a line from Bean’s official history about two athletic brothers, and wove a compelling story around them, setting the end of the story at the battle for the Nek in early August 1915, rather than the cliché of the landings on 25 April. The Nek remains a controversial battle, with historical debate over whether it was a diversion for the New Zealand attack on Chunuk Bair or for the British landings at Suvla Bay. Those involved in making the film laboured to get the film historically ‘right’, ensuring that the fine details, particularly visual, would be correct. Weir considered many of the extras to be re-enacting rather than acting,5 and the desire for historicity became so strong that he had to emphasise that the work was entertainment, not strict history. He feared that the enthusiasm of the cast and crew for capturing the myth would turn the film into a history lesson instead of entertainment, apparently failing to distinguish between the events on Gallipoli and the Anzac legend, which suggests some confusion in his mind between history, the myth and the movie.6 The film presents considerable factual material about the campaign, and at one level can be read as accurate. Uniforms, gun smoke and many other details and events are more or less correct, although the story takes understandable cinematic licence with pedantic details such as representing just three waves of attack, not four, at the Nek. Typically of cinema, it takes a simplistic and linear view of cause and effect, failing to explore alternative possibilities and debates; for example over the purpose of the attack at the Nek, or the fact that many Australian men at that time had a good grasp of international issues and were not ignorant of the causes of the war. In the end, however, a movie’s most powerful representation of history is not at the factual level but at the emotional and mythic level, and Gallipoli gives a particularly powerful mythic significance to these events. The British are consistently portrayed as useless, with foppish, dogmatic and condescendingly foolish officers, and lazy soldiers, enjoying quiet cups of tea while Australians sacrifice their lives. The blonde Archy (his name suggests archetype) tragically embodies the anti-British theme of the film: a pure soul and naive believer in the greatness of the British empire, he is eventually killed by the stupidity of the system he idealised. Most unfortunate is the portrayal of Colonel Robinson, modelled on the real-life Colonel Antill. The film portrays him with a British accent, giving the impression of pig-headed British leadership when in fact the officer responsible was Australian. Despite Anzac Cove being awash with nationalities, New Zealanders not least among them, except for the British High Command and the occasional Turkish soldier, the movie is populated almost exclusively by Australians. The fact that the support troops for the Nek attack were actually British is glossed over. The only foreigners given any real coverage are the Egyptians in Cairo

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where they form part of the exotic background that bemuse, horrify and fascinate the men. Effectively, this film is less about the Gallipoli campaign than it is an exploration of what Gallipoli means to Australians: hence its narrow focus on advancing the bushman-Anzac stereotype and its consistently anti-British attitude. This makes it the archetypical Anzac film, for it follows the Australian tradition (which began in July 1915) of making films about Anzac that glorify and idealise the Anzac as the embodiment of what it means to be Australian.

Further Reading Dermody, Susan and Elizabeth Jacka, The Screening of Australia, vol 2, Anatomy of a National Cinema, Currency Press, Sydney, 1988. Haltof, Marek, ‘Gallipoli, mateship, and the construction of Australian national identity’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 21:1, Spring 1993, pp.27–36. Lawson, Sylvia, ‘Gallipoli: you are being told what to remember’, Filmnews, 11–12, November–December 1981, p.11. Reynaud, Daniel, Celluloid Anzacs: The Great War through Australian Cinema, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2007.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

David Stratton, The Avocado Plantation: Boom and Bust in the Australian Film Industry, Pan Macmillan, Sydney, 1990, p.22. Jane Freebury, ‘Screening Australia: Gallipoli – a study of nationalism on film’, Media Information Australia, 43, February 1987, p.7. Peter Weir, interview, Cineaste, 11:4, 1982, p.42 Peter Weir, interview, Literary Film Quarterly, 9:4, 1981, p.214. Weir, interview, Literary Film Quarterly, p.214. Bill Gammage, ‘Working on Gallipoli’ in Anne Hutton (ed.), The First Australian History and Film Conference Papers 1982, The History and Film Conference, Sydney, 1983, p.70.

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The Cowra Breakout By Belinda Smaill The Cowra Breakout (Phillip Noyce, Chris Noonan, 1984, 270 mins) tells the story of an important Australian wartime event that took place not in a foreign land, but in the small New South Wales town of Cowra. This historical miniseries, consisting of three 90-minute episodes, is largely set in the Cowra Second World War prisoner of war camp which housed Italian, Korean and Japanese prisoners. In 1944 a mass breakout occurred, initiated by Japanese non-commissioned officers and soldiers. The prisoners were armed only with improvised weapons such as knives and baseball bats. Many prisoners died under machine-gun fire and while a number also escaped, a significant proportion of these escapees took their own lives rather than face being recaptured. The Cowra Breakout is primarily concerned with the months leading up to this event. In keeping with the historical mini-series genre, this period is represented by way of a mix of documentary and drama. The Cowra Breakout is set in an actual location, makes use of archival footage, visually recreates this time and place with considerable accuracy and attempts to make sense of the real and tragic events that happened in Cowra. However, rather than retrace the officially known facts of the episode, the series foregrounds a small number of fictional characters, constructing a melodrama with a select cast of protagonists and antagonists. The central narrative thread explores the relationship between a Japanese prisoner, Junji Hayashi (Junichi Ishada), and an Australian soldier, Stan Davidson (Alan David Lee). The opening scenes are devoted to a stand-off that occurs between two Japanese soldiers and Australian troops in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. This sequence concludes with Davidson bayoneting Hayashi during hand-to-hand combat. Yet, through an unlikely twist of fortune, the two adversaries become friends some time later when both find themselves in the Cowra prisoner of war camp, one as prisoner and one as prison guard. Typically, the historical mini-series perceives actual past events through the prism of fictionalised or semi-fictionalised personal stories. This frames the past through a sense of immediacy and drama, allowing television viewers to identify more readily with the events depicted.

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Stuart Cunningham observes that Australian mini-series made in the 1980s also displayed a particular narrative structure that routinely displaced the centrality of the event by emphasising causation. In other words, the event itself (the prison breakout and the many deaths that ensued) becomes less important than the reasons why the event occurred. These reasons are elucidated through the observation of individual behaviour. Over the course of the three episodes of The Cowra Breakout the relationship between Hayashi and Davidson gradually develops. This friendship becomes a mechanism by which the viewer is offered more and more insight into the cultural pressures facing each man and also each cultural group. In one conversation between the two that takes place in the final episode, Davidson seeks to learn more about the psychology of the Japanese prisoners in his capacity as sergeant in charge of security in the Japanese compound. Hayashi states: ‘We are in a shameful situation. A Japanese soldier should not be taken prisoner; it brings great shame on him and his family.’ He describes the Japanese cultural code that viewed capture as humiliating and death in combat as honourable. Some in the Japanese compound are determined to follow these strict expectations, while others seek a less destructive option. This struggle for power within the compound is exacerbated by the actions of the Australian military personnel and eventually leads to the decision to stage the breakout. In comparison with conventional fictional representations, the

The Kennedy–Miller mini-series The Cowra Breakout was made during a boom in Australian film and television production that resulted from the 10BA tax legislation. 10BA offered large tax incentives for the private financing of film and television. The mini-series is extremely high-cost television. With 50 mini-series made in Australia between 1980 and 1986, this was a unique time in Australian television. As many have observed, 10BA was responsible for the production of some of the nation’s best film and television, but it also led to many less memorable works. The Cowra Breakout was produced by the well-known Kennedy–Miller production company who are associated with other landmark mini-series including Vietnam, The Dismissal, Bodyline, The Dirtwater Dynasty and Bangkok Hilton. Many of the Kennedy–Miller series were ‘television events’. Not only did they deal with events of national significance, they were designed to have national impact when they were aired. They were promoted extensively, achieved high ratings and critical success. They can be understood as what is now known as ‘water-cooler’ television, designed to create discussion and, at times, controversy.

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historical mini-series lacks suspense because the final outcome is already known. Viewer pleasure is located less in waiting to know what the conclusion might be, and more in the explanation of how these events unfolded.1 As a production for television, The Cowra Breakout demonstrates formal or stylistic features that both fit with the television (and mini-series) format and offer very specific conceptualisations of history. The emphasis on character development and explanation described above is one feature. Another important factor is the use of what Cunningham terms ‘multiperspectivism’. Utilising an approach that was innovative when the mini-series was made in the 1980s, The Cowra Breakout is not told from the perspective of any single character or point of view. Frequently when viewing scenes from the perspective of a character or narrator, the viewer is asked to identify and empathise with that perspective. As Cunningham observes: ‘The Cowra Breakout is one of a number of mini-series that promote a “more radical perspectivalism”, one that effectively displaces the unreflective chauvinism to which so much recent Australian media is prey. In doing so, these mini-series produce remarkably innovative elliptical approaches to major historical events in the nation’s history. Thus almost half of The Cowra Breakout is spent on the Japanese side, encouraging empathy with their point of view.’2 For Cunningham, the foregrounding of the Japanese point of view means a significant shift in the way national mythology and drama is frequently represented on screen. Davidson and Hayashi are on an equal footing in terms of screen time and depth of representation. Moreover, there are many scenes that explore only the relationships between the Japanese prisoners, with their dialogue presented in Japanese and subtitled in English. As a number of scholars have noted, the historical mini-series is selective in the themes and episodes that it represents. Rather than simply entertaining the viewer, the historical mini-series deals with events of national significance, many of which are familiar to audiences. In this respect it falls into the category of ‘serious drama’ and is often understood as more in alignment with cinema than television. The historical mini-series is a fictionalised drama that draws on and imagines actual occurrences through the lens of individual experience. While often criticised for a lack of accuracy, the mini-series is more art than fact. Like art, it offers an avenue through which the audience can re-conceive of culture and society. The mini-series provides ways of supporting or challenging what viewers already understand as national mythologies, values and stories. The Cowra Breakout must be understood in relation to two national historical contexts. The first is the period in which Australia was involved in the war in the Pacific. The series is couched in relation to the strong feeling against Japan and the Japanese at this time. These attitudes are a continuation of the way Asia had been characterised in Australian culture

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The Cowra prisoner of war camp The town of Cowra is located 330km south west of Sydney.The prisoner of war camp covered an area of over 30 hectares and was divided into four separate compounds. One of these compounds, B Compound, was made up entirely of Japanese non-commissioned officers and junior ranks. Officers were housed in another compound with prisoners of other nationalities. Housing 1100 prisoners, more than twice as many as it was constructed for, the breakout was initiated from the latter compound. It resulted in the death of 234 Japanese soldiers and 108 were wounded. Four Australian soldiers were also killed. The camp was dismantled after the war but the relic foundations still mark the site. In 1979 scenic Japanese gardens were established near the site of the camp and the Cowra War Cemetery. The breakout was the only battle waged on Australian soil against foreign military personnel and was the largest prison break in history.

since colonisation with the ‘yellow peril’ or ‘yellow hordes’ posing a threat to British-settler rule from the north. These notions rely upon stereotypes and perceptions of cultural groups that see them as homogenous and internally undifferentiated. In response to this historical context, The Cowra Breakout represents the Japanese characters in ways that personalise them, show them as complex individuals and thus challenge the straightforward demonisation of the whole national group. One way in which this is achieved is through showing the tensions and differences between the prisoners, as some advocate following strict Japanese customs and others do not. Equally, some Australian military leaders are shown as naive or self-interested. The primary relationship between Davidson and Hayashi extends across all three episodes and offers a model of cross-cultural interaction, with the two developing a strong friendship based on mutual respect and growing understanding. Thus, the series looks back to the past and offers more empathetic relationships against the backdrop of a time of significant prejudice. The second context is the early 1980s, the time in which the series was produced. The Cowra Breakout fictionalises past events in ways that have a direct bearing on Australian culture in the present, namely the 1980s. At this time in Australia there was an increasing re-evaluation of British colonialism, including a reassessment of Aboriginal land rights. There had also been a significant rise in non-European immigration over the previous decade that resulted in a growing Asian Australian community. Changing government immigration policy came hand in hand with policies of multiculturalism and a new awareness of the benefits of cultural diversity for the nation. John Tulloch describes the 1980s mini-series as constructing a history ‘where

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military, economic and political events are mediated by liberal (“multiperspectival”) multiculturalism’.3 In the face of a changing social environment, nationalistic myths are frequently revised through a reframing of historical events. Representing a fictionalised version of the events in Cowra in 1944, in this case, poses an idealised view of cross-cultural interactions and tolerance. It both rewrites prevailing social attitudes in Australian history, as noted above, and offers a model for how to imagine the possibilities of multiculturalism in the present. These two contexts present differing ways of understanding the relationship between history and the series. In both instances The Cowra Breakout tells a nationally significant story, one that re-imagines Australian cultural attitudes through the lens of fabricated personal stories.

Further Reading Australian Screen, http://aso.gov.au/titles/tv/cowra-breakout/ Cunningham, Stuart, ‘Style, form and history in Australian mini-series’, Southern Review, 22:3, 1989, pp.315–30. Gordon, Harry, Voyage from Shame: The Cowra Breakout and Afterwards, University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland, 1994. Tulloch, John, Television Drama: Agency, Audience and Myth, Routledge, London, 1990.

Notes 1 2 3

Stuart Cunningham, ‘Style, Form and history in the Australian Mini-Series’, Southern Review, 22:3, 1989, p.320. Cunningham, p.319. John Tulloch, Television Drama: Agency, Audience, and Myth, Routledge, London, 1990, p.93.

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War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us By Gabrielle A. Fortune Gaylene Preston’s award-winning documentary War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us (1995, 88 mins) is considered one of her best film productions.1 War Stories comprises of interviews with seven New Zealand women who lived through the Second World War. The interviewees were diverse in their ethnicity, socio-economic status and place of residence, offering a broad spectrum of individual perspectives and experiences. They included accounts by the wife of a conscientious objector, isolated by societal disapproval and disadvantaged by official sanction; and a Wellington woman who married an American GI, exposing herself and her child to disparaging public scrutiny that reflected the commonly held belief that those who married Americans were ‘loose women’.2 Extending the range of experiences beyond the home front there are poignant accounts of widowhood, awaiting the repatriation of a prisoner of war, being the victim of sexual assault, and overseas service in the WAACs (Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps). Popular music of the 1940s, archival material, personal photographs and wartime newsreel footage establish the war context, and are strategically interspersed with edited extracts from the individual oral histories of the participants.3 War Stories has been described as combining ‘a feminist analysis of the untold stories of ordinary Kiwi women and their experience of war with gripping stories of danger and survival’.4 New Zealand-born Preston developed her feminist ideals in the late 1960s and 1970s as an art student in Canterbury (New Zealand) and then in London, where her interest in film grew. Returning to New Zealand in 1976, she began utilising women’s interviews in feature documentaries.5 Produced in a period that promoted Anzac mythology as a cornerstone of national identity, War Stories offers glimpses of opposition to the idea that war united New Zealanders. It foregrounds the voices of women at a time when escalating interest in Anzac Day saw increasing numbers attend dawn ceremonies focusing attention on the predominantly male experience of battles such as Gallipoli. Released in 1995, War Stories represents a vehicle by which Preston could create a counter-narrative, and ‘document the drama of people’s lives and … let them speak, reveal themselves’ in ways that preserve

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women’s realities.6 Preston explained that she uses her skill as a feminist filmmaker to expose the underlying meanings of women’s experiences and ‘to not get in the way and to find a good structure to amplify the telling’.7 Preston described the interview process as ‘tickling’ the subject’s life story from them.8 She recognises the life story as a myth and editing as an enhancement of the portrayal of an individual’s lived experiences.9 For Preston, turning the interview into a film is a process whereby the viewer can ‘get to know’ the female interviewees in a fashion that ‘makes for emotionally compelling viewing’.10 Preston’s portrayal of film-making as ‘a collaborative art’ and the end product as ‘a mythology’ suggests the interface between the cooperative enterprise and the production and editing processes.11 Finding the women’s perspective and favouring their voices are central to Preston’s persuasive style. In a recent interview Preston commented that if a work failed to impress the critics then perhaps the film-maker had failed in their job of persuading:12 My job is a persuader. I persuade the story into a script and I persuade the script on to the screen by persuading actors and cinematographers and editors and other creative people to make a film that persuades audiences.13

She stated: Of course, although each story is told one at a time and appears to be uninterrupted, the interviews are edited. Once you’ve got a cutaway to a photograph you can move whole sentences around in voiceover. You can find a word from another part of their interview and insert it.14

Preston’s approach is illustrative of the commanding role of the director to ‘cut and paste’ in the interests of a commercially viable product at the same time as she strives to maintain the integrity of the research subjects.15 By juxtaposing the (relatively) short interview snippets and the newsreel excerpts, Preston achieves several important effects. Newsreels throw into stark relief the lower-pitched voices of the women versus the loud jingoistic commentary of the reporters urging New Zealand’s population to face war with courage and financial generosity, and assuring them of victories in Egypt or Italy. Strident band music, marching soldiers, massed aircraft flyovers, and bombardments in the desert war, rudely change the tempo as the filming moves away from the interviewee’s quiet understated dialogue. Tui Preston’s description of the time lag between hearing her husband is missing in action, and finally receiving a postcard from a prisoner of war camp, is contrasted with the newsreel commentator declaring in a booming voice that the ‘Fast moving Eighth Army [is] swinging across the Desert’. Loud bombardments and exploding shells fill the screen emphasising the subdued tone of the wife and mother character as she recalls the unsettling feelings of waiting for news whilst she kept up her daily routine. There is poignancy here as well because Tui had

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revealed in the interview a love affair whilst her husband was overseas: she ended that relationship in favour of keeping her son and rebuilding her marriage when her husband finally returned home. She describes the pain of the decision to end the affair. Whilst Tui was in some respects the typical home-front wife and mother she also represents a woman making independent decisions regarding her sex life, although ultimately social constraints dictated the outcome. Tui felt sure New Zealand society would take a dim view of divorce and, as Deborah Montgomerie has shown, ‘cheating’ by the wife of a serving soldier was likely to be seen as particularly reprehensible by contemporaries.16 In War Stories Preston confronts stereotypical gender roles as interviewees reveal their war-time occupations and preoccupations. Mabel Waititi took on the family business, a bus service and ‘cream run’. Although she subscribes to the notion that it was unreasonable for her to have to take on ‘a man’s job’, she takes pride in her physical strength and resilience in unloading petrol drums and other heavy items and returning to work although injured, all the while breastfeeding her child. Underlying the stories of coping with work and motherhood are concerns about soldiers’ welfare and repeated utterances about feelings of helplessness. Flo Small expressed this sense of powerlessness as meaning ‘you couldn’t do one thing’ to stop the war or the men leaving for war. During the interviews, the women’s eyes mist over as they remember not the protection of their men folk (one of the clichés of what war is supposed to offer women), but rather the desertion they experienced as men refused to postpone their departure. Tui specifically asked her husband to delay going overseas until their baby was born but she said ‘he wouldn’t hear of it. He’d made up his mind and that was all there was to it.’ Rita Graham expressed similar exasperation with her conscientious objector husband who lost his privileges in the detention camp by stubbornly adhering to his principles. As punishment he was barred from writing letters, thus depriving his wife of the one solace she had in the aftermath of the death of their baby daughter.17 Preston’s interviewees demonstrate that the war emergency either foisted roles on women, or meant they had to seek out work and reward that challenged patriarchal norms. However, although taking on jobs normally performed by men, their sense of powerlessness to influence events or decisions suggests the limitations of their newly-acquired opportunities. Not surprisingly, Montgomerie found that the gender order in New Zealand ‘proved remarkably resilient’ in the post-war period.18 Difficulties often surfaced when the men returned to women who had forged independent lives, work and socialising patterns. Tui Preston remembered this extremely unhappy post-war phase as a case of ‘just stumbled through it’. War Stories also confronts notions of happy-ever-after romances. The method adopted, however, is to set the tone as a classic tale of love and romance – even to the extent of writing ‘stories’ with a heart-shaped ‘O’ in the title. The opening

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music, ‘As Time Goes By’, with the line ‘A Kiss is Still a Kiss’ oft repeated, heightens the sense of watching a series of love stories. Further emphasising the romantic is the opening interview that commences with Pamela describing her first meeting with her future husband as love at first sight – weak knees, palpitating pulse and feeling ‘peculiar in the tummy’. As Pamela’s story of romance intensifies, the 1940s love song continues as backing. The tragedy of war strikes home as the viewer finds out that her husband, 26-year-old Air Force Squadron Leader Paul Rabone, was killed over Europe in 1944. Pamela returned to New Zealand with her baby in 1946. The theme of shattered romance is amplified by the insertion of the black and white newsreel footage of war. The noise of war crackles and splutters, contrasting with contemporary 1940s’ photographs of the women, serene and composed. The contrast suggests the efforts of women to control their lives in the face of war, but serenity is undermined by their words as they recount anger, frustration and hurt.19 Preston used her mother’s oral account of her experiences as a young married woman during the war as the lynchpin of War Stories. Tui Preston’s story, and that of the other six women interviewed, can be extrapolated to the wider New Zealand wartime society. They all have unusual stories to tell, but simultaneously they seem representative. Their stories do not seem that farfetched, and the method of portraying the storytellers during the interviews enhances that perspective of them – they are ordinary women. The combined effect of the techniques used in War Stories is to suggest the credibility of each interviewee. The contrasting military and political jargon of the newsreels works to enhance the quiet assured memory of the subjects, fully illustrative of Preston’s own claims to be a ‘persuader’. Home-front suspicions and disapproval aggravate the experiences of these women. Flo Small’s best friend was alienated by disapproval of her marriage and parenthood with an American GI, and Rita Graham amongst other slights received white feathers in her mailbox. Neva Clarke McKenna probably most aptly captured the essence of the effect of war on New Zealand women and the gap it created between them and society’s expectations. Neva served as a WAAC in Egypt and described some traumatic experiences. When she returned home, Gisborne locals expected her to marry and ‘settle down’. She said: ‘They thought that’s what we would want to do. They had no idea what that experience had done to us.’20

Further Reading Dennis, Jonathan and Jan Bieringa (eds.), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1992. Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington & Indianapolis, 2001.

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Shepard, Deborah, Her Life’s Work: Conversations with Five New Zealand Women, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2009.

Notes 1 War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us, Gaylene Preston, 1995; Deborah Shepard, Her Life’s Work: Conversations with Five New Zealand Women, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2009, p.238. See also Judith Fyfe and Gaylene Preston (eds.), War Stories our Mothers Never Told Us: Nine New Zealand Women Remember the Second World War, Penguin Books, Auckland, 1995. 2 Harry Bioletti, The Yanks are Coming: The American Invasion of New Zealand 1942–1944, Century Hutchinson, Auckland, 1989. 3 The seven were chosen from a collection of 45 interviews conducted by Judith Fyfe. The women in the documentary are Pamela Quill, Flo Small, Tui Preston, Jean Andrews, Rita Graham, Neva Clarke McKenna and Mabel Waiiti. The full collection of interviews is archived in The Women in World War II Collection, Oral History Centre, Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. 4 Shepard, p.238. 5 Punitive Damage (1999); Coffee, Tea or Me? (2001); Mr Wrong (1985); Ruby and Rata (1990); Bread & Roses (1993); Titless Wonders (2001). 6 Cineaste, ‘Facts, fairytales and the politics of storytelling: an interview with Gaylene Preston’, 30:4, Fall 2005, p.36. 7 Cineaste, p.36. 8 Shepard, p.239. 9 Shepard, p.239. 10 Shepard, p.239. 11 Shepard, p.239. 12 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2001, pp.68–73. 13 ‘White lies and war’, an interview with Gaylene Preston by Peter Calder, ‘Canvas’, New Zealand Weekend Herald, 10 April 2010, p.15. 14 Shepard, p.238. 15 For a discussion of the ‘paradoxical mutuality of the four documentary functions’ (recording, persuading, analysing and expressing) see Michael Renov (ed.), Theorising Documentary, Routledge, New York and London, 1993, p.21. 16 Deborah Montgomerie, The Women’s War: New Zealand Women 1939–45, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2001, p.161. 17 For a discussion of subordinated masculinities, see R.W. Connell, Masculinities, University of California Press, Berkeley, 2005. 18 Montgomerie, p.12. 19 See, for example, Neva Clarke McKenna’s interview transcript in Fyfe and Preston, War Stories, pp.162–84; and Florence Small’s interview in the same publication, pp.92–114. 20 Fyfe and Preston, p.183

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Revealing Revealing Gallipoli By Peter Stanley The 2005 December Films documentary Revealing Gallipoli, written and directed by Wain Fimeri, became the main Australian audio-visual contribution to the 90th anniversary of the Gallipoli campaign. An ambitious, multinational co-production, it combined innovative film-making techniques and recent developments in the scholarly study of the Gallipoli campaign, as well as a challenging commercial enterprise. This reflection on the process and the product, written by an historical consultant to the project, offers an analysis of the intersection of history and film, where creative intentions, production imperatives and historical interpretation meet. Gallipoli has always been closely associated with the formation and development of national identity in Australia, and the 2005 anniversary attracted great attention in Australia. At the time I was the Principal Historian of the Australian War Memorial, a centre of commemoration and interpretation. I was also writing a book, Quinn’s Post, Anzac, Gallipoli, due to be published in April 2005. Feeling the full bottle on Gallipoli, I eagerly grasped an opportunity to communicate about it on film. The experience became among the most challenging and rewarding of my career. Late in 2004, December Films, a Melbourne-based film production company, contacted the Memorial, seeking financial support, access to its film and photograph collection and historical expertise for the film that became Revealing Gallipoli. Melbourne film-maker Wain Fimeri’s credits included the Great War documentary Pozières (2000, which used dramatic reenactments to tell the story of that battle and its effects) and Love Letters from a War (2003), a poignant story of a family shattered by the death of a father at Tobruk in 1941. I became first an ‘historical consultant’, mainly involved in commenting on successive drafts of the script, and later a presenter. The most striking features of Wain’s scripts were his capacity to absorb and synthesise vast amounts of literature swiftly and to express a view of the campaign more sophisticated than a simple nationalist reading. I soon came to admire his ability to maintain his creative vision in the face of a seemingly unending stream of financial imperatives, logistic pressures, the demands and

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expectations of institutions and partners, and the inexorable schedule against which he worked. His film reflected emerging international scholarship on the campaign, the main feature of which is that Gallipoli studies have become transnational, breaking out of the national mould into which they had fallen, not least in Australia.1 Accordingly, Revealing Gallipoli was to be an international coproduction, involving a collaboration between December Films and ABC TV (Australia), Turkish Radio and Television, TVNZ (New Zealand), S4C International (Wales) and RTÉ (Ireland). This international effort initially entailed using three presenters from Australia (me), Ireland (Prof. Keith Jeffrey) and Turkey (Sava¸s Karaka¸s). Keith Jeffrey, of Queen’s University, Belfast, is an authority on Ireland in the Great War as well as a considerable raconteur in his own right, while Sava¸s was a popular television presenter in Turkey, as well as an authority on the naval war in the Dardanelles. Fimeri and producer Tony Wright sought to create a new kind of film about Gallipoli, telling the story from several international perspectives rather than focusing again on Anzac achievement. Wright told a journalist that ‘we wanted to see through the myopia of the Anzac legend, and see that there were more people involved’.2 Wain’s script envisaged presenters rather than expert ‘talking heads’: this enabled him to script and more closely integrate – indeed, to control – the experts’ contributions. He used the familiar devices of contrasting the larger context of the campaign with the ‘personal stories’ of characters, such as Frank Parker, a Port Melbourne soldier, and a Turkish 16year-old, Adil Shahin. It also included novel techniques, such as animating contemporary still photographs as three-dimensional images, a technique since commonplace but at the time new and expensive. Filming on Gallipoli (in the cold, wind and rain of what was probably a relatively mild December 2004) was both a trial and an education. I grew to respect and admire the crew’s professionalism and skill, especially that of the Director of Photography, Jaems Grant, ACS. Jaems’ eye for interpreting Wain’s directions revealed to me the creativity and judgement involved in making images work on screen. Even more impressive was Wain’s unremitting grasp of what he wanted the film to be. As writer and director, Wain had a vision for what the film would look and sound like, and how it would convey his interpretation of the campaign in the time allotted. It became clear in shooting how closely integrated were the presenters’ pieces to camera, in their settings, their words, and even their gestures – set pieces such as the scenes shot on the Narrows ferry and at Horse Guards in London were closely scripted and choreographed. The experience gave me a striking insight into how film-making is both a creative and practical discipline.

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Filming on Dardanelles ferry. Peter Stanley (centre), with director Wain Fimeri (in dark jacket) and DOP Jaems Grant (left), sound recordist Paul Finlay and camera assistant Hayri Co.

The film-makers’ experience compensated for my own lack of experience. I had auditioned for the role by improvising in the Film Australia’s car park in Sydney, as if we were on Gallipoli. Improvisation turned out to be unnecessary. Wain had given us all a script, with our narration carefully plotted and worded. I have to say that I did not grasp until the first morning’s filming at Anzac Cove that we would be required to speak the words he had written, rather than improvise our own along these lines. This entailed learning ‘lines’ and delivering them in exactly choreographed ways, and as the shoot proceeded we learned how to speak and walk and gesture to Wain’s instructions. We filmed scenes over and over until we achieved the look and sound Wain wanted, gaining in confidence if not (in my case) in proficiency. While Wain remained remarkably patient in listening to (and sometimes accepting) arguments made by the two historians in the team, he also displayed an admirable clarity of purpose in remaining true to the interpretation he wanted to convey. Make no mistake; an historical documentary belongs to the writer and director – the one person in this case. The presenters, while carrying their own authority, were essentially mouthpieces for that vision. But film-making must always be a collaboration, and

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The other Gallipoli of 2005 Revealing Gallipoli was the main Australian film to mark the anniversary, but it was not the only important Gallipoli film of 2005.Turkish film-maker,Tolga Örnek, was also making a major documentary, exploring Gallipoli from a Turkish-flavoured international perspective. Örnek had secured substantial collaboration from the Memorial and other institutions. His Gallipoli achieved theatrical release in Australia (and elsewhere) and was rightly hailed as a substantial achievement, not least for rejecting the seemingly obligatory Turkish position of lauding the part of Mustapha Kemal in the campaign. (Kemal played a significant part in the Turkish victory, though his later standing as ‘Atatürk’, the father of the Turkish republic, ensured that this is invariably exaggerated.) The Memorial effectively favoured Örnek’s Gallipoli over Fimeri’s Revealing Gallipoli, regardless of their provenance, respective merit, substance or likely impact. While practically ignoring Wain Fimeri’s Revealing Gallipoli, the Memorial hosted the Australian premiere of Örnek’s film at the Memorial a few days before Anzac Day 2005. Örnek, unusually for a non-Australian in his 30s, was made an Officer in the Order of Australia.

the strength of Revealing Gallipoli was the authority and advice of the presenters married to the director’s creative skill. Producing different versions brought further challenges – the ABC wanted one 90-minute version, while other national versions ran to two one-hour episodes. The Welsh and New Zealand versions of the film used their own presenters and December Films produced versions in Welsh and Turkish. Despite logistic obstacles – the Welsh production faced blizzards while filming on Gallipoli later in the winter of 2004–5 – December Films made no fewer than 13 different versions in three languages between January and April 2005. The ABC broadcast Revealing Gallipoli on the evening of 24 April 2005, to respectable viewing figures and critical regard. It won the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards Village Roadshow prize for screenwriting and an Australian Teachers of Media award as ‘best documentary’ and was shortlisted for several other awards. The Victorian Premier’s award judges praised Revealing Gallipoli as ‘utterly unsentimental, scrupulously fair-handed and without jingoism’.3 While it avoided the sort of parochial nationalism so often found in Australia, it did in fact endorse a Turkish jingoism, a feature that illuminates the inescapable pragmatism of film-making. Tony Wright was central to securing deals with the various overseas partners. This necessitated

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unavoidable compromises, such as diminishing the British presence at the expense of the Irish, because RTÉ signed up while the BBC did not. And there was barely any mention of the French role in the campaign (who lost as many dead as Australia) because, as Wain later remarked: ‘In television, history is written by those that pay for it.’ The realities of funding also impelled the film into taking an explicitly pro-Turkish stance. As historical consultant I was mystified why Wain seemed reluctant to accept my argument that the inclusion of a quotation from Atatürk’s famous 1934 speech (the one beginning ‘Those heroes’ that is now so familiar in Australia – see box below) misrepresented – in my view – the historical reality. It was not until long after I surmised that a positive treatment of Atatürk must have been the implicit cost of essential Turkish cooperation and facilities. It is futile to express outrage at Wright’s pragmatism, an inescapable part of practical film-making, especially when dealing with international partners with strong emotional stakes in the subjects of such projects. Despite such compromises, I never regretted for a moment becoming involved in Revealing Gallipoli. I found inspiring and humbling the experience of observing the competence and creativity of other members of the team (particularly Wain Fimeri’s ability to visualise and express history on the screen, Keith Jeffrey’s deceptively easy manner and Jaems Grant’s ability to combine physical stamina, technical competence and insightful placement of his lens). Revealing Gallipoli was worthwhile, both as an historical interpretation and as an experience. Atatürk’s speech In 1934 Kemal Atatürk, President of the Turkish republic, directed that a British empire delegation visiting Gallipoli be greeted with an address reassuring them that British empire graves would be respected. Sixty years later, an extract of the address, attributed directly to Atatürk, became a key text in Turkey’s reconciliation with its former enemies, part of Turkey’s broader goal of attaining membership of the European Community. The words appear on monuments on Gallipoli and around Australia, energetically seeded by Turkish diplomats, and are often recited at Anzac day services as a potent symbol of reconciliation.Though beautiful in sentiment, the words actually misrepresent historical fact because they imply that ‘enemy’ graves on Gallipoli have been or are cared for by Turks. In fact, until 1918 graves were looted and desecrated, and after 1919 the graves were exclusively cared for by the Imperial (later Commonwealth) War Graves Commission. The address retains its popularity and appeared in Revealing Gallipoli, among many other places.

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Notes 1

2

3

Led by histories such as the Canadian Tim Travers, whose 2001 book Gallipoli was among the first western works to draw on hitherto closed Turkish archives, Gallipoli histories began to tell more than national stories. My own Quinn’s Post and Harvey Broadbent’s Gallipoli: The Fatal Shore continued this approach, as have other works such as Robin Prior’s 2009 Gallipoli: The End of the Myth. Wendy Tuohy, ‘Gallipoli Revealed’, The Age (21 April 2005) http://www.theage .com.au/news/TV--Radio/Gallipoli-revealed/2005/04/20/1113854248705.html, accessed 30 October 2010. ‘Resume’, Wain Fimeri: Writer/Director, http://wainfimeri.com/, accessed 24 October 2010.

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Introduction By Emma Hamilton •

Smiley (1956)

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The Devil’s Playground (1976)

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Puberty Blues (1981)

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Whale Rider (2003)

Social expectations and understandings of childhood and adolescence vary considerably over time. Filmic representations of adolescence reflect this and the complex relationship between society, history and the journey from childhood to adulthood. The authors in this section examine the different ways childhood has been represented and understood onscreen as well as the ways film can be utilised as historical evidence. Josephine May and Emma Hamilton both explore the manner in which film functions as historical evidence, suggesting that film embodies social issues relevant at the time of its cinematic release. Thus for May, The Devil’s Playground utilises adolescence as a metaphor for Australia’s own ‘coming of age’ in the 1970s. Here the boy child’s journey through adolescence, shaped in response to his repressive schooling, is seen to represent Australia’s transition from British colony to independent (adult) nation. For Hamilton, Smiley utilises childhood as a metaphor for Australia’s relationship with Britain and attempt to cope with Cold War concerns in the 1950s. In making this argument, Hamilton questions how viewing childhood as only a metaphor, rather than an actuality, impacts upon how society constructs and perceives adolescence. Examining the representation of the girl child, Lisa Featherstone explores the way in which Puberty Blues (1981) subverts social perceptions of childhood and adolescence, and particularly girlhood, as a state of innocence protected in the cocoon of Australian suburbia. The uncomfortably realist style and autobiographical nature of the film adaptation adds weight to its

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exploration of teen behaviour in Australian ‘surfie’ subculture in the 1970s. In so doing, the film exposes both the pressures on girls to maintain subservience to boys and broader patriarchal structures, whilst the act of viewing Puberty Blues unites girls in the commonalities of their fears about their gender performance. Showing how representations of childhood change over time, this perspective is contrasted by Jennifer L. Gauthier’s analysis of Whale Rider. Released in 2003, Gauthier perceives Whale Rider as part of a growing ‘girl power genre’, aimed at exploring the role and social position of the female adolescent with a triumphant conclusion that grants respect to her role and contribution to the community and presents a positive role model to the audience. These texts provide only a small sample of the vast catalogue of Australian and New Zealand films centred on the concept of adolescence, yet they illustrate distinct trends in the approaches taken to represent and understand it. In particular they examine the use of adolescent journey as metaphor, the role of film in reflecting or subverting concepts of adolescent innocence and power, and they analyse how ‘adolescence’ is a concept that is constructed in an historically contingent way.

