_Exile and the Kingdom_ reviewed by Lynne Star This review is copyright. All rights reserved. Permission must be sought from the author before it is used in any way. L.Star@massey.ac.nz First published in FMST : Feminist Studies in Aotearoa Electronic Journal No. 16 July 1/ 1994(FMST@stonebow.otago.ac.nz). EXILE AND THE KINGDOM (1992) Director/Producer, Frank Rijavec; Co-director, Noelene Harrison; Script, Frank Rijavec. I viewed this documentary with friends a week ago. Bright red and yellow desert, green tablelands, iridescent turquoise river, azure sky, talk of the wagyal, the rainbow snake who eats young men who break his laws, and who fought with the sea serpent for space when the people were forced from their land to make way for squatters and miners. Pictures of prisoners in chains, captured by police or as slaves for pearl diving bosses. A woman crying the loss of her river - her snake dreaming river - to a dam. The cadences of chants and songs, the clicking of sticks and boomerangs, now partly familiar. Stories of survival in almost unbelievable circumstances (if you don't know much about colonisation). Exile from everything held dear: language, art, sacred sites, rituals, families, trees, food, songlines, skinlines, stories, traditions, dreaming; all the essential law things that keep you whole. Yet The Kingdom there, everpresent: 'It makes us what we are. Without our law we would be like white people'. '... No matter what the whitefella might do I'm always happy because I carry the story of my people'. A documentary written, composed, shot and narrated by indigenous Australians, the Ngurin, Injibandi, Ngarluma, Karuma and Bandjima peoples, who represent the five main groups living in the Pilbara tablelands and the Fortesque river areas of the Kimberleys to the north of Perth, Western Australia. The primary bodies of these peoples now live in Ieramagadu (Roeburne) township, but, for many, their focus remains their homelands. When I flew into Perth for the first time I noticed with a sinking heart, staring at the 'ground map' provided in the plane to mark our progress, that Australians who are not Aboriginal like to call many of their ranges and mountains after white 'explorers'. This was the beginning of my mourning, and my education in aboriginal resistance, which this film renewed for me. Establishing shot: pan follows a Police Jeep cruising a dusty country street Narrator: The town of Roeburne will be remembered for one thing only. It's the place where the death of a young local sparked an impassioned plea for a fullscale inquiry into black deaths in custody. Shots 2-4 Aboriginal people around town Radio Clip V/O: The 16 year old youth died in police custody in September 1983. They came from everywhere to the Roeburne cemetery to mourn his passing. It's a slow death in the village. This is poverty, unemployment and wholesale alcoholism wrapped up in a neat little package. Governments have been spending money here for years ... (sound fadedown) Shot 5 MS Aboriginal man Narrator: A lot of news reporters come to Roeburne with the same old picture of our people already fixed in their minds. It's nearly always bad news, but then, bad news sells. Shot 6 MS Aboriginal woman : But in the middle of the community we have some people who doesn't drink and in the middle of the community we have some people who works for the people. We have our troubles here just like any other town, maybe more than our fair share, but there's a big story down here the media never tells. It's about the really important things in our lives. ... Shot 7 Helicopter shot moving over pools of bright water and red-yellow desert with green fringes Narrator: Our story goes well beyond the town of Roeburne ... The story begins 'when the world was soft', the learning times, sometimes called the dreaming, with the creation spirits, the marga, who still live here. An elder stands in the place where the gods left their footsteps. On the banks of the river he kneels to drink, then blows the water from his mouth twice across the river addressing the margas in their language: (subtitles) 'I belong to this place. We're bringing the children to see. don't harm us'. The two small children measure their feet in the footsteps of the marga. Four kalarra (skin) groups relate the child through parentage to the rain and wind, to people, plants and animals, sun and the earth, to everything in known creation, giving to her/him a secure and predictable set of roles and relations, brothers and sisters, mothers, uncles, cousins and so forth, traditions and rituals. Mobs going down to corroborees; smiling boys filing off the grounds to greet their people as men for the first time. I find my eyes wet as the people weep for their boys who have 'died'. As I go on I realise that this film is mostly about boys and men, and sure enough, when the credits roll I see that it is mainly men who have made the film. The women are there but this is a men's business film which is appropriate within Aboriginal law. When certain times arrive the mobs get ready and leave for their traditional country to initiate their boys into manhood and their girls into women's business, bearers and protectors of the law, year by year learning more, to become, eventually, respected elders. The white authorities call it, with pathetic, even deliberate, inaccuracy, 'walkabout'. Welfare and housing authorities visit the empty houses. School teachers struggle to understand. Unlike Two Laws , another documentary made by Aboriginal people on a similar topic, this one conforms to standard documentary practice. It doesn't, for example, have people speaking who are present but mostly out of shot while the camera roves over the feet or backs of other people, trees, sky, animals, in an unpredictable and original manner incomprehensible if you have no enculturation and eloquent if you have even a little. This one was designed for a non-Aboriginal audience as well. A standard voice-over with a narrator who introduces himself at the start in longshot (but side-on, not facing the camera). 