You have made both feature films and documentaries. Have you a preference between the two?
Storytelling is really my longing and interest, the influence of storytelling on our lives, on how we live and how we see the world. That's really why I make films. And documentaries - there are stories that are better told in that way and this little story, The Coolbooroo Club is one of those, because it comes from a history of a community, a real story, a true story of events that fiction, the best of fiction, is also about. It's about people in adversity digging deep within themselves and the meaning of their community in order to find the empowerment to go on and deal with things and find their way through this miasma that's been set for them.
So mythically I see it more spiritually or mythically because there's a good conversation to be had between those two
Feature films are really what I want to do, but it took me a long time to get The Tale of Ruby Rose up. I think it was because the way that the story was structured wasn't really legal tender at the time. It was written in 1983. People saw value in its regional history and sociology, but they didn't see value in its connections to the self and the self's spiritual journey because notions of spirituality in the early 80s were still considered to be vague. They were dismissed. Attitudes were quite dismissive. It was a fairly dry, rationalist-based period of time. We're still in it but, fortunately, there are little chinks. People are beginning to see the need to make connections between experience that is not understood or resolved within rational terms.
So Ruby Rose took a long time to get up - and was canned by the people who bought it. They bought it in order to get hold of The Lighthorsemen, but then put it on a shelf. It was a disaster for me because it meant that I had no work. The problem with making films is you have got to play the game - and the game is that your first film has got to give you a bit of a shunt on. If you don't get that, you're the mercy of styles and trend. Within the bureaucratic institutions, it's just like a sea, it can go one way or the other. So it's taken me ten years, basically, to get to the point where the next feature film I'm doing can be made.
I had done a lot of story-writing at that time, but all of the stories have really been about the same thing: how do we connect with the world or with the cosmos and what is the human longing which people refer to in different ways for resolution and hope and where does that hope lie? That's really the focus that I have. It's always in anything I'm interested in doing.
Ruby Rose is set in the 30s and in Tasmania.
It came from oral histories. The original idea came from a clinical history and an oral history. The clinical history was a phobic experience. It's interesting that most phobics, people from all walks of life, if they go through a deep experience, end up invigoring forces or personifying forces in their lives. A highly rational person can, in spite of their rationale, recognise numinous forces at work in their life within the phobia. This is a clinical history.
Then, in the regional histories of Tasmania, in the highlands, there are many stories about people who, in isolation, begin to see beyond traditional perspectives of religion that they have been given.
So in the case of Ruby, that story came from a couple of old histories where people, one woman in particular who spent a lot of time in isolation and she really dispensed with the normal parameters of life. Her search was a spiritual journey. But she wasn't a mystic. Religion was just a dry and arid form for most of these people where, if they were in town, they might go to a service in a church, but that was as close they came to any kind of institutionalised discussion about soul or self, spiritual self. Whereas real spiritual digging was going on in people's lives. There was no dialogue that could be had on any official social basis to inform it. Religion was just a very personal thing. It comes out when you listen to these people.
So those are the two things that interested me: isolation and what isolation does to us. If you're stripped of all of these socialising forces, where do you end up? Most people end up with some sort of inanimate god, a personification of the forces that impact them, in other words, a spiritualising. They lose the Enlightenment picture and they go back to a pre Enlightenment picture of cosmology. That's what interested me.
And you used dream, the Tasmanian Devil and the darkness to explore this?
Yes. It's the same now. That's still my interest.
This has its effect on relationships between men and women and their not being able to be articulate or help one another in their journey?
Yes. These people are captive inside the pictures of self that they were given by their parents and their society. Men were never allowed or meant to have so-called female longings or notions. At least anything like what Ruby was expressing would be considered loopy and, certainly, feminine and, therefore, not part of the male world. Therefore, there's no possibility for them, as husband and wife, to share their problems and their journey.
She wanted to do something for the boy so that none of this would happen to him?
Absolutely. Good on her.
The grandmother and her helping Ruby in the search?
That's right, Grandma. I think that when I wrote the story - probably my attitudes have changed since then - I saw her as someone who clearly had a Christian faith. That was the tradition she was brought up in. But she saw it in what I see to be a cosmological frame. By that I mean she wasn't contained by some kind of Christian fundamentalism. Her experience of the world had taught her that the soul path was the primary religious journey that a person needs to go on. Dogma can, in fact, obliterate that path at times. It can certainly obfuscate it for people.
There was a lot of dialogue in the film that the Americans cut out, dialogue between the two of them which had to do with interpretations - where Ruby was interacting with Grandma about the pictures that she had and how they were connected one to another. In a sense it was more of an explanatory conversation. You know, quite often when film-makers do these directors' cuts, they're not necessarily as good as the film that the producers gave us. I've seen quite a few directors' cuts and sometimes they don't actually work better. They're better off without those parts left to the imagination.
I'm not sure with Ruby Rose. There are some hops or skips in the structure of the story at the points where the Americans cut out sections. They cut out about four major sections in the film, some 15 to 18 minutes. You have to make a leap at those points.