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Smiley By Emma Hamilton Smiley (Twentieth Century Fox, 1956, 86 mins) is neither a documentary film, nor is it situated in a real past time or around a definite historical event. Rather, Smiley is a fictional film set in the 1950s with a plot that revolves around the attempts of a nine-year-old boy, Smiley William Thomas Greevins (Colin Petersen), to save up enough money to buy his very own Raleigh bicycle. As such, this film raises important questions about historical evidence and the type of sources historians consider ‘valid’: most notably, are films that deal specifically with historical issues alone worthy of historical study, or are all films forms of historical evidence? Here Smiley is used as evidence for the way in which film functions as a reflection of the time of its production, in this case as a reflection on issues in Australia during the 1950s. In this way all films can be utilised as important and valid evidence that is both a manifestation of then-contemporary historical issues and, in the case of Smiley, also as a reflection on the way in which society selectively interprets and creates self-serving narratives to cement notions of identity, often rooted in historically stable conceptualisations of the nation. Specifically, this essay considers the way in which representations of the child, in this case Smiley, are used as a symbol of further national and international discourses. Smiley was co-written, produced and directed by an Englishman, Anthony Kimmins, and the film opens with an acknowledgment of thanks by the producers to their ‘friends in Australia who co-operated so wholeheartedly’. Indeed, the film was nominated for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award (BAFTA) in 1957 for best British screenplay. The British background of the film suggests that, if it is to be viewed as evidence of Australian culture in the 1950s, it must be viewed through the prism of British-Australian relations. This interest in making a film in and about Australia may be seen as particularly significant following Australian reliance on American military aid in the Second World War, and the signing of the Australia-New Zealand-United States (ANZUS) military alliance in 1951, which cemented the perception that Australia was turning away from its British ties to embrace America, both politically and culturally. However, the

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making of a British-Australian film at this time may be seen as part of a broader movement taking place in the 1950s against this American connection. As Richard White notes in his reflection on Americanisation in Australia, although many popular forms of entertainment in Australia, such as motion pictures, television, music (especially rock’n’roll in this era), comic books and popular literature derived from American origins, ‘now the common view was that Americanisation threatened Australian culture’ and widespread censorship campaigns against ‘trash’ were common.1 In this way the British origins of Smiley signal broader societal concerns regarding Australia’s cultural influences and a desire by some sections of the community for wholesome family entertainment that was associated with Britain rather than America. Smiley was also co-written by Moore Raymond, a Queensland native who, after living in London for 30 years, died in New South Wales in 1980. As his brother asserted, the three Smiley stories were inspired by his memories: he ‘recalled with affection the time he spent in the hot, dusty little town [Augathella, Queensland], and brought to life many of its quirky characters’.2 Although this does indicate Australian involvement, this statement also reflects upon the role of nostalgia and personal memory in constructing history, problems also associated with other forms of historical evidence including oral testimony. At the most fundamental level, the plot of the film may be seen to function as a parable that addresses and eases tensions in a Cold War context. Smiley sees an advertisement for a bicycle in a catalogue belonging to a wealthier classmate, Fred (Gavin Davies), and becomes determined to save the four pounds necessary to buy it. He undertakes multiple odd jobs as well as a three-week stint as a rouseabout but, despite his Protestant work ethic and town support, he loses his savings three times: by breaking a church window; through gambling; and through theft by his alcoholic, gambler father, Pa Greevins (Reg Lye). In the end, though, Smiley saves the life of an English boundary rider who gifts him the bicycle. The portrayal of the child, Smiley, and his transformative journey towards material ownership, communicates messages at both the micro- and macro-level, illustrating the capacity of film to create narratives that service broader political and social purposes. At the micro-level, the representation of the child serves to illustrate the enfranchisement of all individual citizens within a consumer-capitalist society. In this world even children desire material goods and, most importantly, if they work hard and are integrated within a community of likeminded people, they are able to achieve their goals and, in so doing, attain happiness. However, this film does not represent wholly positive individuals or actions: Pa Greevins is an alcoholic, who steals from his own son, and a running tension exists between all members of this nuclear family; the publican Jim Rankin (John McCallum) sells opium; and there is ongoing

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anxiety regarding interaction with the Indigenous camp on the town’s outskirts, and with the landscape itself. These anxieties acknowledge underlying societal fears, whilst simultaneously resolving them through the representation of the child’s transformative journey to personal attainment and his capacity to engage with public institutions that are not only economic but educational, legal and religious. These institutions are conceptualised as positive and are embodied respectively in Principal Mr Stevens (Charles ‘Bud’ Tingwell), Sergeant Flaxman (Chips Rafferty) and Reverend Lambeth (Ralph Richardson), who are all just, fair and morally incorruptible. Certainly, this representation acts to reflect dually upon Cold War anxieties regarding the subversive power and infiltration of atheistic Communism, and, at the same time, tensions surrounding the changing nature of capitalism and labour that were increasingly seen to create a dehumanised, conformity focused, ‘mass society’. Smiley’s journey resolves these tensions in a socially reaffirming way: Smiley’s capacity for economic engagement reinforces the perception of stable economic growth and the prosperity associated with increased disposable income. Allowing a child of lower socio-economic status to engage in this consumer-capitalist system helps to establish egalitarianism within that structure: the aim of the film appears to be in proving that the spoils of growth are available to all people, provided they are willing to work. Ultimately, the message sent here is an effective reflection of Prime Minister Menzies’ rhetoric surrounding ‘independent virtues of thrift, self-provision and independence from the state’, which at that time ‘may have appealed precisely because these were seen as values that were vulnerable in the face of mass society’.3 At the macro-level, Smiley’s journey can also be seen as a metaphor for nationhood. Smiley commences the film possessing distinctly adult qualities: he recites poetry and has a large vocabulary, he troubles himself with the romance between school teacher Miss Workman (Jocelyn Hernfield) and Sergeant Flaxman, and promises that he will provide dinner for his mother. He is, as many scholars have suggested of Australia itself, ‘born modern’.4 As the film progresses, however, Smiley faces increasingly adult situations – he must live away from home as a rouseabout, he must cross the river to the Aboriginal camp, he must face his father’s flaws and, ultimately, he must immerse himself in the Australian bush to face death, as he is bitten by a poisonous snake. Smiley’s advancement in this quest symbolises a definite, linear sense of progress with the attainment of a sense of national identity made obvious by his survival in the bush, and the granting of the bike as a result. Indeed, by the time of the sequel Smiley Gets a Gun (Twentieth Century Fox, 1958, 90 mins), this embracing of Australian identity in Smiley, and symbolically in the nation more broadly, is complete: Smiley keeps a pet kangaroo and the community tames nature in the form of a bushfire and the

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accessing of an underground water table. Significantly, though, it is an Englishman who gifts the bicycle to Smiley, thereby reinforcing the ties between these two nations. This representation of linear progress to a completed sense of national identity is hardly surprising in the light of nation-building activities taking place in this era, many of which emphasised Australia’s evolutionary role with Britain. The 1950s saw increasing technological advances resulting not only in innovations for the home and advertising culture, as evidenced by this film, but also the development of atomic weaponry, which saw Australia grant permission for atomic testing on its soil and the mining and export of uranium. This technological discourse also saw the development of major national projects such as the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme, expanded air travel and the long-range weapons project in Woomera, South Australia. In addition to this, Australia was increasingly in the world view due to two major events: the 1954 Royal Tour conducted by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh; and the 1956 Melbourne Olympic Games.5 Seeing the representation of the child as a signifier of broader domestic and international identity discourses does raise an important question: what becomes of childhood itself? How do our representations of the child, whatever their broader symbolism, affect how we see children? I would suggest that this representation illustrates children kept in a ‘limbo’, hovering between adulthood and an idealised childhood state. On the one hand, Smiley’s childhood is one of adult responsibility – he works, contributes to his family and ultimately challenges his father through a physical assault – on the

The 1954 Royal Tour No event signals the connections between English traditions, Australian identity and the role of the child quite like the 1954 Royal Tour of Australia conducted by Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh. Over the tour’s 57 days and 250 formal engagements throughout the nation, it is estimated that up to threequarters of the Australian population saw the royal couple. This fanfare went some way towards calming tensions regarding a turn towards America, and recognised Australia’s growing importance to the Crown as an independent entity. Priority was given to children wishing to view the Queen, emphasising the perception that with children lay the future of British-Australian ties.1 1

David Lowe,‘1954: the Queen and Australia in the World’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 46, 1995, pp.1–10.

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other, though, he maintains a sense of idealised childhood – he believes in high romance and engages in a rural landscape that carries within it ideas of freedom and escape. Indeed, the display of Smiley fishing with ‘cobber’ Joe, and removing his clothes to dive into the clear river water on multiple occasions, in an area he clearly knows well, invokes a sense of pleasure and nostalgia for childhood delights. In addition, the concept that work, in and of itself, constitutes a removal of childhood from a protected state should also be viewed in a post-Great Depression context where the capacity to work and have disposable income becomes in itself a freedom, rather than an oppression of childhood. Ultimately, this limbo between life phases and the use of child as signifier rather than actuality dually historicises and sees as complex and transient the idea of ‘child’, whilst also obscuring a meaningful engagement with a rights-based discourse. The representation of childhood in Smiley comes to signify important concerns regarding national identity and broader domestic and international concerns of the period. In doing so, this film illustrates the capacity of fictional films to function as valid historical evidence of the time they were released, in this case, of 1950s Australia in a Cold War context.

Further Reading Kociumbas, Jan, ‘Lost in the bush: searching for the Australian child’, History of Education Review, 2, 2001, pp.37–54. May, Josephine and John Ramsland, ‘The disenchantment of childhood: exploring the cultural and spatial boundaries of childhood in three Australian feature films’, Paedogogica Historia, 1, 2007, pp.135–49.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

Richard White, ‘“Americanization” and Popular Culture in Australia’, Teaching History, August 1978, p.19. Robert Raymond, From Bees to Buzz Bombs: Robert Raymond’s Boyhood-to-Blitz Memoirs, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Queensland, 1992, p.36. John Murphy, ‘Shaping the Cold War family: politics, domesticity and policy interventions in the 1950s’, Australian Historical Studies, no. 105, 1995, p.549. David Lowe,‘1954: the Queen and Australia in the World’, Journal of Australian Studies, no. 46, 1995, pp.1–10. Lowe, pp.1–10.

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The Devil’s Playground: Coming-of-Age as National Cinema By Josephine May After many years of sporadic production, the 1970s witnessed a revival in the Australian film industry. Renewed interest in the arts included greater financial support for cinema projects from government. There was also a strong desire to see ‘Australian stories’ on the big screen. At this time, a number of young film-makers, many of whom went on to successful international directorial careers, made ambitious films that addressed national concerns and reflected a new seriousness about film quality. Their films were recognised at the time and since as self-conscious attempts to forge a new ‘national cinema’. National cinemas feed from, and into, trends in historical context in a discursive or intertextual loop. The 1970s was a time of burgeoning national consciousness epitomised by the election of the Whitlam Government with its explicit campaign to locate Australian nationalism in the Australian polity, rather than to share cultural ownership of the state with Great Britain. Feature film production reflected and fed into these heady days of nation-building as well as wider trends in the cultural landscape such as challenges to racism, sexism and conservative sexual mores that were also taking place in the community. Interestingly, three of the most significant films of the Australian 1970s film ‘renaissance’ employed single-sex boarding schools as settings for coming-ofage dramas: Picnic at Hanging Rock (Weir, 1975), The Devil’s Playground (Schepisi, 1976) and The Getting of Wisdom (Beresford, 1977). In these films the opposition between the authoritarianism of the school and the adolescent quest for freedom and identity is utilised as a backdrop for a discussion of Australian national identity at a time of self-conscious nation building. These films explore youth in terms of sexuality and agonistic rites of passage, but they were also concerned with much larger conceptual systems, especially with youth as a constitutive metaphor for Australia.1 Sylvia Lawson wrote that these films were ‘concerned with growing up, throwing off repressive authority; it is as though the adolescent central figures were surrogates for an idea of colonial and post-colonial Australia’.2 The Devil’s Playground is the

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only one of these three films set in an all-boys school, and the discussion of 1950s Catholic attitudes to sex and gender presented in the film’s narrative is also the vehicle for an exploration of wider issues of Australian identity. Following its release in July 1976, critical acclaim was almost universal. In terms of the relationship between feature film and history, The Devil’s Playground is a fine example of the ‘double vision’ of films, allowing historians to approach feature films as historical evidence in two main ways; that is, as evidence regarding the historical period in which its narrative takes place (here, the sexually repressive mores of the 1950s) and, secondly, for cinematic reflections of the era in which it was produced (the nationalistic concerns of the 1970s). The film is loosely based on autobiographical material from writer/producer/director Fred Schepisi’s brief schooling at a Catholic junior seminary or juniorate in the 1950s.3 It was shot on location at the Chirnside mansion, home of the Corpus Christi seminary, Werribee, in Victoria. The story centres on the sexual and moral awakening of 13-year-old protagonist Tom Allen (played by Simon Burke) in his journey away from his vocation to be a priest, and his final rejection of seminary life. Throughout the film, Tom’s adolescence is sexualised, defined by a growing awareness of the body and sex, the ‘devil’s playground’ of the title. Because of his bedwetting and his masturbatory urges, Tom’s unruly body causes him to question the rule of the seminary that requires disciplining of the ‘natural’ body. The Devil’s Playground provides a damning critique of the monastic rule in the 1950s Catholic juniorate at the moment before the radical changes to Catholicism in the 1960s.4 Schepisi employs the past moment, the 1950s, to speak to the film’s present, the 1970s, to challenge the growing myth of the 1950s as a ‘Golden Age’ of safety, security and sexual containment. Indeed the 1950s in the form of the seminary is characterised in The Devil’s Playground as a spiritually and psychologically dangerous and repressive place. It shows how both the teaching brothers and the boys struggle with sexual urges in the face of the bodily denial required in seminary life – a denial that leads to suffering at many levels and, in the case of one student, to death. Schepisi was asked if the film, because of its forthright language and sexual material, was a dramatisation of the 1950s from a 1970s perspective.5 In reply, Schepisi asserted that no, in fact he had ‘held back’ to a considerable degree on ‘all this bizarre behaviour’ in his own experience of seminary life. This was because ‘Nobody would believe it’. While describing this sexual repression, the film however does affirm the growing openness and sexual freedoms of the 1970s. Caputo argues that coming-of-age films in general, usually set in the 1950s and 1960s, ‘get their best battery power from battling the conflicts of the new sexual mores emerging out of the dying days of the good old times’.6 While The Devil’s Playground goes to some lengths to establish Tom’s heterosexuality, his

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The boy as nation in Australian history The Devil’s Playground discusses the coming-of-age of the Australian nation in ways that are historically specific, but which have a long lineage in visual forms of national representation. For example, historians have noted that ‘Australia’ was represented as a boy in cartoons of the nineteenth century. Less discussed is the fact that the figure of the ‘boy’ as representation of the nation was taken up from the earliest days of Australian cinema production. For example, in The Kid Stakes (1927), director Tal Ordell transferred the cartoon character of Fatty Finn into the medium of cinema. Fatty Finn can be related to the nineteenth-century cartoon representation of Australia, The Little Boy from Manly, created by Livingston Hopkins in April 1885 for The Bulletin (see cartoon below), and which continued to be used as a symbol for Australia long after Federation. Furthermore the boy, discursively positioned as ‘Australia’, has continued to be renewed in Australian cinema, especially from the 1950s when there was an upsurge in interest in the child-centred film.The ‘boy’ appears, for example, in the two films by Anthony Kimmins, Smiley (1956) and Smiley Gets a Gun (1958), and in Henri Safran’s film adaptation of Colin Theile’s book, Storm Boy, made in 1976.

Little Boy from Manly Meets Uncle Sam, The Bulletin 1896.

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involvement in homosexual acts and homoerotic and homosocial ‘mateship’ relationships with fellow students is accepted. Brian Waite, the boy who seeks out a homosexual relationship with Tom in the film, is not judged in any way because of it. Their mutual interest in sex is characterised as natural. The behaviours that the film problematises, arise rather from spiritual fanaticism represented narratively by the boys who flagellate themselves for ‘purification’ and the boy who dies because of it, as well as in the tortured behaviour of Brother Francine. The real ‘crime’ is the sexual repression that leads to ‘unnatural’ behaviours and urges. In the end, young Tom escapes from the seminary after his best mate, Fitz, is expelled. If we accept that the journey of Tom Allen out of the seminary is, at the same time, a metaphor for the movement of Australia away from the perverting and unnatural influence of colonial culture, then what kind of national culture is Tom, and Australia, moving towards? The Devil’s Playground is an autobiographical narrative, and Richard Coe maintains that Australian autobiographies show certain features common to Australian culture that reveal ‘current preoccupations and obsessions [which operate at a] subconscious level’, at the level of myth. He writes that the myth of the Australian child-self (in which he includes the

The ‘double vision’ of feature film The Devil’s Playground shows the complex nature of the interactions and interventions of feature film with and in history. The film addresses two main historical moments – the 1950s which it directly represented and the 1970s from which it arose and to which it was primarily aimed. The Devil’s Playground also exemplifies the fact that film is inherently an ambivalent medium, in that it both constructs reality and challenges it at the same time. By depicting a range of masculinities, and at the same time affirming hegemonic heterosexual Australian masculinity, representations of males in the film become the vehicle for both contestation and affirmation of the historical construction of Australian national identity. The range of masculinities among brothers and boys suggests the plurality of ways to be masculine in Australia, and challenges the old idea of the bushman/bloke as the only way to be an Australian. However, in the positioning of the church/culture as the feminine, unnaturally controlling men’s bodies, the film affirms a frontier manly Australian ‘essence’ that needs freedom of expression.When young Tom Allen turns away from the repression of the old culture and towards freedom, heterosexuality, mateship, football and beer, narratively constructed as ‘normal Australian life’, he is embracing Australia’s dominant idea of itself at the time but, as the film shows, only one of its realities.

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adolescent) is ‘the myth of its own culture, or more precisely, its non-culture’, with which it has a love-hate relationship.7 The idea of the Australian nonculture is an adolescent preoccupation that arises from the struggle with, and the rejection of, the monolithic ‘parent’. Christos Tsiolkas argues that The Devil’s Playground shows no yearning for education or delight in learning among the students.8 The only ‘culture’ on display is the dead hand of an old world Catholicism that is no longer relevant. The classroom practices shown are outmoded and boring, having little to do with the boys’ real interests that include all matters to do with sex. The depiction of the male adolescent in The Devil’s Playground takes this trajectory, more affirming of sexuality and focused on the body, while positioning the youth as the optimistic symbol of the passage of Australia from colonial dependence to post-colonial independence, from the culture of the old country to the non-culture of the new. At the film’s end, barely discernible through the window of the car speeding him to freedom, Tom Allen [Australia] is a blank page, a reflective surface, free to create himself in the wide world.

Further Reading and Viewing May, Josephine, ‘Insistent bodies versus the rule: the representation of male sexualities and gender identities in The Devil’s Playground’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, 10:1, January 2006, pp.107–123. Stratton, David, The Last New Wave: The Australian Film Revival, Angus & Robertson, Sydney, 1980. Tsiolkas, Christos, The Devil’s Playground, The Currency Press, Sydney, 2002. Three movie clips from The Devil’s Playground with curator’s notes are available from Australian Screen Online http://aso.gov.au/titles/features/ devils-playground/

Notes 1

2

Raffaele Caputo, ‘Coming of age: notes towards a reappraisal’, Cinema Papers, no. 94, August 1993, p.13; see Judith Bessant, ‘Fine for poets, anathema for scientists: youth culture and the role of metaphor in youth research’, Melbourne Studies in Education, vol. 42, no. 2, November 2001, pp.27–48. Bessant writes that youth has been understood by the use of three main metaphors: pedagogical, heuristic and constitutive, pp.38–41. Sylvia Lawson, ‘The film industry’ in Ann Curthoys, A.W. Martin and Tim Rouse (eds.), Australians from 1939, Fairfax, Syme and Weldon Associates, Sydney, 1987, p.247.

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Schepisi had attended the Juniorate of the Victorian Marist Brothers at Mount Macedon. See Peter Malone ‘Brides of Christ in Devil’s Playgrounds’ in John Benson, Ken Berryman and Wayne Levy (eds.), Screening the Past: The Sixth Australian History and Film Conference Papers, The Sixth Australian History and Film Conference, The Media Centre, La Trobe University, Bundoora, 1993, p.64. Val Noone, ‘Post-war Catholic intellectual life: a view from the seminary’, Footprints, no. 4, June 1999, pp.2–28; Maurice Ryan, ‘Remembering religious education: insights from contemporary Australian autobiography’, Journal of Religious Education, vol. 50, no. 4, 2002, pp.23–8. Malone, p.65. Caputo, p.13. Richard N. Coe, ‘Portrait of the artist as a young Australian’, Southerly, no. 41, 1981, pp.126–62, see pp.130–1. Christos Tsiolkas, The Devil’s Playground, The Currency Press, Sydney, 2002, p.5.

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Sex and Subculture: Bruce Beresford’s Puberty Blues By Lisa Featherstone The film Puberty Blues exploded into Australian cinemas in the summer of 1981. Puberty Blues was a savage, satirical and sometimes downright frightening study of a ‘surfie’ subculture in Sydney in the early 1970s. Directed by the Australian, Bruce Beresford, the film was based on the cult autobiographical novel of the same name, written by teenagers Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey in 1979. An instant success at the box office, it was a wild ride, an uninhibited view of teenage life. Set in Cronulla, a south Sydney beachside suburb, the film traces the story of protagonists Debbie (Nell Schofield) and Sue (Jad Capelja). The characters’ story begins in ‘Dickheadland’ and they slowly become part of the coolest gang on their beach, with all this encompasses – drunken parties, fumbling sex and getting high. The film version of Puberty Blues was originally imagined and propelled by its producers, Margaret Kelly and Joan Long. Raising money for a film on ‘surfie chicks’ was slow and laborious until Bruce Beresford came on board.1 Beresford had made a number of commercially viable, distinctly Australian films such as The Adventures of Barry Mackenzie (1972), as well as the feminist film The Getting of Wisdom (1977). It was the right moment in time for the endeavour. Edgier films such as Puberty Blues were made commercially possible in the early 1980s by injections of funding into the arts, largely through the Federal Government’s 10BA scheme, which offered indirect subsidies and tax breaks to Australian feature films.2 As Michelle Arrow has argued, the late 1970s saw a renewed focus on ‘quality’ movies, aimed at presenting a positive view of Australia to the international viewer. Thus in this period, there was a stream of historical films made in Australia: Australian national identity was to be most safely explored through historical narratives that displaced the contemporary vision.3 Puberty Blues was almost the exception. Set in the early 1970s, it may have initially been a stretch to call Puberty Blues an historical film, because the resonances were so contemporary. It dealt very clearly with post-sexual revolution themes and issues: sex, drugs and a little bit of rock’n’roll. Yet, there is some sense of historicity. Due to the use of voice-overs, there is a sense of distance, of growth, of journey, with the narrator, Debbie, looking back at her very recent

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past. And now, as twenty-first-century viewers, there is an almost inevitable sense of history: this is a film that considers an important space in Australia’s social and cultural development and Puberty Blues is a key film in terms of both setting and message. Puberty Blues can be read largely as a realist film. It remains generally faithful to the book, which itself was autobiographical. The film has sometimes been criticised for underplaying the youth of the girls. In the book, Debbie and Sue are (uncomfortably) only 13, well below the age of consent. In the film, Beresford was forced to use older, more physically mature actresses, in order to meet censorship standards. Further, some of the sex and drug scenes were toned down, in order to avoid an R rating at the box office.4 Nonetheless, the sentiments remain, and there is little escape from the horrors faced by the teens, whether 13 or 16. The potential for disaster is perhaps best exemplified in the heroin death of the gentle and confused Garry. Puberty Blues is an intriguing mix of comedy and stark, dark, social critique. It is a funny film – the clothes, the language, the irreverence. At times the comedy verges on virtual farce, as in the fight scene at the beach, when the surfie gang collide with yet more authority figures, the lifeguards. At other points, the film mixes humour with agony and embarrassment. In particular, Debbie’s first attempt to lose her virginity is cringeworthy to the audience. In the dark purple, cramped space of the panel van, Debbie and Bruce skirt around each other, coming together only to (attempt) intercourse. There is no love, not even romance, let alone pleasure. Beresford’s direction is masterful here: the physical and emotional pain of the scene is briefly lightened by the night-time snacks of the boys in the front seats – phallic looking hot-dogs. Yet the awkwardness and insincerity of the scene lingers, even as the audience laughs. The film makes entertaining use of stereotypical Australian symbology which was later to be parodied so effectively in The Castle (1997). Puberty Blues has the gorgeous panoramic beach shots, the fit and tanned surfers, and more darkly, the xenophobia, the underage binge drinking and, of course, the panel van. Most notably, Beresford makes intense use of the Australian vernacular: the Australian accent in Puberty Blues is broad and strong, and the film acts as a fascinating historical record of many Australian terms which have largely fallen into disuse such as ‘root’ and ‘moll’. Yet the film cannot be read or understood merely as a comedy. In particular, the film subverted traditional notions of childhood innocence, and undermined ideas of suburban life as a benign, safe space. It is clear that for Debbie, Sue and the other teens, school and home life is barely even peripheral; merely an irritation, an unreality compared to the companionship and acceptance of their peers.5

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In particular, the girls place their boyfriends at the centre of their universe. Time and time again, we see the girls buy into misogynist cultures, reinforcing the superiority of the white Australian male. As Debbie’s voice-over notes: If you were pimply, a migrant, or just plain ugly, you couldn’t get a boyfriend. If you couldn’t get a boyfriend there were two options. You could be a prude or a moll. Being a prude was too boring. At least if you were a moll, people knew who you were.

It is both touching in its desperation, and alarming – but more often the latter. In one of the most shocking scenes, the local ‘moll’ Freda is gang-banged by three surfers. It is not quite rape (she does consent, more or less), but it is too close to rape to be comfortable viewing. Debbie and Sue, too, are troubled. But they follow the boys’ lead and do nothing, say nothing. After all, ‘she’s just a moll’. Though Puberty Blues has been described by some as ‘apolitical’, it is deeply political, in the feminist sense that the personal is political.6 The miserable sexual experiences of even the most popular girls (who appear really as orifices for male sexual urges), the ever-present threat of sexual violence, and the broader inequalities the boys would enforce, ensured that the girls were only ever passive players in any relationship within the film. Yet, the determined chronicling of the banal, sexist events of surfie life is a slow form of resistance. In a world where surfie girlfriends were not expected to eat or pee, let alone orgasm, telling their story was a small victory. Further, with voice-overs by Debbie, the film takes a particularly ‘female’ view of the misogynist subculture. This was – and is – probably a large part of the film’s charm and appeal. For voiceless young women, it was a relief to know that they were not isolated in their fears and desires. The excruciating scenes as Debbie waits for a late period must have been re-lived by many girls and women in the audience, all sighing a breath of relief as the first spots of blood arrive. Kathy Lette later noted that she and Gabrielle Carey did not know about second-wave feminism as they wrote the book.7 Nonetheless, ideas about the injustices and inequalities faced by women permeate each scene, prefiguring later films on violent masculinity in Australia such as Blackrock (1997) and The Boys (1998).8 Or, as Lette suggested in 2003 – perhaps with the benefit of hindsight – ‘we wanted to show the girls that they didn’t have to be sperm spittoons, you know, they could have another identity’.9 It was, as Lesley Speed has noted, a ‘nascent feminist perspective’, though frequently both book and film have been read and understood as feminist.10 In the final scenes of the film (shot superbly) Debbie and Sue ride a surfboard – going against all gender normative roles, where only boys can ride the waves. It is somewhat of

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Puberty Blues, the Novel: from Sylvania Waters to celebrity Released in 1979, Puberty Blues was written by best friends Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey. After working around Sydney as the satirical group the ‘Salami Sisters’, Lette and Carey completed the book when they were 19. It has generally been understood as a memoir of their gritty adolescence, and Carey herself claimed the novel was ‘totally autobiographical’.1 It was an instant success, and was reprinted several times in the 1980s, with a recent volume released in 2002. There is enduring interest in Puberty Blues as both a coming-of-age tale, and a snapshot of Australian life in the 1970s. The 2002 edition contains forewords from two famous Australian expats, Kylie Minogue and Germaine Greer. Kylie’s commentary is as light and fluffy as her pop princess persona, and she warmly recalls her teenage pleasure in illicitly reading Puberty Blues. Greer’s introduction is a searing social commentary on Australian life in the 1970s and 1980s.These two forewords represent the dual, interconnected readings of Puberty Blues: voyeuristic pleasure and a sharp cultural critique. 1

Australian Story, n.p.

a feminist triumph. Yet this excitement is underscored by the melancholy observation that nothing much has changed for the other women on the beach or in the suburbs. Famous for its shock value, Puberty Blues portrayed a Sydney surf subculture in all of its glory and misogyny. Not all reviewers received the film positively, with some misunderstanding its essential Australian-ness, while others withdrew from its gritty realism.11 It was, however, a box office success in the 1980s, and has a continuing interest, even fascination. Though set very specifically in a certain time and space, Puberty Blues does have a certain timelessness, despite the dated clothes and 1970s vernacular. Watch it now, and the shock remains.

Further Reading Lette, Kathy and Gabrielle Carey, Puberty Blues, Picador, London, 2002. Schembri, Jim, ‘Puberty Blues’, Review, Cinema Paper, 36, n.d., pp.72–3. Schofield, Nell, Puberty Blues, Currency Press, Sydney, 2004. Speed, Lesley, ‘You and me against the world: revisiting Puberty Blues’, Metro Magazine, 140, 2004, pp.54–60.

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Notes 1 Nell Schofield, Puberty Blues, Currency Press, Sydney, 2004, pp.16–17. 2 See Screen Australia, The operation of 10BA, viewed 13 August 2010, http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/gtp/mptax10ba.html. 3 Thus successful Australian films in the late 1970s and early 1980s were mainly historically set, including Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975), My Brilliant Career (1979), Gallipoli (1981) and The Man From Snowy River (1982). See Michelle Arrow, Friday on Our Minds: Popular Culture in Australia since 1945, University of New South Wales Press, Sydney, 2009, pp.112–15, 156–7. 4 Peter Coleman, Bruce Beresford: Instincts of the Heart, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1992, p.112. 5 On education in Puberty Blues see Josephine May, ‘Puberty Blues and the representation of an Australian comprehensive high school’, History of Education Review, vol. 37, no. 2, 2008, pp.61–7. 6 On ‘apolitical’, see Lesley Speed, ‘You and me against the world: revisiting Puberty Blues’, Metro Magazine, no. 140, 2004, pp.54–60, 57. 7 Australian Story, interview of Kathy Lette and Gabrielle Carey with Caroline Jones, ‘The Big Chill’, produced by Helen Grasswill, aired 30 September 2002. Transcript viewed on 13 October 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/transcripts/ s685468.htm 8 See Felicity Holland and Jane O’Sullivan, ‘“Lethal larrikans:” cinema subversions of mythical masculinities in Blackrock and The Boys’, Antipodes, December 1999, pp.79–84. 9 ABC. Kathy Lette, interviewed by George Negus, aired 10 February 2003. Transcript viewed 13 October 2009, http://www.abc.net.au/dimensions/ dimenstions_in_time/transcripts/s780748.htm 10 Speed, p.54. 11 See for example Janet Maslin, ‘Puberty Blues’, New York Times, 15 July 1983, Review, p.13; William K. Halliwell, The Film Goer’s Guide to Australian Film, Angus and Robertson, London, 1985, p.210.

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Whale Rider By Jennifer Gauthier Whale Rider (South Pacific Pictures, 2003, 101 mins) is a film directed by Niki Caro, based on a novel by acclaimed M¯aori writer Witi Ihimaera. The film tells the story of Pai (Keisha Castle-Hughes), a young M¯aori girl who struggles to come to terms with her culture and identity in contemporary New Zealand. Caro’s film garnered attention and awards all over the world, including an Academy Award nomination for Castle-Hughes, the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, the Audience Award for World Cinema at Sundance and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Foreign Film. While she herself is a P¯akeh¯a,1 Caro worked closely with the local residents of the township of Whangara on the East Cape region of the North Island and studied M¯aori language for a year before filming began. Caro also had the cooperation of the novel’s author, who acted as an Associate Producer for the film. Whale Rider foregrounds the clash of cultures that characterises postcolonial societies, specifically concerns about land, family and tradition. Whale Rider does not explicitly address issues of colonisation, but the powerful influence of the P¯akeh¯a world is ever-present despite the absence of white characters. The culture clash is perhaps most clearly embodied in the character Porourangi (Cliff Curtis), Pai’s father, who left the M¯aori community after the death of his wife and son, who was Pai’s twin. Rather than stay and be a leader of his tribe, he lives in Germany and pursues his career as an artist, making art steeped in the western tradition of formalism. He and his father, Koru (Rawiri Paratene), are at odds whenever he visits; his father’s disappointment with his choice to live in the P¯akeh¯a world is oppressive. The film’s narrative foregrounds the important role of family in M¯aori culture and the generational clash highlights the negative impact of a westernised society that does not place as much value on familial ties. Since Porourangi has left the village, Koru is desperate to find someone who can lead the community into the future. The urgency of Koru’s quest speaks to the ongoing erosion of M¯aori traditions through contact with P¯akeh¯a culture. Throughout the film the viewer is provided with evidence that young Pai is destined to be the new leader, but Koru cannot abide a female partaking of the male traditions of taiaha (spear fighting) and haka (a war dance). Pai

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Te Paepae Ataata Although widely praised by audiences, Whale Rider initiated some controversy in the M¯aori world, not only for its improbable content, but also because it was not made by a M¯aori film-maker. Caro’s success in telling a M¯aori-centred narrative highlighted the fact that in its first nine years, the New Zealand Film Commission had invested in 30 feature films, but not one made by a M¯aori. The New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) was founded in 1978 to encourage the production, distribution and promotion of New Zealand films. The founding documents of the NZFC and the later Film Fund make no mention of the diversity of New Zealand’s culture or society. Although M¯aori make up a significant portion of the nation’s population and M¯aori was declared an official language of New Zealand in 1987, the funding structure of the government film agency did not reflect this diversity until recently. In 2003, Barry Barclay, along with film-maker Merata Mita and Tainui Stephens (a radio, television and film producer and NZFC board member), submitted a proposal to the NZFC to set aside funding for specifically M¯aori film projects. The proposal, Mana M¯aori Paepae (MMP), drew upon M¯aori culture and language to communicate its message; setting out a process for the support of M¯aori film-making by establishing a committee, or paepae, that would accept feature-film proposals from the M¯aori creative community and recommend them to the NZFC for funding.The New Zealand government createdTe Paepae Ataata in 2007 to support M¯aori film-making (ataata). Taking its guiding principles from the idea for Mana M¯aori Paepae, the organisation allocates funding to M¯aori writers, directors and producers and helps support the ongoing training of M¯aori in the film industry.

represents the culture clash defined not only as M¯aori vs. P¯akeh¯a, but also as man vs. woman, or more generally tradition vs. modernity. In Whale Rider, it is only by embracing a female leader for his people that Koru can save M¯aori heritage and culture from complete assimilation. The film’s title comes from an ancient M¯aori legend, which tells of an ancestor, Paikea, who rode on the back of a whale across the ocean to found the first M¯aori settlement in New Zealand. Pai’s leadership potential (she is symbolically named after Paikea) is made evident not only by her skill at traditional M¯aori activities, but also in her spiritual connection to the great ancestor. The film opens with shots of whales swimming underwater as Pai’s voice-over explains her birth, immediately linking her to whales and the sea. Throughout the film, we see numerous shots of her looking out at the ocean,

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communicating silently with the whales. The first instance of this mystical relationship occurs when her father tries to take her back to Europe with him. As they drive through the beautiful landscape of her birth, she makes him stop the car and she gets out and gazes out to sea. She is bound to the land/sea and cannot leave it. Whale Rider utilises a fairly conventional style to tell Pai’s story. Voice-over narration sutures us into Pai’s point of view at the beginning and end of the film. In these voice-overs, Pai describes her spiritual connection to the ancestors and her quest to gain the respect of her grandfather. However, the camera rarely takes her point of view and instead we see long shots of CastleHughes’ very expressive face; her pain and joy are evident and we are clearly intended to sympathise with her at every moment. The plot takes shape around Pai’s struggle and focuses on the key moments of her growing knowledge of, and connection to, her M¯aori heritage. The acting style and narrative structure appear to have been carefully designed for maximum emotional impact, much as mainstream Hollywood films are. Lisa Gerrard’s haunting score provides subtle cues for the audience’s emotions in particularly dramatic moments. Synthesised strings and vocals give the film a mystical tone and emphasise Pai’s spiritual connection to nature. Whale Rider’s climactic moment is split between Pai’s moving speech in honour of her grandfather and the beaching of the whales. Caro begins with a scene of Pai struggling to deliver a speech she has written about her heritage, but she is overcome with emotion when she discovers that her grandfather has not come to her school performance. Standing on a stage high above the audience, Pai speaks about her grandfather’s search for a new leader for her people, demonstrating her prescient understanding of the importance of this quest and her belief that both men and women should be allowed to represent her people. Interspersed with these scenes are shots of Koru emerging from his house to see several whales that have beached themselves. In the subsequent scenes the members of the community gather to try to save the whales, suggesting the importance of the event for the village as a whole. This sequence serves as the ultimate proof of Pai’s connection to the ancestor, as she had called for his assistance in Koru’s search, and he came. As community members attempt to return the whales to the sea, Pai climbs on the back of the largest male, riding him into the ocean. She becomes the whale rider. In these sequences, the viewer is positioned less as a member of the community and more as an empathetic observer of this exciting spectacle. When Pai is taken out to sea on the whale’s back, we are left with some doubt as to whether or not she will survive, but this anxiety is quickly quelled with a scene of Pai in a hospital bed. She has recovered and the film ends as Koru visits her to ask her forgiveness.

