David Gulpilil is the first Aboriginal person that I can remember.
As a Generation X kid in the anodyne, white European eastern suburbs of Melbourne, you didn’t (knowingly at least) encounter any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people on the trams or in the supermarkets in my part of the city.
Then came British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg’s 1971 classic, Walkabout – a haunting tale about two white city kids, a brother and sister, who get lost in the desert and are rescued by an unnamed traditional Aboriginal boy. Distilled, Walkabout is an (unmade) road movie with a tragic twist that stems from the profound cultural clash between the white kids and the Aboriginal boy, played by then 16-year-old Gulpilil, as the trio meander through the sands and survive the blackfella way.
Gulpulil, the young Yolngu traditional dancer from north-east Arnhem Land, was magnetic in this, his first movie in an acting career that is to be celebrated with a retrospective at this year’s Melbourne International film festival, including a conversation with Australian film critic Margaret Pomeranz.
In Walkabout, he exudes a magnetism and a physical radiance that has endured across four decades in front of the camera. But there is far more to Gulpilil the actor; there is a nuance and depth to his acting that transcends language (Yolngu and English). Re-watching some of his dramatic movies and documentaries recently, the penny dropped: here is an actor who does lingering silence like few others – something that directors from Roeg to Rolf de Heer have harnessed masterfully.
It’s easy to forget sometimes, in light of the weighty subject material (the violent colonial frontier, modern Indigenous social disadvantage, pre-contact tribal life and modern settlement travails) that has largely defined Gulpilil’s acting career, that he is also naturally comedic.
Charlie’s Country, for all his character’s innate tragedy, has moments of intense humour, which Gulpilil carries casually with a wry look or deadpan utterance, and which echo the disarming blend of c’est la vie fatalism and improbable optimism that is an essential in much Indigenous life. Witness, for example, the same defining, pervasive blackfella humour expounded by Gulpilil’s characters in Ten Canoes and Charlie’s Country, despite being set generations apart.
The camera adored the young Gulpilil in Walkabout, Mad Dog Morgan and Storm Boy. Now, as it dwells on the sinewy older man with the leonine salt and pepper hair in Ten Canoes, Charlie’s Country and in the documentary about his world, the aptly named Another Country premiering at the festival, the lines on Gulpilil’s faceand the light in his eyes hint at a life lived across two Australias and a need to tell the stories at the intersect.
In Arnhem Land Gulpilil is referenced with a reverence afforded few other names, among them the Yunipingu, Marik and Gurruwiwi. Such respect acknowledges the bridge that Gulpilil – as a dancer, a storyteller (he has written for children), actor and now a documentary narrator of life in his settlement of Ramingining – has built between the Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples of Australia.
Another Country is an important, timely film given the parlous state of post-intervention Indigenous policy making in Australia, where the much referenced “gap” between black and white continues to widen on critical social and economic indicators, when too many heads nod blithely at a prime minister who insists Australia was “unsettled or, um, scarcely settled” at invasion in 1788, and when tens of millions of dollars are spent on debating the symbolism of constitutional recognition, and when Gulpilil, at 60, is considered to be a very old man indeed in far too many Aboriginal communities.
The two Australias need decades more of David Gulpilil.
- Melbourne International film festival runs from 30 July to 16 August at venues citywide. The David Gulpilil retrospective includes the world premiere of Another Country on 31 July
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