Was that the version we saw?
Yes. We didn't have enough money to do two versions.
A review of Ruby Rose said that the bath sequence was a spiritual rebirth symbol. Are you happy with that kind of symbolism?
Yes, absolutely. It was, in a way, a baptism into a new communion in the sense that Ruby had recognised that she was not alone in the universe, that Grandma was her soul partner. This experience gave her renewed vigour to go back and deal with life. Now, she brought her own baggage to this, the idea of bringing all the stuff of Grandma's back to the mountain. But people do. Life's not a clear path. But, yes, this was clearly a ritual moment for them. Like The Piano, when it came out in 1993, people had already started thinking again about the notion of ritual. But in 1985 or 1986, when we shot Ruby Rose, people didn't really understand this at an ordinary level. I wish in some ways that the film had been made now because so much of the material which is in it would have been better understood by the community.
Do you like that link with The Piano, its setting and themes?
Yes, absolutely.
For most Australians, Tasmania is somewhat remote and the mountains even more so. Could this story have been set anywhere else or is
it particularly Tasmanian?
It's particularly Tasmanian because every regional history is particular. So the Nunga story, from Western Australia, in The Coolbooroo Club could never have happened in Sydney or Melbourne. But, for me, regional history becomes universal myth, the universal story, and the more regional you are, the more universal it's going to become, because the intimacies of a community are the closer experience of spirituality, a mirror of the broader pictures of spirituality.
It's the same for story, like the universal story which variousus contemporary psychologists would talk about. This is the story, there's one monomythic story and we all fit into it. There's a certain amount of truth that I see in that, too. The closer you get to people intimately connected to a community in that story, the more likely you are to find those universal truths. Having said that, I'm sure that you could find a story of isolation which created for a person an inner world which was at odds with the rational pictures that they were given in downtown Fitzroy. But that kind of isolation is absolutely unique.
You don't have those mountain structures anywhere else in Australia, cool temperate highland. In the Australian Alps you've got Kosciusko, but you don't have ups and downs and hidden valleys whereas Tasmania is full of them. And in that time there were still people trying to tame it. This is still the dream that Henry had which he brought from Europe with its history of husbandry to this wilderness. It's the same as in the history of North America. You have conflict or conquest over and against indigenous being. The pictures of indigenousness in Ruby Rose are the land. There are no people left up there to tell that part of the story. Ruby, in a sense is picking up those song lines from the land. She represents an indigenous aspect of the conflict.
The Coolbaroo Club. Where did you first come in contact with the story?
Well, Steve Kinnane is the co-writer and co-producer. He's a Nunga in the community in Western Australia and his family was intimately connected with this story, this history. His mother was Mum Smith. She was one of the main community personalities. She was one of the rocks, one of the anchors. It's not the right metaphor but she was a very strong person and had a very deep connection with belonging and identity. The card games she ran were one way that she could help people stay together. So it was a very personal history for him. He'd spent three years developing an idea that could have become a book but became a film. He was collecting oral histories from many of the people who appear in the film and shaping it into a first draft. It was offered to me as a director as a commission by Penny Robbins, the producer of the film.
From there on, Steve and I sat down and rewrote the script. My interest was seeing this film not as history but as story. And again, what is the meaning of this story for these people and how can we begin to get some idea of how this community operates, lives and exists outside of the `normal issues', `current affairs-driven' picture of Aboriginality that we've got. As a community it really is pretty much disconnected from indigenous history and meaning. So, it's just a little picture of a small group of people and how they live, as if they were one of us, because that's the way they tell the story about themselves.
Steve was very keen on this. He had a more rational base because he's searching for a more objective view of his community's history and I suppose I was coming from a slightly different position where I felt that the more intimate and the more subjective the story, the better.
Did he want to tell the story for his own people or for the broad Australian audience?
It had to be for both and, very importantly, as a Nunga, he knew that it had to be told in a way that made sense for the community, but he also knew that it was quite different from the way we tell stories. We don't have a patriarchal community and an eldership base in our community, partly because of our cynicisms and partly because the Enlightenment has moved towards our notion of democracy. So, there are big differences in the way you tell a story. But it would have to be for both and he really wanted the story to be celebrated within their own community. He wanted the young kids to see something in their forebears' experience that made sense to them - and that's a big problem at present in the Nunga community. There's more and more alienation from the older community, disconnection and loss of meaning. The same kinds of harassment are at work now. Steve thought that this is a story that needs to be out there and abroad in the Nunga community, but also in the Australian community.
Who chose the archival material?
It was created on need. One of the things that I felt very strongly was that, originally, his idea had no real context because, to him, it had already been told: stolen children, settlement life, servants to the whites, all of that was the background to the story; he just wanted to tell the life of the community in the midst of this harassment and what they did. And I completely agreed with him but I said, `Look, you've got to remind people of how they got here', because the importance of the Coolbaroo Club rests in the story behind the story. Otherwise it's just a little old dance club like anybody else's. The meaning of the club rests in what was going on that brought these people together, how they got there and then what they did.