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While typical Hollywood cinematic devices prevail, Whale Rider draws upon some aspects of a M¯aori aesthetic. Caro’s film faintly echoes Barry Barclay’s documentation of M¯aori life in his pioneering films; it specifically echoes his portrayal of a tightly-knit community coming to terms with the influence of P¯akeh¯a society in Ngati (1987). Set in the same geographic region of the country, Whale Rider follows in Ngati’s footsteps, particularly in the scenes of community members gathering at the marae or in someone’s home. But where Ngati was more intimate in scope with a meandering narrative and multiple plot lines, Whale Rider focuses on large-scale dramatic events that foreground Pai’s struggle and propel the plot towards its emotional conclusion. Caro has taken a mainstream cinema aesthetic and infused it with some elements of M¯aori film-making, creating a transnational, hybrid film that speaks to global audiences. Fourth Cinema In addition to his work as a film-maker, Barry Barclay has lectured and written about the concept of Fourth Cinema, or cinema made by Indigenous peoples with a kind of Indigenous essence. This essence, Barclay suggests, may only be understood by Indigenous people, but like all cinema, Fourth Cinema works on many different levels. Also important to Barclay’s concept of Fourth Cinema is the idea that film-makers can use the medium as a popular court of appeal; they can infuse their work with larger political goals. The conditions of production in Fourth Cinema are less hierarchical and more cooperative than those in First (or Hollywood) Cinema. Fourth Cinema filmmakers are interested in the process of production and respect for Indigenous communities and protocols. Barclay suggests that the conditions of exhibition might be different as well. A Fourth Cinema film event might be a communal gathering where people watch the film, eat a meal together and generally share each other’s company. He even suggests that film-makers might pay people to come to the film, arrange transportation for them on a bus, prepare the meal for them and make the occasion into a kind of hui (gathering).This idea, he says, fits into the M¯aori tradition of hospitality and gift-giving; rather than asking the audience to go to the film, you bring the film to them.1 For Barclay, film-making is a political act that empowers Indigenous peoples and cultures. In his Fourth Cinema aesthetic, the act of taking back the camera is likened to an act of revolution. Fourth Cinema films challenge the power relations established by Hollywood cinema. 1

Barry Barclay, personal communication, June 2003.

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Part of the film’s appeal is its skilful embrace of the ‘girl power’ genre, a global phenomenon in popular culture that highlights girlhood as a powerful position of social, political and cultural agency. Featuring a strong-willed female protagonist, these texts chronicle the protagonist’s rise to respect after being dismissed by the larger community on the basis of her gender and/or age. In such texts, female heroes challenge conventional patriarchal values and offer positive role models for young women. Scholars trace the girl power ethos back to a group of young feminists who called themselves Riot Grrls, but the idea was brought into the mainstream by the British popular music group, the Spice Girls in the mid-1990s. Film and television texts credited with founding the modern genre include Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–2001), Sabrina, The Teenage Witch (1996–2003), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997– 2003), Charlie’s Angels (Joseph McGinty, 2000) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Ang Lee, 2000).

Further Reading DeSouza, Pascale, ‘Maoritanga in Whale Rider and Once Were Warriors: a problematic rebirth through female leaders’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, 1:1, January 2007, pp.15–27. Gonick, Marnina, ‘Between “Girl Power” and “Reviving Ophelia”: constituting the neoliberal girl subject’, NWSA Journal, 18:2, 2006, pp.1–23. Hokowhitu, Brendan, ‘The Death of Koro Paka: “Traditional” M¯aori Patriarchy’, The Contemporary Pacific 20:1, Spring 2008, pp.115–41.

Note 1

Non-Indigenous New Zealander.

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Introduction By Michelle Arrow •

One Summer Again (1985)

•

Evil Angels (1988)

•

An Angel at My Table (1990)

•

The Piano (1993)

•

Heavenly Creatures (1994)

•

Ned Kelly (2003)

Historians have long been interested in the social and cultural meanings of crime, violence and deviance, so it comes as no surprise to find the producers of historical films framing their narratives around similar concerns. Depicting crime and violence on screen raises important ethical questions while also testing the limits of representation itself: does the representation of ‘true crime’ constitute an additional violation of its victims? Can the life of someone who has experienced trauma and violence be sensitively – and truthfully – depicted in film? Each of these films grapples with questions of truth, violence and deviance in starkly different circumstances. Ned Kelly is one of Australia’s iconic criminal figures. According to Sarah Pinto, Gregor Jordan’s 2003 film Ned Kelly is less interested in why Kelly resonates in Australian folklore than in offering a portrait of Kelly the individual. Jordan’s Kelly, Pinto argues, is a ‘profoundly – and even more crucially, legitimately – angry man’, whose anger drives his heroic actions and identity. In this reading, anger is transformed into a reasonable motivational force, and criminal violence is its logical consequence. It also has the effect of rendering Kelly a victim, as well as an agent, of history. While the scarcity of evidence of Kelly’s life has necessitated a deal of invention on the part of film-makers, the line between ‘truth’ and fantasy is stretched for different reasons in Peter

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Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994). The film depicts the infamous ParkerHulme case, in which two teenage girls, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, murdered Pauline’s mother in Christchurch, in 1954. Their youth and their intense friendship meant that the crime attracted intense public interest, and Jackson used his film to restore the perspectives of Parker and Hulme to the story and to remedy representations of their relationship as ‘deviant’. Central to the film is the recreation of the girls’ elaborate world of make-believe, which makes the film so fascinating for historians. While a simple claim of ‘truthfulness’ is difficult to sustain, instances of what Rosenstone calls ‘true invention’ add to the richness of the film, as James Bennett explains. While Ned Kelly and Heavenly Creatures both depict graphic violence on screen, Evil Angels (1988) portrays a different kind of violence: that enacted by the state against Lindy and Michael Chamberlain. Falsely accused of murdering their daughter, the Chamberlains were demonised by the press and the Australian people and were subsequently found guilty of their daughter’s murder. In my chapter, I argue that Evil Angels was a crusading film, emphatically insisting on the Chamberlain’s innocence at a time when many people still believed they were guilty. Jane Campion’s An Angel at My Table (1990) offers an intimate perspective on history, and the treatment of those deemed to be ‘deviant’, in particular. Based on the autobiography of distinguished New Zealand writer Janet Frame, who was falsely diagnosed with schizophrenia and confined to an institution for many years, the film succeeds because it fosters a sense of intimacy between Frame and the audience, as Fincina Hopgood points out. Like most of the films discussed in this section, An Angel at My Table depicts the traumatic experiences of its protagonist in bracing, yet compassionate ways, and Frame emerges from these experiences, as Hopgood notes, strong and resilient. Jane Campion’s success has been crucial to the emergence of a distinctive, contemporary New Zealand cinema industry, and her most successful film to date is the historical drama The Piano (1993). An historical romance depicting imagined, rather than actual historical, characters, The Piano rests on the violence of colonisation. In her chapter, Harriet Margolis suggests that the film is about colonial attitudes towards property as much as it is about love, and that the film was part of a broader re-imagining of Aotearoa New Zealand identity and history. Nonetheless, she also suggests that the film’s representations of M¯aori were enmeshed in colonialist discourses, and the depiction of M¯aori, and of New Zealand’s, history was sharply criticised by New Zealanders. In the spirit of The Piano’s imagined histories, and acting as an Australian precedent, Bill Garner contemplates the deliberately anachronistic settings of the television series One Summer Again (1985). While the documentary explores the nineteenth-century Heidelberg School of painting, it replaces the iconic Australian bush with a contemporary urban and modern landscape, which raises jarring questions about ‘history’ and representation.

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One Summer Again:The Dramatising of the Heidelberg School By Bill Garner One Summer Again (1985) is a series of three one-hour length episodes on ABC TV, dramatising the Heidelberg School of painting, the movement also known as Australian Impressionism which produced the first self-consciously national images as the Australian colonies approached Federation. The series opens with Tom Roberts, the leader of the movement, cycling into the country with his painting gear on his back. A viewer with an eye for anachronism might notice that he is riding a modern bicycle. A couple of scenes later, as the women art students erupt into the street after having been excluded from the life-drawing class, we see modern cars passing. How could this be possible? Surely the action is taking place in the 1880s? Later, Frederick McCubbin stumbles through a paddock of car wrecks as he and Roberts make their way to a sketching ground. Interior scenes suggest the late nineteenth century, but costumes seem ambiguous. The characters behave as if they are in the past, but the setting is often the present. The ‘rules’ of period drama have been deliberately broken, but for what purpose? The iconic pictures of Roberts, McCubbin and Arthur Streeton were associated with an assertive Australian identity in which the bush was represented as primal. These pictures inform the look of the series and the paintings often set the scenes, but the representation of the past is constantly undercut by glimpses of the present. The deliberate use of anachronism dislodges the drama from its imagined ‘time’ with the result that the 1880s do not seem so distant or so different. A clear separation between past and present is usually the mark of historical drama and diminishing it in this way raises questions about the conventions of representing the past on-screen. In 1981 the Marxist historian Humphrey McQueen approached the ABC with a proposal for a technically innovative television series about Tom Roberts and the Heidelberg School. He wanted the series to disturb viewers in the same way that the Impressionists had done. The national broadcaster was keen but wary. Although drawn to a subject of national importance, the ABC’s priority was that a drama should first be entertainment. If it were to

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What does the past look like? Challenging the convention of period Period drama is a very powerful influence on how we ‘see’ the past. In the film industry, ‘period’ refers to any representation outside the present that requires special dressing to indicate the time in which the action occurs. For convenience it is broken into decades (like history) but a period ‘look’ usually only becomes visible after about two decades.The 1980s is now period, but has the 1990s yet become sufficiently differentiated? Even where a production is respectful of research, the relationship between the drama and the history is highly problematic. On the one hand, drama can embody what historians have empirically established, while on the other hand the fictionalisation falsifies that history. Conventional expressions of ‘period’ exacerbate this conundrum by entrenching stereotypes such as the representation of the 1960s (flower children, LSD, Vietnam protests) or the 1920s (short skirts, gangsters and the Charleston). But historical dramas can open the audience to fresh understandings of the past simply by presenting period differently. Challenging period conventions is an effective way of suggesting new interpretations of history. But is period dressing necessary for historical drama at all? A test case is the rejection of period in One Summer Again. At the time it was first screened some viewers found it confusing, others found it stimulating.

proceed it would be as a standard costume drama. This idea appalled McQueen. The tension surrounding the project eventually led to sackings and the shifting of McQueen to an advisory role.1 Just before shooting was to begin the series was cancelled because period dressing (estimated at an additional 25 per cent of the original budget) would cost too much. This opened the way for an argument to be mounted to shoot in the present, which would cost much less (and allow a much more radical interpretation). With great trepidation, the ABC agreed to let the experiment proceed. The creators welcomed the new approach but McQueen was concerned that viewers might be confused by mixing the present with the past, as popular ideas of what the ‘past’ looked like were formed from costume dramas. But when it was broadcast the response was generally very positive and the experiment showed that the audience was open to history being dramatised without the usual period trappings. And it was precisely the audience’s familiarity with the conventions that allowed the subversion to be both entertaining and provocative. Instead of undermining credibility, the radical structure flagged and supported the revisionist history the series was offering.

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In the late 1880s Australian Impressionism was itself breaking the rules of academic painting. By also breaking the rules, the series opens a new space for the viewer’s imagination, offering a way of reconsidering both the representation of the past and of the relationship between the ‘past’ and history. While the blatant anachronism initially shocks the eye, the mind soon accepts the new convention. By rendering anachronism irrelevant, attention is focused on elements other than the detail of reconstruction and the themes of the series are able to emerge less encumbered with period foliage. It tapped into contemporary concerns with the marginalisation of women, the power of taste-makers, the market value of celebrity, the impact economic conditions have on art and even the danger of STDs in a bohemian lifestyle. And the broad question of identifying a distinctively ‘Australian’ art that so concerned the artists in the 1880s was exercising ABC television viewers a century later as the problem of national identity. An element usually suppressed in period drama set before the twentieth century is any sense of modernity. The creators of One Summer Again wanted to present the Melbourne of the 1880s as a very modern city. In The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Graeme Davison had shown that Melbourne in the late nineteenth century was possibly the most modern city in the world.2 In One Summer Again the characters are simply dropped into the metropolis described by Davison. When Roberts and Jane Sutherland catch an electric train it reflects the reality that in the late 1880s the artists lived in a recognisably ‘modern’ world: they might take suburban trains, switch on a light, and even ride in a lift or make a telephone call. Another gesture towards authenticity was made by shooting in locations frequented by the artists, including the beaches, the bush and the exterior of Roberts’ studio. Drama prioritises character over history and writers and actors extend characters beyond what historical evidence can justify. With historical drama one must always wonder to what extent history is re-made to fit the characters and enhance the story. Viewer beware: One Summer Again includes many scenes lacking any evidentiary justification. Do such inventions render the whole programme inauthentic or historically useless? Not if we recognise that the relationship between the past and its representation is always problematic. Historical fiction informs our understanding by offering plausible hypotheses: the drama suggests ‘it could have been like this’ but it does not say ‘it probably was like this’. In One Summer Again the characters are tightly constrained by class and economic factors as well as by their personalities. They are not mysteriously ‘driven’ individuals. Their lives are formed by what is going on around them: what is being taught at the Gallery School; who controls the local art societies; what the critics are saying and who is buying. So in one scene Roberts instructs the young Arthur Streeton on the importance of putting a

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price on a picture. Their ‘school’ is an ensemble in which conflict – the essence of drama – is used to draw out complexities. For instance, McCubbin is presented as loathing Conder. The painters are not initially drawn together by a shared ideology but by shared opposition to the conservative forces in the local art world and by recognising that their ambitions will be advanced by being part of a group. The manifesto declaring that theirs is a ‘truly Australian art’ only appears later, in the catalogue of the game-changing 9×5 exhibition (9 inches by 5 inches was the size of the cigar box lids on which they painted impressions for the show). For a national art movement their ideology is remarkably flexible. The Heidelberg School of the series is fragile, riven with differences and constantly threatened with dissolution because drama looks for conflict and so also represents history as conflict. Roberts, Streeton, McCubbin and Conder were already familiar to the ABC television audience. To these were added Jane Sutherland and Clara Southern, the two women artists most associated with the movement.3 Bringing the women into the foreground reflects the politics of the 1980s which alerted both dramatists and historians to the situation of women artists in the 1880s. Theodore Fink, a lawyer to the land boomers, and Maurice Brodsky, editor of the high-class gossip magazine Table Talk, comment on finance, the economy and society. The male painters’ commercial success is shown as coming on the back of a property and sharemarket bubble. Paintings such as Roberts’ Shearing the Rams and McCubbin’s Down on His Luck are framed dramatically by politics and money. In the series, while Roberts is making his studies for Shearing the Rams he witnesses a militant shearer threatening to burn down the shed, as happened during the shearers’ strikes of the time. And the drama makes it clear that McCubbin’s sad-looking model for Down on His Luck was the artist and small businessman Louis Abrahams, who really was depressed, and killed himself after going bankrupt. Historical dramas onscreen usually rely heavily on published sources, but in 1985 the published history of the Heidelberg School was still fragmentary. Conder was the only one who had been served by a full-length biography and only because he was regarded as an English painter; very little was known about Sutherland and Southern. While the audience was familiar with the male painters’ names and with some of their works, few would have had any sense of their lives or their circle, so the series provided the opportunity of working on a new canvas. The characters that emerge are not bushmen with brushes but dandified city bohemians with an eye for the market. This sat uneasily with their reputation as the first authentic painters of the bush but it was soon to become the new orthodoxy, for 1985 saw the publication of City Bushmen, a revisionist history which emphasised the urban identity of the painters and the often derivative nature of their images of the bush.4

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Although Humphrey McQueen was happy with the final result, as an historian he remained uncomfortable with ‘making things up’. When history is re-imagined through fiction the result is often disturbing to historians, as in the controversy surrounding Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.5 The compromises exacted by television drama exaggerate even more the disjunction between the ‘historical’ and the ‘dramatised’ past. McQueen resolved his own contradiction by later writing a conventional biography of Tom Roberts, against which the liberties taken in the series can be judged.6

Further Reading Astbury, Leigh, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985. McQueen, Humphrey, Tom Roberts, Macmillan, Sydney, 1996. McQueen, Humphrey, ‘Tits and feathers’, Island Magazine, 22, Autumn 1985, pp.21–35.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5

6

For a full account see Humphrey McQueen, ‘Tits and feathers’, Island Magazine, no. 22, Autumn 1985, pp.21–35. Graeme Davison, The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Melbourne University Press, Melbourne, 1978. Information about both women may be found at http://www.artistsfootsteps.com. Leigh Astbury, City Bushmen: The Heidelberg School and the Rural Mythology, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1985. Historians Mark McKenna and Inga Clendinnen disputed what they saw as Grenville’s claim for a new form of history writing in her account of life at Sydney Cove. See McKenna ‘Writing the Past: History, Literature and the Public Sphere in Australia’, viewed 30 October 2010, http://www.humanitieswritingproject .net.au (now discontinued); and Inga Clendinnen ‘The history question: who owns the past?’, Quarterly Essay, no. 23, 2006, pp.1–128. Grenville’s response, viewed 30 October 2010 is at http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_River_ History%20and%20Fiction. Humphrey McQueen, Tom Roberts, Macmillan, Sydney, 1996.

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Witnessing Innocence: Fred Schepisi’s Evil Angels By Michelle Arrow On 17 August 1980, a dingo took Lindy and Michael Chamberlain’s baby daughter Azaria from a campsite at Uluru/Ayers Rock. This tragic event quickly gained notoriety: firstly, as a media event centred on a criminal trial, where Lindy was convicted of killing her daughter, and later, when she was pardoned, as a terrible miscarriage of justice. Most observers argued that Lindy was widely presumed guilty of murder because the eyewitness testimony of a handful of individuals was sidelined, not just by faulty forensic evidence, but also by the millions who came to see her in press reports and concluded that she ‘looked’ guilty. Fred Schepisi’s 1988 film Evil Angels served as an intervention into the public discourse around the case, emphatically demonstrating the Chamberlains’ innocence at a time when many were still convinced of their guilt. Evil Angels (or A Cry in the Dark as it was known internationally) is an example of the historical film as crusader: it sought to make amends for the ways Australia treated the Chamberlains, and to rewrite perceptions of the history it depicted. Evil Angels was released on 3 November 1988, the year of Australia’s bicentenary and one year after the huge success of Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee, which had sought to shape a positive and exportable version of Australian identity. Evil Angels, with its dark portrait of Australia, was a confronting rupture in the veneer of popular nationalism being celebrated in 1988. It was also highly topical – filming took place while the Royal Commission into the case was still conducting hearings, and the producers held off releasing the film until shortly after the Chamberlains were exonerated by the Northern Territory Court of Appeals of all charges in connection with their daughter’s disappearance. Evil Angels is based on John Bryson’s book of the same name (1985), which, through careful accretion of close detail, presented an overwhelming picture of an innocent woman falsely convicted of murder. Producer Verity Lambert optioned Bryson’s book and scriptwriter Robert Caswell was hired to produce a screenplay, as Fred Schepisi had rejected the offer to write and direct because he was daunted by ‘the responsibility of getting it right’.1 Schepisi later agreed to direct the film after Meryl Streep signed on to play

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Lindy and wanted to work with an Australian director.2 Caswell conducted extensive research, including wide-ranging interviews with the Chamberlains, ensuring that the film offers emotional insights not included in Bryson’s text. Caswell became an impassioned advocate for the Chamberlains: when he first met with Streep, he told Lindy that ‘I got so worked up telling her about you and the way you’d been so thoroughly fucked by the Northern Territory government, police and judiciary, that I broke down and howled like a baby’.3 While Lindy and Michael acted as advisors on the film, Schepisi nonetheless insisted that the film was ‘not Lindy’s point of view’, and, indeed, the film includes scenes to which the Chamberlains were not privy, such as those featuring gossiping members of the general public.4 Evil Angels is unequivocal in its insistence on historical fidelity: the first words we see on screen are ‘This is a true story’. The film sets out to present the truth of Azaria Chamberlain’s disappearance and the subsequent ordeal of her parents in order to demonstrate their innocence to a hostile public. Indeed, reviewing the film in the New York Times, Vincent Canby complained about the film’s lack of melodrama, arguing that ‘Mr. Schepisi

The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain The Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain (1983), directed by Judy Rymer and featuring a ‘personal narration’ by author Frank Moorhouse, was broadcast in 1984, after the Chamberlains had been convicted and their appeal to the High Court had been dismissed: their guilt seemed certain and the narrative of the case had reached a point of closure.The film is an unusual hybrid of docudrama and presenter-led documentary: it shifts between Moorhouse’s commentary and dramatisations of the case based on both the defence and the prosecution’s versions of events. Re-enactments by actors are used to posit two scenarios to explain Azaria’s disappearance, but the film marshals documentary effects (with captions and a presenter) to stage a fictitious event that undermined the Chamberlains’ claims to innocence. In staging Lindy’s version of the story first, and then countering it with forensic claims and the prosecution’s vivid account of murder, the re-enactment, as Moorhouse himself later noted, gave ‘the prosecution hypothesis a theatrical plausibility’, making truth claims that were, in fact, false and thus deeply damaging to the Chamberlains.1 1

Frank Moorhouse, ‘The Azaria-Chamberlain case (1980–86): hysteria and the intellectuals’, Australian Cultural History, no. 12, 1993, p.165.

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has chosen to present the terrible events in the outback in such a way that there’s never any doubt in the audience’s mind about what happened’.5 Yet the film’s aim was precisely to leave the audience in no doubt as to what happened to Azaria Chamberlain and it reinstated the eyewitness accounts of Lindy, Michael and the campers at Uluru as the truthful version of events. We, the audience, see what Lindy sees – a dingo emerging from the family tent with something in its mouth. There is no sense that this is a mere ‘possibility’: as Dan Harper noted, when Michael and Sally Lowe hear Azaria’s cry, ‘Schepisi shows us what Lindy saw … So [she] was not the only one who saw it. We saw it, too.’6 We watch the media packs and court proceedings with mounting horror because we know what really happened. The film also exposes the ways the media manipulated the Chamberlains and produced narratives of the story that chimed with community prejudices. For example, when the first inquest visits the Chamberlain’s campsite at night, we see a cameraman trip over his sound recordist. Lindy covers her face and laughs, but the photograph of her appears on a tabloid newspaper under the headline ‘Azaria Anguish’. By highlighting the ways that the media actively constructed prejudicial narratives about the case, the audience is invited to rethink their consumption of such narratives. Rather than soften Lindy and Michael Chamberlain for a mass audience, the film insists that we accept their difference on their own terms. We see Lindy’s brusqueness and Michael’s religiosity, the qualities that hardened public opinion against them, but we also see Michael’s crisis of faith, and Lindy’s loving care of her baby daughter – intimate behaviours witnessed only by those who were there. As a depiction of such recent – and controversial – history, Evil Angels was bound to be held to a higher standard of accuracy than most historical films, and Schepisi assembles a range of cinematic techniques to persuade his audience that they are witnessing events that actually happened. Key media images are restaged in the film in a framework of innocence, not suspicion and guilt, and we often see the media pack from Lindy and Michael’s point of view: witnessing the media from the perspective of those framed by it. This is also reinforced by a doubling effect – we often see images and scenes twice, once, as they happen, (e.g. when the Chamberlains are being interviewed by the press), and again, through a television screen, often located amongst a crowd of people who are also watching. Schepisi uses very few close-ups, and the first close-up we see is of Azaria, being lovingly bathed and dressed by Lindy at the campsite. There is also very little use of music to heighten dramatic effects or other devices that could be said to manipulate the audience. The effect of this restraint is to remind us that we are not meant to consume this text as a cinematic event but as a representation of historical truth. Indeed Schepisi declared that Evil Angels was not a ‘movie’, but

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something approaching a ‘home movie…not in the sense of cheap, or corny, or amateur-looking, but for people to have the feeling ‘this is actually happening’. I wanted it to be something you experienced. I wanted the feeling that you were involved in the event.’7 Evil Angels operates as an historical representation, but it also serves as an artefact of the mid-1980s. It does this in two key ways: in its depiction of ‘everyday Australians’ and their relationship to the case, and in its deployment of Meryl Streep’s post-feminist star power, at its peak in the 1980s. Evil Angels not only holds the media to account, but the general public. Some of the most uncomfortable scenes in the film depict ‘ordinary’ Australians at barbeques, dinner parties and pubs discussing the case, implicating them in the Chamberlains’ persecution. Audiences see themselves reflected onscreen in a manner that is intended to provoke shame, and Lindy Chamberlain recalled that following the film’s release, ‘many people wrote us letters of apology […]. They were people who realised how much they had been gulled by the bad press and helped contribute to our pain themselves.’8 The casting of Meryl Streep, a leading film actress of the 1980s, added a feminist inflection to the film, ensuring it would attract international attention.9 Streep was famous for her immense versatility playing a range of complex women in films like Sophie’s Choice (1982) and Out of Africa (1985). Indeed, Karen Hollinger argued that Streep formed her own genre in the 1980s, the ‘Meryl Streep film’: complex, literate and focusing on a multifaceted heroine, and in this way, Lindy Chamberlain joined the ranks of Streep’s strong cinematic heroines, framing our understandings of her story.10 Upon the release of Through My Eyes, the 2004 television mini-series about her story, Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton commented that: Viewers will see all sorts of things that they’ve never seen before, and they’ll see them in a way that isn’t dry or boring, like reading a court transcript that they may not understand. You’re seeing Tony and Simone’s view of the research they’ve done into this. And in 10 or 15 years, someone else will have a go and it will be a different way around.11

Here, she points out that any kind of history-telling is mutable, dependent on the teller and their motivations. Different histories matter at different moments. Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton is also aware that there can never be a definitive version of her story that might relegate it to the ‘past’, for it is still a living story, with frequent anniversaries and reminders. All the screen versions of the story, including Evil Angels, are attempts to come to terms with the trauma of the case. Evil Angels, perhaps more so than any other film of the story, challenged widely-circulated images of the Chamberlain case, reimagining and transforming them.

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Further Reading Bryson, John, Evil Angels, Penguin, Ringwood, Victoria, 1985. Chamberlain, Lindy, Through My Eyes, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1990. Mizejewski, Linda, ‘Meryl Streep: feminism and femininity in the era of backlash’ in Robert Eberwein (ed.), Star Decades: The 1980s, Rutgers University Press, Piscataway NJ, 2011. Staines, Deborah, Michelle Arrow and Katherine Biber (eds.), The Chamberlain Case, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2009.

Notes 1 Lindy Chamberlain, Through My Eyes: An Autobiography, William Heinemann, Melbourne, 1990, p.607. 2 Chamberlain, p.607. 3 Chamberlain, p.607. 4 Chamberlain, p.605; Philippa Hawker, ‘The making of Evil Angels: an interview with Fred Schepisi’, Cinema Papers, no. 70, 1988, p.10, reproduced in Deborah Staines, Michelle Arrow and Katherine Biber (eds.), The Chamberlain Case, Australian Scholarly Publishing, Melbourne, 2009, pp.236–239. 5 Vincent Canby, ‘A cry in the dark’, New York Times, 11 November 1988, n.p. 6 Dan Harper, ‘A Cry in the Dark (aka Evil Angels, Fred Schepisi, 1988)’, Senses of Cinema, no. 13, 2001, viewed 30 October 2010, http://www.sensesofcinema .com/contents/01/13/cry.html. 7 Phillippa Hawker, pp.236–239. 8 Chamberlain, p.750. 9 Linda Mizejewski, ‘Meryl Streep: feminism and femininity in the era of backlash’, in Robert Eberwein (ed.), Acting for America: Movie Stars of the 1980s, Rutgers University Press, Piscataway NJ, 2010, pp.201–222. 10 Karen Hollinger, The Actress: Hollywood Acting and the Female Star, Routledge, New York and London, 2006, p.73. 11 Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton and Debi Enker, ‘Trial by Fury’, Sydney Morning Herald, 22–8 November 2004, The Guide, p.5.

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An Angel at My Table By Fincina Hopgood An Angel at My Table (1990) is a film rich with insights into New Zealand’s history and culture. Through its protagonist, Janet Frame, we are offered privileged access to the experience of growing up in New Zealand in the 1930s and 1940s, as we follow Janet’s journey from childhood, through adolescence, into adulthood. Janet’s determination to become a writer – already apparent in primary school – allows the film to explore social attitudes towards artists, while her experiences in New Zealand’s psychiatric institutions present a damning indictment of the medical establishment and society’s inability to accept those who look or act differently from others. The film is adapted from Janet Frame’s autobiography, which was originally published in three volumes: To the Is-land (1982), An Angel at My Table (1984) and The Envoy from Mirror City (1985). Frame is New Zealand’s most acclaimed novelist, with numerous awards, fellowships and honours including membership of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Order of New Zealand.1 Frame grew up in a working-class family, with three sisters and one brother. The family frequently moved house around New Zealand, following their father’s changing posts as a worker on the railways. During her university studies, Frame was diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia and spent several years in psychiatric care (this diagnosis was later found to be incorrect). After her collection of short stories won an award, Frame was mentored by New Zealand literary figure Frank Sargeson. Like many intellectuals and artists from Australia and New Zealand in the 1950s, Frame travelled to Europe – basing herself principally in London and Ibiza – where she sought to establish her literary career by working on manuscripts and meeting with publishers. While she found she was more readily accepted overseas as a writer than she had been back home, Frame soon returned to New Zealand, where she continued to write until her death in 2004.2 The director, Jane Campion, also grew up in New Zealand, although she received her training at the Australian Film and Television School in the 1980s and has since based herself in Australia. Campion has said in interviews that she identified with, and responded to, Frame’s tales of childhood in New Zealand. Describing her response to To the Is-land, the first

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The emblematic image of a young Janet Frame (Alexia Keogh) alone in the vast New Zealand landscape.

volume of Frame’s autobiography, Campion recalled ‘how much my childhood felt like hers’: ‘It awakened my own memories of my childhood; her book really seemed to me to be an essay on childhood in New Zealand.’3 Originally, Campion and scriptwriter Laura Jones intended to adapt the autobiography as a three-part mini-series for television, to reflect the structure of Frame’s three volumes. By the time she completed the shooting of An Angel at My Table, Campion had already established a reputation on the world stage as a significant new film-maker, after her short films and first feature, Sweetie (1989), screened at the Cannes film festival, with Peel (1983) winning the Caméra d’Or for best short film. The New Zealand Film Commission convinced Campion to re-edit the mini-series as a feature-length film. The film went on to win numerous awards, most notably the Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival. Campion and Jones consulted with Frame throughout the process of developing the screenplay. When it came to deciding how to depict Frame’s years in psychiatric care, the film-makers also drew upon Frame’s novel Faces in the Water (1961), a fictionalised account of her experiences in psychiatric hospitals in New Zealand in the 1940s and 1950s. In her autobiography, Frame does not dwell upon her harrowing experiences of institutionalisation,

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Memories of family life Jane Campion has taken care to recreate on screen Janet Frame’s memories of her early childhood.The film opens with brief glimpses of a baby’s feet on grass and a mother’s outstretched arms and voice, which evoke the sensual world of babyhood. As Janet grows, scenes from her childhood become longer and more detailed. We see Janet and her sisters sharing a bed, reading stories, dressing up and dancing in the forest, and the night-time drama of her brother’s epileptic fits. These scenes are still episodic and fragmentary, as our own memories of childhood are.

which included multiple electric shock treatments, but instead she directs interested readers to this earlier novel. While the montage sequence depicting Janet’s years of institutionalisation occupies relatively little screen time (only ten minutes out of the film’s total running time of 155 minutes), it contains some of the most haunting images in the film, such as the pathetic sight of male and female patients in a zombie-like state ‘dressed up’ for a ballroom dance, and Janet incarcerated in a cell, desperately scribbling poetry on the wall in an attempt to survive these dehumanising conditions. These and other scenes in the psychiatric hospital are all adapted from Faces in the Water. The film-makers faced the challenge of depicting Janet’s traumatic experiences in psychiatric care without alienating the audience. To accomplish this, Campion builds an intimate relationship between Janet and the audience throughout the first half of the film, so that this relationship is firmly established by the time Janet is hospitalised. This intimacy is achieved through the devices of cinematography and voice-over narration. Extracts from Frame’s autobiography were used in Jones’ screenplay as voice-over, to provide access to Janet’s internal thoughts and emotions. This is especially important given Janet’s shy, introverted nature; she does not share her feelings easily with other characters. Campion and her cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh add to this intimacy through their choice of shots, particularly the many close-ups and point-of-view shots that literally bring the camera (and the audience) closer to Janet and privilege her emotions above those of other characters. While there are times when Janet may act or behave strangely, we never lose our intimate relationship with her. This is most obvious in the scene where Janet suffers a nervous breakdown in the classroom, while she is being observed by the school inspector. As an anxious Janet turns towards the

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blackboard, she freezes and becomes fixated on a piece of chalk in her hand. We see a close-up of her impassive face, then a shot from Janet’s point of view of the chalk in her hand, before another close-up of her face as Janet stands motionless for what seems an unbearably long time. There is no music, no sound other than the whispers of schoolchildren, and Campion extends this moment long enough to make the audience feel uncomfortable. In their discomfort, the audience shares the awkwardness of this moment with Janet and sympathises with her feelings of distress. One of the factors contributing to Janet’s shyness and difficulty socialising with her peers is her appearance, especially her frizzy red hair which earns her the nickname ‘Fuzzy’. Throughout the film, Janet tries – and fails – to achieve the culturally accepted standards of femininity. This is apparent in scenes where other women offer advice as to how Janet might style her hair (e.g. in the school changing room or when Janet is to meet with her publisher) and where Janet studies her appearance in the mirror. She adopts a toothless smile to cover her rotten, decayed teeth, a legacy of her family’s poverty. Janet’s embarrassment over her appearance intensifies her self-consciousness, leading her to retreat from social interactions with others. This introverted nature, and her struggles with the pressures of teaching, are misinterpreted by the medical establishment as symptoms of a mental illness. Interestingly, Janet initially embraces the label of being ‘schizophrenic’ because of its association with famous artists, writers and musicians like Robert Schumann, Hugo Wolf and Virginia Woolf. The film presents a critical view of society’s tendency to view artists as ‘mad geniuses’. This fascination is still evident today in the popular success of films such as Shine (Scott Hicks, 1996), A Beautiful Mind (Ron Howard, 2001), The Hours (Stephen Daldry,

A personal journey through New Zealand cinema In 1995, New Zealand actor Sam Neill was commissioned by the British Film Institute to make a documentary about New Zealand cinema, Cinema of Unease (discussed in this volume by Brenda Allen), which offers further insight into the attitudes of New Zealanders towards mental illness and the arts. He recalls growing up in New Zealand in the 1950s, which he describes as a ‘paranoid time’: ‘it was rigorously conformist, politically conservative and socially dull. But […] the greatest fear of all was madness, paradoxically for many the only way out.’ Neill presents madness as a form of escape from the ‘suffocatingly dull life’ of 1950s New Zealand, suggesting there was no room for visionary artists, like Janet Frame, in the conservative Anglophile country he remembers.

