LIKE MY BROTHER
Australia, 2024, 89 minutes, Colour.
Juliana Kerinalua, Arthurian Moreen, Freda Puruntatameri..
Directed by Sal Balharrie, Danielle MacLean.
With “Brother” in the title, this is obviously a film about the Sisters.
This is a genial documentary about young women from the Tiwi Islands, their love for Australian rules football, its becoming their passion, the opportunities for training, for playing, time in Melbourne…
The opening scenes remind audiences that Australian Rules football has been significant for indigenous players, families from the Northern Territory, Bathurst and Melville Islands, from Darwin. There are some scenes of play to excite the audiences.
However, we are introduced to 3 young women in 2018, their playing at home, their studies at the Tiwi College at Pickataramoor on Melville Island and the work with the teachers and tutors there. There is quite a deal of footage of them at play, the camera highlighting their skills, running, catching, kicking the ball, quick work with their fingers…
Since the action of the film takes place over five years, 2018-2023, the audience has the opportunity to get to know the young women, their personalities, their education skills, their playing skills, the place in the family (and especially warm interviews with genial grandmothers and the sadness of a funeral), their attachment to their communities, the homesickness during the months in Melbourne for training and playing.
The film serves very much as a promotion of the AFL W, not just in theory of equal opportunities for men and women in the code, but rather knowing and admiring the young women and their skills, hopeful for their future careers.
And, with Brendan Majors, Essendon coach, and the sequences in Essendon and The Hanger, this film will be a great favourite with Essendon supporters and the Essendon club.
While the film is strong in its promotion of the football code, it is also very strong in presenting the Tiwi people, memories of their traditions, their adaptation to 20th and 21st-century life and styles, the links to the land and the animals that form their totems, the homesickness when they are away from home. The film also notes the pregnancies of the young women, the care for their children, the older generation looking after the babies when the young women go south for their play, happiness for some who continue, a sadness for those who are not picked.
At the end, with a funeral ceremony, there is a scene of the Pukamani rituals, so strong on the Tiwi Islands, commemorating those who have died, but also a ritual ending of grief and the beginning of a new phase in affirming life.
This is a film definitely affirming life, affirming the role of indigenous women, welcoming the wider Australian audience to the women, their backgrounds, and their place in 21st-century Australian society.
(The Missionaries of the Sacred Heart lived as missionaries with the Tiwi peoples on Bathurst and Melville Islands since 1911. And the Australian rules connection? The late Brother John Pye, MSC, OAM was an extraordinary man. Famed for bringing the game of football to the outlying parts of the Territory, he has a special place in the hearts of all football loving Territorians.
It was not long after arriving at the Bathurst Island Mission in 1942 that Brother Pye introduced Australian Rules Football to the Islanders. He used football as a means of promoting relations on the islands and regularly organised inter-community matches. Tiwi quickly took to the game and the first dedicated ground was built in Wurrumiyanga.
In 1951 Brother Pye was involved in the formation of St Mary’s Football Club and was the driving force behind the formation of the Tiwi Island Football League (TIFL) in 1969/70.
Affectionately described as ‘Mr Football’ Brother Pye’s vision, wisdom and leadership resonates today. It is impossible to say how many thousand of lives Brother John Pye touched by introducing football to the Tiwi Islands and other remote parts of the NT but by enshrining this wonderful man into the AFLNT Hall of Fame thousands more will know of this great man and his contribution to football in the Northern Territory.)
