I'm not really sure if I can use the term "black fella." I know indigenous people can, and do, use it towards one another. I just don't know if I can use it because I'm not schooled enough in the history of Australian racial relations to know if there are hurtful associations with someone like me using it, or if it is actually sort of a term of endearment, which it sounds like to me. After all, I am invader too, though the invading I did was far more recent and doesn't implicate anyone in my lineage. Things were already pretty much settled by the time I did my invading.
I do know, of course, that "black fella" is a term of othering. Or at least, a term of distinguishing one thing from another thing.
The protagonist of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Fred Schepisi's 1978 film, is, in some respects, difficult to distinguish in this way. He's got one white parent and one indigenous parent. For the white Australians of the early 20th century, that was close enough to white to earn him some chances to "make good for himself" in their society. However, it was also close enough to black to make them wary that at any moment, he might conform to their lowest expectations of his other parent.
Which, I'm sad to say, he does. Which makes this a very complicated film.
It's adapted from Thomas Keneally's novel, which itself was inspired by true events, and it makes for my fourth Australia Day/Invasion Day in a row where I've watched a film that examines the plight of indigenous Australians -- following Walkabout in 2022, High Ground in 2023 and Charlie's Country in 2024. As an invader trying to atone, I figure it's the least -- the very, very least -- I can do.
Jimmie (Tommy Lewis) has been raised under the good graces of a reverend and his wife, who show the same mixture of optimism and wariness described above, only disguising their racism as charity. When Jimmie is of age, he tries to "make good" in the way they have trained him, proceeding through a succession of jobs that end through no fault of his own. Each employer takes advantage of him in some way or asks something of him that is against his core beliefs, and if he's even slightly reluctant to comply, they stiff him his pay or cast their favor elsewhere.
It's a rough existence that eventually starts to see strides in the right direction -- er, that's debatable -- when he meets a white woman he wants to take up with, Gilda (Angela Punch), whom he believes he has impregnated. (Given that he first sees her canoodling with a married farmer, it's unlikely he should have trusted her in the first place.) When the baby is born, it's revealed not to be Jimmie's, as the boy's skin color shows no similarity to his own. At this point, unfortunately, they are already married.
This, I thought, was a really interesting inversion on a scene we see in a lot of movies, where a white man is retroactively cuckolded when the newborn he thought was his has features readily identifiable as belonging to another man. That this is flipped against Jimmie in the other direction gives an idea of just what he is up against while trying to "make good" in this world ... and is just one of the factors that sets the stage for what is going to come next.
Spoilers for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith.
When one particular employer denies buying him groceries as part of the pay he is receiving for building a boundary around the employer's property -- on the grounds that Jimmie has lost focus with the arrival of some friends, which the employer worries has turned his property into a "blacks camp" -- Jimmie confronts him, explaining that not only is he owed this, but he has a wife and child to feed. (Despite not being the father, Jimmie has dutifully adopted the role.)
The man holds his ground, and in order to scare the man -- who isn't at home at the time, leaving only his wife and his grown daughters -- Jimmie and his "uncle" (Steve Dodd) appear at the farmhouse wielding axes. They don't plan to do anything with the axes, it would seem, but when the matriarch goes for her gun, a bloodbath ensues that leaves only the two Aboriginal men standing.
I was taken aback by the direction this films takes, though not mostly that The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith "goes there." My modern mind, trained on the moral logic of very careful Hollywood studio executives, finds it to be a disconnect that these "black fellas" could be guilty of anything so heinous as murder. We are not yet removed from a long period of mainstream movies where minority characters have been portrayed as saints, or given only very minor rough edges.
No, the thing that took me aback most was that having made this terrible error, Jimmie then leans into it and makes things far worse. We never lose our sympathy for Jimmie, not fully, but let's just say -- no need for further spoilers now that I've established my context -- that some of what Jimmie does after this is far less ambiguous and far more deserving of our scorn. In fact, one act is so heinous that it is almost disqualifying of our sympathy, even if Jimmie felt that the man it would hurt most was fully deserving of being so hurt.
Because Fred Schepisi is not an indigenous filmmaker, as he would need to be if he were to make a film like this today, it's hard to know just how we should view the narrative choices in this film. On the one hand, it's obvious that the film is on the side of its indigenous characters, even if Jimmie becomes problematic over the course of the narrative. On the other, it's possible for a white filmmaker to make a movie that has good intentions and still fails to depict things as sensitively as it should. I have not heard anything like that in the discourse about The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, but then again, I have not actually heard any discourse about The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. When I told my wife I was planning to watch it, her eyes widened and she said it was really good. If this movie were considered problematic by students of Australian film, I think she would have mentioned it.
What this film really does is reveal that war is ugly and that it takes down even the most well-intentioned people, on both sides. At one point in the film, Jimmie very pointedly says "Tell them I've started a war!" Rarely is having started a war considered a good thing, and certainly not here.
The film clearly operates as a metaphor for political activism, and possibly a call to it as well. That's the same sort of political activism that expresses itself in things like renaming Australia Day as Invasion Day. Jimmie also has several lines of frustrated dialogue where he says that he specifically, or indigenous people generally, did not do anything to deserve this sort of treatment. But some of the lines are "I didn't do anything," without the clarification. If this is how they treat you when you didn't do anything, might as well do something, and at least hit your enemy where it hurts in the process. They're going to think of you the same way either way.
There's a really good thesis statement for the film in a line of dialogue I jotted down, which is related to the way wars lay everyone low -- and in particular this war that has raged between indigenous people and the white invaders who arrived with the First Fleet in 1788. A school teacher played by Peter Carroll, who becomes a hostage of Jimmie and one of his mates when they go on the run, hears the two indigenous bickering with each other about which of the two of them is guilty of which transgression. The teacher says "If you want to stand there comparing evils, you won't end until you've put a bullet through each other's heart."
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith does not put a fine point on many of its ideas, to its credit, but I was glad for this one. There's no real comparison between the evils done by the white men against the indigenous population who have lived here for 60,000 years, and whatever "evils" the indigenous may have done in response to those evils. However, this movie does bemoan the fact that we far too rarely see the productive response to evil, which would be good. Far more often we see the unproductive response, which is just more evil.
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