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2002) and The Soloist (Joe Wright, 2009) – all based on real people. One of Frame’s reasons for writing her autobiography was to debunk her own mythology as ‘New Zealand’s mad writer’. Campion reflected upon this curiosity about ‘the real Janet Frame’ when she observed: when her autobiographies came out, I was incredibly eager to find out what the story really was, and I was shocked to find out how normal she was. […] it was like the unravelling of a myth.4

Campion’s film continues Frame’s project of unravelling the myth of the mad genius by focusing on the ordinary and universal experiences of Janet’s childhood and adolescence – siblings, school, friendships, holidays, leaving home. An Angel at My Table insists upon Janet’s normality in the face of the tremendous hardship and adversity. From an early age, Janet endured her family’s poverty, her brother’s epilepsy and the deaths of two sisters. All this occurs before Janet is hospitalised, which is yet another traumatic experience. The fact that Janet emerges from these ordeals to become New Zealand’s preeminent writer of the twentieth century is testimony to her strength, not her illness. In her adaptation of Frame’s autobiography, Campion has crafted a loving portrait of family life and of the strength of the writer’s imagination that sustains Janet along the challenging journey of finding one’s own identity free of social expectations.

Further Reading Frame, Janet, An Autobiography (in three volumes), George Braziller, New York, 1991. Jones, Laura, ‘An Angel at My Table: The Screenplay’ in Janet Frame’s, An Autobiography, Pandor, London and Sydney, 1990. Verhoeven, Deb, Jane Campion, Routledge, New York and London, 2009.

Notes 1

2 3

4

To make the distinction between the character in the film and the author in real life, I refer to the character portrayed on screen as ‘Janet’, and I use ‘Frame’ to refer to the actual person, particularly her writings. Frame’s posthumously published novel Towards Another Summer (2007) gives a fascinating insight into the experiences of living ‘in exile’ as a writer overseas. Lynden Barber, ‘Angel With An Eccentric Eye’ in Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Jane Campion: Interviews, Jackson: Mississippi University Press, 1999, p.60; and Michael Ciment, ‘The Red Wigs of Autobiography: Jane Campion’, Wexman, p.63. Barber, pp.59–60.

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The Piano By Harriet Margolis A watershed in the history not just of New Zealand cinema but also of Aotearoa New Zealand itself,1 The Piano (Jane Campion, 1993, 121 mins) remains alive as a cinematic reference around the world. Its status, in fact, is as something of a cult film, precious to some audiences but also widely satirised.2 It has been read primarily in terms of its love story, not between a voluntarily mute woman (Ada, played by Holly Hunter) and the man who becomes her husband (Stewart, played by Sam Neill) through an arranged marriage in colonial Aotearoa New Zealand, but between Ada and her husband’s assistant (Baines, played by Harvey Keitel), a man who has ‘gone native’ among M¯aori. Baines awakens her sexuality and sense of self to the extent that she is willing to turn away from the one person with whom she has been close, her illegitimate daughter (Flora, played by Anna Paquin), even causing Ada to separate from her piano, which has been her real means of self-expression up until now. The Piano is, however, as much about colonialist attitudes to property as it is about love, with the Indigenous M¯aori playing an important role in both subplots. Director Jane Campion has said that in conceptualising the film she took inspiration from her own family history of nineteenth-century colonial experience in Aotearoa New Zealand, and that she also spent time in the National Library doing research that influenced the look of her characters in terms of their dress and hair, as well as in relation to certain small but striking components of the story.3 Campion wanted to explore the psycho-social impact on relatively puritan Protestant settlers of contact with M¯aori, whose society imposed no similar prudish constraints on their individuals.4 Unsurprisingly, M¯aori objected to The Piano on various counts, some of which she shrugged off by saying that ‘the tendency of certain Maori is to have a heroic vision of their past and that was not what I intended to show’.5 Yet Campion’s representation of relations between P¯akeh¯a (European settlers) and M¯aori during colonial times is accurate with regard to P¯akeh¯a contempt for M¯aori attitudes towards the land. ‘What do they want the land for? They don’t do anything with it. They don’t cultivate it, don’t burn it back, nothing! How do they even know that it’s theirs?!’ Stewart exclaims to Baines

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as they walk past markers Stewart has posted to delineate land Baines has exchanged with him for Ada’s piano. Such an attitude marked colonialist justifications for land appropriations around the world, particularly in Africa and America, as well as in Australasia. By 1993 a M¯aori cultural and political renaissance in Aotearoa New Zealand had brought about major changes in what was becoming a postcolonial nation despite itself. When Great Britain began in the 1960s to cut its economic ties with the former colony as it turned towards the European economic and political union, Aotearoa New Zealand was forced to reassess its own national identity. M¯aori had always been a strong visual component of representations of that national identity, along with native flora and fauna,6 but from the 1970s, M¯aori increasingly claimed a more active role, making the M¯aori language literally a talking point and forcing the government to address old grievances from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries about illegal appropriations of land. Forced legally and economically to re-evaluate what was done in the past and where the country could go in a future cut loose from mother Britain, P¯akeh¯a New Zealanders experienced an unease about how to identify themselves that has yet to settle (witness the frequent magazine and newspaper features on ‘what is a New Zealander?’ in the last two decades). Aotearoa New Zealand has long been popularly known as ‘Godzone’/’God’s own’ because of its ‘clean, green’ image. As with Once Were Warriors’ trompel’œil opening that critiques commercial exploitation of the land at the expense of its pristine qualities, Campion points to the destructive impact of settler society on the land. One peculiarly persistent criticism of Campion’s script was its unacknowledged resemblance to an iconic New Zealand novel, Jane Mander’s The Story of a New Zealand River (1938). This novel deals, among other things, with the exploitation of native timber, and with commercial gain overwhelming environmental concerns. Around Stewart’s house we see the ugly stumps of trees he has cut down, leaving himself surrounded by mud. In addition to the need to clear space for housing and to use trees for building materials, many colonists, Campion has noted, ‘burned down all the woods’ because they found the isolation of native bush ‘claustrophobic’.7 In a crucial scene, one drawn from the history of colonial relations between M¯aori and the British, Stewart, assisted by Baines’s translations, offers blankets and muskets in trade for land with a local M¯aori chief. (Muskets were a major item of trade, since M¯aori with muskets could more successfully wage war on other M¯aori who had yet to obtain them through their own contact with colonists.) Stewart’s offer comes after the chief, speaking in M¯aori with subtitles on screen (an unusual gesture of respect for M¯aori in a film from this time), explains that the land in question is tapu (sacred) as a burial site.

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Victorian sexuality Jane Campion has said that she set The Piano in 1850 because she wanted to make a film about the discovery of sexuality among people who she assumed were sexually ‘naive’ because of Victorian prudery, and in the absence of twentieth-century concepts of ‘love, sex and eroticism’. Campion acknowledges a debt to nineteenth-century novels by George Eliot and the Brontë sisters: ‘My goal was to contribute my point of view on the nineteenth century, because there are things that I could treat that these writers couldn’t speak about so openly.’ Yet it may be naive on our part to assume that, because the representation of sexuality was unavailable in mainstream nineteenth-century media, the awareness of sexuality was also non-existent. A collection of letters from Tom King, a mid-nineteenth-century New Zealand colonist, including letters to his wife, Mary, who was three years older than he was, raises interesting possibilities. It is clear from these letters that Victorian prudery was absent from their marriage. Away from Mary in 1854, he writes: ‘I shall come back starved for want of kisses and shall have to return not to a coy blushing maid, but to a ripe joyous woman, one who will return my kisses with ardour and respond with warmth to my embraces.’

This is the scene that precedes the exchange between Stewart and Baines as they walk past Stewart’s new markers for what had been Baines’s land. And this scene is a key reason why The Piano has achieved such critical acclaim. It transcends the frequent critical denigration of melodramas and love stories – simplistic by definition – by achieving another level of discourse. Ada, as well as her piano, is clearly an object of exchange among men: firstly, her father and Stewart, and then Stewart and Baines. To regain her piano, she must bargain with Baines, but since the piano is tantamount to herself through its importance to her sense of who she is, and since the bargain involves allowing Baines certain liberties with her person, the extent to which she can avoid exploitation (commercial or sexual) is pretty limited. For many detractors of the film, Baines is no better than Stewart: both men are rapists.8 The parallel between Ada and M¯aori is thus as victim of the colonialists’ (i.e. white males) exploitation resulting from their capitalist view of the world. The general M¯aori response did not particularly object to Campion’s criticism of P¯akeh¯a colonialism, although many did not appreciate the suggestion that their ancestors had been victims. The most frequent M¯aori objection was that Campion had relegated M¯aori to a backdrop (the mythical and unchanging

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‘natural’) against which a story of ‘civilised’ P¯akeh¯a concerns might play out. From their point of view, Campion, however unintentionally, presented a less than positive representation of M¯aori interactions with the P¯akeh¯a world. Internationally, this was not particularly problematic due to a lack of knowledge regarding M¯aori–P¯akeh¯a relations, with the notable exception of a negative response from the African–American popular culture analyst bell hooks.9 Domestically, though, it was part of a local debate that Annie Goldson may have accurately summed up, with reference to some responses published by expatriate New Zealanders, by saying that ‘perhaps because of their absence, they missed the subtleties of the political moment in this country. The film’s representation of New Zealand history, for all its provocation and poetry, was found by audiences here to be lacking.’10 Campion has said that she told Waihoroi Shortland, her official cultural advisor for The Piano, ‘that I didn’t want to approach the question from a political angle. I wanted to find the reality and authenticity of M¯aori behavior, of their way of speaking, without trying to impose a political point of view.’11 She said similarly naive things about whether she was a feminist, even as The Piano was acclaimed as a feminist film, but she has since ‘come out’ as an ardent feminist. Presumably, with her anthropologist’s background, she has also since realised that one cannot observe and represent another culture without bringing one’s own ideological point of view to bear.

Further Reading Margolis, Harriet Elaine (ed.), Jane Campion’s The Piano, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004. Polan, Dana, Jane Campion, British Film Institute, London, 2001. Wright Wexman, Virginia (ed.), Jane Campion: Interviews, Mississippi University Press, Jackson, 1999.

Notes 1 Its significance for the New Zealand film industry was that – along with other international successes like Once Were Warriors and Heavenly Creatures – it persuaded the New Zealand government to consider film production as a viable component of the national economy. See Peter Calder, ‘Would-be Warriors: New Zealand film since The Piano’ in Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa (eds.), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2nd edn, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1996, 185. 2 For example, Topless Women Talk About Their Lives, Harry Sinclair, 1997 and The Real Blonde, Tom DeCillo, 1997.

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3 See Harriet Margolis, ‘A strange heritage: from colonisation to transformation?’ in Harriet Margolis (ed.), Jane Campion’s The Piano, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, 1–41; also see various interviews found in Virginia Wright Wexman (ed.), Jane Campion Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, 1999. See for example Thomas Bourguignon and Michel Ciment, ‘Interview with Jane Campion: More Barbarian than Aesthete’, p.103; Miro Bilbrough, ‘The Piano’, p.114; and Lynden Barber, ‘Playing it Low-Key’, p.143. 4 See Bourguignon and Ciment, p.104; Vincent Ostria and Thierry Jousse, ‘The Piano: Interview with Jane Campion’, pp.124–5, and Barber, p.144. 5 Bourguignon and Ciment, p.103. 6 See Martin Blythe, Naming the Other: Images of the M¯aori in New Zealand Film and Television, Scarecrow, Metuchen NJ, 1995. 7 Marli Feldvoss, ‘Jane Campion: Making Friends by Directing Films’, p.99. ‘Bush’ is the local term for the densely covered natural state of much of Aotearoa New Zealand before settlers cleared the land for development. 8 For example, Lisa Samas, ‘What rape is’, Arena Magazine, 8, December 1993, p.14, and Carolyn Gage, ‘No,’ Broadsheet, 204, Spring 1994, p.59. 9 bell hooks, ‘Gangsta culture—sexism, misogyny’, in Outlaw culture: resisting representations, Routledge, New York, 1994, pp.115–23. 10 Annie Goldson, ‘Piano lessons’ in Jonathan Dennis and Jan Bieringa (eds.), Film in Aotearoa New Zealand, 2nd edn, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 1996, p.198. 11 Ostria and Jousse, pp.130–1.

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Heavenly Creatures: The 1954 Parker-Hulme Case By James E. Bennett Heavenly Creatures (Peter Jackson, 1994) is a dramatised representation of events leading to the 1954 Parker–Hulme murder case in which two Christchurch schoolgirls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, aged 16 and 15 respectively, committed matricide, slaying Pauline’s mother, Honora Rieper (née Parker). There are several versions of the film (ranging from 99 to 109 mins) due to a number of deleted scenes in the earliest North American cinematic and video releases. The age and gender of the perpetrators, the intensity of their friendship, the brutal nature of the murder and later revelations about the families of the two teenagers were factors that made this one of the most publicised cases in New Zealand criminal history. The intention of Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson’s Academy Award-nominated original screenplay was to overturn layers of mythology surrounding the protagonists, and to give the New Zealand public a space in which to rethink the case 40 years on.1 Their project resonates with the theories of philosopher Walter Benjamin who envisaged history as a ‘technique of awakening the unconscious world of remembrance’. Benjamin believed film was the ideal modern technology to fulfil this mission as it: transformed our notions of time and space, showed us life as the naked eye cannot perceive it, an unconscious optics that with the intensity of ‘dynamite’ might have the power to awaken the sleeping collective.2

Heavenly Creatures echoes the newer social histories (especially in the United States) that rethink the notion of the 1950s as a period of social tranquillity, domestic calm and suburban normalcy by interrogating society itself and the mechanisms employed to contain deviance. The historic case also rests heavily on emotions and obsessions that are arguably best portrayed through film. The context of Heavenly Creatures’ production was a small-scale local film industry that rose to international prominence in the 1990s through a series of critically acclaimed commercial feature films, notably The Piano (1993) and Once Were Warriors (1994), made respectively by a female and M¯aori

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director. The specific viewpoint of the film-maker in Heavenly Creatures is a very good exemplar of the social and cultural change to New Zealand society by the late twentieth century, and the dialectic it reflects between past and present. Rather than offering a perspective that merely reinforces the 1950s medical and social commentary of two ‘deviant’ protagonists, Jackson as auteur instead provides a pungent socio-political critique of the community inhabited by Parker and Hulme. Jackson and Walsh identified with them as subjects who seemed more from their own era (i.e. the 1990s) and to that extent their approach can be seen as a rescue narrative that mirrors the sensibilities of post-colonial New Zealand society.3 The parody, for example, of adult figures of authority, most notably the doctor and vicar, show that the film-maker has little time for the dominant patriarchal narratives of the 1950s that demonised Parker and Hulme. Best known in his early career for low-budget cult splatter films, the success of Heavenly Creatures catapulted the ‘Kaiser of Kiwi Ketchup’4 into mainstream commercial success. Jackson’s long-term partner and collaborator, Fran Walsh, was an important inspiration for the project in which the filmmaker engaged for the first time with material that had a factual basis. In other respects there is a clear stylistic and imaginative continuity with the early schlock horror elements the film-maker brought to his craft. In Heavenly Creatures, Jackson combines many genres and elements including surrealism, gothic horror, black and white dream sequences that bookend the film, plasticine characters to represent the interior make-believe world of the two girls, an introductory montage of Christchurch drawn from 1950s commemorative documentaries, and elements of the drama-documentary style. He also employs the voice-over technique drawing on key entries from Pauline Parker’s diaries, the central exhibit in the Supreme Court trial following the murder. The overall effect is a distinctive aesthetic that interweaves the ‘reality’ of 1950s Christchurch with the make-believe world constructed by the two girls. While Jackson presents the story to his audience in a more sympathetic light than 1950s textual representations, he does not present events exclusively through the eyes of any one character. The imaginative qualities of the film – especially the lavishly visualised make-believe Kingdom of Borovnia – together with Jackson’s stated intention of authenticity in choice of historic locations, retention of actual names from the 1954 case and other detail, make this a difficult film to classify. Often assumed to be merely a fictionalised version of events, it contains many examples of what film historian Robert Rosenstone has classified as ‘true invention’.5 In other words, it employs invention in order for it to succeed as a dramatic visual text; inventions that are broadly consistent with historical discourse despite some recontextualistions and dramatised scenes that depart from the ‘reality’ of the case. Nevertheless, it must be conceded that the

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Heavenly Creatures, Dir Sir Peter Jackson, New Zealand, 1994.

potential for multiple audience readings of a complex visual text such as Heavenly Creatures renders problematic any claim to its inherent truthfulness. The opening sequence of the film employs the technique of ghosting through a voice from the past that is clearly foreign to the contemporary viewer. The travelogue sequences of mid-twentieth-century Christchurch, provincial, orderly, white and conservative, are suddenly robbed of this bucolic veneer when juxtaposed with a hand-held camera following two blood-splattered girls running and screaming along a tunnel-like path. The underbelly of the city is suddenly exposed. This shocking and dizzying combination is an important element in Jackson’s film making techniques that allow him to first set up and then quickly dash audience expectations. The film’s narrative arc is centred on the friendship between Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker: it begins with their first meeting in class at Christchurch Girls’ High School in 1953 and culminates in the murder of Pauline’s mother along a deserted path in Victoria Park in the winter of 1954. Events are seen largely (but not entirely) from the girls’ perspective. This was a deliberate corrective employed by Walsh and Jackson to the adult authority figures from the 1950s who succeeded in shutting down the two girls and depriving them of a voice during the ensuing legal process. In their hands the protagonists are also humanised in opposition to the 1950s commentariat that constructed them as monsters. The titles at the beginning establish that we will hear their

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Controlling and remedying ‘deviance’ One of the notable features of this case was the sensational and salacious social commentary on the relationship between the two girls, reported with little restraint by the print media. Their age, gender and personal interactions with adult professionals also challenged contemporary ideological standards of femininity. Parker and Hulme were widely believed to have had a homosexual relationship and, as Glamuzina and Laurie have argued, this was interpreted as a symptom of their pathology. The 1950s were a time marked by much disagreement between medical and psychiatric professionals on the aetiology of homosexuality; however, it was almost universally seen through medical eyes as an abnormality, and commonly as a perversion or illness. In Jackson’s version we see Pauline’s homosexuality diagnosed, and ipso facto her deviance constructed, by the medical man, Dr F.O. Bennett. By the time Heavenly Creatures was released, private, consenting same-sex relations between consenting males had been decriminalised in New Zealand for nearly a decade, and it had long since shifted from a medical condition to a social identity. This dialectic between past and present is captured powerfully by the camera as it zooms in on Dr Bennett’s mouth when he struggles to enunciate the word ‘homosexuality’ to Mrs Rieper, just as it did when Dr Hulme expressed his coded misgivings about the ‘unnatural’ friendship between the girls to the Riepers.

words and that this is their story based in large measure on Parker’s diary entries. One problem in reading the film arises from the extensive use of plasticine characters from Borovnia, some of whom are predisposed to acts of violence. This elaborately imagined make-believe world, as detailed in the diaries, is regularly intercut with the often drab world of 1950s Christchurch, and is sometimes read by audiences as a sign of madness in the girls. This issue also besets contemporary and (in some cases) more recent commentary that interprets the diary entries unproblematically as evidence of murderous intent by the girls towards others in their community. In point of fact, Jackson’s purpose was to critique social conformity and to peel away the layers of a parochial 1950s community. Through a combination of dialogue and the technique of flashback, the audience quickly appreciates that both girls experienced difficult childhoods and, for different reasons, have a problematic relationship with their parents. They bond, in part, through their common need for an escape valve: Juliet from her feeling of parental (read maternal) neglect and even abandonment earlier in her life, and Pauline from her dull and less privileged social

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circumstances. Juliet and her family are English (an exotic attraction to Pauline), her parents are respected professionals well known in the small community, they are of secure upper middle-class circumstances, and the trappings of this lifestyle are openly displayed at Ilam, the official residence of the Rector of Canterbury College, Dr Henry Hulme. Games, rituals and make-believe underpin the growing emotional intensity of Parker and Hulme’s friendship that is only strengthened after each conflict they experience with adults, be they parents, teachers, the vicar or doctor. A sequence of events sees the two protagonists spiral into crisis: affairs culminate in the Hulmes’ decision to leave New Zealand and to place their daughter with her aunt in South Africa to convalesce after Juliet’s recent bout of tuberculosis. In a misidentification of the real obstacle facing them, Parker and Hulme decide that Pauline’s mother, who refuses to allow her daughter to accompany the Hulmes overseas, is really responsible for their imminent separation and must be made to pay the ultimate price. We see Pauline virtually accepted as a surrogate daughter of the Hulmes, a dream that is ruptured irrevocably at the end of the film in the black and white shipboard sequence. Pauline’s ultimate fear of separation from Juliet and the Hulmes comes to pass, symbolising the condition attached to their eventual release from prison that they never see each other again.

Further Reading Bennett, James E., ‘Medicine, Sexuality and High Anxiety in 1950s New Zealand: Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures (1994)’, Health and History: Journal of Australian and NZ Society of the History of Medicine, 8:2, 2006, pp.147–75. Bennett, James E., ‘Fifty Years of Parker and Hulme: A Survey of Some Major Textual Representations and their Ideological Significance’, Journal of New Zealand Studies, 4, 2006, pp.11–37. Glamuzina, Julie and Alison J. Laurie, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View, New Women’s Press, Auckland, 1991. Rich, B. Ruby, ‘Introduction’ [America edition] in Julie Glamuzina and Alison J. Laurie, Parker and Hulme: A Lesbian View, Firebrand Books, Ann Arbor, 1995.

Notes 1

Tod Lippy, Heavenly Creatures interview with Peter Jackson and Frances Walsh, ‘The one ring’, TBHL, viewed 7 October 2003, http://www.tbhl.theonering.net/ peter/interviews/walsh_jackson.html, now discontinued.

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Making Film and Television Histories Vanessa R. Schwartz, ‘Walter Benjamin for historians’, The American Historical Review, December 2001, viewed 7 October 2003 http://www.historycooperative .org/journals/ahr/ah0501001721.html. Tod Lippy, n.p. Barry Keith Grant, A Cultural Assault: The NZ Films of Peter Jackson, Kakapo Books, Nottingham, 1999, p.1. Robert Rosenstone, Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1995, pp.64–76.

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Ned Kelly (2003) By Sarah Pinto Filmic histories of the story of Edward ‘Ned’ Kelly (1855–80), that quintessentially Australian bushranger hero, have been a feature of Australian cinema since its beginnings at the turn of the twentieth century. The very first feature film produced in Australia was in all likelihood Charles Tait’s Story of the Kelly Gang in 1906, and new versions of the events of Kelly’s life and death have been appearing on Australian screens ever since. The endurance of this story is hardly surprising; Kelly is nothing if not a compelling historical figure. The son of an Irish convict, Kelly and his family were well known to the colonial authorities of central Victoria, a direct result of either the Kellys’ wide-ranging criminal activities or persistent and unwarranted police harassment, depending on your perspective. Kelly himself was arrested on several different charges as a teenager and first spent time in prison as a 15 year old. Following an incident at the family home in 1878 during which a young police constable, Alexander Fitzpatrick, claimed to have been attacked and shot, Ned and his brother Dan went into hiding, joined by two friends, Steve Hart and Joe Byrne, who together would become the Kelly Gang. When the gang shot and killed three members of a police search party, they were outlawed. On the run, the Kelly Gang robbed banks, shot and killed an associate they believed had turned informant, and took hostages in a siege at Glenrowan that led to the deaths of Hart, Byrne and Dan Kelly. Ned survived the siege only to be sentenced to death for his crimes after a very public trial in Melbourne, and was hanged on 11 November 1880. There is more to the Kelly story, however, than the gang’s bushranging activities; Kelly was not an ordinary outlaw. He wrote letters of protest, the most famous of which was the Jerilderie Letter, an 8000-word manifesto Kelly attempted to have printed and distributed during the gang’s occupation of the town of Jerilderie in 1879. The Jerilderie Letter ‘gives the impression of a man ready to explode’, as Alex McDermott put it, and is notable for its warning of impending violence from Kelly and his gang.1 The siege at Glenrowan famously saw the gang attempt to derail a passenger train, take hostages at the local inn, and face police in home-made armour. Kelly’s trial was notorious for the unusual conversations between Kelly and his trial

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judge, Sir Redmond Barry. And his hanging took place despite a public petition against the sentence that reportedly attracted as many as 30,000 signatures. Given the notoriety of these events, it is perhaps unsurprising that the story of Ned Kelly was being told and mythologised even before the siege that claimed the lives of his gang and led to his arrest and execution. In fact, Kelly has been so mythologised in Australian culture it can sometimes seem difficult, if not impossible, to view Kelly the person rather than Kelly the outlaw, the Australian Legend, or the criminal.2 The mythological Kelly is usually a skilled bushman and loyal brother, son and mate whose criminal activities were forced upon him by the injustices and inequities of colonial Victoria. Although the significance of the mythological Kelly as a cultural icon can be easily appreciated – in everything from adoring fan websites to Sidney Nolan’s series of paintings – explanations for this significance are a little less clear. David Tacey has suggested Kelly’s ongoing importance can be explained by his embodiment of a ‘significant part of the Australian psyche… [namely,] the release of Oedipal rage, primal narcissism and the attempted defeat of an apparently repressive, paternalistic system’.3 Katherine Biber, however, gestured towards a more straightforward explanation of Kelly’s endurance when she noted that ‘violent white men are the backbone of [Australian] culture’.4 There are few violent white men in Australia culture with the profile and prominence of Ned Kelly. Whatever the reason, Kelly’s popularity seems only to have increased in recent times, and his story continues to be a significant presence in Australia’s fictional historical narratives. Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly (2003) has been one of the most visible of these recent histories, in part due to the presence of Heath Ledger in the title role, an actor who, at the time of the film’s release, had successfully made the move from Australian to Hollywood film and was soon to become a bona fide film star. A dark and sombre treatment of the Kelly story, Jordan’s film is closer in tone to Tony Richardson’s infamous Ned Kelly (1970), starring Mick Jagger, than the light-hearted treatments of the more recent Reckless Kelly (Yahoo Serious, 1993) or Ned (Abe Forsythe, 2003). Jordan’s version is based in part on Robert Drewe’s historical novel, Our Sunshine (1991), and like Drewe’s novel the film’s focus is squarely on Kelly the man rather than Kelly the myth; the film is narrated throughout by Kelly in voice-over and concludes with his capture, two filmic strategies which work to maintain a focus on the character and emotional life of Kelly as an individual rather than his entry into Australian mythology. Jordan’s film positions Kelly-the-individual as a victim of police persecution and colonial injustice, motivated in his actions by the noble causes of defending the honour of his family, his friends, and himself. Indeed, in this film it is anger at the injustices which befall Kelly and his kin that shapes his character and

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directs his action. Jordan’s Kelly is an aggressive, violent and justifiably angry Australian hero. Whilst the possibility that Kelly was an intensely angry man is sometimes considered in non-fiction histories of his life, it is rarely so central as it is in Ned Kelly. In Jordan’s film, Kelly’s heroism can be found precisely in his willingness to be guided by the anger he feels in response to the injustice and oppression that surrounds him. It is Kelly’s anger, then, that offers him legitimacy, fuels his heroism, and makes him Australian. Typically understood as a social and moral emotion, political psychologist Graham Little tied anger to three interrelated forces: intense rivalry, intense misery and the overwhelming need to defend oneself.5 Jordan’s angry version of Kelly’s character clearly aligns with Little’s conceptualisation. Unsettled and uncomfortable, Kelly’s rivalry, misery and desire to defend himself (and his friends and family) leads to the articulation of an anger of such violence and intensity that it disrupts the social and political order of nineteenth-century Victoria. Political and social in nature, then, Kelly’s anger can be seen most clearly in Jordan’s film in the way he responds to the mistreatment of his family and the behaviour of the colonial authorities. Central to Kelly’s family-driven anger is his outrage at the treatment of his mother, Ellen. Ned Kelly is strikingly clear in its depiction of the relationship between the unjust treatment of Ellen Kelly and the motivations underpinning the behaviour of her son; at times it seems Kelly’s actions are entirely explicable in terms of his anger at his mother’s arrest and imprisonment. The key to this representation can be found in the scene that follows Ellen’s arrest for her involvement in the Fitzpatrick incident, one of the most significant and wellknown events of the Kelly story. Ellen’s arrest in Ned Kelly is set to ominous music and under the cover of darkness. Ned’s sister, Kate (Kerry Condon), rides to a Chinese camp where Kelly, his brother Dan (Laurence Kinlan) and Joe Byrne (Orlando Bloom) are in hiding. Upon learning of his mother’s arrest and Fitzpatrick’s allegations against him, Kelly flies into an uncontrollable rage: ‘They’d take the word of a drunkard liar and arrest an innocent woman? Is that right?’ Kelly yells at Aaron Sherrit (Joel Edgerton) as he grabs at him – and then throws him away – in anger. ‘I won’t take this injustice. I’m going to kill him. I swear I’ll scatter his blood and brains like rain.’ Kelly is so lost to his anger at this moment in the film that he has to be physically prevented from immediately seeking out Fitzpatrick to exact his revenge. Fuelled in part by the imprisonment of his mother, Kelly’s anger is also directed towards the unfair and unjust behaviour of the authorities of colonial Victoria, and particularly that of the colony’s police force. One of Ned Kelly’s earliest scenes depicts an incident of intense anger on the part

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of Kelly at police injustice, an incident that functions as a founding moment in the film not only of the Kelly story, but also of Kelly’s character. The scene is a depiction of the teenage Kelly’s arrest and subsequent incarceration for horse-stealing. Importantly, it represents an event that sent a 16-yearold Kelly to prison for three years, despite his ongoing protestations of innocence. In Jordan’s film, Kelly becomes uncontrollably violent as Constable Hall (Russell Gilbert) attempts to arrest him for his involvement in the theft of a horse. Kelly argues with Hall about the ownership of the horse, during which the Constable (unintentionally) shoots at him. ‘What are you trying to do? I ought to tan your hide for that,’ Kelly yells at Hall as he attacks him in the street. Hall is rescued from Kelly’s violent anger by two other police officers, but even so, Kelly’s anger cannot be subdued. A captured Kelly encourages Hall to assault him as he is being restrained by the two other officers, provoking the Constable with taunts: ‘Is that the best you can do you bloody coward?’ Ned Kelly is, as Ina Bertrand noted, an ‘angry version’ of the Kelly story.6 Perhaps more significantly, however, Jordan’s film is also a version of the story in which Kelly is a profoundly – and, even more crucially, legitimately – angry man whose willingness to be guided by his feelings of anger at injustice forms the basis of his heroic actions and identity. By the end, Kelly’s anger has been controlled, in part for the sake of the social and political stability of the colony. As the man who eventually captures Kelly, Superintendent Hare (Geoffrey Rush) reminds his officers, in a (prematurely) nation-making moment, that Kelly and his gang are ‘leaders of a movement…[that] threatens the stability of an entire country’. Even so, Kelly’s actions retain their legitimacy in this film, and an angry and violent version of white Australian masculinity is celebrated and valorised as a result. In contrast to so many other films released in Australia at the turn of the twenty-first century, Ned Kelly affirmed a version of Australian masculinity that had been the subject of a great deal of political, social and cultural critique, in no small part due to the damage the assertion and representation of this subjecthood was seen to be capable of inflicting on its various others.7 And further, in attaching a sense of anger to the representation, the film also seemed to be suggesting anger as not only a legitimate response to these critiques, but also an acceptable – and perhaps even heroic – motivational force. At the same time, the mobilisation of anger that occurs within the film’s historical representation functions to re-legitimise the victimised and violent white man as an historical subject. Given the various oppressions associated with the articulation of this subject in history-making – oppressions that have been highlighted by so much (fictional and non-fictional) historical writing in Australia in the closing decades of the twentieth century – Ned Kelly looks increasingly like a particularly troubling historical project.

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Further Reading Butterss, Phillip, ‘From Ned Kelly to Queens in the Desert’ in Susan Magarey (ed.), Social Justice: Politics, Technology and Culture for a Better World, Wakefield Press, Kent Town SA, 1998, pp.65–79. Innes, Lyn, Ned Kelly: Icon of Modern Culture, Helm Information, Westfield, 2008. Jones, Ian, Ned Kelly: A Short Life, Lothian Books, Melbourne, 2003. McDermott, Alex (ed.), The Jerilderie Letter, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2001.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

7

Alex McDermott, ‘The apocalyptic chant of Ned Kelly’ in Ned Kelly, The Jerilderie Letter, Text Publishing, Melbourne, 2001, p.xxvii. Although there has been some debate about the authorship of the Jerilderie and Cameron letters, McDermott convincingly argues here that the voice is undeniably that of Kelly. As Kelly historian Ian Jones has suggested, the armour with which Kelly is so readily associated can also act as a barrier to our understanding of the person within. Ian Jones, ‘A new view of Ned Kelly’ in Colin F. Cave (ed.), Ned Kelly: Man and Myth, Cassell Australia, Melbourne, 1968, p.155. David Tacey, ‘Descent into the unconscious: part 1’, Island, no. 55, Winter 1993, p.58. Katherine Biber, ‘“Turned out real nice after all”: death and masculinity in Australian cinema’ in Katherine Biber, Tom Sear and Dave Trudinger (eds.), Playing the Man: New Approaches to Masculinity, Pluto Press, Annandale NSW, 1999, p.32. Graham Little, The Public Emotions: From Mourning to Hope, ABC Books, Sydney, 2001, pp.153–4. Ina Bertrand, ‘New histories of the Kelly Gang: Gregor Jordan’s Ned Kelly’, Senses of Cinema, no. 26, May–June 2003, viewed 7 July 2011, http://www.sensesofcinema.com/2003/26/ned_kelly/. Sarah Pinto and Leigh Boucher, ‘Fighting for legitimacy: masculinity, political voice and Ned Kelly’, Journal of Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, vol. 10, no. 1, 2006, pp.1–29.

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Introduction By Rebecca Beirne •

Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938)

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My Brilliant Career (1979)

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Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters (1979)

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Love the Beast (2009)

Understandings and representations of gender and sexuality are significantly informed by temporality, and no film text can escape the influences of its era. The authors within this section examine screen texts that engage with issues of gender and sexuality in diverse ways, each of which reflects the specific timeframe of its production. Yorick Smaal argues that Dad and Dave Come to Town is a more explicit representation of male homosexuality than was generally the case in films from the 1930s. This is achieved through the portrayal of Mr Entwhistle, a shop assistant in the enterprise owned by the ‘Dad’ of the title. Although presented as a flamboyant, ‘sissy’ character archetype, he is nevertheless positioned favourably among the main characters of the film. Kristen Stevens shows us a more traditional vision of Australian maleness in Love the Beast, a film which offers a nostalgic view of the role played by muscle cars in the development of young (sub)urban masculinities. Representations of mateship have always played a strong role in Australian popular culture, and Love the Beast is no exception to this, but the mateship here portrayed is quite apart from Anzac or bush mythology, with these young men brought together by mechanical technology; fitting for a film from the twenty-first century, which nonetheless explicitly engages with a personal journey through the late twentieth century. During the 1970s in Australia, as around the world, the feminist and gay and lesbian social movements saw a rapid expansion in filmic and television representations that foregrounded strong female characters as well as diverse sexualities rarely seen on screen previously. A key aspect of many feminist

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texts in the 1970s was the reclaiming of female voices from the past, and this can be seen in Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 adaptation of the iconic Miles Franklin novel My Brilliant Career (1901). Jill Roe argues that the film is as much a cultural marker as the novel was before it, demonstrating a 1970s aesthetic in an 1890s setting through its feminist approach and women producers. The first Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, held in 1978, was a watershed moment for Australia’s queer communities, and this event is commemorated in the 1979 documentary Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters. Ahead of its time in various ways, including the reclamation of insults in its title, this film offers a glimpse into this important time in Australian gay and lesbian history. While these films represent only a fraction of the screen texts that explicitly explore issues of gender and sexuality, each of them offer unique portraits of the variety of ways in which Australian film-makers have engaged with these issues.

