The Ark

Aboriginal people portrayed in feature films like Jedda are a far cry from the way they have been documented by missionaries and anthropologists.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Jeff Brownrigg of ScreenSound Australia in Canberra sifts the myth from the reality and reveals some of the treasures in Australia's film archive.

THEME

Rachael Kohn: The attitudes of European to Aborigines is a hotly contested subject amongst historians today.

Hello, this is The Ark and I'm Rachael Kohn.

Screensound Australia, the National Screen and Sound Archive, possesses some of the earliest records of Aboriginal Australians on film, as well as feature films that vice us an insight into the changing perceptions of Aborigines by White Australians.

Jeff Brownrigg is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Canberra, and he combines his interest in the film record with 19th century missions in the Bass Strait.

Jeff Brownrigg: In the Bass Strait there are quite a lot of interesting things. For example, the islands are settled, certainly settled by people and land leases and things taken out after the 1830s. And by the 1850s there was obviously a big enough population for people such as Bishop Nixon from Hobart, to feel that he needed to come out in a ship and deliver various services that the church could provide. He was an Evangelical.

So from the 1850s onwards, there really is quite interesting contact, and I think at each stage in 1850, with Bishop Nixon, in the 1870s, from the 1870s to the 1880s over a period of about 13 years, Canon Brownrigg (no relation really strictly speaking), a man who went out in ships of his creation into Bass Strait in those 13 years after 1872.

Rachael Kohn: Do you mean he built his own ships?

Jeff Brownrigg: Absolutely, yes. He wrote a little booklet called The Cruise of The Freak, which describes the first of his missionary visits to the islands. The boat was called The Freak, and I believe that she already existed before he got hold of her, and she was more or less the regular vessel in which people from Launceston went out into Bass Strait to proselytise, and he later built a ship of his own called The Franklin. I think The Franklin was about 9 tonnes, The Freak was about 5 tonnes.

Rachael Kohn: Not very big.

Jeff Brownrigg: Not very big at all. In fact Stephen Murray-Smith in something he wrote, talks about the pilot in Port Phillip Bay saying in the 1970s that anybody who went out in a ship under 1,000 tonnes into Bass Strait was mad, or words to that effect.

Rachael Kohn: Now the people who lived on the Bass Strait islands, who were they?

Jeff Brownrigg: I suspect that the people of the Bass Strait islands thought of themselves as being mixed race, but islander. In other words, they weren't strictly speaking European, and they weren't strictly speaking Tasmanian mainland Aboriginal people.

They generally, I think, the descendents of people who were either mainland Aboriginal Tasmanian women, and sealers and convicts, freed convicts, perhaps escaped convicts, a range of different people who gravitate towards the island and the work that you can do there, things like sealing in the very earliest days, and then of course muttonbirding. We know that George Augustus Robinson, who was the protector of Aborigines in Tasmania, ended up transporting them to what I think is now called Gun Carriage Island in the 1830s, so people of pure blood were transported to the island, were very miserable.

Progressively their numbers dwindled and they were eventually moved back onto the mainland to half way down the eastern coast, and effectively died out, we know that story. The islanders however, thought of them as a sturdy, independent group who were islanders, who were just that. And their needs of course were catered for by people like Bishop Nixon and Canon Brownrigg, and then later Bishop Montgomery in the '90s, after Canon Brownrigg. So there are three interesting sort of periods of missionary visits.

Rachael Kohn: Well one of the ways we know about what people thought then on either side of that relationship, is the way the missionaries themselves recorded their interactions. When was the first time that they actually used sound recording, or indeed film?

Jeff Brownrigg: As far as I can tell, the late 1890s is really the period in which people like Professor Haddon in the Torres Straits start to record the sounds and of course the sights of indigenous people in and around Australia. In the Bass Strait Islands of course, that comes, if it comes at all, quite a lot later, with the exception of at a tangent in the person of Fanny Cochrane-Smith, who is recorded by the Royal Society, I think in Launceston in the 1890s and is put forward as the last of the sort of pureblood Tasmanians. So she's quite an interesting character, and those recordings have survived. But the missionaries themselves of course, talk about the indigenous people and their dancing and singing, quite a lot earlier, and indeed in the journals and records of George Augustus Robinson way back into the 1830s there are quite good descriptions of things that happened.

I have one of Canon Brownrigg's descriptions if you'd like to hear what somebody in 1872 was saying about the indigenous people.

'In respect of intellect', he writes, in an account of his first voyage, 'they were low. Yet not so inferior as often described. They appeared stupid when addressed on subjects which had no relation to their mode of life, but they were quick and cunning within their own sphere. Their locomotion sharpened their powers of observation with much increasing their ideas. In such circumstances, mind may degenerate, but it cannot advance. The inferiority of the Aboriginal mind is not to be denied. Their religious ideas were exceedingly meagre and uncertain', and here we go, here's the Canon, possibly even the bishops before and after him speaking, 'Their religious ideas were exceedingly meagre and uncertain, they appear to have had no religious rites and few congenial ideas. They dreaded darkness and feared to wander from their fires. They recognised a malignant spirit and attributed strong emotions to the Devil. They believed him to be white, a notion supported by very substantial reasons, and suggested by their national experience.'

Now in some ways, there are pros and cons all the way through that, that make us sort of move in one direction towards saying this man is deeply racist, and in others towards a sense that he has some gentler understanding of the people as a people. But it's interesting though that the Devil's white.

Rachael Kohn: Yes, well one would expect so in those circumstances. Jeff, did attitudes change when the feature film started to depict Aborigines on screen?

Jeff Brownrigg: I'm actually quite interested in the films of Charles Chauvel, and of course Chauvel brings to mind Jedda, from the mid-1950s. But back in the mid-1930s, Chauvel had made another film called Uncivilised which is about the child of missionaries who are lost in the desert, but their child Martin is raised by an Aboriginal tribe in a South Sea Island setting supposedly somewhere I the Kimberley.