'My name is Roger Solomon but my mothers call me Irabuderee, 'Face like star'. It has crane shots, zooms, close-ups, old photographs, clips from another documentary, and many helicopter shots of vistas whose exquisite, still beauty burned into my brain even though I have never been this far north. It is also divided, whitefella style, into four sections covering the law, dreaming, Colonialism etc, But there the similarities end, for this is an unusual documentary in a number of ways. Its chief strength is the Aboriginal voices - surely not the secret lore but enough to convey the treasure of cultures clinging tenaciously to survival. It tells of men's business, and more broadly, the people's stories, 'the big story', over generations, a rich and positive heritage including the lives of 'dear ones' (dead people), though tribal tradition forbids the naming of names after death. It moves freely within what English speakers, captured in binaries, think of as 'past' 'present' and 'future', 'dreaming', 'myth' and reality', 'history' and the 'spiritworld', only here as an undifferentiated complex whole. For instance rock drawings of Captain Cook's colonial entourage meld with ancient drawings of the marga and an elder laughs at the picture of the soldier in his funny hat as he tells how the whitemen were seen as marga, and clearly still are, by some. Within this world, it is easy to see hysterically phallic Perth City (and its offensive brewery) 'disappeared' from the Swan. As easily and in the same way as the marga fought and ate the two lawbreakers, they will 'eat' Cook's descendants. The sound of idiom, the words of the people telling stories, of musical calls and instruments not heard now except by the people, of the noise of feet on the soft land. Stamping the red earth. Once the land was soft. I was camping on Bilm Bilm A strong wind blowing I see Tuwurri Gorge I take flight The wind of the coast is rushing through Rushing over the Bilm Bilm. A tree touches me, I see firelight, I am full of power I see them dancing, stamping on the wet broken ground I see the dancing ground now I hear a great beating rhythm I see the two of us travelling together through a whirlwind of fires I rest Then again I see the road to follow, The world touches me with fire, I am loaded with power Dancing dancing The evidence is the dancing paths drummed in by generations at the corroboree sites. I read that in WA, before the invasion, there were over 200 distinct language groups (described, in deference to the Anglophones, as 'as different as French is from German') This doco says 129 nations. Whatever, it is a lot of knowledge to lose. Understatement throughout. For instance, brief shots of photographs of near-naked Aboriginal prisoners in chains, circa 1900's. Mid-west Australian summer temperatures routinely record in the 35-45 range (100-120 Fahrenheit). To the North, where many of these groups are from, the average rises. When I lived there, in relatively balmy Fremantle by the sea, opposite two delis, the drink and food trucks delivering cool goods, and all the shops, offices and cars of anyone who was anyone, had the refrigeration and air conditioning running constantly all Summer - a noise you endured to make life bearable. In the desert sun your brain boils, your skin fries, snakes come out with the wildflowers and anything metal bites you. Cars bite you. Outdoor furniture is wood or plastic so it won't, so badly. Chains must burn .... When students in first and second year classes at Murdoch, the West Australian University I attended until early this year, were shown documentaries with information about the realities of invasion, and genocidal policies of the sort spoken of in this documentary, the majority sat stunned and paralysed. Seeing this, we, the 'teachers' asked them 'How are you feeling?' They answered, 'Dreadful - we didn't know'. Gradually one or two would talk about experiences they had had with 'blackfellas', but my overall impression was that most had passed through a secondary education and early adulthood, celebrating the Bicentenary of white invasion in the names of 'exploration', 'tall ships', 'pioneers', 'settlers', and the hysteria of a television announcer crying as the long awaited, handhewn, replica of Cook's ship 'Endeavour' slid into Fremantle Harbour last December. They had never heard about poisoning, headhunting, shooting and massacres, some of which had happened only 40 or 50 years ago in their own towns, or if they had, it had been semi-forgotten, not recognised as relevant. Many took some time to see the issue of deaths in police custody as related to these things. Colonisation was not on the High School curriculum. It was absent from the public rhetorical agenda, as it was from those of families and friends. The Aboriginal students had heard these things, but not the Anglo's. One adult student had survived a massacre - in the arms of an uncle who ran from the police and, fell dead on the child who lay hours crushed under his body. Aboriginal students knew the massacre sites. They knew the police chiefs who notched their guns and the politicians who broke the protest lines at sacred sites. They knew that certain functionaries of the universities (some of whom should have been, by official designation, their friends and helpers) were the offspring or consorts of these same police and politicians. Circumstances in Australia and New Zealand with regard to colonisation have some similarities. But they also have such differences that, when I first arrived in Australia, I struggled to comprehend what was happening, and had happened, to Aboriginal peoples. And many Australians, unfamiliar with New Zealand, could not comprehend me when I tried to explain what went on in New Zealand. And now, when I try to tell New Zealanders, they too find they are stretching to understand. They look at me disbelievingly - 'you're exaggerating' ... The Treaty of Waitangi is indeed a long way distant from the doctrine of 'terra nullius' ('empty land' - no recognisable people - the first nations on the same imaginary as kangaroos). The spirit brothers of Tohu and Te Whiti may have existed in Australia, but there is no sign in white discourse, only the beginnings of an Aboriginal imaginary showing over the blank white horizon. This film does the job eloquently. My friends - (involved with things Maori) sat, noticably not as stunned, they knew the similarities. A documentary made by the Ngurin Aborginal Corporation with the assistance of the WA Film Council, the WA Film and Television Institute, The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, the Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority and the Australian Film Commission. Available in ABC shops (in Australia). Lynne Star teaches Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatu, Aotearoa/NZ. FMST invites submissions of short articles, reviews and research reports (up to 30K) : FMST@STONEBOW.OTAGO.AC.NZ Try out your ideas, comment on FMST, debate your research, review feminist books, films or issues relevant to women and Feminist Studies in Aotearoa and the Pacific.