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Dad and Dave Come to Town: Mr Entwhistle and Male Homosexuality By Yorick Smaal Dad and Dave Come to Town (1938) is essentially a fish-out-of-water story, one of Australia’s greatest bush comedies with the delightful twist of being set in the city. The narrative centres on a rural family who uproot from their familiar surrounds and relocate to an urban centre where they attempt to adapt to modern city life. The central premise of the film asks whether Australians have the confidence to be modern in the wider world of 1938.1 One significant aspect of the film is its portrayal of sex and gender in the inter-war period. Dad’s daughter, Jill, is particularly notable as a strong, determined and educated young woman: one of her lines, ‘Don’t call me girly’, became the title of a 1985 feminist documentary on women and women’s images in early Australian cinema. Most striking, however, is the character of Mr Entwhistle (an effeminate, over-the-top, but ultimately heroic floor walker); a stereotypical sissy who might have been read in a number of different ways. Arguably, his inclusion in Dad and Dave Come to Town might be considered as the first cinematic portrayal of male homosexuality in Australian film. Not unexpectedly, he is portrayed as working in retail. The story begins on a farm where the opening scenes introduce the Rudd family and their associates. Bill Ryan (Peter Finch) wants to marry Sarah Rudd (Valerie Scanlon) but the central character, Dad Rudd (Bert Bailey) – engaged in a long-standing neighbourly feud with Old Mr Ryan (Marshall Crosby) over the sale of his bottom paddock – will hear nothing of the arrangement. After a series of comic interludes involving the marriage proposal, the family dog and Dave’s (Fred McDonald’s) inane patents, a timely letter announces the death of Dad’s brother Alfred. Dad and Dave, along with Mum Rudd (Connie Martyn) and daughter Jill (Shirley Ann Richard) – who is a new addition to the Rudd family dynamic – set off for the city to learn more about Dad’s inheritance. In this unnamed metropolis they discover that Dad has acquired Alfred’s home, Bella Vista, and centrally for the plot, his business; Cecille’s Fashion and Dress Emporium. This

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‘frock shop’, in 1930s parlance, becomes the primary setting for the remainder of the film. The business has been performing poorly under the corrupt management of Mr Rawlings (Cecil Perry) who is secretly in cahoots with competitor, Pierre (Sidney Wheeler), owner of a nearby rival dress shop. When Rawlings is discovered and ultimately dismissed, Jill takes over the running of Cecille’s and along with Mr Entwhistle (Alec Kellaway), and publicity agent Jim Bradley (Billy Rayes), she sets in motion a new business plan. As the plot develops, Dad becomes known as the celebrity ‘farmer dressmaker’ and decides to undertake a major renovation of the store. Meanwhile, his son Dave is smitten with Myrtle (Muriel Flood), one of the store models. As the grand re-opening arrives, Pierre reappears to plays his trump card (a £1000 promissory note he had from Alfred) in a last ditch bid to obtain control of Cecille’s. As the centrepiece fashion show of the gala opening commences, Pierre’s hoodlums begin to strip the shop of its fittings. Dad’s rural nemesis, Mr Ryan, arrives in time to buy Dad’s paddock for £1000 and the company is subsequently saved. Dad, Dave and Mum return to the farm while Jill, Bradley and Entwhistle remain to manage the store. At the time Dad and Dave Come to Town was shown to audiences in the late 1930s, male homosexuality was an established (although cloaked) part of Australian metropolitan life. Small but sophisticated urban subcultures were evident in large centres such as Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Adelaide. Here, men relied upon the visibility of difference to meet like-minded others in public places, marking out their sexuality through dress, demeanour or affection. Those ‘in the know’ could spot a potential suitor. Within the relative safety of intimate social circles, patterns of gender-inversion were a significant part of homosexual identity. Some men adopted a sophisticated vernacular, used ‘female’ names and engaged in other effete rituals.2 The character of Entwhistle fits neatly within this model. This is signalled in no small part by his role as an urban floor walker, a role requiring detailed knowledge of, and interest in, ladies’ fashion, make-up and accessories. His ‘perfectly gorgeous idea’ for Cecille’s female uniform, for example, was ‘a lovely mist blue with a garland of roses around the neck’. Entwhistle’s own attire is also telling: he is coiffed and well dressed in a suit, complete with a tightly-knotted, diagonally-striped tie and pocket square. The most suggestive aspect of Entwhistle’s sexuality, however, is his voice and exaggerated behaviour. Kellaway speaks with an affected air and his physical performance employs dramatic postures and wild gesticulations, attributes that had been well-honed by the seasoned American actor, Franklin Pangborn, who was well-known for his kaleidoscopic variations of the sissy in the 1930s.3 Entwhistle is also positioned as an emotionally fragile individual, an attribute most readily ascribed to women; he is never considered as a ‘real’

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Mateship and masculinity The urban masculinities portrayed generally in Dad and Dave Come to Town do not measure up to their rural counterparts. Effeminacy and corruption can be considered a corollary of city life that weakens the heroic male image.1 Forged in the harsh social and climatic conditions of the Australian bush, Dad Rudd embodies the archetypal contemporary Australian male. His ultimate triumph is the result of honesty, hard work and straightforwardness. As he explains in his own words: When I was Dave’s age I’d stand up at the back of the plough at the bottom of the ten acre paddock and watch them furrows running away to the rim of the world. Every furrow was as straight as a die. But some of these blokes in the city, they can’t plough straight; they can’t run straight.

The connection between country life and mateship, working-class solidarity and egalitarian loyalty, are emphasised towards the end of the film when Old Man Ryan comes to Dad’s financial aid despite their differences.‘Where I come from’, Ryan explains to Pierre, ‘a man sticks to his word.’ ‘You’re a man’, Dad replies, putting his hand on his neighbour’s shoulders. 1

Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, revised ed., Harper and Row, New York, 1987, p.16.

man and his weakness supports the traditional nexus between sex-role behaviour and deviancy.4 When Entwhistle is promoted to manager, for example, he gasps, falls to his seat, and removing his handkerchief, begins to mop his face. He acknowledges his own weakness when Jill threatens to let another employee go. With his hand trembling, Entwhistle sips a glass of water intended for a potential ex-employee: ‘I’m afraid I could never be a dictator’ he reveals, a line which places his failed masculinity hierarchically below Jill’s controlled and ‘square-shooting’ demeanour. This impotency is reinforced towards the end of the film when one of Pierre’s goons, ready to strip the shop of fittings, refers to the floor walker as ‘Miss’. And although he gallantly attempts to prevent their actions, Entwhistle is hopelessly inadequate in physical confrontation. He is seen clinging desperately to a settee, shrieking hysterically as the men begin to carry the item away. But how readily did contemporary Australian audiences make the connection between this persona and male homosexuality? Garry Wotherspoon suggests that ‘no-one seeing the movie can be in any doubt as to the type of character that Entwhistle was meant to represent’.5 Even Ken

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Hall, the film’s seasoned director, regarded Entwhistle as a new inclusion to ‘Australian film’s repertoire of types’.6 Members of the creative and literary set, and those enmeshed in the homosexual world itself, would certainly have been able to read the cues. Others might have been aware of other contemporary evidence; articles in scurrilous newspapers, such as the Truth, linked window dressers and floor walkers with ‘perverted’ practices. For the general viewing audience, the most explicit reference to the object of Entwhistle’s desire is made by Cecille’s fraudulent manager, Rawlings, when he states: ‘All he can think about is frocks. Why he can’t even see the women inside them!’ If Rawlings appears quite certain about Entwhistle’s identity, then Dad Rudd is not quite sure what to make of it all, at least at the beginning. Mistaking a room of mannequins for real women (‘I think it must be one of them nudist colonies I been reading about’), Dad’s confusion is evident as Entwhistle materialises from the storeroom. Dad: ‘What are you doing in there?’ Entwhistle: ‘I go in there every morning as part of my routine.’ Dad: ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’ Entwhistle: ‘Nothing of the kind. I enjoy it.’

As Entwhistle goes on to explain that he was only rubbing the mannequins down, Dad, shocked by such a revelation, threatens to have them thrown out. Dramatically throwing his arm to one side, Entwhistle replies quickly: ‘But you can’t do that, they’re specially imported from France!’ While part of the joke here is Dad’s confusion between mannequins and real women, it also relies on the mistaken belief that Entwhistle might be interested in the opposite sex. And while his general bewilderment continues – ‘This is our shop-keeper Mr Floorwhistle’, he announces to Jill – Dad may have developed a clearer sense of the situation a short time later when he (inexplicably) remarks ‘there goes a natural-born milker’ as Entwhistle makes his exit. Dad’s confusion articulates the uneasy position that Entwhistle occupies in this Australian narrative. Contemporary audiences were more likely to understand him in a variety of different ways rather than as an immutable and clear-cut homosexual character. For some, he may have been read as an archetypal sissy – an essentially negative, but innocuous and asexual stereotype used to position and articulate dominant representations of masculinity; in this case rural, working-class notions of mateship, as embodied in Dad Rudd. For others, this cinematic typecast may have had explicit links to certain effeminate elements of male same-sex desire in the pre-war period. Muddying the waters further are the positive aspects of the character’s role:

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Entwhistle is accepted by the Rudd family and considered an ally. Towards the end of the feature, when Jill remains in the city to manage Cecille’s, she announces to the rest of her family before they leave that she is ‘counting on Mr Entwhistle’. Two years after Dad and Dave Come to Town first screened, Kellaway’s character was reprised to manage Dad’s campaign for parliament in the 1940 Cinesound feature Dad Rudd, M.P. The appearance of Mr Entwhistle at a time when male homosexuality was criminalised, medically diagnosed, and generally maligned and marginalised, is significant because it circulated widely a (potential) identity type that usually remained hidden in mainstream Australian media, although ultimately the final interpretation lay with the viewing public.

Further Reading Lamond, Julian, ‘The ghost of Dad Rudd, on the stump’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 6, 2007, pp.19–32. Routt, William D, ‘Dad and Dave come to town’ in Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie (eds.), The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, Wallflower Press, New York and London, 2007, pp.31–9.

Notes 1

2

3 4 5 6

Paul Byrnes, ‘Curator’s Notes’, Australian Screen Online, viewed 19 February 2009, http://www.aso.gov.au/titles/features/dad-and-dave-come-to-town/notes; Andrew E. McNamara, ‘The promise of modernity – Ken G. Hall’s ‘Dad and Dave Come to Town’ (1938–39)’ in Ann Stephen, Philip Goad, and Andrew McNamara (eds.), Modern Times: The Untold Story of Modernism in Australia, Miegunyah Press and Powerhouse Publishing, Carlton and Sydney, 2008, p.xxvi. For discussion of homosexuality in the inter-war years see for example Clive Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows: The Development of Gay and Lesbian Culture in Queensland, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Qld, 2001, pp.90–104; Garry Wotherspoon, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-Culture, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1991, pp.33–79. Russo, p.34. Russo, pp.4–5. Wotherspoon, p.53; Garry Wotherspoon, ‘Gays and writing: Thirties images’, Gay Information: Journal of Gay Studies, nos. 14–15, 1984, p.50. Bruce Molloy, Before the Interval: Australian Mythology and Feature Films, 1930– 1960, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia Qld, 1990, p.57.

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My Brilliant Career By Jill Roe The filmic adaptation of Miles Franklin’s novel My Brilliant Career was released in 1979 to general acclaim, and has since become an Australian classic. Set in the southern regions of New South Wales during the 1890s depression, it tells the story of Sybylla Melvyn, a spirited but impoverished young bush girl who longs for a career, rather than marrying squatter suitor Harold Beecham. The story is told with sympathy and style through a number of key episodes. Some of these are light-hearted as romance blossoms. Others are taut and sad as it becomes apparent that marriage is not to follow. Perhaps, given that the tale is told from Sybylla’s point of view, it was never going to happen. Whether or not Sybylla will ultimately have a ‘brilliant career’, the ending is still positive and her struggle commands our respect. The success of the film may be attributed to several striking features. Most obvious is the apt casting of, and fine acting by, the key characters, Judy Davis as Sybylla and Sam Neill as Harold, as well as memorable performances by minor characters such as Helen Morse as Aunt Helen. Likewise, the film evinces an impeccable sense of place, from the opening scenes of father Richard Melvyn’s drought-stricken smallholding at ‘Possum Gully’, to the elegance and refinement of grandmother Bossier’s homestead ‘Caddagat’ further south and the Beechams’ even grander ‘Five Bob Downs’, to the squalor of Barney’s Gap, where Sybylla is sent to work as a governess to repay her father’s debt to free selector Peter M’Swat. Sensitive production values are evident throughout, with Gillian Armstrong, now an acclaimed international film director, in charge: discrete symbolic images such as the early piano playing and wood chopping scenes, where a frustrated Sybylla tries to hold her own against parental pressure, and the balance between these and longer sequences, have often been praised. Above all, the film captures the spirit of the novel, which promoter and producer Margaret Fink appreciated from the beginning,1 as did scriptwriter Eleanor Witcombe who knew author Miles Franklin personally when young. A lifelong enthusiast of theatre, Miles Franklin attended some of Witcombe’s early plays,2 and the two kept in touch afterwards, mostly by telephone.3

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Feminist movements ‘First-wave feminism’ refers to the campaign for women’s rights that focused on obtaining the vote, and was successful at both state and federal levels in Australia by 1908, with South Australia leading the way in 1894. New Zealand was the first country in the world to enfranchise women in 1893. ‘Second-wave feminism’ refers to the campaign for the social and sexual rights of women as the equals of men, symbolised by the ‘women’s liberation’ movement in the 1970s.The notion that there have been ‘waves’ of feminism has sometimes been questioned on the grounds that feminism has a long history, dating back to the time of the French revolution, with feminist activism continuing on through the twentieth century. Valid as those perspectives are, the surges of the 1890s and the 1970s do represent peaks of enthusiasm for the cause.

As is well known, the film is based on the semi-autobiographical novel of the same name written by Miles Franklin in the late 1890s when she was 18 years old, and after local rejections, finally published by Blackwood of Edinburgh in 1901. Maybe the ambiguous name ‘Miles’ helped things along – even today some people still assume Miles Franklin was a man – but Henry Lawson had pointed out in the preface he contributed to the novel that it was the work of a young girl, and this was a well-known fact. In any event, My Brilliant Career was the most important novel of the year of Federation, and warmly welcomed in Australia and elsewhere despite oft-remarked crudities of style. What made the novel so notable in its day was that it was not just a standard romantic novel with a happy ending. As foreshadowed in the prologue addressed to ‘My Dear Fellow Australians’ and underlined in the final chapter, ‘A Tale that is Told and a Day that is Done’, where the author expresses her pleasure in ‘the mighty bush’ and solidarity with the bush workers, the novel concludes on a political note. No wonder Australian readers rallied around Sybylla. Self-determination was a vital issue in the age of empire as it was for first-wave feminism. It does not take long to see ways in which the film differs from the book. On the one hand, all the novel’s settings were carefully selected and beautifully captured on film, with a site beyond Hay found for ‘Possum Gully’. The Ryrie homestead at Michelago south of Canberra and the Macarthur mansion at Camden Park were chosen for ‘Caddagat’ and ‘Five Bob Downs’, and the old gold diggings at Captain’s Flat, also near Canberra, became a suitable setting for the M’Swats. The careful viewer will find a good many representations of distressed times in addition to the basic financial problems

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of the Franklin family, as when the impulsive Sybylla runs to help a swaggie at the gate. On the other hand, for all its fidelity to time and place, the film is more narrowly focused than the novel. It concentrates on the issue of marriage, with the novel’s forceful issue of nationalism present only by implication. Consider again the beginnings and endings. Whereas the film begins with Sybylla’s lucky escape from Possum Gully, the novel takes more time on family misfortunes at the outset. And whereas in the film’s ending, Sybylla is seen posting off her manuscript, in the last chapter of the novel she realises she is just an ordinary girl, one of the working people of Australia. The film’s approach to romance has been a matter of frequent debate. Some have thought the treatment too harsh: surely Sybylla could have had both career and marriage, as the increasingly desperate Harold offers? Others, recalling the novel’s ending, have thought it becomes soppy, little more than another period romance. But, in fact, what has changed since the novel was written is our attitude to married women working. We now see things differently. Both the novel and the film are of their time; they continue to speak to us even now, albeit in different contexts. That is to say, if the novel of My Brilliant Career was a cultural marker, so is the film. In 1979 many commentators drew attention to the fact that the film was made by women film-makers. By now it may be difficult to appreciate what a novelty this was (or perhaps not). In retrospect it seems clear that this was integral to its impact. It is not just that Harold Beecham as portrayed would have been a good catch and the temptation to somehow save him from an unruly girl, as Sybylla undoubtedly was. Such a depiction may well have been irresistible to a male production team. Rather, the Armstrong–Fink film conveys the experience of womanhood itself, which by definition women

Feminism or nationalism? Careful consideration will show that whereas in the novel Sybylla’s feminism and nationalism are interwoven, in the film we hear nothing about nationalism; the focus is entirely on feminism. What does this mean? An historian would say that both author and film-maker were in touch with the politics of their times and that the times had changed. The great cause of the 1890s was federation, soon to be resolved, while new issues emerged within the feminist movement in the 1970s.Thus, in the film, Sybylla’s struggle to become a writer becomes a tale of liberation in keeping with contemporary attitudes. Likewise, the production team’s careful attention to historical setting and other detail of the 1890s encourages an appreciation of women’s repression then and now.

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film-makers were better placed to interpret. That this is a vital point may be aligned with the warm response of so many women worldwide, women who were at that time strongly aware of subordination in the work force and struggling for the right to work. Miles Franklin’s editor and friend Beatrice Davis felt sure that Miles would have loved the film. This too may seem strange, insofar as the author often dismissed the novel as a girlish work and resolutely kept it out of print for decades, even specifying in her will that it must not be reissued until a decade after her death. However, the main reason for her evasive attitude is that it was her best-known work and she used it as a bargaining chip with publishers, who always wanted to have it on their lists. In fact, she was forever writing plays, and as early as the 1920s saw the possibilities of film as a source of income for writers. At a deeper level, something of her own feisty spirit shines through the film’s Sybylla, and it rings true to her basic values in that respect. Not that she would have been uncritical of aspects: it was not in her to be an uncritical observer of life or art. Family members have recalled that the homesteads as portrayed were far grander than in reality; and how she would have responded to that passionate kiss between Sybylla and Harold is something to wonder about. Given her late nineteenth-century views on sex and sexuality, she may have thought the film makes far too much of their mutual attraction, especially in scenes such as the pillow fight. One aspect of the situation today would certainly have interested her. Four decades after its release, the film is still widely available, on CD, DVD and through audiotapes, and there is a great deal written about it on the web as well as in print. Thanks to the film, Miles Franklin has never been better known. But who owns her work these days? And what about the film? For quite a time the film was owned off-shore, and Australian rights have only recently been retrieved. How secure will Sybylla Melvyn be in the twenty-first century? We can only speculate. But whatever happens, her feisty spirit is sure to remain relevant. After all, a century on, the novel is still popular, and as American critic Theodore Sheckels reminds us, the film is one of the masterpieces of Australian cinema.

Further Reading Focus on Miles Franklin, Australian Literary Studies, 20:4, 2002, n.p. Franklin, Miles, My Brilliant Career, William Blackwood & Sons, Edinburgh, 1901. Roe, Jill, Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography, Fourth Estate, Sydney, 2008. Sheckels, Theodore F, Celluloid Heroes Down Under: Australian Film, 1970– 2000, Praeger, Westport, Conn, 2002

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Notes 1 2 3

As was apparent in an interview in the Sydney Morning Herald published on 11 October 1979. Jill Roe, Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography, Fourth Estate, Sydney, 2008, p.115. Personal communication, 26 May 2010.

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Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters By Scott McKinnon Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters (One in Seven Collective, 1979, 45 mins) is an important example of independent documentary film-making made by those who found themselves otherwise excluded from, or misrepresented on, cinema screens. It is a piece of political activism springing from the lesbian and gay rights movement of the 1970s with the intention of allowing homosexual people to tell their own history and to control the messages which were presented about them. Today, the film stands as a valuable record of significant events in the history of sexuality in Australia. Placed in its original context, the film represents part of a shift whereby gay and lesbian people stepped out of the closet to stand both behind and in front of the camera. Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters is the work of film-maker and producer Digby Duncan and a lesbian feminist group called One in Seven Collective and uses historical images, contemporary film footage and interviews with gay and lesbian individuals to tell its story. It was financed in part by an Australian Film Commission grant and in part through the financial support of the Gay Film Fund, a Sydney-based community organisation which was established specifically with the aim of funding local lesbian and gay film projects and which raised money to do so by holding dances and filmscreenings in the mid- to late-1970s.1 These film screenings also provided a rare and valuable opportunity for gays and lesbians in Sydney to find representation on cinema screens. The provocative use of the derogatory labels ‘witches’, ‘faggots’, ‘dykes’ and ‘poofters’ in the film’s title reflects the intent of the film-makers to stand defiant against discrimination and to claim, with playful determination, ownership of the telling of history. An interviewee early in the film states that it is necessary for gay and lesbian people to ‘…use the word dyke and use the word poofter because we have to take these terms of abuse and say, look, I’m proud of being a dyke … and … look, I’m proud of being a poofter’. Ownership of these words indicates a resolve by gays and lesbians to choose how they are described and how they are represented on screen. Words which have been used as weapons against them are reclaimed as weapons with which homosexual people can fight for their own rights.

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Poster for Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters. The film opens with a montage, which begins in Medieval Europe and depicts moments in the history of homosexual oppression. Still images and a voice-over describe the charge of heresy, used to condemn the ‘deviant’ to death by burning at the stake. The narrator claims that lesbians, labelled ‘witches’, were among those burned and that the bodies of homosexual men were used as ‘faggots’ (or bundles of wood) to stoke the fires. Using examples from Stalinist Russia, the 1950s American McCarthy trials and other moments in history, the film creates a narrative which draws a direct link from the ‘witches’ and ‘faggots’ of Medieval Europe to the ‘dykes’ and ‘poofters’ of 1970s Sydney. While this does not contemplate the historically contextualised and constituted nature of sexuality, it aims to place lesbians and gays as a visible part of world history.

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An outline is then given of the legal status of gays and lesbians in 1979 Australia and examples are offered of some of the devastating effects of discrimination on those who dared to be ‘out’ as homosexual. What follows, and what lies at the heart of Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters, is the story of a series of events which began on 24 June 1978. On that date, a Day of International Gay Solidarity was marked by a morning protest march, a public meeting and a night-time street party, dubbed a ‘Mardi Gras’. Although all necessary permits were held by the organisers, the Mardi Gras was shut down by police who, in the ensuing turmoil, made 53 arrests. Digby Duncan was there with her camera and, although only comprising a small portion of the film’s 45 minutes, the footage she recorded is the core of this documentary. It is significant that it was a member of the lesbian and gay community that recorded this, rather than the media or police. To be openly gay in 1979 was to place at risk one’s professional and personal life. No anti-discrimination laws were in place to protect employment and sex between consenting male adults remained illegal. As a result, many people were forced to hide their sexuality from employers, family and friends. For those trapped ‘in the closet’, the consequences of being ‘outed’ as homosexual were greatly feared. In this respect, the camera could be a weapon of oppression which threatened to expose those who wished to remain hidden. Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters reflects a significant shift whereby the camera was recruited as a weapon of liberation, which enabled gay and lesbian people to tell their own truth and claim the right to live openly. It is a call to ‘come out’ as a means to achieve equal rights and indicates a defiant choice to be seen and to be heard. One particular scene reflects this most clearly. The sequence shows a police officer attempting to drag a male protestor into a paddy wagon. Other protestors appear and grab the man, trying to pull him away. We watch in slow motion as another protestor appears and shoves the officer, at which point the shot freezes. The audio continues, the shouts of the riot can still be heard, while the vision remains frozen on this image. Taken in isolation, this sequence and image may contain different meanings for different viewers. If viewed by police in 1978, it may well have been understood as evidence of an individual resisting arrest, illegally aided and abetted by others. Yet placed in the context of this documentary, and understood from the point of view of the individual behind the camera and the collective in whose film it is framed, this is an image of political resistance by a group who have been identified from the start of the film as having been oppressed throughout history. The protesters are seen as people fighting back against the forces of that oppression. By taking ownership of the telling of the story and the focus of the camera, the film-makers defy the threat of exposure in order to reveal the acts of the protestors and of the police.

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The Lesbian and Gay audience in 1979 When contemplating the meaning of Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters to gay and lesbian audiences in 1979, it is important to consider the extraordinary changes taking place in a community which was slowly becoming a more visible part of the life of the city. From the late 1960s and early 1970s, gay and lesbian activist groups were established in Australia; newspapers and magazines by and for gay and lesbian people were produced; and the subject of gay and lesbian rights was becoming part of public discourse. A common rallying cry heard at lesbian and gay rights protests at this time was ‘out of the bars and into the streets’. This represented a significant division between, on the one hand, those who participated in gay bar and club culture while preferring to avoid the risks involved with pushing for change and, on the other, those involved in the activist movement who saw visibility through ‘coming out’ as a necessary step towards equality. Witches, Dykes, Faggots and Poofters was made by activists but directed to both groups as an audience. For those actively fighting for equal rights, this was a record of their work and an encouragement to continue. For others, this was a reminder of the oppression they faced and a call to join the fight.

Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters includes interviews with Mardi Gras participants and footage of subsequent activist meetings and demonstrations, at which a further 131 individuals were arrested. In this respect, the film now stands as a record of an important time in the history of the Australian gay and lesbian rights movement. Held annually since 1978, the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade is now the culmination of a two-week cultural festival and is a significant part of the life of the city. Duncan and the collective were there with their cameras and although only comprising a small portion of the film’s 45 minutes, the footage they recorded is the core of this documentary and forms a rare visual record of the birth of this event. Important to the place of this film as an historical document is the contrast that footage of the first Mardi Gras provides with current images of the now annual event. Television news broadcasts frequently illustrate stories on gay and lesbian rights issues with vision from more recent Mardi Gras parades, and these images often depict gym-toned, scantily clad and well choreographed bodies moving to a soundtrack of a cheering crowd and thumping dance music. In contrast, the street party seen in Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters seems almost quaint, with many participants in everyday attire and the dancing decidedly unchoreographed. Our perception shifts

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The first Sydney Mardi Gras, 24 June 1978.

dramatically once arrests begin, the startling difference lying in the sounds of the crowd. The cheers of celebration and the beat of dance music are replaced by the roar of the angry and frightened. This reveals the political significance of a far from quaint party, which was, and continues to be, a defiant claiming of public space by a group expected by many to remain hidden. Interesting to contemplate is the continued form of the Mardi Gras in comparison to the 1978 street party seen in Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters. To some, police participation in and corporate sponsorship of the current parade reflects a welcome acceptance of the gay and lesbian community, while to others it signifies a worrying ‘mainstreaming’ of a politically radical event and culture. This documentary stands as an interesting reference point in debates over how, if at all, the parade should stay connected to its origins while reflecting the changing concerns of Australia’s gays and lesbians. Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters is a documentary unapologetically told from a specific viewpoint and created by a group who saw themselves as too infrequently able to tell their own stories. Documentary film is used as a medium through which these stories can be seen and heard. As an historical document, it is a record of a significant moment in the evolution of the gay

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and lesbian rights movement and of the origins of an annual event which remains, more than 30 years later, an important part of the life of a city. Perhaps, most importantly, its claiming of the camera as a weapon in aid of visibility and liberation reflects a time of significant change in the history of sexuality in Australia.

Further Reading Harris, Gavin, John Witte and Ken Davis, New Day Dawning: the Early Years of Sydney’s Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras, Pride History Group, Sydney, 2008. Willett, Graham, Living Out Loud: A History of Gay and Lesbian Activism in Australia, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2000. Wotherspoon, Garry, City of the Plain: History of a Gay Sub-Culture, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney, 1991.

Note 1

Ricardo Peach, ‘Queer Cinema as a Fifth Cinema in South Africa and Australia’, PhD thesis, University of Technology, Sydney, 2005, p.209.

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Love the Beast By Kirsten Stevens Love the Beast (Whyte House Productions and Pick Up Truck Pictures, 2009, 89 mins, DVD release) is a unique Australian story which provides insight into what it is to be masculine or, more specifically, what constitutes a configuration of masculinity in late twentieth-century Australia. The film is an autobiographical documentary directed by and starring home-grown celebrity Eric Bana. The well-known actor and comedian traces the evolution of his life away from the screen, investigating instead his interest in cars, racing and specifically the role that his first car has had in providing a constant focus, and consistency of subjectivity, for him and his mates. The car acts as a touchstone: a referent which remains stable and central to the development of a masculine identity throughout the friends’ lives. From adolescent dreams of freedom to cultivated adulthood, the car remains as the locus of self and friendship for Bana and his mates. The film highlights the importance of mateship in the Australian masculine tradition and further links this through the notion of the motor car as a central element of suburban life in Australia, in particular since the 1970s and the glorification of powerful ‘muscle cars’. Bana’s story is presented as the ‘more typical’ story of a young man growing up in Australia since the late 1960s. Rather than the images of sand and surf or the romanticised bush and outback, Bana’s story begins in the north-western suburbs of Melbourne, close to the airport in the semi-industrial area of Tullamarine, surrounded by factories and warehouses. To Bana’s mind, he and his mates Tony, Jack and Temps were ‘essentially … land locked mammals’. The mammals of Bana and his friends were typical of the recent migrant population which characterised Melbourne’s northern and western suburban sprawl: predominantly middle class, Caucasian, heterosexual and born in Australia – even if their parents were not. Their location in the suburbs along with the particular historical circumstance of their youth are both important considerations in understanding the role that the car played in the evolution and maturation of the men in Bana’s documentary. The film itself is characterised by the constants which seemingly run throughout Bana’s life – his mates and his ‘beast’. It is these two constants

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which most vividly establish Bana’s maturation from boyhood to manhood and establish his masculinity and Australianness. The beast of the title is Bana’s 1974 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe, a car purchased by an adolescent Eric at age 15, less than ten years after its production. It is telling that the car central to Bana’s masculine identity is not only a powerful Ford, produced and sold only within Australia, but also that far from associating the car with feminine qualities, or characterising the car as woman as is made explicit in John Carpenter’s Christine (1983) or Margaret Dodd’s short This Woman Is Not a Car (1975),1 Bana’s car is more often than not identified in animalistic terms. Bana’s XB Coupe is his horse, more companion than car, and capable of tossing him if it is not handled with care. This association of car as beast not only identifies the affection that, for Bana, exists in his relationship with the machine, but also suggests a connection to the colonial constructions of masculinity, which found expression in the form of the bushman in such Australian tales as The Man From Snowy River (1982). Such narratives identify the attainment of adult masculinity with the testing of ability and physical prowess, invoked in The Man From Snowy River by Jim’s skill with horses and his heroic ride down the hillside.2 Long after settlement and firmly within the mechanical age, for Bana and his mates the powerful horse was replaced with horsepower, yet the association of this new mechanical beast with masculinity remains clear. Most commonly identifiable with the socio-historical category of Generation X, Bana and his mates grew up in the era of the ‘muscle car’. Powerful cars with big engines which happily existed in a time before exorbitant petrol prices and widespread environmental concern, these cars found glorification throughout the 1970s in particular through exposure in the media and a number of locally-made narrative films. An historic moment in 1977 saw the Moffat Ford Dealer Team Falcon XC coupes controversially deliver the first one-two ‘form finish’ at the Bathurst 1000 car race – a moment more important to the likes of Eric Bana than man walking on the moon. The same year saw the release of Michael Thornhill’s The FJ Holden and two years later the release of George Miller’s Mad Max (1979). The Australian car culture of the 1970s, captured in different ways by these two films, developed around machines of power and speed, and their obvious connection to western notions of male virility, made explicit through the categorisation of these powerful V8s as muscle cars, was not to be lost on the Gen-X adolescents. In his analysis of the first Mad Max instalment, Adrian Martin aligns the film with Australian car culture and reveals the importance of the car in providing a means of escape and forming collective experiences of freedom, space and community.3 Martin quotes actor Tim Burns, who reveals the importance of the car in providing ‘some kind of visceral experience that could

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Eric Bana and friends bonding under the hood of a car.

break you out of the ennui of suburbia’.4 For the youthful population growing up in Australia during the 1970s and 1980s, the suburbs presented a challenge of space – at once expansive and confining. The car, as locus of technology, identified itself as a mode of mobility which would allow for the masculine escape from an increasingly domestic and feminised suburban life. Bana also identified with the freedom that his XB Coupe offered. As he reveals in the interview extra contained on the Madman DVD release of Love the Beast, for a boy in the suburbs the car offered ‘mobility, it was freedom’. As Bana describes, the car provided him not only with the ability to escape from the suburbs through a move into racing the car itself interstate, but also provided him with access to his mates in several ways: through socialising with them on the road and in the act of driving within the suburbs, as well as in providing a locus and focus for their collective experience of growing up. A central idea which Bana pursues throughout the film is the notion of his car as a modern campfire, an object which has the power to bring him and his mates together and develop a sense of shared and sustained experience throughout their lives. This notion of the campfire has particular importance in understanding the role that the formation of homosociality plays within the film. The most privileged form of Australian masculinity developed within Bana’s documentary is the experience of mateship. Mateship is a distinctly Australian expression of masculinity and homosocial relations; it has achieved a romanticised status akin to a national identity since its early development within the bushman and Anzac mythology. The fraternal bond

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which characterises ‘mates’ finds expression as ‘exclusively male, not female, [mates] share a particular sceptical camaraderie in doing things together [and] there is a lack of emotional expression other than sharing jokes’. The absence of women within Bana’s documentary is conspicuous, with only Bana’s mother and wife making limited appearances. The film’s central interest is in the bonds which exist between man and his car, and between men who love cars. In this way Bana’s XB Coupe can be understood as performing the role of a campfire to the four mates who come together to work on, tinker with, fix and drive it. The customisation and personalisation of the machine characterises the privileging of the male relationships, which develop a utopian reconfiguration of familial relations into egalitarian masculinity, replacing gendered and hereditary forms of power in favour of a homosocial community. The technology of the car provides for a defeminised means of creation – the production of a mechanic progeny, which rejects the necessity of the female and instead privileges an understanding of man as creator, even within the feminised domesticity of suburbia. The car becomes a living entity which embodies the collective masculinity of Bana

Car culture in Australian film Car culture in Australia found particular visibility through a number of narrative films which emerged from the 1970s onwards. Of particular note are Peter Weir’s The Cars That Ate Paris (1974), Michael Thornhill’s The FJ Holden (1977) and George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy (1979–85).These films primarily celebrate cars as cult objects, displacing the value of the car from the market economy and any notions of it as merely a commodity, or valued for pure automotive functionality. Instead, Max’s Interceptor, Kevin’s FJ and the monstrously modified cars of Paris become fetishised objects. These fetishised, customised and personalised cars, however, always remain as liminal spaces, offering as Morris suggests both ‘danger and safety, violence and protection, sociability and privacy, liberation and confinement, power and imprisonment, mobility and stasis’ (emphasis as in the original).1 Australian car culture is then celebrated if not idolised by these films. The roads are a dangerous place in Miller’s world, while the cars themselves can kill in The Cars That Ate Paris, and for Kevin, his FJ Holden only ever succeeds in creating the illusion of a freedom which is ultimately unattainable. 1

Don Edgar, Men, Mateship, Marriage: Exploring Macho Myths and the Way Forward, Harper Collins Publishers, Sydney, 1997, p.79.

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and his mates, echoing their own coming of age through its guided automotive maturation from sedan into race car. The race which signifies the ‘adulthood’ or ultimate evolution and maturation of the car is the 2007 Targa Tasmania: a five-day endurance tarmac rally which Bana enters with his mates and his beast. The race provides the backdrop for the unfolding story of Bana and his mates, providing the narrative anchor for the film’s development. While the race ultimately leads to the ‘death’ of the car itself, and the further revelation of its centrality in the surrogate family of Bana and his mates, the portrayal of the race provides an important component of authenticity in the scripting of the documentary. While the film itself employs a number of standard conventions of the documentary film to convey the truth of its subject matter – voice-over, interviews, file footage, a variety of video formats, home movies and old photographs – the overwhelmingly authentic stylistic quality of the film finds expression through its recourse to media coverage-style filming of the Targa rally. The multiple cameras positioned within and around Bana’s car – at least six camera set-ups – throughout the race, combined with helicopter bird’s eye view, provides coverage of the event in-keeping with the coverage expected for most major motor racing events. The split-screen presentation of the footage, broken into a four-screen view, reflects the usual sport coverage of such events and gives immediacy to the footage that carries the viewer along with the car and driver. This immediacy and authenticity manifests itself clearly at the moment in which Bana’s car veers from the road and crashes with palpable force into a roadside gumtree. While the primary focus of Love the Beast is a 1974 Ford Falcon XB GT Coupe, the film ultimately provides a greater insight into a formation of masculinity in late twentieth–century Australia. The development and interest in car culture and the centrality of the car to suburban Australian life highlights an interesting area of study for both Australian gendered behaviour and social investigations of suburban life more generally. Whilst in Australia little has been written on the expression and forms of masculinity developed within the suburban landscape, Love the Beast provides an historical and cultural context in which such an insight could be made.

