This week in lecture and tutorial we learned about Indigenous Australia. I found this week to be very interesting because I only know so much about Australia’s history. I knew about Aboriginal Australians; however, I didn’t realize how big of an impact they had on Australia’s history and film productions. The Aboriginals were the earliest known humans in Australia many thousands of years ago. Today, they barely make up any of Australia’s population. It wasn’t until I saw the movie Australia did I even realize that years ago legislation’s were passed to segregate and protect the Aboriginals by restricting what they could do and who they grew up with. Australia was the first time I realized that they actually went to the extent of taking children from their families to be sent off to white families in order to reconstruct their cultures and who they were. It wasn’t until the past 50 years or so that some of their rights were given back to indigenous people. This amazes me that it has gone on for so long without people stepping up to say it was wrong. I think that films incorporating aboriginal people and their ideals into the films are definitely good ways to get people thinking about the past and what was so wrong about it. I think it is also important to incorporate this into movies because without watching these films that I’ve watched in this class, I would never have realized what happened to these people since I am from America.
I thought that Beneath Clouds was a very interesting film. At first I found it was a bit boring, but after thinking about the message that it gives the audience, I realized there is much more to it. It intertwines the life of a girl (Lena) who is looking to figure out what world she belongs in with a boy (Vaughn) who despises his mother for abandoning him, and yet still breaks out of jail to see her before she passes away. After listening to the presentation in tutorial I realized that these two characters represent two opposing ideals. Vaughn represents full Aboriginality which is what Lena is running from, while Lena represents the White Australian who stole his people’s identity and land.
In tutorial we also talked a lot about the film Jedda. Throughout this film, many myths and discourse were apparent. Just in the one scene that we watched in class, you can see that the husband is insistent on the idea that Aboriginals cannot be tamed. He argues with his wife by telling her that you can’t change hundreds of years of a culture in one lifetime. I found this scene very interesting because I’m sure that was the viewpoint of a lot of people back in the day. However, this specific scene makes people look back and realize what was happening and instead of making the Aboriginals look bad, it makes the White Australian look ruthless in thinking they could judge others and be superior of them. This film definitely showed racism at its greatest degree.
In Marcia Langston’s article she talks about the recent occurrence of Aboriginal people in Australian films. As I said before, I think this is an important part of Australia’s film industry. Aboriginal’s want their story to be told. They want people to know the pain and hurt that they had to go through without a choice or say in the matter. What better way to express this than in film? It allows people, not only Australian’s, but American’s like myself to learn about their history and how it has helped to shape Australia’s culture as a whole. This leads me to the fact that I found it very interesting in Langston’s article when they talk about how the Australian Film Commission agreed, ‘to fund the film through to completion, and to establish policies and guidelines on the funding of future Aboriginal film projects..’. It then goes on to quote an Aboriginal woman who says she did not completely agree or support it, but ‘at least it didn’t portray us as drunks’. If the AFC were going to fund Aboriginal films it would be the best way of making people aware of what Aboriginal people represent.
To tie in the film Beneath Clouds with this topic I found it interesting how Langston brought up the topic of the Aboriginal audience upset by the portrayal of alcoholism and consumption by the indigenous people. I found it interesting that the movie showed the scene with the mother sitting at the table surrounded by beer cans that had once been full. Whether or not alcoholism is a problem in the Aboriginal culture or whether it is just a simple myth, I found it intriguing to think it was still represented in the movie, or if this was just a simple coincidence.
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