A lot of the contextual material came in that restructuring. We looked all over the place but Steve had a pretty fair idea of what was available. He knew, for instance, that there wasn't one skerrick of footage of Nungas in Perth in existence, because essentially the white press were banned by the government from covering Aboriginal affairs - not in law, but implicitly.
You included race advertisements from the past with what now seem extraordinarily prejudiced and condescending lines, for instance,
about aborigines reading English `and not just the funnies, Jacky...'
`And not just the Sunday funnies, Jacky.' That came from A.W. Morse in a speech at the time.
That was certainly one of the most telling moments in the film. The other aspect is that, while it is a documentary, the sequences re creating the
past gave you the opportunity to do drama. That was an effective way of storytelling, that the audience thought it was looking at documentary
but it was actually looking at drama.
Yes. But, to me there's little distinction. Of course there are distinctions and you have to be guided by the storyteller. And essentially the cosmology and the ethics of the storyteller determine how you make the links between those elements. But this notion that there is objective truth and subjective truth doesn't actually fulfil what we experience. There are connections between story and real life that we have lost that many other cultures don't have a problem with because they blend the two. So too in the Aboriginal community. The way the people tell these stories to themselves was mirrored, or we hoped it would be mirrored, by the way we crafted the film, and the blending of all these elements was one of those things. So, to redress the archival footage, to support one of the points in the story and then go on is exactly what would happen. For instance, `Look at this photo. Here's old Billy. Remember when he was doing such and such'. That's just the way it would be told. So what was your question?
The dramatic sequences...
Well, it wasn't going to work without them, because there's essentially a black hole surrounding footage of the Nunga community. It wasn't going to work as a film unless these elements were enlivened by a story and being able to see characters interacting. Now, on a documentary budget it's very hard and most re-enactment is a sort of stylised two dimensional business which it's hard to get beyond because you haven't got the money to dimensionalise the material you're working with. But we found a really great bunch of people to work with.
The singer was very good.
She's fantastic. She has got a beautiful voice and Lucky Ocean's compositions are fantastic. It was all done in two weeks. Just extraordinary.
Her singing and the dancing enhanced the whole atmosphere. Will the film reach a wide audience and change attitudes?
I think people will find it perplexing in a sense but, hopefully, challenging as well as enjoyable. A lot of European Australians, well-meaning, well-intentioned, may think, `Hang on, why are these people doing white dance stuff? Why are they having to borrow our culture? Why didn't they have the freedom to continue to have their own culture?' But they've missed the point. I felt that when I went in. I thought, `What's going on here?' It took me a while to realise you're just laying another trip on these people. They are evolving as a people and they absorb, like any group of people would, the surrounding social conventions and express themselves socially through those conventions. Full stop.
But we think, `Well, it's not right. There's some further colonialism going on there'. But that's another film, another story, the half-caste notion of aboriginality which offered a sense of place for a lot of people at the time. They'd been dragged from their community experience into servant life, a kind of paltry version of white culture. They weren't allowed to go back to the traditional culture, by law. They weren't allowed to really enter the white community. They had to find a place of their own. But they did.
Some of the older ladies had Catholic religious pictures on their walls.
Quite a lot of the women are Catholic because there were quite a few Catholic missions in Port Hedland, New Norcia and many of them continue to have a Catholic faith. As far as orthodoxy is concerned, I'm not sure. Many Nunga and Koori people blend their Catholic experience with some other more traditional notions of spirituality. For instance, Helena is Catholic but she keeps it separate from the story-telling tradition. It's as if privately she would be making connections between the meaning of her Catholic faith with what I would consider to be the spiritual story in this film, but publicly she wouldn't say it. In a sense what she's giving us is what she's got to give us. There's no point in regressing to a more public proposition of faith. Whereas, when other people speak, they might refer to some more public position, politically or religiously. None of them did, even though they knew that in what they were saying there were connections between the community and the spiritual self.
You also made a documentary about Africa?
Yes, The Valley.
That's the kind of film you've been making since Ruby Rose?
Yes. But I've been trying to make features for ten years and it's been a long, long road. I've written about five or six scripts, two for British producers and they just got lost; one that got sold from under me and has been done by other people; two that are on the shelf at home. My wife, Catherine, is a writer and we have often worked together. We've made about six documentaries together. All of my documentaries are mainly to do with environment/ecology/spirituality/psychology, I suppose. Both of us are very interested in the convergence of each of these disciplines in the modern era and the need for those disciplines to talk to one another, which is not new, but I think it's very important for us to do that.
Catherine has her own work. We're both storytellers. We both work essentially as script editors on each other's projects. She has done four books in that time, so I have been working with her on those. We did a book together called We the Earth, which was published in 1995 and in the United States in 1996. We're planning a documentary based on that book.
Interview: 19th August 1996