Further Reading Davison, Graeme and Sheryl Yelland, Car Wars: How the Car Won our Hearts and Conquered our Cities, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2004. Lucas, Rose, ‘Dragging it out: tales of masculinity in Australian cinema, from Crocodile Dundee to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’, Journal of Australian Studies, 22:56, 1998, pp.138–46.

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Morris, Meaghan, ‘Fear and the Family Sedan’ in Brian Massumi (ed.), Politics of Everyday Fear, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, pp.285–305.

Notes 1 2

3 4

Meaghan Morris, ‘Fear and the family sedan’ in Brian Massumi (ed.), Politics of Everyday Fear, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993, p.293. Rose Lucas, ‘Dragging it out: tales of masculinity in Australian cinema from Crocodile Dundee to Priscilla, Queen of the Desert’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 22, no. 56, 1998, p.140. Adrian Martin, The Mad Max Movies, Currency Press, Sydney, 2003, p.30. Tim Burns cited in Martin, pp.31–2.

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Introduction By Michelle Langford •

They’re A Weird Mob (1966)

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Illustrious Energy (1987)

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Serenades (2001)

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Pacific Solution (2005)

For more than 200 years, migration has played an important role in shaping Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand societies. From the early settlers and convicts, to those who traversed the seas from Europe and Asia during the Gold rushes (from the 1850s), or the mainly southern European immigrants fleeing the devastating aftermath of the Second World War, and the refugees of contemporary times fleeing wars, dictatorships and persecution – these two small south Pacific nations have become home to people from virtually all the world’s ethnic, cultural and religious backgrounds. But like the often tragic events that have compelled many immigrants and refugees to flee their homelands, so too their arrival has often been met by discriminatory government policy and entrenched racism. In Australia, for example, migrants were subject to the ‘White Australia policy’ (1901–73), and forced to assimilate into a supposedly homogeneous Australian society by abandoning language and cultural practices. Earlier, in the nineteenth century, cultural tensions were felt by the large numbers of migrants from Asia who came to labour on the gold fields of both countries. For the Europeans, this group constituted a ‘yellow peril’, a derogatory term that cast Asians as an ‘other’, to be feared and derided. As a result of such racism and discrimination, little is known about the largely Chinese immigrants who contributed much to the economic foundations of Australia and New Zealand. According to Brenda Allen, Illustrious Energy addresses this forgotten history as it traces the stories of a few Chinese labourers in Otago in 1895 and their individual struggles against both racism and assimilationist policies.

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Allen highlights the important role played by the film-makers themselves in unearthing archival evidence of the Chinese sojourners, whose stories would surely have been forgotten entirely if the film has not been made. Sadly, however, due to haphazard archival policies this film is under threat of disappearing into oblivion like the history it represents. In contrast, They’re A Weird Mob is, as Jessica Carniel notes, ‘one of the most well known films about Australia’s post-war immigration’. Its fame, however, as Carniel argues, runs the risk of perpetuating problematic representations of migrants, which reflect the assimilationist policies of the time. Carniel demonstrates how, in its comic depiction of a middle-class educated Italian migrant to Australia in the 1960s, this ideological problem is counterbalanced by the positive story it tells about ‘welcoming migrants to Australia’. Annie Goldson, the producer of the documentary Pacific Solution paints a far less rosy picture of the plight of contemporary refugees in the era of post9/11 and the rise of global terrorism. This film follows the story of the ‘Tampa boys’, a group of Hazara asylum seekers from Afghanistan who were caught up in one of the most internationally publicised refugee scandals in Australian history. Through what Goldson calls the ‘globalised humanitarian’ perspective on the personal and political ramifications of the event, the film demonstrates how the earlier assimilationist policies have in recent times given way to aggressive ‘protectivism’. In my essay on Serenades, I show how the film posits the legacy of the colonial period as a problem for contemporary Australia and its aspirations towards multiculturalism in the late twentieth century. Writer/director Khadem’s understanding of multiculturalism as harmony in diversity is contrasted in the film by the fractured rendering of colonial encounters between Afghan cameleers, German Lutheran missionaries and Indigenous Australians in the South Australian outback of the 1880s. While representing only a small portion of films about immigrants, refugees and multiculturalism made in Australia and New Zealand over the last century, this selection of films casts some light not only on forgotten histories of these nations’ most marginalised people, but also provides some insight into the political and ideological agendas that shape the way newcomers have been treated and represented.

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Who’s the Weird Mob Anyway? Assimilation and Authenticity in They’re A Weird Mob By Jessica Carniel As one of the most well-known films about Australia’s post-war immigration, Michael Powell’s They’re A Weird Mob (1966) is also one of the most complex and arguably problematic filmic representations of migrants’ experiences. Nevertheless, it remains one of the very few mainstream Australian films from the time that in any way addresses immigration and settlement during this period of post-war nation building. Specifically, the film captures a moment in Australia’s post-war history when immigrants were expected to assimilate into an Australian culture and society that was still imagined in terms of its colonial connections to Britain. Critical perspectives of They’re A Weird Mob vary from those that decry its assimilationist overtones to those who are able to recognise in the film a form of inclusive ‘benign multicultural tolerance’.1 While the film remains problematic because of its assimilationist message, particularly from a current multiculturalist perspective, it must be appreciated as an important artefact of its era. Based upon John O’Grady’s comic novel of the same name, They’re A Weird Mob depicts the humorous adventures of a newly arrived Italian migrant, Nino Culotta, played by Italian actor Walter Chiari. Expecting to take up a job as a sports writer for his cousin’s Italian-language magazine La Seconda Madre, Nino arrives in Australia only to discover that the paper has folded and his cousin has absconded. The well-mannered writer soon finds work as a builder’s labourer, and is befriended by his Australian coworkers who induct him into Australian social and cultural practices. Nino also falls in love with Kay, the daughter of an Anglo-Australian building constructor (played by iconic Australian actor Chips Rafferty), and the film culminates in a celebration of their impending marriage. The film is essentially a cross-cultural comedy of errors. Its humour derives from misunderstandings between the newly arrived migrant and the people and practices of the host society. While the film ostensibly plays upon ethnic or national differences, it is important to also consider the intersection of these with class differences.

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Assimilation and multiculturalism: what’s the difference? Australia is commonly described as a multicultural nation. Multiculturalism was first introduced as a policy in 1973. It has continued to be the framework through which contemporary settlement policy is devised, even if there has been a movement away from the term by more recent governments, who have emphasised such terms as ‘social cohesion’ and ‘inclusion’,‘diversity’ and ‘harmony’. It is important to emphasise that multiculturalism is a settlement policy, not an immigration policy: it does not determine who comes into the country but rather what services and support is available to them upon arrival. In They’re A Weird Mob, no such services were available to Nino and he is expected to completely assimilate to Australian culture.

Following the Second World War, Australia embarked upon a programme of mass immigration. The war had made Australia realise its physical and demographic vulnerability; it was a western country situated in the Asia-Pacific with a fairly negligible population. Furthermore, the country was in need of workers to support the development of new infrastructure, perhaps exemplified by the Snowy Hydro-electric Scheme, and its emerging manufacturing industry. Rather infamously, Australia’s immigration programme was marked by its racially discriminatory policies. Despite the presence, albeit marginalised, of a non-white Indigenous population, Australia was imagined as a white nation and immigration policy was devised and implemented to support and sustain this desired national identity. Various practices and pieces of legislation, known collectively as the ‘White Australia policy’, restricted non-white immigration and established a hierarchy for desirable migrants based upon racial and cultural criteria. The British and other northern Europeans were at the top of this scale, whilst clearly non-white migrants, such as Asians and Africans, occupied its lower rungs. Italians and Greeks fell somewhere in the middle yet were the two most significant migrant groups arriving in Australia during the 1950s and 1960s. At the time that They’re A Weird Mob is set, the White Australia policy had already begun what Gwenda Tavan calls its ‘long, slow death’.2 The Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, the foundational piece of legislation for the policy, was replaced in 1958 by the Migration Act, which still forms the basis of Australian immigration legislation today. This shift in legislation saw the removal of many discriminatory practices, but was in fact just one of many steps towards the final, official abolition of the White Australia policy in 1973. While the White Australia policy sought to control the racial composition of Australian society, Australia’s policy of assimilation sought to control its

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cultural identity and practices. Under assimilationism, migrants were expected to abandon the accoutrements of their previous ethnic and national identities, such as language and cultural practices, and to embrace Australian culture completely. At the time in which They’re A Weird Mob is set, assimilationism had partially given way to an intermediary policy of integration, which acknowledged acculturation as a more gradual process; migrants were still expected to learn English and to participate in Australian culture and society as much as possible, while the expectation of full assimilation was delayed until at least the second generation. As an Italian, Nino Culotta represents an acceptable face of white immigration, albeit of a darker shade of pale; however, he should not be read as typical or exemplary of the average Italian migrant during the 1960s. While Italian immigrants ranged across the socio-economic spectrum, the vast majority were from rural and working-class backgrounds, as they were the ones most in need of new economic opportunities, and entered into comparable labour roles upon arrival in Australia. The character of Nino Culotta is part of the educated Italian middle class and comes to Australia with the intention of continuing work in his white-collar profession of sports journalism; in a sense, Nino’s acculturation is as much a question of class as it is national or ethnic culture. Certainly, Nino’s education and urbane manners are an important part, if not the entire basis, of the overall joke: it is portrayed as ridiculous that a continental European from a country renowned for its high culture should be expected to assimilate into the decidedly more lowbrow cultural milieu into which he is unexpectedly thrust. This disjuncture between the urbane middle-class migrant and his new working-class friends highlights the ambiguity of who exactly comprises the ‘weird mob’ of the film’s title; it encourages us to question whether it is the foreign migrant or the culture and society to which he has migrated that is really weird. As Roland Caputo and Adrian Danks argue: ‘The “weird mob” of the film’s title refers not to the migrant but to the very strangeness of Australian culture as perceived via the gaze of a foreigner.’3 Arguably, it is director Michael Powell’s status as a non-Australian that magnifies this for the audience; that is, Powell’s lens is as much the gaze of the foreigner as that of Nino himself. Despite the imagined Britishness of Australian culture at the time, Powell’s own Britishness allows him to distil the uniqueness and strangeness of Australian culture. The nationality of They’re A Weird Mob’s director, as with other aspects of the production, has caused occasional debate about whether the film can in fact be classified as Australian and, given Powell’s foreignness, about the particular perspective it is taking of Australian culture. The conflation of Powell’s and Nino’s gazes as both foreign and classed together with the portrayal of Australian people as the ‘weird mob’ may suggest a mocking or

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Will the real Nino Culotta please stand up? The film They’re A Weird Mob is based upon Nino Culotta’s 1957 book of the same name. Culotta is, however, not a real person; he is the invention and nom de plume used by Irish Australian humorist John O’Grady for They’re A Weird Mob and its subsequent sequels including Cop This Lot and Gone Fishin’. Initially the book was marketed under Culotta’s authorship, but the publishers strategically revealed the truth several months after the book’s initial release.1 Despite – or perhaps because of – this, the book went on to be a popular best-seller and perhaps one of the best-known Australian comic novels of the time. David Carter suggests that O’Grady’s Nino Culotta is a fairly benign form of the literary hoax quite common in Australia, such as the Ern Malley and Helen Demidenko/Darville affairs.2 1 2

David Carter and John O’Grady, ‘Nino Culotta: popular authorship, duplicity and celebrity’, Australian Literary Studies, vol. 21, no. 4, 2004, p.56. Carter and O’Grady, p.56.

superior tone by the film-maker. It must be remembered, however, that the film is based upon the novel of the same name by Australian humorist John O’Grady. While O’Grady cannot lay claim to an authentic Italian migrant voice in either the book or the film, for which he contributed to the screenplay together with Richard Imrie (the Anglicised pseudonym taken on by Powell’s long-time collaborator Emric Pressburger), we can and indeed should view him as an authentic Australian voice; that is, O’Grady is himself one of the ‘weird mob’ whose culture is actually at the centre of the film. Between O’Grady’s voice as an Australian insider and Powell’s gaze as a foreigner, the film does provide an insight into life for new and old Australians in the 1960s. Arguably, Nino’s Italian ethnicity becomes almost peripheral to the narrative; he is but a cipher to represent ‘new Australians’ in general at a time when Italians happened to be one of the more significant and well-known groups. Interestingly, while the film is undoubtedly assimilationist in its overall message, its portrayal of migrants and Australian immigration is overwhelmingly positive. For example, the scene on the ferry in which a group of Italian migrants is harassed by a drunken Australian man functions to represent the man’s cultural intolerance as itself intolerable behaviour. This is juxtaposed against the behaviour of Nino and the other Italian migrants, and must also be compared to the acceptance offered to Nino by his workmates, even as they strive to teach him how to be Australian.

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Ultimately, They’re A Weird Mob is clearly a pro-assimilation film yet it is simultaneously a film about welcoming migrants into Australia, albeit conditionally. While it does not necessarily offer any nuanced insight into the specific experiences of many migrants who came to Australia at that time, it offers a rare and often humorous glimpse into Australian society in the 1960s, prior to the advent of multiculturalism as both a policy and as an everyday part of Australian life.

Further Reading Caputo, Rolando and Adrian Danks, ‘They’re a weird mob’ in Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie (eds.), 24 Frames: The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, Wallflower Press, London, 2007, pp.91–99. Carter, David and John O’Grady, ‘Nino Culotta: popular authorship, duplicity and celebrity’, Australian Literary Studies, 21: 4, 2004, p.56. Hoorn, Jeanette, ‘Michael Powell’s They’re a Weird Mob: dissolving the “undigested fragments” in the Australian body politic’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies, 17: 2, 2003, pp.159–176. Tavan, Gwenda, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Scribe, Melbourne, 2005.

Notes 1

2 3

Roland Caputo and Adrian Danks, ‘They’re a weird mob’ in Geoff Mayer and Keith Beattie (eds.), 24 Frames: The Cinema of Australia and New Zealand, Wallflower Press, London, 2007, p.99. Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, Scribe, Melbourne, 2005, passim. Caputo and Danks, p.99.

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Illustrious Energy By Brenda Allen Illustrious Energy (Leon Narbey, 1987) was filmed on location in the rugged, unforgiving Otago high country of southern New Zealand. Set in 1895, the narrative follows the varying fortunes of two Chinese sojourners, Kim and his son-in-law, Chan. These men left their families and came to New Zealand to work on the gold fields; however, the Otago rush had peaked in 1863. Kim and Chan struggle with the land and the elements isolated from the much reduced Chinese community far away in the orchards and in the town. These characters owe money to the store and to their friend, Wong. Like many actual Chinese sojourners, Kim and Chan are stranded in a strange land, too poor to return home, and Kim’s advancing years show he will soon be unable to continue with the physically demanding work. As they pick away at the land, surveyors chart the area, heralding the arrival of white settlers. In the 1980s and beyond, it was not customary to use Chinese actors or characters in a feature film. In Illustrious Energy, however, Kim, Chan and Wong are given a great deal of screen time and the absence of other lead characters compels the audience to identify with them, to sympathise with their plight, and to vicariously experience some elements of their marginalisation. The film, in spite of some anachronisms, is an early attempt at giving voice and representation to this group of pioneers. During the film’s short theatrical release Chinese New Zealanders flocked to the cinema to experience a part of their history that most did not know about, and to enjoy seeing people like themselves on the big screen.1 When the script was being developed in the early 1980s, very few people knew that Chinese sojourners had come to New Zealand. Official records remained untouched in the archives and letters to or from the Chinese had, for the most part, been lost, or were with recipient families in China. Therefore the characters and the plot of Illustrious Energy had to be fictional. There was one reliable archive available to scriptwriters Martin Edmond and Leon Narbey (who also directed): the (then) little-known work of the Reverend Alexander Don. Reverend Don travelled to China taking letters and money to the families of sojourners, learning the language to facilitate his work with Chinese in

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Otago, where he spent many years as a minister, and paving the way for a proposed missionary project in south China.2 When time permitted, he travelled on foot over large distances, ministering to and recording details of Chinese individuals throughout New Zealand. His records contain notes, lists of names (mostly in Chinese script) and photographs of Chinese people, their social and mining activities, their dwellings, and a variety of local landscapes. The mise-en-scène of Illustrious Energy is based as far as possible on Reverend Don’s photographs and he is represented as a character in the film. The scene where his small Chinese congregation listens to his preaching with little understanding is consistent with the fact that he converted very few people.3 In the film, Reverend Don also appears at the local store in Chinatown and defuses a potentially violent anti-Chinese incident. Anti-Chinese racism intensified as the nineteenth century wore on, and this is represented within the film.4 Director Narbey communicates Chan’s vulnerability with the use of subjective camerawork. This includes a sequence where, in order to reach the Chinese settlement, Chan must walk through the white settlement and, because he has already experienced racist incidents on his journey to town, this is a tense scene. Chan is curious but watchful, unsure that he will arrive unharmed. The camera follows closely behind so that, like Chan, the audience cannot see behind or around the corner. A more mobile camera would give the audiences a wider view than that afforded Chan, defusing the narrative tension and promoting a feeling of safety.

Chan (Shaun Bao) returns with supplies for the Chinese New Year.

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That anti-Chinese racism was encoded in law is shown when Wong offers to pay the poll tax for Chan’s wife and child to come to New Zealand. The poll tax, instituted in 1881, cost five pounds and was payable each time a Chinese person entered or re-entered New Zealand. This moment in the film refers quite explicitly to 1895, the year before the poll tax was raised to 100 pounds, an impossible sum, even for Wong. By the time Illustrious Energy was released the poll tax, the sojourners, and the fact that they had initially been welcomed as a source of labour and later derided, had been forgotten, even among subsequent generations of Chinese New Zealanders. Later, when that history was ‘rediscovered’ it became a matter of shame for those whose ancestors enacted or did nothing to prevent it. But until the waves of Asian immigration in the 1990s, New Zealand Chinese, like Chinese diasporas in all countries where such laws had been enforced, were known as ‘model minorities’ because they caused no trouble and kept out of the public eye.5 Thus there was no outburst of anger or political backlash and few of the old people passed on their stories. This may be why, when Narbey travelled New Zealand seeking experienced actors and crew of Chinese ethnicity, he found very few. Interviews and auditions demonstrated the impossibility of making the film with inexperienced people. The budget required work to keep rolling.6 Thus the crew were mostly non-Chinese, and the main actors, Shaun Bao and Harry Ip, came from overseas. Peter Chin, who plays Wong, is an exception. He was local, a Dunedin lawyer. In 2004, Chin was elected Mayor of Dunedin, a post he retains today. Making the film provided other cross-cultural challenges. Narbey talks about using the subjective camera not only to communicate danger, but also to replace spoken language with visual language and to introduce the land almost as a character. Chan would not have had a voice in wider society and mining is a solitary activity. The script had to take this into account. Narbey and Edmond also record that they were anxious about which language to use. Films with subtitles were unpopular to a mainstream audience. On the one hand, financial returns had to be considered, and on the other, it seemed unacceptable, even ridiculous, to have the Chinese speaking in English among themselves. In the end there was no choice. The Chinese New Zealanders who play the extras did not have first language skills in Chinese, and they spoke a different dialect to the main actors, who spoke different dialects from each other. They all communicated in English off the set and there was no possibility of using Chinese conversationally onscreen.7 In preparing the Central Otago site where Kim and Chan live and have their diggings, production designer, Janelle Ashton, found shards of Chinese pottery.8 It is possible that these finds provided the impetus for later archaeological examination that established the claim and the hut had

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belonged to Chinese miners. The hut has been restored and the area designated an historic place (named after the film).9 The road Chan travels to town on is also the path people in the area would have taken. Furthermore, the wide shots record areas that have since been flooded as part of a hydroelectric project. The mining activities are also historically credible. Great care has been taken to show the need to prise lumps of clay out of the cliff, break them by hand and take them down to the river, the nearest supply of water, with only a pulley to augment physical effort. Social and religious customs shown in the film include the family loyalty of Kim and Chan and the way that Wong functions as a central figure for the Otago Chinese. Chinese diasporas formed clan-like groups operating along similar lines to extended families but with a floating membership. Established members provided assistance with local knowledge of institutions and language.10 Chan goes to Wong in the night when he needs help and is welcomed, and Wong has provided the land claim that he and Kim work. Other moments of tradition include Kim at his shrine. Out of fear of the surveyors, whom he calls ‘white devils’ and ‘land butchers’, Kim hangs a mirror to deflect the evil. The most comprehensive portrayal of custom, however, comes at the film’s opening where Kim, Chan and Wong disinter the bones of a friend, washing and packaging them ready for return to China. Burial in China was believed necessary for the spirit to complete its journey. Kim shows grief as he visits the box, temporarily placed on the shrine. Illustrious Energy was and is still a rare film. The brief theatrical release was closely followed by the sale overseas of the distribution company, Mirage. Although the New Zealand Film Commission (NZFC) had funded the film, it went as part of the company assets and there was only one final print due to the expense of celluloid.11 That objections to this loss went unheeded is indicative of 1980s’ attitudes of the New Zealand government and wider public towards local productions. Few thought them worth preserving or studying.12 Copies were available from the NZFC, but they were expensive and made from a negative that is not the fine-cut negative used for cinema release. The original film was finally located in 2008 in the UK, and while the NZFC do not own the film they have negotiated the rights to local distribution. A DVD release is planned as part of a larger project to make New Zealand films available.13 In 1987 Illustrious Energy was a film ahead of its time: although Australia, Canada and America, for instance, also utilised Chinese labour and enacted similar racist laws, none could provide a counterpart.14 In New Zealand during the 1990s significant numbers of new Chinese immigrants arrived, giving the ethnic group a higher public profile. By 2001 when Prime Minister Helen Clark gave an official apology for past racism, Chinese New Zealanders were reclaiming their histories. Following the apology, Illustrious Energy, a

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movie researched and filmed in the 1980s, available only in an unfinished state and still the only moving image representation of that history, was screened in museums and festivals as part of the revival.

Further Reading Allen, Brenda, ‘Identity and Cultural Salience in Illustrious Energy’, Illusions, 40, Winter 2008, pp.9–13. Ip, Manying and David Pang, ‘New Zealand Chinese identity: sojourners, model minority and multiple identities’ in James H. Lui et al. (eds.), New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2005. Ip, Manying and Nigel Murphy, Aliens at My Table: Asians as New Zealanders See Them, Penguin, Auckland, 2005. McKinnon, Malcolm, Immigrants and Citizens: New Zealanders and Immigration in Historical Context, Institute of Policy Studies, Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, 1996.

Notes 1 Panel discussion at the New Zealand Chinese Association Conference, ‘Going bananas: multiple identities forum’, held at the Auckland University of Technology on 12 August 2006. 2 Donald Cochrane, ‘The story of the New Zealand Chinese mission 1867–1952’, viewed 20 October 2010, http://www.archives.presbyterian.org.nz/missions/ nzchinesehistory.htm. 3 Cochrane. 4 Manying Ip and Nigel Murphy, Aliens at My Table: Asians as New Zealanders See Them, Penguin, Auckland, 2005, p.20. 5 Manying Ip and David Pang, ‘New Zealand Chinese identity: sojourners, model minority and multiple identities’ in James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh and Teresia Teaiwa (eds.), New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations, Victoria University Press, Wellington, 2005, p.175; pp.178–82. 6 Leon Narbey in conversation with the author, January 2006. 7 Leon Narbey, Illusions, no. 8, June 1988, pp.3–5. 8 Leon Narbey, in conversation with the author, February 2006. 9 ‘Illustrious Energy Historic Area: Conroy’s Gully, Alexandra’, New Zealand Historic Places Trust Register, viewed 10 February 2010, http://www.historic.org.nz/ TheRegister/RegisterSearch/RegisterResults.aspx?RID=7548. 10 Khun Emg Kuah-Pearce and Evelyn Hu-Dehart (eds.), Voluntary Organizations in the Chinese Diaspora, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2006.

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11 Lindsay Sheldon, The Selling of New Zealand Movies: The Inside Story of the Dealmaking, Shrewd Moves and Sheer Luck that took New Zealand Films from Obscurity to the Top of the World, Awa Press, Wellington, 2005, p.97. 12 In America the film’s name was changed to Dreams of Home. 13 ‘Classic New Zealand Films Returned to New Zealand’, New Zealand Film Commission, press release of 31 July 2009, viewed 1 August 2010, http://www.nzfilm.co.nz/NewsAndMedia/NewsAndPressReleases/News/CLASS IC_NZ_FILMS_RETURNED_TO_NZ.aspx. 14 The 2009 Canada/China mini-series Iron Road addresses the plight of Chinese workers in Canada. Although it was made two decades later, the mini-series provides an interesting companion piece to Illustrious Energy. Any comparison of the two works should take into account the 20-year time difference, the relative ease of access to archival sources in the 2000s, and the international nature of the 2009 production.

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Serenades By Michelle Langford Serenades (Mojgan Khadem, 2001) tells the story of a young woman, Jila (Alice Haines), born of a one-night encounter between an Aboriginal woman and an Afghan cameleer. The film traces her emotional journey through a complex web of inter-cultural and inter-faith relationships in outback South Australia in the 1880s. Khadem developed the screenplay in close consultation with historian Christine Stephens whose research provided the background for this historical melodrama. Serenades was one of a number of Australian films produced in the early 2000s to deal with the colonial era. Rabbit Proof Fence (Phillip Noyce, 2002), The Tracker (Rolf de Heer, 2002) and The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) sought to critique a range of colonial narratives by confronting audiences with images of violence against, and oppression of, Australia’s Indigenous population by British colonisers. In part they were an attempt to come to terms with the nation’s dark history. These films appeared at a time when debate about injustices to Indigenous Australians was at its height, sparked by the ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ (1997) on the ‘Stolen Generations’, and inflamed by the then Prime Minister John Howard’s refusal to formally apologise for the widespread removal of Aboriginal children from their families. While Serenades was produced with great awareness of this context, it also attempts to bring to the screen a range of somewhat lesser-known colonial encounters between Indigenous Australians, Afghan cameleers and German Lutheran missionaries. In doing so, Khadem offers an alternative to the polarity – Indigenous vs. nonIndigenous – that so frequently frames Australian colonial narratives. Instead, Khadem’s film produces a triangulation of inter-cultural and interfaith encounters in order to examine some of the tensions and social fractures that arise at the points where differences intersect. As a melodrama, these tensions and fractures ultimately take their toll on the central female protagonist, who becomes emblematic of broader social and cultural forces at play in colonial Australia. Through Jila, Khadem (who is herself a religious refugee from Iran) pleads for equality, tolerance and acceptance of difference.

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The film opens with wide shots of a camel team hauling their cargo through the red Australian desert. These images remind us both of the ruggedness of the landscape, and the crucial role camels and their predominantly Afghan handlers played in the exploration, cultivation and settlement of the vast Australian interior. As the camera cuts in closer to the team our attention is drawn to one piece of unusual cargo: a heavy wooden piano. It is destined for the Lutheran mission, the ‘Anchor of Hope’, where the first part of the film takes place. The privileged introduction of the piano heralds the important role music will play in underscoring the discordant encounters between the various cultural groups depicted throughout the film. Additionally, as a conventional melodramatic device, music also functions to heighten the viewer’s sense of pathos towards the female protagonist Jila, whose destiny is decided by men and against whose dominance and divergent values she must fight to gain autonomy as a woman. Suspicion and distrust of the Afghans by the Christian settlers and the subordinate place of the Aboriginal people in this colonial space is highlighted several times throughout the first 15 minutes of the film. Upon arrival at the mission, the Afghan cameleers are seen performing their afternoon prayers, their rugs laid out upon the sand facing Mecca. A cut away shows young Johann (Ben Winsor) tapping haphazardly at the untuned piano, producing a discordant sound. The piano, a symbol of European culture, dominates the shot. In the background we see a number of Aboriginal women and children who appear rather over-dressed in European clothing – constructing them as subjects of European domination. While Pastor Hoffman (Billie Brown), Johann’s father, is mostly out of frame, his arms reach authoritatively across the piano asserting his presence. The sound continues as the film cuts back briefly to the praying Afghans and then to a mid-tracking shot of Hoffman, who is now centre-frame. Glancing in the direction of the Afghans, Hoffman remarks intolerantly: ‘I wish they didn’t have to put on a show every time they deliver our goods.’ In this brief sequence visual information is used to convey a set of attitudes and relationships to the viewer. For example, Hoffman and the Afghans never appear in the same shot. This visual separation emphasises the rift between cultures. Interestingly, it is the Afghans who are viewed as ‘other’ by the Europeans, a place frequently ascribed to Aboriginal people in discourses of colonial power and domination. Visually, through costuming, posture and framing, the Aboriginal people are depicted as having been assimilated into European ways and values, albeit in significantly subordinate roles as servants. The Afghans, who bring this ‘other’ religion, present a threat to the mission’s work of converting and ‘saving’ the Indigenous people. Pastor Hoffman’s paternalistic and self-righteous attitude is emphasised shortly afterwards when he directs his Indigenous servant Joseph (David Ngoombujarra) to warn his relatives to stay away from the

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Afghans. This warning is prophetic, as the Afghans do go to the Aboriginal camp that night, leading to Shir Mohammad (Sinisa Copic) exchanging a gun and some tobacco for one night with Wanga (Franchesca Cubillo). It is this exchange that leads to Jila’s conception. These brief scenes set up the world of divergent values and attitudes into which Jila is born. About eight minutes into the film, we flash forward to Jila, aged seven. The traces of her hybrid upbringing – largely between her Aboriginal tribe and the mission – are evidenced through costuming, song and tradition. Khadem triangulates the colonial encounter through a musical motif. This is achieved in three ways: firstly, when Shir Mohammad chastises Jila for singing a Christian hymn – according to Islam, girls should not sing; secondly, through a flashback of Jila’s grandfather, Rainman (David Gulpilil), passing on an ancestral song about the tree where her mother was born; and thirdly, through the Christmas carol ‘Silent Night’, which is being sung (in German) at the moment of Wanga’s death from influenza. It is clear that Jila blames the Pastor for her mother’s death, for earlier he had cut a branch from her mother’s tree to be used as a Christmas tree. ‘You cut the tree, you cut her life’, remarks Rainman later. The tree and the song ‘Silent Night’ are used as highly loaded and emotionally charged objects to convey a sense of the cultural dominance of the white, Christian settlers. Their religious tradition (Christmas) supersedes the beliefs of the Indigenous people. The tree is used to illustrate the doctrine of terra nullius, which lay at the heart of the Australian colonial endeavour. Furthermore, the soft, lyrical sounds of ‘Silent Night’ forms a stark sonic juxtaposition with Wanga’s loud and painful death and hints at the act of ‘silencing’ not only of Wanga through death, but of the entire Indigenous population under colonisation and beyond. Just as Shir Mohammad’s customs seek to silence the female voice, Indigenous voices are silenced, literally cut off by the imposition of white cultural practice. This tension is brought to a melodramatic climax through the soundtrack as Jila runs from her mother’s side to the church, pushing a bottle of glass marbles from the window ledge, sending them crashing to the ground. Amidst the sound of crashing glass, a series of low minor chords darken the light harmonies of ‘Silent Night’. Khadem uses this melodramatic sonic device to express both Jila’s emotional state and to reinforce her commentary on these colonial tensions. Later, music is again used to heighten the film’s melodramatic tension and to highlight the rift between cultures. Johann (Aden Young), the pastor’s son, returns home from attending boarding school in Europe. He is now a dashing, well-educated young man who still harbours a deep love for Jila. Upon learning that she is to be married to the local Mullah (Nick Lathouris), Johann offers to pay a higher bride price and presents Shir Mohammad with a music box as a token of good faith. Shir Mohammad is initially intrigued

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‘Afghan’ cameleers Most Australian schoolchildren will know that camels accompanied explorers Burke and Wills on their journeys into the Australian interior. Many probably also know that the famous Ghan railway that stretches between Adelaide and Darwin was built on the backs of these camels and their Afghan drivers in whose honour the railway is named. The story of the men who accompanied the animals to Australia and worked with them for many decades is perhaps less well known. According to Christine Stephens’ detailed history, the first ‘Afghan’ camel handlers who were brought to Australia with a shipment of camels from India in 1860 were probably ‘Sepoys’, Indians who served in the British army. The handlers came to be known as ‘Afghans’ despite their diverse origins from Afghanistan and the Indian sub-continent.1 While they brought with them their customs and religion, the men were not allowed to bring their wives and families to Australia. According to Stephens, both Aboriginal and European women feared the ‘barbaric’ Afghans, who were perceived to represent a sexual threat to both communities.2 By the 1880s, however, and with the weakening of kinship ties amongst Aboriginal communities, Afghan men were increasingly taking Aboriginal and European brides.3 This is reflected in Serenades by the mix of Aboriginal, Irish and French wives of the Afghan cameleers living in the Ghantown. 1 2 3

Christine Stephens, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns: A History of Afghan Camel Drivers in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989, pp.1–2. Stephens, pp.214–15. Stephens, p.218.

with the apparatus until the voice of Dame Nellie Melba, one of Australia’s most famous nineteenth-century female sopranos, begins to sing out. A shot of Jila recoiling reminds us that in Shir Mohammad’s culture, women are forbidden from singing. An act of ‘good faith’ is interpreted as a grave insult. It is this issue of marriage and the subordination of women to men’s laws that fuels the film’s climax and denouement. This involves Jila untangling herself from the strictures of the two religions that have failed her in a bid to assert her independence as a woman. Believing that she has poisoned the Mullah on their wedding night, Jila flees towards the mission. Seeking guidance and absolution from the Pastor, but finding none, Jila refuses to be ‘saved’ either by religion or by Johann. ‘I don’t need you to rescue me’, she exclaims when he offers to give her spiritual rather than marital love. Jila, still

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dressed in her traditional red Afghan wedding attire, flees into the desert where she is metaphorically reborn. The final movement of the film begins with a shot of Jila’s face emerging from beneath the water. Her prominent green eyes – an emblem of her hybridity – stare directly into the camera, articulating a directive to viewers to think about the issues of cultural conflict raised by the film. This is followed by a montage of Jila refashioning the red silk of her Afghan gown into something reminiscent of an Indigenous ceremonial costume, weaving a grass skirt, painting herself with ochre and preparing a sand drawing of a radiating sun. The white ochre markings blend with the traditional Afghan henna paintings on her hands and feet forming traces of her hybridity. These images are intercut with alternating shots of the mission and the mosque. This triangulated cross-cutting or cinematic ‘weaving’ reminds viewers of Jila’s upbringing between ‘dominant’ cultures and religions, which had occurred largely at the expense of her Indigenous background. As Jila dances, she not only asserts her connection to the land and to her Indigenous heritage, but also asserts her autonomy as a woman. Although, in the final shot Johann can be seen in the background riding towards Jila, Khadem refuses the melodramatic convention of the happilyever-after ending by closing the film on a freeze frame, thus preserving Jila’s new-found autonomy, rather than subordinating it to a generic convention. It is through this highly lyrical and suspended ending, which is accompanied by a hybrid musical composition by Iranian-Australian composer Davood A. Tabrizi, that Khadem’s film most engages with contemporary debates around the rights of Indigenous Australians and the horrors of the Stolen Generations. By triangulating the cultural conflict, Khadem not only attempts to move beyond depicting historical colonisation as a binary matter, but suggests it may be one of complex, competing and interwoven struggles for legitimisation, autonomy and identity formation.

Further Reading Stephens, Christine, White Man’s Dreaming: Killalpanna Mission 1866–1915, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1994. Stephens, Christine, Tin Mosques and Ghantowns: A History of Afghan Camel Drivers in Australia, Oxford University Press, Melbourne, 1989.

