Radiance was your first feature film. What was your background in film-making before you came to Radiance?
I was living in Canberra and thought I would go to Alice Springs where the rest of my family, that I hadn't really met before, lived. I wanted to meet them. A job came up at CAAMA, the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, so I went for the job, initially as a television presenter. I thought,'it's just an air fare to Alice Springs'. I actually didn't get that job but I got another in the television production department, so I started as a trainee there. That's where it all began, really.
And you did some documentary film-making?
Yes, my production before Radiance, all of it was documentary and television. I had never really done any drama previously.
Did you find that the documentary training and background stood you in good stead, or was Radiance a completely new venture?
No. It was great because I had a good idea of storytelling and the production process as well as working with crews. It was the working with actors that was the unknown thing. But I was lucky to have such good actors that allowed me to find my footing and explore with the whole cast, so that was terrific.
Louis Nowra's play - did he approach you or did you approach him?
Actually, Trisha Morton Thomas, who plays May, the bitter and twisted sister in the film, she's actually my relation and I went to see her do her entry performance. She did the monologue from the film that she does on the mudflat. It's one of the high points of the film. She stood up and did that piece, just on her own, to the audience. I was devastated by the piece and so moved by her performance and the writing that I rang Louis the next day and asked him if I could adapt it as a half-hour drama, because we were talking about doing half-hours at that stage. But he said, "No, look, I think you should do it as a feature." I said, "Fine". So Andrew Myer the producer and I, we got started. It was terrific.
And both you and Louis Nowra collaborated on the screenplay?
Yes. He wrote the screenplay and I worked with him on it.
Was it difficult to make the transition from stageplay to film?
I think everyone's their own judge of that. We wanted to keep its essence, that it was very much a drama between these three people and to keep it claustrophobic, keep it in the house, rather than try and broaden it out too much in the adaption. I think we tried to keep a balance and give it enough narrative push to make it interesting. It was a balance between the two.
It worked that way. It's a very powerful story of women. Was that part of your aim, to bring the insights and feelings of those three women to the screen?
I think so. Obviously being an Aboriginal woman, these characters are close to me and my experience, so it was a story that was close to me, a story that I relate to - not that it's necessarily my experience or the characters like mine, but it was a known area to me. I think that was the more appealing thing about it, rather than working from a feminist point of view. It was just that it was a close story to me. But it was also the writing that really attracted me to the piece. I had never seen women portrayed as characters in such an interesting, fully-dimensional, fully-developed way before.
Where did Louis Nowra got such empathy from?
I know this sounds like a cliche, but a lot of his friends are Aboriginal women and he actually wrote it for the Aboriginal people in the play, Lydia Miller, Rhoda Roberts and Kylie Belling. He wrote it for them and they were involved in a lot of the workshopping of the script so, by the time I got it from being a play, it was quite a developed piece that rang true, because they had spent a lot of time working on the material.
So it's an authentic voice of Aboriginal women?
I think so, yes.
Rachel Maza's character is very successful with a singing career and in opera. You used the operatic overtones to take the audience beyond
the particular world of the Aboriginal women.
Yes. Initially when we were drafting it, people were urging us to give her a different career. They said, "Make her a blues singer, maker her a jazz singer. An opera singer is too unlikely in someone like her." That's a racist premise in itself, for a start. But then we also thought, well, one of the leading opera singers in the world is Kiri te Kanawa, and she's Maori, so that was great.
Deborah Mailman gives a vital performance as well, and Trisha Morton Thomas embodies the disappointment and bitterness. It's a powerful combination. The character of the mother is rather mysterious. What are your perceptions of the dead mother and the effect she had on those three women? The mother belonged to a very different generation of Aboriginal women.
I think both the elder daughters didn't really understand her, as is often the case of daughters and their mothers - it comes later in life that you understand your parents and their social position. I often think children blame their parents for a lot of things, but without understanding the context. It's often the case: children judge their parents without knowing the situation of their parents or understanding their position. I think both the older daughters blamed their mother for not having a good, proper household to grow up in, blamed her for their being taken away to convents when actually she had very little control over that. So they were, with reason, unsympathetic to her.
I suppose I was interested in exploring that and, particularly, those aspects of the stolen generation. A lot of children have felt, "Why did my parents give me up? Why did my mother give me up?" There are often two sides to the stolen generation story, and we wanted to explore that. We didn't really want to make the mother present. We thought of having flashbacks, but felt that the imagined is often more evocative than actually seeing things, so we kept her unidentified, apart from the photo. But, to me, she was a woman who was struggling with being a young, independent, beautiful Aboriginal woman who was growing up in very difficult times. In her situation, she was often betrayed by the men who she thought loved her. And she was used by them, which was just part of being an Aboriginal woman in those times. She tried to have a good life, tried to be in love and live a full life.
A comment about the priest who presided at the funeral and was distracted looking at the daughter?
Yes, that was probably very offensive.
A touch farcical?
Very much, and the actor actually played it all up.
There were very few people at the funeral.
A lot of people asked why there wasn't anyone there. In an Aboriginal community there are always people there. We were making a statement there that does not have much basis in reality, but we were trying to show how extremely isolated they were. There was the question of Catholics cremating people and all sorts of religious inconsistencies there.
Ultimately the ashes in the Radiance container were the source of pathos and black irony.
Yes.
Radiance was very popular at film festivals right round the world.
A couple of critics have said that it only appealed because it was a black film and that the audience was very keen to see it. But I dont think that was valid. There have been two other Aboriginal films and they were both commercial disasters. People found it a moving film, because its heart was there and it really treated people like people. That's what they liked about it.
And for the Australian public?
Look, I think absolutely that there's a resistance to Aboriginal films and Aboriginal people. It's a very strong part of our cultural make-up. But Radiance did quite well, actually, about half a million dollars, which is more than most of the Australian films of 1998 got in box office. So it's done quite well considering the low budget. It's done better than any other Aboriginal film ever before.
Interview: 18th December 1998