Martin is raised and becomes I suppose the sort of 'king' of this tribe in the north. A society journalist is sent to look for him, and Beatrice Lynne, the journalist, heads off into the desert, but she's captured by an Afghan camel driver, and sold into slavery in effect, to the very man she's looking for. And slowly she discovers that in fact he's far from uncivilised.

And whether this depicts the idea of nature and nurture, the notion that this man's nurture is what's made him civilised, or whether it's his nature because he's a white man and he's in fact in charge of a black tribe is another issue. But these things are worked within the film, and the film is full of all sorts of racial reference. It's the mirror image of Jedda. If you look at Jedda, it's about an Aboriginal girl, born in a cattle camp whose mother dies, who's raised by a white family, and then is drawn back by some mystical sense of her own roots and her own culture and her own past. And I think that represents a huge leap forward, Uncivilised as Australia's singing Tarzan film. Well it owes a huge amount to the Johnny Weismuller films of 1932 and 1934.

Rachael Kohn: And that was quite a romantic depiction of the jungle, I think of nature.

Jeff Brownrigg: I think it is, absolutely, except that in the Australian film a very tall British actor called Dennis Hoy was imported, and he was a vaudeville start, he's a very different sort of character, and instead of going Ah, ah, ah-ah, (I didn't do that very loudly, but I could have done it much more loudly than that) his cry is I O, I O, I O, in a little tune written by Mr Melody Man from the Argonauts.

Rachael Kohn: Oh, how wonderful.

Jeff Brownrigg: Lindley Evans, who composed the music for the film. So there are things in Uncivilised that remind you of Jedda. There's a river journey and indigenous people who sit about, the indigenous people of the 1930s are in rather sort of concocted pillbox and ice cream cone hats. By the 1950s, that's changed I think pretty radically. I think the attitude that Chauvel has developed towards Jedda as a person, and in a sense to the indigenous people regardless of the limitations of those attitudes in the 1950s, the attitudes have changed pretty remarkably, and Chauvel's coming from a very different angle.

Rachael Kohn: Well the recent film, The Rabbit Proof Fence, reflects certainly the current point of view, that the Christian missionary assault on the Aboriginal people was tragic and misguided. Do you have any sense from the archives that Screensound, the National Screen and Sound Archive, that the missionaries themselves had some misgivings about what they were doing?

Jeff Brownrigg: The representations of indigenous people that are taken by people who are not strictly missionaries. I suspect that the people who generally record on film and sound recordings the activities of indigenous peoples anywhere, tend to be people with a sort of ethnographic interest, and those interests were growing in the late 19th century and developing, and of course the technology came along to make it possible for them to go into the field and make sound recordings and make films, and of course they're driven more by an ethnographic interest than an interest, in a sense, of saving souls.

The missionary recordings that we have in Screensound's collection, are often recordings of indigenous peoples in Australia and New Guinea, singing songs, western hymns and songs that are redolent of North America and various I suppose Christian singing traditions.

Rachael Kohn: Are those recordings seen today by Aboriginal Australians as valuable? Do they avail themselves of these records as important resources for their own history?

Jeff Brownrigg: It's probably a question better addressed to AIATSIS, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which has its own large collections, and would be the natural focus of that sort of investigation. We get a little of it and we3 get film makers coming, looking for footage who want particular things, you know, ceremonies associated with women. We've released some material on video ourselves of various things, with the help of Aboriginal actor, Justine Saunders who came and worked with Marilyn Dooley in our collections and produced a wonderful compilation of various aspects of the representation of indigenous people in our film collection. So there is an interest I think.

Other questions have been interesting in the past. We were asked at one stage informally, about the use of film records in land right claims for example. You know, what could film tell us, what could documentary film tell us about issues of ownership for example. Film doesn't go back all that far, we go back to the middle 1890s, so it's not a complete record and perhaps not a significant record in the sense that it records a very long period.

Rachael Kohn: Well I suppose this year is quite important. Fifty years since the filming or the screening of Jedda, and 100 years since the death of Fanny Cochrane-Smith.

Jeff Brownrigg: Absolutely. And they're issues that will be picked up certainly in Tasmania and perhaps in the film community in Australia. Not too long ago, I'm pretty sure they were discovered in a printing house in London the tri-separation negatives of Jedda.

Now I'm not a film technologist, so you've got to put up with a little bit of limited knowledge here. But the bits of the film that were needed to produce and generate a new splendid copy were found, and a new copy was made. I think up to that point there was only a copy that had been screened around the country, and those copies tend to get scratched and battered, and cut up if they break and bits cut out and so on. So we do have a new print of Jedda, and doubtless that will be rolled into service this year to celebrate that event.

Rachael Kohn: I look forward to it. Jeff Brownrigg, thanks so much for speaking to me.

Jeff Brownrigg: Thanks very much, Rachael.

Rachael Kohn: Jeff Brownrigg is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Canberra. If you haven't seen Jedda, this is the year to do it.

Next week the religion of Alexander the Great will be the subject of The Ark. That's The Ark, with me, Rachael Kohn.

THEME

Guests

Jeff Brownrigg
is Director of the People's Voice National Community History Project and the Head of Research at ScreenSound, the National Screen and Sound Archive. He is also Professor of Cultural History at the University of Canberra.

Further Information

Images from Jedda(1955)
http://www.screensound.gov.au/Screensound/Screenso.nsf/AllDocs/BAFF6FDD8C46733ECA256F4D001C47BD?OpenDocument

ScreenSound Australia - National Screen and Sound Archive
http://www.screensound.gov.au/screensound/screenso.nsf