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Pacific Solution: From Afghanistan to Aotearoa By Annie Goldson Pacific Solution (2005) is a 50-minute documentary that charts the experience of the ‘Tampa boys’, a group of young Hazara asylum seekers who were stranded off the coast of Australia in 2001. It follows their journey to, and life in, Aotearoa New Zealand and their eventual reunification with their families. The ‘Tampa boys’, as they became known, were unaccompanied minors between the ages of about 12 and 18, who along with 400 other Hazara were indeed at the eye of a political storm.1 Escaping from the Taliban in Afghanistan, they were plucked from a leaky fishing (popularly known as ‘people smuggling’) vessel by the courageous Arne Rinnan, captain of the Norwegian container ship, the MV Tampa. Captain Rinnan, obeying the ‘law of the sea’, picked up the desperate boatload. But after the miracle rescue, the asylum seekers were stranded on the decks of the distinctive orange ship while Australia, Norway and Indonesia debated their fate. The asylum seekers wanted passage to nearby Christmas Island, an Australian territory, where they could undergo processing, applying for refugee status in the fashion determined by international covenant. The Australian government, spearheaded by a vociferous John Howard, sought to prevent this, refusing the Tampa entry into Australian waters, even deploying the Australian Special Forces to board the ship. While the world took stock of events, the refugees were scattered. With little fanfare New Zealand agreed to process 131 asylum seekers – the ‘Tampa boys’, along with the few family groups – and should they be determined as refugees agreed to settle them as part of its national refugee quota. Australia formulated a scheme through which the others could be farmed out to Pacific Islands for processing of their claims. As legal scholar Penelope Mathews points out, this scheme was ‘audaciously, indeed somewhat contemptuously’ named the ‘Pacific Solution’.2 Under this agreement, the remaining Tampa asylum seekers were shepherded onto the Australian troopship, the SS Manoora, and ferried to the island of Nauru, an impoverished and ecologically devastated nation, which hastily erected camps for their internment. Papua New Guinea also signed up and, although New Zealand assisted with the crisis, Helen Clark’s Labour government refused to sign. It was while the

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Boy on bus. Tampa refugees were heading for Nauru on the Manoora that the 9/11 (11 September 2001) disaster in America exploded onto the world scene, changing the political landscape of the new century and making the future of all asylum seekers much harder. The 40 young men (and a few girls who were part of the family groups) accepted into New Zealand were educated at Selwyn College, a progressive secondary school in Auckland. They mostly prospered – and in time, when they acquired New Zealand citizenship, were allowed to bring their immediate families to settle in Aotearoa as part of the country’s refugee reunification programme. This process of reunification became the heart of the film Pacific Solution. We made the documentary for TVNZ, our state broadcaster, and as is evident, I need to declare an interest. I produced the documentary but the idea, which struck me immediately as powerful, came from a student at the University of Auckland, a playwright who was too busy to pursue it further. I felt that it not only would have presumably strong personal stories, but it addressed the current political context (Afghanistan and the post-9/11 world), the politics of, and relations between, New Zealand and Australia, and the increasingly important issue of refugee re-settlement, seen as a vexed issue worldwide. My sense too was that despite the highly commercial orientation of even our state broadcaster, it could be fundable. I was right. The commissioning editor at TVNZ was prepared to give us a license fee and we

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were funded by NZ on Air. The director, James Frankham, was multi-skilled, a kind of one-man band who shot, recorded sound, and field produced as he roamed through Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan. The documentary uses a largely expository ‘journey’ style, following the central story of the Tampa refugees through combining interviews (with the young men, immigration officials and with two Australian advocates, QC Julian Burnside and journalist/writer David Marr), a sprinkling of narration (written and spoken by the boys themselves) and with as much archival footage as we could afford. We established the boys’ lives, providing some context to their plight, and followed the search (by letter and telephone) for their families who were often scattered by the conflict, living in camps in Pakistan, on building sites in Iran and elsewhere. We then captured, where possible, the moment of reunification amongst family members and traced the aftermath of settlement. As well as capturing the story of the Tampa and the ‘boys’, Pacific Solution follows two New Zealand immigration officials who had the difficult job of travelling to

Refugees in truck.

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Documentary modes Pacific Solution is ‘expository’, belonging to one of the modes in an elastic taxonomy, which was developed by Bill Nichols, an American academic, as a way of theorising documentary practice. He initially described four modes through which this representation is enacted – expository, observational, participatory and reflexive, adding a further two, poetic and performative, in later writing.1 Nichols was the first to popularise the term ‘representing reality’, pointing out how traditionally documentaries strove to represent reality as faithfully as possible (1991).The development of new modes was a response to the genre’s truth claims, its apparent offering of a window on the world. However, as Nichols iterated, documentary still constructs a version of the world and is not the world itself. Paralleling developments in history and anthropology, documentary saw the more common usage of reflexivity in the late-twentieth century articulating a different notion of documentary ‘truth’. Using various techniques, such as revealing the director onscreen, or deploying elements of ‘mockumentary’, such modes or styles emphasised that documentary is always a constructed cultural text, not a reflection of reality. 1

Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991, pp.99–138.

remote areas in the Middle East to authenticate family members as genuine or just those understandably desperate to leave Afghanistan. Only immediate family and dependants of the original Tampa refugees were eligible for settlement. It goes without saying (although is rarely commented on) that the timeframe of the experience of the Tampa asylum seekers was extraordinary. The devastating impact of the destruction of the World Trade Center afforded John Howard an opportunity to entrench his anti-‘boat people’ stance. In a deft move, he was able to turn those fleeing the Taliban into terrorists themselves. His rhetoric hit a note with broad swathes of the Australian electorate, assisting his campaign for re-election in late 2001. That Howard’s sound bites hit a chord is unsurprising given the crisis of 11 September 2001. His discursive position, however, described by Mummery and Rodan as ‘protectivist’, was already well established.3 ‘Protectivism’, derived from the phrase ‘protecting our way of life from them’, is elastic. It divides the world into the ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric,’ those ‘for us or agin’ us’ to use George Bush’s famous call to the ‘coalition of the willing’, uttered on 6 November 2001.4 ‘Protectivism’ conflates ‘boat people’, ‘queue jumpers’ and

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economic refugees with terrorists, which is then used to justify incarceration in detention centres for these disparate groups. As well as defining ‘protectivism’, Mummery and Rodan describe its opposite. ‘Globalised humanitarianism’ argues that we share a common humanity, and calls to treat others as we would like to be treated ourselves,5 dissolving the victim/villain line by emphasising a nexus of causes. Suffering, compassion and obligation, together with a demand for humane solutions, are key elements of globalised humanitarianism, which stresses the need for dialogue and international legal processes rather than war. Clearly, Pacific Solution sits firmly in the ‘globalised humanitarianism’ camp. In the tradition of social political documentary, it attempts to stress tolerance, understanding, a recognition of difference and (subtly) attempts to impose its beliefs on its audience. It also capitalises on trans-Tasman rivalry, allowing Kiwis to feel righteous and liberal when compared to their Australian counterparts (even though our two eloquent refugee advocates, Marr and Burnside, are both Australian). In its use of young people and families as its central focus, the documentary appeals to the ‘normalcy’ of family life (what parents would want to willingly send their oldest sons off into an uncertain future? Who is not moved by the images of the families reuniting when each had thought the other dead?), hoping to make audiences think about what they would do if confronted with genuine danger. Pacific Solution provides some political context and refuses to give the ‘other side’ a voice (unless reframed by the use of processed television archival footage), attempting to engage with Afghanistan’s recent history. Its structure as a journey also allows it to sidestep the problems of exploring ‘balance’ demanded by a more rhetorical ‘current affairs’ documentary style. The characters in the film, selected of course by the film-makers, are endearing, have personalities and humour. One Christchurch family have turned their entire back lawn into a vegetable garden and ‘family fun’ is planting, weeding and blessing Allah for the copious rain. A grandmother, unable to read and write in her own language, sits in front of a computer with earphones over her burqa studying the English alphabet. Several Tampa boys (and one girl) have trained and have reasonable jobs, and are shown to be studious and ambitious, eager to work and contribute, and show confusion and hurt by Howard’s refusal, suggesting that it was Australia that lost an opportunity. They are the antithesis of the ‘dole-bludger’ image often visualised and generated by the ‘protectivists’. Yet, while making the film, I was aware of the problems of film’s idealisation of the refugee community. New Zealanders, like many in ‘host’ countries, mostly feel they are being generous letting people into ‘God’s own’ (New Zealand), and have expectations that refugees and migrants should be grateful for whatever they get. While Kiwis can feel morally smug about their

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generosity, their country has not felt the pressure that Australia has: it is a brave boat that could navigate its way to these islands. The pressure for refugee communities to be ‘model minorities’ must be at times overwhelming. The stresses that many have undergone – torture, loss, alienation, constant fear – can, and does, result in various forms of dysfunction that can explode into violence but mostly goes unseen, and unconsidered. Some of the ‘Tampa boys’ refused to cooperate with us, tired of being categorised as ‘refugees’ and wanting to meld into the multicultural mix that is South Auckland. Others (like most adolescents) were easily embarrassed by their newly arrived parents, some of whom were rural people with conservative beliefs and dress codes. To consider these ‘problems’ more openly in a film such as Pacific Solution can involve engaging audiences with a deeper understanding than mainstream television is prepared to allow. Given the film’s adherence to ‘global humanitarianism’, as its makers we decided that these issues were too difficult to air. As I write, the ‘Pacific Solution’ as a policy is back on the agenda. The turmoil in the international arena along with worsening environmental conditions are generating more refugees from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, Burma and parts of Africa, and some are making their way to Australia via Indonesia. One thing is certain. The tide of displaced people, and the arguments over their fate, will continue.

Further Reading Mathews, P, ‘Australian refugee protection in the wake of the Tampa’, American Journal of International Law, 96, 2002, pp.661–76. Mummary, Jane and Debbie Rodan, ‘Discourse of democracy in the aftermath of 9/11 and other events: protectivism versus humanitarianism’, Continuum, 17, 2003, pp.433–43. Nichols, Bill, Introduction to Documentary, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2001. Nichols, Bill, Representing Reality, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis: 1991. Žižek, Slavoj, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Verso, London and New York, 2002.

Notes 1

Hazara are ethnic Shiite Muslims who have suffered discrimination and subjugation under various regimes in Afghanistan, but particularly under Taliban rule.

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Penelope Matthews, ‘Australian refugee protection in the wake of the Tampa’, American Journal of International Law, no. 96, 2002, p.661. Jane Mummary and Debbie Rodan, ‘Discourses of democracy in the aftermath of 9/11 and other events: protectivism versus humanitarianism’, Continuum, no. 17, 2003, p.437. ‘Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists’. George Bush uttered this famous phrase in a joint press conference with French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, anticipating the invasion of Afghanistan that was launched on 7 October 2001. Mummary and Rodan, p.437.

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Introduction By James E. Bennett •

Forgotten Silver (1995)

•

Rosie’s Secret (1994)

• Outback House (2005) •

The Colony (2005)

Historians are generally much more comfortable with the codes and conventions of the documentary form than they are with other forms of screen text. This is because of the documentary’s capacity to resemble the apparatus of a scholarly written text using an array of devices that include expert talking heads, the deployment of original archival footage of past events and visual documentary evidence that all work to support the authenticity of the narrative. Screen texts that foreground their own construction and that subvert the simple dichotomy between factuality (synonymous with documentary) and fiction (closely associated with drama) are very useful tools in training us to think more critically and imaginatively about the production and reproduction of histories. Even though none of the chapters in this section offers us actual history (or ‘reality’) they nonetheless all provide a useful entry point for thinking about the nature of history and its complexities. Craig Hight discusses a very effective example of the hoax form of mock documentary (or ‘mockumentary’) – Forgotten Silver, directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes. The narrative focuses on Colin McKenzie, a previously unrecognised hero of New Zealand cinema (who turns out to be a fictional character). As Hight observes, the appeal of the film lies in an important national myth, and this explains its radically different reception by New Zealand and international audiences. A clear continuity exists with Rosie’s Secret – also a mock documentary of the hoax variety – by Lisa Matthews. Only 11 minutes in length, this short

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and snappy production focuses on the role of Rosie Foster and her fictional role in the construction of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Nancy Cushing argues that at one level Matthews is making a point about the erasure of women from historiography, but at a broader level there is a more important point here about the distortion of evidence mobilised in the interests of powerful causes. Produced in the mid-1990s, both Forgotten Silver and Rosie’s Secret cause us to reflect on the ease with which the moving image can be manipulated in the contemporary era. Historical reality television became a popular trend in Australia and overseas in the first decade of the twenty-first century. While this type of historical representation should never be confused with historiography, there is an educational as well as more obvious entertainment purpose behind its production. Susan Hardy and Anthony Corones conceptualise Outback House as a form of ‘tele-historical tourism’. They argue that some conventions of this genre are quite ahistorical, and yet it also offers the possibility of ‘true invention’ based on what we do know about the past. Like Outback House, The Colony did not so much offer an opportunity for re-enactment of the past as a space for twenty-first century participants to play with and even reinvent it. In that sense, historical reality television is a mediation between past and present; it provides a mass audience the opportunity to empathise with people from the past and to experience it albeit nostalgically, but is always heavily overlaid with the sensibilities of the present. Claire Lowrie points out that the major focus of The Colony related to the hardships of early frontier life for white colonists. Made at a time when the History wars raged in Australia over the nature and extent of frontier violence, she argues that the series ultimately provided a comforting narrative about Aboriginal-settler relations when the past became too challenging for contemporary participants to confront.

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Forgotten Silver By Craig Hight Forgotten Silver (1995) is a New Zealand television mockumentary directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes and first broadcast to New Zealand audiences on 29 October 1995. Intended as a playful in-joke on film history and national culture, and involving the willing participation of a number of figures within the New Zealand film industry, it demonstrates how easily there can be slippage between the agenda of film-makers and the expectations of their audience. Never openly acknowledging that it is fiction, the programme forced viewers to decide for themselves whether or not it could be believed. The film-makers exploited some factors unique to the local broadcasting context of the time to pull off their hoax. Firstly, the programme was screened in the ‘quality drama’ Montana Sunday Theatre slot by the official state broadcaster Television New Zealand (who played along with the hoax). In 1995 New Zealand was also celebrating 100 years of cinema, with the Film Commission actively promoting an awareness and celebration of this milestone and the New Zealand Film Archive conducting a nationwide search for forgotten old films. While most of the material collected by the Archive had been home-movies and similar short excerpts of film, there was an unstated hope that the search would uncover material of historical importance. The first screening of Forgotten Silver was also preceded by a significant amount of publicity focusing on the importance of its find. An article in the New Zealand Listener ‘broke’ the story, claiming to herald a ‘sensational find’ with the discovery of a hoard of long-lost films by previously unknown film-maker ‘Colin McKenzie’. Written in the same tone the directors used in the programme, it expressed excitement at the importance and relevance of the work of McKenzie, and of the implications that this discovery seemed to hold for both New Zealand and world cinema history. Jackson and Botes proved to be very accomplished in appropriating all the codes and conventions of documentary to create a convincing fiction. They clearly intended that viewers approach the programme as though it were a documentary, drawing on certain well-established expectations concerning what the genre can offer, and in particular how documentary texts represent the historical world. The programme utilises the ‘expository mode’ of

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documentary, the form that relates most closely to the traditional essay. It offers an argument about the world, using onscreen narrators (Jackson and Botes) and a variety of editing devices to present an array of evidence in an apparently balanced and objective way. Forgotten Silver begins with Jackson in his backyard, locating him, and the story of McKenzie, in real and identifiable surroundings. Before the title credits the audience is also presented with a line-up of clearly-labelled expert talking heads, including Jonathan Morris, film archivist, Harvey Weinstein of Miramax films, and film historian Leonard Maltin. They all argue for the historic importance of the films found and of the place of McKenzie himself as a pioneer in the history of film. Another key player in the documentary is McKenzie’s ‘widow’ Hannah, who offers a more personal testimony. As the film progresses she reveals vital clues, which help Jackson and the viewers piece McKenzie’s story together – the programme builds tension and drama by pacing these revelations at regular intervals. The rhetoric of scientific discovery is also drawn upon to enhance the plausibility of Jackson’s findings; for example, McKenzie’s experiments with the egg whites he supposedly used to make film stock, and his complex attempts to develop colour film, are ‘authenticated’ by experts who explain the scientific principles behind these various inventions. The McKenzie story is constantly reinforced through the use of key pieces of visual evidence such as black and white photographs showing McKenzie as a young man, and old newspaper clippings that chart his progress in the filmmaking business. These all provide a seeming wealth of material to support Jackson’s claims for the historical authenticity and significance of McKenzie’s accomplishments. Perhaps most convincing as evidence are the extracts from McKenzie’s own films, both his fictional work (the feature film Salome) and his ‘reportage’ films of Gallipoli and of the Spanish Civil War. These latter films appear to ground the documentary firmly in broader historical narratives. A crucial part of the effectiveness of the programme also derives from the subtlety and variety of ways in which it exploited cultural stereotypes and accepted notions concerning the nature of New Zealand history and society. Although McKenzie’s endeavours are in vain in terms of personal recognition during his lifetime, they serve as a kind of historical lesson for the audience of the way things should have happened, a message that resonated strongly with the programme’s New Zealand audience. Much of the narrative structure of the programme serves to unfold the story of McKenzie’s life, presenting a biography with references to a number of already known historical events (such as the two World Wars). This is expertly intercut with an expedition into the West Coast bush by Jackson and Botes, as they search for a huge set supposedly built by the film-maker for his masterpiece Salome.

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Colin McKenzie experiments with egg whites to produce film stock.

Newspaper announcement.

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This journey into the New Zealand bush is one of the more important ways in which Forgotten Silver draws specifically on New Zealand myths to make its narrative so compelling. In New Zealand popular culture the native bush and its associated landscape plays a similar function as the western frontier does in American folklore, or the outback does in Australian mythology. It is the bush which served as a frontier for early European colonists, and as the place where the more admired aspects of a supposed New Zealand character were forged, and where McKenzie demonstrates his resilience, independence and persistence in the face of obstacles. Other aspects of McKenzie’s character also draw upon stereotypes established by the colonial period of New Zealand history. He is one of the legendary backyard inventors supposedly at the heart of New Zealand’s development, and both he and his brother Brooke serve as soldiers in the various conflicts claimed to have forged the beginnings of the nation itself. It is Brooke, with a camera built by his brother, who provides the first footage from an iconic event of collective sacrifice: Gallipoli. Forgotten Silver, then, not only appeals to an important origin myth for the New Zealand nation, but also reinforces the accepted narrative promoted by the myth, through appearing to provide the first ‘real’ (documentary) evidence of the hardships suffered by New Zealand soldiers. The Forgotten Silver hoax was revealed in national newspapers the day after the screening, prompting significant media coverage and commentary, and an outpouring of letters to the editors of local newspapers. From a cursory survey of responses reported in the media, the New Zealand audience could be divided roughly into three broad categories. Firstly, some viewers evidently still felt some confusion over whether or not Colin McKenzie could be considered a New Zealand historical figure and whether Forgotten Silver was in fact a documentary. These viewers expected there to be a clearly demarcated line between reality-based television and fictional programmes; they insisted there should be something either preceding or during the programme which flags when a programme is fake. While Forgotten Silver does feature a number of clues suggesting it was fictional, these were often subtle and perhaps overwhelmed by the effectiveness of the programme’s other devices. A second portion of Forgotten Silver‘s audience expressed some appreciation of the skill involved in the making of the programme, and to some extent supported the idea that there were some national myths which New Zealanders should be able to laugh at (this is very much the reaction of overseas audiences who have enjoyed the programme on DVD). This is the audience Jackson and Botes were playing to; those who did not automatically assume that information structured into documentary form conformed to assumptions of objectivity, accuracy and balance.

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Orson Welles and War of the Worlds One early, infamous hoax which exploited a mass medium was the 1938 radio broadcast of H.G.Wells’ science fiction classic War of the Worlds, performed by a dramatic troupe led by Orson Welles. Like Forgotten Silver, the broadcast played to then audiences’ expectations of non-fiction; in this case to listeners’ belief in the authority of radio news bulletins. Welles and his fellow actors intended that listeners would get the joke quickly (Martians invade!), then appreciate the skill involved in telling the story. And in fact they included explicit disclaimers before and after the broadcast. But some listeners only heard the testimony from apparent eyewitnesses, sounds of chaos and alien machinery, and breathless accounts by reporters on location who were suddenly cut off, and many reacted with fear and alarm. They overwhelmed the telephone exchanges of the police and emergency services on the eastern coast of the United States, and Welles was later forced to publicly apologise for the stunt. The War of the Worlds example demonstrates the ways in which the distinctions between fact and fiction within each medium rely on expectations developed around a genrebased set of textual conventions, and the rich possibilities for those who create media content to play with these expectations.

The third and most interesting responses to the programme were from those angry at having been taken in by the hoax, and frustrated with filmmakers willing to play with some of their core beliefs about television non-fiction. They expressed outrage at the ‘violation’ of the trust that they had placed both in documentary film-makers and television broadcasters. There was also anger directed at film-makers playing with some of the more treasured popular New Zealand legends, such as Richard Pearse’s alleged preWright brothers flight. For these members of the New Zealand audience (in the mid-1990s) the country’s more ‘sacred’ national myths and symbols of national identity were perhaps still too vulnerable to be subjected to such an exercise in deconstruction. The challenge which Jackson and Botes set in producing Forgotten Silver and perpetrating the hoax of its documentary status was not just to the acceptance of a form of representation, but to a climate of adherence to assumptions concerning the ‘truthfulness’ of documentary and other nonfiction texts. As some viewers commented, if Jackson and Botes can make us believe in a fiction, then what are the implications for other film-makers, and other texts, which attempt to do this on a day-to-day basis?

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Further Reading Hight, Craig, Television Mockumentary: Reflexivity, Satire and a Call to Play, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2010. Roscoe, Jane and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001. Roscoe, Jane and Craig Hight, ‘Forgotten Silver: a New Zealand television hoax and its audience’ in Alex Juhasz and Jesse Lerner (eds.), F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, Visible Evidence Series, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 2006, pp.171–86. The full text of the materials discussed in this section, together with letters to the editor, newspaper commentaries, and the Listener articles associated with the programme, are available online at http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/ mock-doc.shtml

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Rosie’s Secret By Nancy Cushing Rosie’s Secret (Ronin Films, 1994, 11 mins) is an important element of a significant genre in the arts in Australia – the hoax. In the film, writer, director and producer Lisa Matthews traces the rediscovery of Rosie Foster, an important figure in labour relations during the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and the first to cut the ribbon at the opening ceremony of 19 March 1932. Unlike poet Ern Malley, Elizabeth Durack’s Aboriginal artist Eddie Burrup, or writer Helen Demidenko/Darville, however, there is no attempt to hide the fact of this fiction. The final frame contains the words: ‘The recreation of characters and events in this film is fictitious.’ Underlying the playfulness of the fabrication is a serious commentary on how histories are created. The film was made in the aftermath of the 1988 Bicentenary of the British colonisation of Australia, an event which inspired a broad range of revisionist publications by academic historians drawing attention to the roles of women, Indigenous people and convicts in early Australian history. Little of this new work registered at a popular level. Instead, Bicentennial events favoured the re-enactment and featured an assortment of stock characters from Australia’s past, most of them male: the benighted convict; the brave pioneer; and the intrepid explorer. Rosie’s Secret urged viewers to think more critically about the production of history, superficially focusing on the erasure of the role of women from great events but, more profoundly, opening up the whole question of how the past can be distorted by manipulations of evidence in the service of the powerful. This film belongs to the genre of the hoax film, one treated in less detail than other forms by Roscoe and Hight in their study of mock-documentaries. As they define it, the mock-documentary (or mockumentary) form is characterised by a mocking not only of ideals of the veracity of the documentary but the form itself – being ironic and self-reflexive and thereby offering viewers ample contextual clues that they are watching a work of fiction.1 Matthews observes the conventions of the documentary punctiliously without straying into exaggeration or parody. One of the features of an historical documentary adhered to in the film is the common technique of only slowly revealing the secret in the story.2 The

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Fact or fiction? Destabilising audiences Like those who responded in the media to the New Zealand hoax film Forgotten Silver (1995; discussed here by Craig Hight), some viewers of Rosie’s Secret will resent having been tricked. This type of response bemused the makers of Forgotten Silver, Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, who had intended that their film would make people more sceptical about what they saw in the media.1 Through the drama of the revelation of their fictional nature, hoax films draw attention to the constructed nature of all history and all film. They encourage viewers to assess critically the versions of the past they encounter in various media. 1

Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, p.149.

discovery of Rosie Foster is attributed to Dr Lenore Coltheart, a researcher whose credibility is heightened by her status as official historian of NSW Department of Public Works and the piles of archive boxes and historical documents with which she is surrounded as she speaks. Coltheart, who later edited the autobiography of Australian women’s rights activist Jessie Street (1889–1970), expresses her curiosity when she found that Rosie Foster, who appeared to be a significant person involved with the building of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, did not exist in state government records but did have a thick file created by Australia’s federal intelligence organisation, ASIO. Dale Spender, Phillip Adams and Richard Hall, high-profile left-leaning critics of the contemporary society and its gender order, provide their commentary on the scandal of Rosie’s exclusion from histories of the building of the bridge, their opinions bolstered visually by the intellectual weight of shelves of books behind them. These opinions are supported by contemporary black and white film footage of the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge with Rosie added in critical scenes; photographs altered to show Rosie in group shots with Bridge bureaucrats and builders; and genuine documents including front pages of newspapers supporting the case through the absence of reference to Rosie. To this is added oral testimony from a number of elderly informants who did actually have a direct relationship with the Bridge opening: a bridge worker, the wife of one of his co-workers, and three journalists. Indeed, only two characters in the film – the fictional Rosie and Lillian Bates, the secretary to NSW Premier Jack Lang – are not played by themselves. Through these classic documentary techniques, the secret is gradually revealed. In the process this revelation contradicts the received historical view that the Sydney Harbour Bridge ribbon was cut by New Guardsman, Captain Francis

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De Groot and the New Guard Rosie’s Secret offers a false reinterpretation of a well-known historical episode. The Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened in March 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression and the Labour Premier, Jack Lang, decided that he would not invite a member of the British Royal family to perform the honours, but would save money by doing it himself. Lang’s handling of the Depression had won him many enemies, amongst them a quasi-fascist organisation known as the New Guard. One of its members, Francis de Groot, decided that he could not allow Lang to open the bridge but would sweep in on horseback to cut the ribbon with his sword.This he did, shouting that he was opening the bridge in the name of the decent and respectable people of NSW. De Groot was quickly arrested, assessed as to his mental state and fined for offensive behaviour, although was later successful in a claim of wrongful arrest.

de Groot, before Premier Jack Lang could officially open it. Here it was Rosie who first cut the ribbon in the name of those who had built it. The coup de grâce used to convince the viewer is production of material evidence in the final scene: the scissors with which Rosie cut the ribbon and the receipt for a fine of £5 for her ‘offensive behaviour’. Sound is used effectively throughout the film. It is principally the unadorned voices of the expert talking heads and the participants. There is little music other than that in the background of original commentaries on footage from the 1930s, but an ominous soundtrack paired with low light levels is used to position the NSW State Archives as a malevolent character in the story. Long shots along dimly lit aisles of archive boxes backed with this music suggest that the archives are a mysterious space where the truth can be buried. Sound in the form of a camera shutter closing as each new image appears adds interest to the screening of still photographs, a dramatic slash accompanies the verbal description of Rosie being edited from film of the ribbon cutting ceremony, and the sound of film running through a projector backs silent footage of Rosie on holiday in the bush. The most effective device, however, is the complete absence of sound when the allegedly suppressed footage of Rosie cutting the ribbon is shown. Unlike the magician who distracts the audience at a critical point in his illusion, Rosie’s action is presented in silent, unadorned slow motion, heightening its credibility. On the first viewing, the film makes a compelling case. The injustices of gender are demonstrated again and a new martyr to the cause is created. Repeat viewings of the film reveal that some evidence of the hoax was present

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for the sharp-eyed. The experts are a little stiff, some unable to look down the barrel of the camera lens as they expound on the slighting of Rosie. The photographs do not look quite right. The Rosie in the historical film footage is clearer than the grainy figures around her and she moves differently. Some of the oral testimony seems rehearsed, the pounding of a fist on a hand a little too emphatic, the hesitations overly dramatic. The initial acceptance of this questionable evidence heightens the message – if we did not notice an actress’s head pasted over someone else’s body in the group photograph, what other forms of unreliable evidence slip past as other stories about the past are told? How much more vulnerable to this type of ruse are we in the digital age when the manipulation of sound and images has become commonplace and undetectable? How much of what is accepted as oral history misrepresents the past in wilful ways? These concerns complicate the overt message of the film, the axiom that history is written by the victors. In discussing Rosie’s excision from the historical record, Phillip Adams proposes a new term ‘mythhistory’ to describe the predominant interpretations of history, suggesting that they are a combination of history (a verifiable record of past events) and myth (beliefs about the past which serve social purposes). It is not only self-conscious hoaxes which misinform, use evidence poorly or follow an unsupported line of argument. In cases like that of Rosie, we are persuaded that the past is distorted to serve a specific political agenda. Although this film concentrates on class and gender relations, it shows that it is not only men with position and influence who can have an impact on ideas about the past. The film-maker, in collaboration with public intellectuals, can also concoct and disseminate a new version of the past which, without its revealing final frame, could lead others to revise their understanding of the past to incorporate a fiction. Since making Rosie’s Secret, Matthews has been involved with the writing and production of a series of important historical documentaries, from the popular series Our Century (1999) to the literary biographies In Search of Bony (2006) and The Shadow of Mary Poppins (2002), the innovative television production Rogue Nation (2008) and the three-part co-production, Darwin’s Brave New World (2009). She has worked on these projects with prominent historians including Peter Spearritt, Peter Cochrane, Michael Cathcart and Iain McCalman. In talking about Rogue Nation, Matthews said that her passion was unearthing untold stories from Australia’s past and that she sought to make the past believable and relatable.3 Her sophisticated engagement with the nature of history in Rosie’s Secret set the tone for these later works, showing her reflective approach and her awareness of the power of the historical film not just to record but also to produce history. Rosie’s Secret is not characterised by historical fidelity, but it does contain important truths about history. It is a powerful reminder of the contingency of

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historical interpretations, the workings of power in the translation of the past into history and the need to apply the same intellectual rigour to filmic representations of the past as to those in other forms.

Further Reading Roscoe, Jane and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001. Rosenstone, Robert A, History on Film, Film on History, Pearson Education, Harlow, 2006.

Notes 1 2 3

Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2001, p.46. Robert A. Rosenstone, History on Film, Film on History, Pearson Education, Harlow, 2006, p.80. ‘Rogue Nation Press Kit’, Screen Australia, viewed 29 September 2009 http://www.screenaustralia.gov.au/showcases/roguenation/RN_Press_Kit.pdf.

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Revisioning the Australian Outback House of 1861 By Susan Hardy and Anthony Corones The 2005 ABC Television series Outback House presented audiences with a recreation of what life would have been like for a squatter, his family and his employees on a remote NSW sheep station in 1861.1 However, by using volunteers in a ‘reality TV’ format, the series said more about its volunteers’ twenty-first-century perspectives on outback life of the 1860s than it said about squatters of the time. This raises the question of whether the series constitutes ‘bad’ history. This is not the case, because representations of history are always contemporary productions that provide a historical ‘set’ for us to inhabit and imagine the past for ourselves. In that sense Outback House offers a good representation of history through unscripted and material engagement with the physical conditions of the past. It is not a poor relation to ‘proper’ history, but rather a fruitful means for the pursuit of historical understanding. Further, it engages a wider audience in the task of revisioning the past. What were the aims of producing this series in a recreated historical setting? Entertainment? Testing historical assumptions about life on a squatter’s sheep station in 1861: ‘what it was like’, how did the class system function, what was the role of women? Discovering how twenty-first-century people would deal with 1861 conditions? Conducting a social experiment, with participation as the only reward for volunteers? According to the producers in the companion book to the series, all of the above.2 Despite the language of testing, discovering and experimenting, it is the perspectives of twenty-first-century people that are being imposed on the artificially recreated past and communicated to the audience in the visual language of television. In particular, the concern with the role, and coping skills, of women in the outback casts a strong contemporary perspective on the historical experiment. None of this would be lost on the intended audience, many of whom would already have seen such variations on the ‘reality TV’ theme as The Colony, Regency House Party, Frontier House, Victorian House and The Edwardian Country House. For them, reality television history would appear to be akin to drama but without the artifice of scripts and actors. They could empathise with the volunteers because they might have chosen to participate

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Playing with health and safety There was only one case of sickness and two accidents on the set of Outback House. No one would reasonably have expected the therapeutic approach to these problems to be that of the 1860s: in the case of the governess’ (Genevieve Yates) upset stomach, the treatment would have been further purging and bleeding; in the accident cases, either binding up the wound with a rag or, in the end, often rough and ready amputation. Nevertheless, the opportunity was missed to even ‘re-enact’ for the camera, with a voice-over, what would have happened in 1861. Medicaments, certified ‘safe’ to use by a twenty-first-century qualified medical practitioner, were supplied for use by the participants, although these were mainly herbal and in no way reflected the actual contents of the squatter’s medicine chest of the 1860s, which were much more likely to have been the ‘big guns’ of medicine at the time: laudanum, opium, calomel and castor oil. An accurate depiction of attitudes and action concerning ill health was thus made impossible due to twenty-first-century insurance and occupational health and safety issues. The appearance of the modern ambulance may have reassured participants and viewers alike that no human beings were to be harmed in the making of the programme; but it also highlighted the tensions involved in attempting to recreate the ‘frontier mentality’ of 1860s New South Wales in the ‘risk averse’ 2000s. Ironically the programme’s original concept document described the ‘squatter’ as an enterprising risk taker, the one thing he, his family and dependants were not allowed to be in the television series.

themselves. Moreover they could vicariously experience the past through the visually-presented reactions of the actual participants. The volunteers for Outback House, the ‘participants’ in the experiment, were encouraged by the promotional material to imagine that they were to ‘travel back in time to the 1860s’, to ‘make history’. But even for them it was an elaborate form of unusually extended, and filmed, entertainment, albeit of a rather challenging kind. In that sense they discovered more about themselves than about outback life in the 1860s. To ‘live the drama’ as a participant is to play a ‘game’ that is turned into a show; and then you re-live it all by seeing yourself on television. What of the historian at work in reality television? After all, life in an 1860s’ outback house has to be researched and (re)invented for the participants (and film crew) to inhabit. The historian3 offers his or her academic knowledge of the period in question in order to inform both the mind-set of the participants

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in the show and the practical situations in which they will find themselves and with which they will have to engage on a daily basis. Transforming the mind-set of twenty-first-century people into that of the 1860s is plainly going to be an all but impossible task if only because (to state the obvious) the real inhabitants of the mid-nineteenth century had mind-sets informed by their past and present, whereas the participants’ mind-sets reflect a future unknown to their real-life 1860s counterparts. To put it more simply: the participants always know that things could be better and indeed will be, after their time on the set is over. It would seem, then, to be easier for the historian to take on the task of simply instructing the participants in how to negotiate the practicalities of everyday mid-nineteenth-century living; but how ‘real’ can the actions and reactions of the participants be when, however necessary as part of day-to-day life on the set, they do not reflect a genuine struggle to survive in the manner in which they are carried out? Twenty-first-century imperatives intrude to ensure the ultimate safety and security, if not always the immediate comfort,

Playing with Aboriginality The land occupied by the squatter and his family in Outback House is part of the tribal lands of the Wiradjuri. By the 1860s, relations between the white and black populations had shifted from the violent clashes of 30 or 40 years before to an uneasy truce with Aboriginal men working as stockmen and trackers and the women employed as domestic servants, nurses and sometimes midwives. In order to reflect colonial domestic arrangements, one of the participants in the series experienced the life and work of an Aboriginal maid, Danielle Schaefer, the young woman being of Aboriginal descent herself. Apart from the entirely to-be-expected misery of a teenager faced with separation from her family and friends, combined with a lot of hard physical work, there were questions from both the girl and her mother (who taught in a TAFE course on ‘Aboriginal Identity’) as to the historical accuracy of the European/Aboriginal relationship depicted in the series. They thought that it was ‘too rosy a picture’ of what an Aboriginal maid would have experienced in the 1860s: she would not, for example, have eaten with everybody else and indeed might have been thrown ‘the scraps’. Her mother claimed that the television audience ought to have been confronted with this inconvenient truth, raising questions about whose ‘truth’ is being depicted here and whether there are lines to be drawn about which aspects of nineteenth-century life would be deemed unacceptable to a twentyfirst-century audience.

