MSC support the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Film, Wolfram.

The 2023 Provincial Chapter affirmed the Uluru Statement from the Heart. It is 120 years since Fr Gsell went to the Northern Territory. We need indigenous stories to remind us and challenge us, so much harshness and violence in our past.

WOLFRAM, Over the years, writer-director, Warwick Thornton, has become one of Australia’s most important indigenous filmmakers. For almost 20 years, his dramas have highlighted these themes, especially in central Australia, Samson and Delilah, Sweet Country, The New Boy, and, now, Wolfram.

Wolfram is set in the 1930s, prospectors, white Australians and a number of Chinese, in Central Australia, prospecting for Wolfram/tungsten. They have leases, have charge of aboriginal children, who are able to go down into the mine shafts, small, working in the narrow dark, sending up samples. They are quite young, have lost connection with their parents, now at the mercy of these white men, harsh, drinkers. The re-creation of these mining settlements, out in the harsh desert, is disturbing.

In many ways and visual styles as well as in the action, Wolfram is in the vein of American westerns. In ride two characters, sinister in look and manner, one, who is ruthlessly violent and his young associate, naïvely absorbing the racism and enjoying the  violence. They want information about a contact who has a lease retired now, a young indigenous man working for him, showing the taken-for-granted contempt for the aborigines and the demands made on them.

In the meantime, there is another story element, the aboriginal mother with her baby, travelling with a Chinese miner, but cutting her hair, leaving the tufts and beads on trees, hoping that her children will find them and follow her. She is quiet, sad, another victim of racism in the 1930s. (On the other hand, the Chinese characters, out searching for Wolfram, are sympathetic – and, the audience appreciating their martial skills when they tangle with the white villains of the drama.)

For Warwick Thornton, this is dramatising the harsh past, acknowledging the truth for aboriginal people, holding up an often unwanted mirror to the behaviour of brutal and racist Australians. And, sadly in the time of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, films like this are still a needed challenge.