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of the participants so that neither their actions nor reactions can be truly of the 1860s; rather they become a pastiche, a costume party, in which the participants perform their meta-analysis of the situation. Not only is the resulting action somewhat one-dimensional and literally and metaphorically sanitised (the rejection of the long-drop toilet, the too-inclusive treatment of the Aboriginal maid), but also the production depicts only one version of outback life in the 1860s. The to-camera comments by the participants certainly attempt to show individual points of view; but these are inevitably personal and, even more inevitably, turn out to be extended expressions of surprise and/or disbelief at the unfamiliar/unwelcome situations in which the participants have found themselves. As such they are irretrievably ahistorical. How much of the substantial invention required for the show can be regarded as true? In one sense, none of it, because it is a representation of how things might have looked, and been done, in the 1860s. That is, it is literal fiction rather than filmic literalism. Nonetheless, there is a case to be made for ‘true invention’ on the basis of what is known about the past (i.e. engaged with historical discourse and expertise), as opposed to ‘false invention’, which ignores historical discourse.4 On that basis, one could hope that the show produces something that might have happened; that could be true as invented past. Consideration of ‘true invention’, however, does not help us transcend the fact that the show is an artefact of our time. Being a contemporary approximation of the past, Outback House offers us a televisual proxy, not the real thing. The very idea of sending ‘us’ into the past is historical subversion because the arrow of time points in the other direction: the past moves towards the present. Putting us in past settings subverts the reactions and behaviours of those in the past: we react and behave as ourselves, not in the way our ancestors did. When an accident occurred during the filming of the show, the arrival of an ambulance made a mockery of historical authenticity, while reminding viewers of contemporary medical expectations and occupational health and safety regulations. The refusal of female participants to wear the period clothing in the way it would have been worn by the settlers subverted the past by exercising a choice that was not a choice at the time. Even so, confronting ‘us’ with the material conditions of the past is an opportunity to learn something we would not discover otherwise. To invert the analysis, ‘doing’ rather than ‘reading’ the past is subversion of the present. Changing the way we think about the past by means of reality television is a subversion of present views about the past; and importantly, Outback House shows us that merely ‘acting’ the past (as in historical dramas) is not as radical as ‘being us’ in a re-invented past. In blurring the distinction between entertainment and historical reconstruction, Outback House poses the question of historical meaning to that audience. Does it just mean ‘15

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minutes of fame’ for the participants? Or, more subtly, does reality TV history insert the viewer into experiential negotiation with an audio-visual recreation of the past? Reality TV history is not historiography. It is what might be called ‘historiopathy’; that is, an audio-visually induced empathic experiencing of a recreated past in the conditions of the present. Given that, what does this tell us about the 1860s? For much of the audience, a great deal. Although Outback House sits alongside, and indeed relies on, written history, it is unlikely that many viewers would be found scurrying off to books or articles in order to find out more about the period. What the viewers are actually participating in is a journey that could be described as a form of ‘tele-historical tourism’. Does it matter whether Outback House challenged ideological perspectives about the past? For some viewers, being challenged about their (perhaps unrecognised) preconceptions would have been an enlightening and exciting part of the televisual journey. This was not a focal point of the project, although viewers already engaged with historical discourse might have been inclined to question the presumptions built into the programme. In terms of producing the ‘effect’ of historical knowledge in viewers, however, the series did its job. They now know what the past would have been like…for us!

Further Reading Hardy, Susan and Anthony Corones, ‘Colonising the past? History, medicine and reality television’, Health and History, 8:2, 2006, pp.124–46. Kavka, Misha, Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality Matters, Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2008. Lynam, Bernard, Outback House: Behind the Scenes of the ABC Television Series, ABC Books, Sydney, 2005. ‘Outback House’, ABC, viewed 1 October 2010, www.abc.net.au/ outbackhouse/.

Notes 1 2 3

4

For further details and commentary see ‘Outback House’, ABC, viewed 30 October 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/outbackhouse/. Bernard Lynam, Outback House, ABC Books, Sydney, 2005, pp.8–10. For more detail on an historian’s involvement in Outback House see Susan Hardy and Anthony Corones, ‘Colonising the past? History, medicine and reality television’, Health and History, vol. 8, no. 2, 2006, pp.124–46. Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1995, p.72.

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Living History: The Colony By Claire Lowrie The reality television series, The Colony, was a co-production between SBS television, RTÉ Ireland and the History Channel (UK) that premiered in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom in 2005. This ‘living history’ series, as the producer Chris Hilton called it, brought together four modern-day families to live on a nineteenth-century style colonial settlement on the banks of the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Over a period of four months, the families – one from Ireland, one from England, a white Australian family from Tasmania, and an Aboriginal clan from the north-east coast of Australia – lived in nineteenth-century conditions, facing, as the narrator put it, ‘hardship, history and each other’. A group of men and women who served as a convict labour force also joined the families. By subjecting twenty-first-century people to the lifestyle, farming techniques and historical events of early nineteenth-century New South Wales, the producers of The Colony enabled both the participants of the programme and the audience to actively engage with, and reconstruct, the past. By inspiring the participants and the audience to use what R.G. Collingwood called ‘historical imagination’, the programme provided insight into the lives and attitudes of historical actors who are largely silent in the colonial archive, including Aboriginal people, working-class women and convicts.1 In addition to reconstructing the past from diverse perspectives, the participants in The Colony were provided with the opportunity to ‘play with history’, to reject it and to ‘reinvent’ it.2 The female participants rejected the nineteenth-century division of labour and the female apparel of the era. The conscious decision of the female participants to abandon historical accuracy served to highlight the difficulties of life for women in the 1800s. The process of playing with history in The Colony also provided a sense of the challenges and advantages of employing a convict workforce in nineteenth-century Australia. This was achieved by casting convict participants who were, at one extreme, aggressive and unmotivated, and at the other extreme, hard-working and easy going. The opportunity to reinvent history was used by the white Australian, Irish and English participants to ease the injustices of black-white encounters on the

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Hurley family on the boat. colonial frontier. They did this by disobeying a colonial proclamation not to associate with Aboriginal people. While they were motivated by aims of justice, the denial of colonial oppression by the participants allowed them to ease white settler guilt and ensured that the represented story of British settlement returned to an old nostalgic narrative of pioneering struggle. Historical reality television programmes like The Colony were particularly popular in the early years of the twenty-first century. Outback House aired in Australia in the same year as The Colony. In Britain, The 1900 House aired in 1999 and was followed up with similar historical reality television programmes. Frontier House was shown in the United States in 2002 and, in Canada, Quest for the Bay went to air in the same year. As with most reality television shows, The Colony centred on a story of endurance and survival with a focus on underlying interpersonal and community tensions.3 As the narrator, Australian actor Jack Thompson, put it: ‘By the end we’ll know which of our families and their convicts are tough enough to have cut it on the frontier.’ The constant use of ‘we’ by the narrator invited the audience to think of themselves as having a stake in the experiment. For the audiences in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the emphasis on survival was highlighted by reference to the isolation of the Hawkesbury River region and the presence of funnel web spiders and poisonous snakes. The Colony told the story of early colonial Australia from multiple perspectives. Throughout the series, the participants reflected on the past

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from their own modern-day perspective and from the perspective of the historical ‘character’ they were assigned. The use of documentary-style camera techniques illustrating ‘day in the life’ moments, combined with the participants’ ‘to-camera confessionals’ and accompanying self-analysis, provided insight into the conditions of life for convicts and free-settlers from different ethnic and religious backgrounds, including both men and women.4 In addition to the settler perspective, The Colony also presented an Aboriginal response to the colonial experience. In the first episode, Anto Donovan, Sharon Costelloe and their six other Aboriginal clan members watched from the top of a ridge as tall ships carrying the white colonists arrived at the colony. The voice of a man speaking the local Darkinjung language echoed across the cliffs as the group watched on and pondered how their ancestors would have interpreted the scene. Ultimately, however, the focus of The Colony was on hardships of nineteenth-century life for white colonists adapting to the environment, sickness and community relations. In the call for participants, the producer Chris Hilton claimed that The Colony would achieve ‘historical accuracy’ based on three years of rigorous research.5 Historical accuracy was important for participants such as Englishman John Stephenson who was excited about ‘getting back to how it were [sic]’ and Irishman Maurice Hurley who saw himself as going ‘back in time’. However, the involvement of twenty-first-century people with their cultural baggage, along with the inability to replicate all aspects of 1800s life, meant the aim of accuracy was an unrealistic one, as Hilton later admitted.6 As Susan Hardy and Anthony Corones point out in the context of Outback House, while the participants lived in the conditions of the era, their risk of dying from a nineteenth-century disease or a snake bite was highly unlikely given the availability of twenty-first-century medical care.7 The active process of imagining and playing with history in The Colony provided something more valuable than absolute historical fidelity. It provided a tangible sense of what nineteenth-century life was like, for example, in regard to the master-convict relationship. Convict workers were known for being difficult to control, and the producers certainly had this in mind when they cast Steve Keogh, a miner from Kalgoorlie, as a convict.8 As the Irish matriarch Patricia Hurley explained, Keogh’s role was to cause trouble and he achieved that. On the other hand, Paul Ward, a highly-motivated worker and a skilled stone mason, was also cast as a convict. The way the families had to negotiate with these two very different convicts provided a sense of the challenges and advantages of employing a convict workforce. The Colony was pitched as educational entertainment. The educational credentials of the series were achieved through the use of a documentarystyle narrator and the involvement of well-known historians. The narrator, Jack Thompson, was the voice of authority on the show, alerting the audience

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to simmering tensions in the community and interpreting them in an historical context. For example, Thompson positioned the ambivalent response of the Australian matriarch, Tracy Hohnke, to her female convict in the context of nineteenth-century notions of convict women as prostitutes.9 The historian Michael McKernan acted as an educator for the participants, informing them of the nature of the society in which they were living and the rules of that society, for example, in administering discipline to their convicts. Just as McKernan educated the participants, so too did he educate the audience. As well as providing historical context through the use of historians and a narrator, The Colony sought to educate the audience about major historical events of the era by subjecting the participants to them. Thus, the white settler participants lose their livestock to the New South Wales Corps in response to the Rum Rebellion of 1808. The most difficult historical reality that the participants (and the audience) were forced to confront was the ‘undeclared war’ between Aboriginal traditional owners and British invaders on the Hawkesbury River during the 1800s. At the Aboriginal camp, historian John Maynard interpreted frontier violence from an Aboriginal perspective, recounting some horrific stories. Maynard engaged with the question of evidence, explaining that while dozens of white deaths were recorded, an unknown and likely much larger number of Aboriginal people died. The narrator repeats this assertion. The Colony went on air during a debate about frontier violence in Australia. In his 2002 book, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Keith Windshuttle claimed that Australian historians, particularly Henry Reynolds, had exaggerated the extent of frontier violence.10 While Windshuttle’s claim was critiqued and rejected by most Australian historians, it was given credibility by the Prime Minister John Howard and some media commentators, spurring on the so-called ‘History Wars’.11 The Colony’s recounting of frontier violence thus subverted and challenged the government perspective of the time, despite being co-produced by a partially government-funded channel. The producers of The Colony sought to represent a complex and often violent history of black-white relations. The white participants, however, took a different approach, re-inventing this history. When they were subjected to a re-enactment of an 1805 proclamation which outlawed contact between Aboriginal people and white colonists, the white participants rallied around the Aboriginal clan, rejecting the proclamation and raising rebel flags. This was certainly a feel-good moment in the series but the underlying motivations for the protest were problematic. The indignation of the Australian family, for example, was directed not so much at the past injustice but at the producers of the show and the historians for forcing them to separate from the Aboriginal participants. Thus, Tracy Hohnke rejected the 1805 proclamation, defiantly explaining: ‘I don’t give a shit what the bloody history man says.’

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Koori Camp. More problematically, the non-Indigenous participants did not seem to understand, nor did the narrator explain, the improbability of colonists of the 1800s openly rebelling against such a proclamation. By playing with history, without consciously reflecting on the reasons and outcomes for doing so, the participants effectively erased past guilt and provided a soothing narrative of white settlement on the Hawkesbury River. For the white Australian, Irish and English participants, The Colony was ultimately a nostalgic journey with the adults regretting having to leave and yearning for the supposedly more simple and family-centred 1800s lifestyle. This nostalgic response is typical of participants in the historical reality television genre.12 For the Aboriginal participants, the issue was more complicated and upsetting. Soon after the proclamation event they decided to go ‘walkabout’, remaining absent from the series for six weeks. In the last scene of The Colony, the participants were taken to Sydney where they returned to twenty-first-century life. As the group toured Sydney in their twenty-first-century attire, the camera flashed back to the abandoned colony where the colonists’ labours were already disappearing as a cow devoured the vegetable garden. The scene jumped from the city and its urban buzz back to the empty and silent huts of the colony. The scene was eerie and ended abruptly, leaving the audience with a sense that the past is indeed a foreign country and they had been on a tour of it. As with all reconstructions

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of the past, this was a selective yet insightful tour that provided glimpses and impressions of an unfamiliar place.

Further Reading Arrow, Michelle, ‘“That history should not have ever been how it was”: The Colony, Outback House, and Australian History’, Film and History, 37:1, Spring 2007, pp.54–66. Gibbon, Belinda, The Colony: The Book from the Popular SBS Living History Series, Random House, Sydney, 2005. Karskens, Grace, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2009. Murphy, Kerrie, TV Land: Australia’s Obsession with Reality Television, John Wiley, Milton, 2006.

Notes 1 R.G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1946, pp.233–249. 2 Robert A. Rosenstone, Visions of the Past, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1995, p.12. 3 Kerrie Murphy, TV Land: Australia’s Obsession with Reality Television, John Wiley, Milton, 2006, p.xi and p.179. 4 Murphy, p.4. 5 The Colony, Australian Television Information Archive, viewed 1 July 2010, http://www.australiantelevision.net/colony/colony.html. 6 Belinda Gibbon, The Colony: The Book from the Popular SBS Living History Series, Random House, Sydney, 2005, p.4. 7 Hardy, Susan and Anthony Corones, ‘Re-visioning the Australian outback house of 1861’, in this volume. 8 Stuart Macintyre, A Concise History of Australia, 2nd edn, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, pp.42–3. 9 Tracy Hohnke was adamant that her female convict should not be involved in the care of the Hohnke children. The female convict was allocated tasks outside of the home such as establishing a vegetable garden. 10 Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume 1: Van Diemen’s Land, 1803–1847, Macleay Press, Sydney, 2002, pp.1–10. 11 Bain Attwood, Telling the Truth about Aboriginal History, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2005, pp.60–1. 12 Michelle Arrow, ‘“That history should not have ever been how it was”: The Colony, Outback House, and Australian History’, Film and History, vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2007, p.58

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Index 100 Crowded Years 93, 100–116 Abberton brothers see Bra Boys ABC 15, 144–6, 179–82, 280, 284 Aberdein, Keith 68, 73, 75, 77 Aboriginal ordinances 17–20 Aborigines apology to 12, 22, 34, 187, 249 ‘Bringing Them Home Report’ 4, 17, 252 see also Aborigines: Stolen Generations Chief Protector of 19, 23 see also A.O. Neville Moore River Native Settlement 22–3 non-Indigenous attitudes towards 11–14, 18, 25, 252, 289 oral history of 17 Progressive Association 14 Protection Act 11, 14 Royal Commission into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from their Families 12, 22–3, 184 Stolen Generations 4, 9–11, 13, 16–17, 19, 22, 34, 252, 256 adaptation 66, 103, 151, 160, 193, 214, 220 adolescence xxii, 151–2, 159, 167, 189, 193 Adventures of Barry Mackenzie, The 164 Afghan cameleers 240, 252–3, 255 Afghanistan 240, 255, 257–62 An Angel at My Table 178, 189–90, 193 anti-Australian 24 see un-Australian Anzacs xx, 128–30 in cinema and film 128–30 see also Gallipoli; Revealing Gallipoli history of xx legend of 121–2, 128–31, 144 and nationalism 128, 147 see nationalism and war graves 147 see also diggers America 31, 153, 156, 195, 249, 251, 258, 272 see also United States Americanisation 154 Anzac Cove 131, 145 Aotearoa see New Zealand Armstrong, Gillian 220, 222 assimilation/ism 5, 7–9, 22, 170, 239 see also Aborigines: Stolen Generations asylum seekers see refugees Atatürk see Turkey

Auckland 43–4, 47, 70, 75, 258, 262 Australia (film) see Luhrmann, Baz Australian see also national; nationalism 10BA tax legislation 134 bush 155, 178, 217 bushmen 182 federation 34, 160, 179, 221–2 Film Commission 106, 225 football 17–18, 20, 161 impressionism (painting) 179, 181 outback 31, 34, 129, 186, 231, 240, 252, 268, 272, 280–4 settlements or colonies 14, 27, 179, 241–2, 253, 285–6, 289 Screen online 17 War Memorial 143 Ayers Rock see Uluru Bad Blood see Newell, Mike Bana, Eric see Love the Beast Barclay, Barry 39–40, 52, 58, 148, 170, 172 Bastion Point 70 Belich, James 66, 69, 79–83, 85, 88 Bennett, F.O. 202 Bennett, Reverend Frederick 42, 66 Beresford, Bruce 123–7, 147, 151, 158, 164, 188 Binney, Judith 80, 88 Black, Michael 81 Boer War xxi, 21, 121, 123–4, 126, 145, 147–8 Boers xxi, 121, 123–6, 147 and Lord Kitchener 125–6 Bone People, The 58 Bostock, Gerry 13–14 Botes, Costa 267, 269, 276 Bra Boys 26–30, 50–4 Breaker Morant see Beresford, Bruce Briggs, Geraldine 14 Britain 80, 95, 101, 123, 126, 151, 154, 156, 158, 195, 241, 286 British army 73, 123–6, 255 British Empire 95–6, 98, 111, 123–4, 126, 128, 131, 147 British Academy of Film and Television Arts Awards 153 British Film Institute 109, 177 Brodsky, Maurice 182 Bryson, John 184

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Buffalo Legends 4, 17–20 Bulletin, The 160 Burns, Ken 79–80, 82–3, 116, 270 see Civil War, The Burnside, Julian 259, 261 Caldwell, Flo 14 Camden Park 221 Camera Natura 94, 105–7 Campion, Jane 178, 189, 191, 194, 196 see also Frame, Janet; An Angel at My Table; Piano, The Canada 249, 251, 286 Canberra 12, 221 Cannes Film Festival 5, 52, 109, 190 Captain Cook 26 Carey, Gabrielle 164, 166–7 see also Puberty Blues; Salami Sisters Caro, Niki 169 Castle, The 165 Catholicism 104, 159, 162 Caswell, Robert 184 Chamberlain, Lindy 178, 184–7 see also Chamberlain, Michael; Evil Angels Chamberlain, Michael 178, 184–7 Chauvel, Charles 5–10, 34, 130 Chief Te Ponga 43 childhood see adolescence Christchurch 111, 178, 199–201, 261 Chunuk Bair 130–1 Cinema of Unease 109–11, 192 City Bushmen 182 civil rights movements gay and lesbian 189, 221, 225, 227–8, 230 see also Mardi Gras protests Indigenous 13, 23, 46–7, 88 women’s 221–2, 228, 276 Civil War, The see Burns, Ken Clark, Anna xx–xxi Coaster, The 114–16 colonialism 18, 26, 46–7, 111, 136, 196 colonisation see colonialism Colony, The 18, 292, 304, 309–13 Communism 155 see also New Zealand, Communist Party of Conder, Charles 182 Cooper, Reuben 18 Cooper, William 14 Cowan, James 42, 81 Cowra prisoner of war camp in 133, 136 war cemetery in 136 Cowra Breakout, The and semi-documentary 122, 133–7 crime true crime 187 gangs 59 Crocodile Dundee see Hogan, Paul Cronulla 164 see also Puberty Blues

Crowe, Russell 26, 28–9 Cumeroogunga walk off Culotta, Nino see O’Grady, John Dad and Dave Come to Town 213, 215–17, 219 Darwin, bombing of 31 see also Japanese (in film) Davis, Beatrice 223 Davison, Graeme 181 Day of Mourning Conference 14–15 de Heer, Rolf 24, 252 Dempsey, Bill 17–19 Demidenko/Darville, Helen 244, 275 deviance/deviant 103, 177–8, 199–200, 202, 217, 226 Devil’s Playground, The see Schepisi, Fred Disappearance of Azaria Chamberlain, The see Rymer, Judy Dixon, Retta 17, 19 documentary cinéma-vérité documentary 47 expository documentary xvii, 105, 259–60, 269 observational 47–8, 260 mock documentary xix–xx, 260, 267, 269, 275 Don, Alexander 246 Down on His Luck 182 see McCubbin, Fredrick ‘Dreaming, the’ 31–2 Duff, Alan 40, 58–60 Edinburgh, Duke of 156 Edmond, Martin 246, 248 Edwardian Country House, The 280 Egypt 129, 131, 139, 141 Eora people 26–28 Europe 141, 171, 189, 226, 239, 254 European 31–2, 34, 42–3, 58, 80, 85, 94, 96–8, 100, 103, 136, 147, 194–5, 242–3, 253–5, 272, 282 Evil Angels 178, 184–7 federation 34, 113, 160, 179, 221–2 feminism 166, 221–2 first-wave 221 second-wave 166 Fimeri, Wain 143–4, 146–7 Fink, Margaret 220 Fink, Theodore 182 First World War 79, 125 see war, First World football see Australian football; rugby union Forgotten Silver see Jackson, Peter Fourth Cinema see Barclay, Barry Frame, Janet 178, 189–93 and adaptations by Jones, Laura 190–1 autobiographies 189–90, 193 awards 189 and institutionalisation 178, 189–91, 193 and Sargeson, Frank 189

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Index Franklin, Miles 214, 220–3 see also My Brilliant Career Frontier House 280 Gallipoli (location) 129–32, 143–7 Gallipoli see Weir, Peter see Fimeri, Wain, Revealing Gallipoli see Örnek, Tolga, Gallipoli: The Frontline Experience gangs Garimara, Doris Pilkington 22, 25 Garner, Bill xix, 178 gay 213–4, 219, 225–9 homosexual xxii, 161, 202, 213, 215–9, 225–7 gender xxii, 22, 73, 116, 140, 152, 159, 166, 173, 119, 202, 213–16, 276–8 Getting of Wisdom, The see Beresford, Bruce Gevacolor 5 Gibson, Ross 94, 105–7 Gibson, Sarah 106 Glenrowan 205 Glorious New Zealand 96–8 Goldson, Annie 94, 113–16, 197, 240, 257–62 Goodall, Heather 13 Governor, The 89–95, 81 Grandad Rudd 215, 217–19 ‘Great Hikoi’ 69 Great War see war, First World greenstone 81 Grenville, Kate 183 Grey, George Sir 67, 80 Grierson, John 100, 102, 114–16 Gulpilil, David 24, 32, 254 Handcock, Peter see Beresford, Bruce Hawkesbury River 285–6, 288–9 Hayward, Rudall Rewi’s Last Stand 67, 74, 81, 85 Te Kooti Trail, The 81, 85 Heavenly Creatures see Jackson, Peter Heidelberg school of painting see One Summer Again Herbert, Xavier 18–19, 32 Poor Fellow My Country 32 Hight, Craig 267, 269, 275 Hilton, Chris 285, 287 Hinemoa 43 History Channel (UK) 285 hoax films see documentary: mock documentary Hogan, Paul 184 Hollywood 5, 9, 31–2, 55, 61, 73, 77, 171–2, 206 Holmes, Cecil 94, 113–15, 117 Hopkins, Livingston 160 Howard, John 22, 252, 257, 260–1, 288 Hulme, Juliet 178, 199–203 Ihimaera, Witi 169 Illustrious Energy see Narbey, Leon

immigrants xxi, 239–43, 249 see also ‘White Australia’ policy Chinese 19, 239, 249 see also New Zealand: Chinese miners and poll tax Greek 19, 242 Italian 242–3 Immigration Restriction Act 242 Imrie, Richard see Pressburger, Emric Indigenous see Aborigines; Maori Irish 33, 42, 85, 147, 205, 244, 255, 285, 287, 289 Jackson, Peter 111, 199–202, 267–70, 272–4, 276 Japanese (in film) 133–6 prisoners of war 133–6 Jayamanne, Laleen 106 Jedda see Chauvel, Charles Jerilderie 205 see also Kelly, Edward ‘Ned’ Johnson, Darlene 16 Jordan, Gregor 177–8, 201, 205–9, 230 Kelly, Edward ‘Ned’ 177–8, 205–7 Kennedy–Miller 134 Khadem, Mojgan 240, 252, 254, 256 Kid Stakes, The 184 Killing of Kane, The 81 Kimmins, Anthony 151, 153–5, 160 Kubrick, Stanley 125 see also Paths of Glory Kunoth, Ngarla 5, 9 Lambert, Susan 106 Lambert, Verity 184 Land of Little Kings 16 Lawson, Henry 221 Leahy, Gillian 106 lesbian 213–14, 225–30 Lette, Kathy 164, 166–7 see also Puberty Blues; Salami Sisters Little Boy from Manly 160 Lousy Little Sixpence 4, 11, 13, 23 Love Letters from a War 143 Love the Beast 213, 231, 233, 235 Loved by a Maori Chieftess 43 Luhrmann, Baz 27–8, 55–8 Mad Max 232, 234 Mad Max II 105–6, 234 Making Utu 76 Malley, Ern 244, 275 Man from Snowy River, The 232 Maniapoto, Rewi 80–1 M¯aori 42–3, 54, 56, 97, 194 M¯aoritanga (Maori culture) 173 Marbuk 5–9 see Jedda Mardi Gras 214, 227–9 see also deviant; gay; lesbian; homosexual; Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters, protests Marker, Chris 105–6 Maroubra 26–9

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Marr, David 259, 261 masculinity xxii, 28–9, 40, 56, 59, 61, 76, 161, 166, 208, 217–18, 231–5 and Anzacs 233 hyper- 26, 29 and muscle cars 231–2, 234 and nationalism 161, 208, 235 Pa¯keha¯ (colonists) and 56, 75 mateship 129, 161, 213, 217–18, 231, 233 Matthews, Lisa see Rosie’s Secret Maungapo¯hatu 80, 83 McCubbin, Fredrick 179, 182 Down on His Luck 182 McKenzie, Colin 267, 269–73 see Forgotten Silver McCrae, Colin 79, 82, 84 McQueen, Humphrey 179–80, 183 Melbourne 13–14, 143–4, 156, 181, 231 Méliès, Gaston 39, 41–4 Trip to the Moon, A 39 Menzies, Sir Robert 155 migrants see immigrants Mihaia 83 Miller, George 134, 232, 234 mise-en-scène 60, 247 Mita, Merata 39–40, 46–50, 56, 58, 170 mockumentary see documentary: mock Moffatt, Tracey 9, 106 Moorhouse, Frank 185 Morant affair 126 Morant, Harry 123–6 Morgan, Alec xix, 23 Morris Suzuki, Tessa xviii Muldoon, Robert 47–9, 70–1 multiculturalism xxi, 17, 19, 28–9, 136–7, 240, 242, 245 Murphy, Geoff 65, 68, 73–4, 76–7, 85 Murray, Stuart 40, 57–62, 76, 78 muskets 195 My Brilliant Career 214, 220–2 My Life without Steve 106 Narbey, Leon 239, 246–9 Nathan, Hilary see Parker, Pauline national cinema 12, 15, 31–4, 56, 87, 93–5, 106–7, 109–10, 113–15, 129, 155, 158–61 identity xxi–xxii, 27, 29, 40, 46–8, 73, 95–8, 114, 138, 143, 155–7, 161, 164, 181, 195, 233, 242–3, 273 mythology 34, 128–9, 135–8, 267, 272–3 see also nationalism, Anzacs National Film and Sound Archive (Australia) 12, 130 National Film Unit/NFU (NZ) 72, 110, 112–5, 117 nationalism 32, 107, 116, 128, 146, 158, 184, 222 Ned Kelly 177–8, 205–8 Ned Kelly (1970) 206 see Jordan Gregor see also Kelly, Edward ‘Ned’

Neill, Sam 94, 109–11, 192, 218, 220 Neville, A.O. 23–4 New South Wales 11, 133, 154, 220, 285, 293 State Archives of 13 New York Times 109, 185 New Zealand Chinese miners in 246–8 see also Narbey, Leon Chinese poll tax in 248 Communist Party of 113 Film Archive 269 Film Commission 170, 190, 249, 269 government 42, 54, 95, 98, 100, 128, 170, 249 Internal Affairs, Department of 95 Ma¯ori film-making in xxi, 39–40, 65, 169–5 national identity 47, 56, 68, 98, 195 Native Affairs, Department of 103 Publicity Office 95, 98 settlements in 77, 80, 95, 98, 111, 170, 247 talkies 112 tourism 42, 44, 93–99 Tourism and Health Resources, Department of 95 wars in 65–6, 69, 75, 77, 79–83, 85, 101, 113, 138–41 Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps 138 New Zealand Film Commission see New Zealand: Film Commission New Zealand Wars, The see Belich, James; Stephens, Tainui Ngati 39, 52–6, 58, 172 Nice Coloured Girls see Moffatt, Tracey Nicholls, Douglas 14 Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy see Moffatt, Tracey Noonan, Michael 68 Northern Territory 5, 17–18, 23, 31–2, 34, 184–5 Noyce, Phillip 133, 252 O’Grady, John 241, 244 On Our Selection 105 Once Were Warriors 40, 58–61, 195 and masculinity 40, 59 One Summer Again 178–82 oppositional cinema 69, 93 Ordell, Tad see Kid Stakes, The Örnek, Tolga 122 O’Shea, John 52, 74 Otago 239, 246–9 Our Century 278 Outback House 268, 280–4, 286–7 Overlanders, The 34, 106 Pacific Solution see Goldson, Annie Papua New Guinea 133, 257 Parker, Pauline 178, 199–203 Parker-Hulme case see Heavenly Creatures; Hulme, Juliet; Parker, Pauline; Nathan, Hilary; Perry, Ann Paths of Glory 125 Patten, Jack 14 Patu! 64, 70–4

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Index Perth 17 Perry, Ann see Hulme, Juliet Piano, The 99, 178, 194–7, 199 Picnic at Hanging Rock 106–7, 158 Pictures see Black, Michael Poata, Tama 52 Pohlmann, Gerd 46–7 Poor Fellow My Country see Herbert, Xavier Powell, Michael 241, 243–4 Pozières 143 Pressburger, Emric 244 Preston, Gaylene 76, 138–41 see also Making Utu; War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us propaganda xix, 93, 95 protectivism 240, 260–1 Puberty Blues 151–2, 164–7 Queen Elizabeth 156 Rabbit Proof Fence 4, 22–3, 25, 252 Rafferty, Chips 155, 241 Rain of the Children 81 Raymond, Moore see Kimmins, Anthony Reckless Kelly 206 refugees 239–40, 257–62 Regency House Party 280 Reid, Peter 13 Revealing Gallipoli see Fimeri, Wain Rewi’s Last Stand see Hayward, Rudall Reynall, Paul 8 Reynolds, Henry 18, 288 Rinnan, Arne see Tampa crisis Rintoul, Stuart 17 see Davison, Graeme River Queen see Ward, Vincent Roach, Archie 23 Roberts, Tom 179, 181–3 Shearing the Rams 182 Rogue Nation 278 Romantic New Zealand 93, 95–9 Ronin Films 275 Roscoe, Jane 274–6 Rosenstone, Robert xvii, 105, 107, 178, 200 Rosie’s Secret 267–8, 275–8 Rotorua 41–4, 97 Royal Commission see Aborigines, Royal Commission into the Separation of Aboriginal Children from their Families see Evil Angels Royal Tour 156 RTÉ Ireland 144, 285 Rudd, Steele see Davis, Arthur Hoey rugby union and 1981 Springbok Tour 40, 49

Rymer, Judy 109, 185 Salami Sisters 167 Sargeson, Frank see Frame, Janet SBS 285 Schepisi, Fred 151, 158–62, 184–6 Second World War see war, Second World Japanese attacks on Darwin 31 Secret River, The see Grenville, Kate Seeing Red see Goldson, Annie Serenades 240, 252, 255 sexuality xxii, 7, 33, 59, 77, 126, 138, 140, 158–9, 161–2, 164–6, 194, 196, 202, 213–19, 225–35 heterosexuality xxii, 7, 33, 59, 159, 161, 231, 233, 235 homosexuality xxii, 161, 202, 213, 215–19, 225–7 women’s 140, 166, 194, 221, 223 Victorian 196 Shaw, Greg 52 Shea, Violet 14 Shearing the Rams see Roberts, Tom Shortland, Waihoroi 197 Simpson-Lyttle, George 8 Smiley, Smiley Gets a Gun see Kimmins, Anthony Social Darwinism 3, 24 Song of Ceylon 106 Sons of Matthew 106 South Africa 40, 46–9, 123–4, 203 see also Boers; rugby union Southern, Clara 182 Stephens, Tainui 66, 81–2, 170 Stolen Generations see Aborigines: Stolen Generations Storm Boy 160 Story of the Kelly Gang see Tait, Charles Streep, Meryl 184–5, 187 Streeton, Arthur 179, 181–2 Sunday Too Far Away 106–7 Sutherland, Jane 181–2 Suttor, Betty 5, 8 Sydney 13–15, 26, 136, 145, 164, 167, 214, 216, 225–6, 228–9, 289 Sydney Film Festival 15 Table Talk see Brodsky, Maurice Tait, Charles 205 Takaparawha see Bastion Point Tamahori, Lee 40, 58–9, 61 Tampa crisis 240, 257–8 tax breaks see Australia: 10BA Legislation Te Kooti Arikirangi 80–1 Te Kooti Trail, The see Hayward, Rudall Te Wheke 73, 75–7

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Making Film and Television Histories Ten Canoes 25 television xviii–xxii, 15–16, 52, 65–71, 79–81, 105–6, 109, 115–16, 133–5, 144, 147, 154, 173, 179, 181–3, 186–8, 190, 213, 261–2, 268–9, 273, 278, 280–3, 285–7, 289 see Governor, The; Cowra Breakout, The; One Summer Again; Outback House; Colony, The; Revealing Gallipoli hoax xxii, 244, 267, 269, 272–3, 275–8 see Forgotten Silver; Rosie’s Secret mini series 133–6, 187, 190 reality xix, xxii, 272, 280–1, 283–6, 288–9 Television One 67 see also TVNZ terra nullius xx, 254 Thatcher, Margaret 114 They’re a Weird Mob 241–5 Thompson, Jack 107, 124, 286–8 Titokowaru, Rı¯ wha 66, 80–1, 85–7 Toplin, Robert Brent xviii Toronto International Film Festival 169 Torres Strait Islands/Islanders 4, 18, 115 Tracker, The 24, 252 Treaty of Waitangi 75, 88, 93, 100–1 see also; Waitangi Tribunal Treaty of Waitangi Act 75, 93, 100–1 Tudawali, Robert 5–6, 9 Tucker, Margaret 13–14 Turkey 120, 122–3 TV guide television awards 109 TVNZ 144, 258 Uluru 184, 186 Uncivilised 5, 9 United States 79, 153, 199, 273, 286 Utu 65–6, 68, 73–7, 81, 85 Victoria 14, 146, 159, 205–7 Victorian see sexuality, Victorian Victorian House Party 280 Waitangi Tribunal 88 Walsh, Fintan Patrick 113 Walsh, Fran 199–201 Walters, Brendon 31 war xx–xxi, 31–2, 34, 39, 52, 65–6, 69, 79–81, 85, 87, 94, 110, 113, 121–6, 128, 130–1, 133, 135–6,

138–41, 144, 151, 153–4, 157, 169, 195, 215, 218, 239, 241–2, 261, 270, 288 American Civil 83 between Maori and British troops 39, 52, 113 Boer xxi, 121, 123–4 Cold 94, 113, 151, 154–5, 157 First World 79, 125, 128, 130,144 Second World xx–xxi, 31–2, 34, 110, 133, 138, 153, 239, 242 Spanish Civil 116, 270 Vietnam 121, 123, 126, 134, 180 graves 147 War Stories Our Mothers Never Told Us 122, 138 Ward, Vincent 66, 81, 85–7, 89 waterfront dispute 113 Weir, Peter 126, 128–31, 158, 234 Wellington 41, 43, 47, 69, 96, 138 whakapapa 46, 48–9 Whale Rider 152, 169–72 Whanganui River 85 Whangara 169 White, Hayden xvii ‘White Australia’ Policy 242 see also assimilationism; Immigration Restriction Act; yellow peril Whitlam Government 20, 158 Williamson, David 129–30 Wilson, Bob see Tudawali, Robert Witches, Faggots, Dykes and Poofters 214, 225–9 Witcombe, Eleanor 244 Witton, George see Breaker Morant Wizard of Oz 7 women 7, 24, 28, 31–2, 42, 47, 54, 76, 85, 87, 110, 116, 122, 125, 129, 138–41, 166–7, 171, 173, 179, 181–2, 187, 192, 214–16, 218, 221–3, 234, 253, 255, 268, 275–6, 280, 282, 285, 287–8 see also Aborigines: women; New Zealand: Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps and war 116, 122, 125, 129, 138–41 Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps see New Zealand Women of the Sun 23 yellow peril 136, 239 Zubrycki, Tom 15