Does that mean I've exhausted the available documents of European Australian settlers treating indigenous Australians horribly?
Surely not, but the movies I watched on January 26th the past four years -- Walkabout, High Ground, Charlie's Country and The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith -- did represent the four movies I already had in my mind that profiled this way, that I had not already seen.
I don't watch Australian movies about those European settlers on Australia Day. Some Australians, or people who live in Australia anyway, surely would. But not me.
Ever since I started to really understand that many indigenous Australians think of this as Invasion Day, and call it that publicly, I relegated the mid-summer holiday to that place in mind of "it's quite problematic, but I do get a day off work at least." In fact, it's so problematic that you don't have to take that day off if you don't want to. The government has made it so you can work it and take a different day off in its place.
My own contribution to pushing back against a certain subsection of gross white Australians, with whom I don't want to be associated, is to watch a movie on January 26th, for the fifth year in a row now, that considers the troubled plight of indigenous people in modern Australian history.
Or, sometimes, not quite so troubled.
Oh, there's still an undercurrent of racism in Bran Nue Dae, Rachel Perkins' 2009 film that I knew, from the poster on Stan, was not going to sink me into a pit of despair, as some of those other films have. How could there not be. To depict the indigenous experience on film is to depict the experience of racism.
But it's also an extremely fun and silly road trip movie, and it's a musical!
When I say Bran Nue Dae was not on my radar, I should clarify that. I had heard the title, had probably seen it on my streamers -- particularly Stan, the Australian one -- multiple times before. But I spared it no more than a passing thought any time I'd seen it, and could not even have told you, for sure, that it was about indigenous Australians. Without having really analyzed whatever faces were on the poster, I might have thought it was African, since that creative spelling of "Brand New Day" is just as likely to be from there or somewhere else as from here. (Of course, if I'd analyzed it a little more closely and seen Geoffrey Rush on the poster, that would have cleared up any doubts.)
I've subsequently learned that the concept originated on stage in 1990, before being adapted to film two decades later. The songs are not particularly memorable, but some do get your toe tapping, and they more than exceed the minimum necessary for this to be a really fun experience.
The story is about an indigenous boy of about 16 (Willie, played by Rocky McKenzie) who lives in Broome, in the northwest part of the country, in 1969. Rocky has eyes for Rosie, played by Australian pop singer and national treasure Jessica Mauboy. However, she's being courted by a white Australian, Lester (Dan Sultan), who appeals to Rosie primarily because he can give her her big break to sing and potentially get noticed at the local roadhouse.
Willie is torn away from the potential romance when his mother sends him off to a Catholic mission in Perth, in the southwest of the country, where he's going to study to become a priest. That mission is overseen by the aforementioned Geoffrey Rush. A couple of the boys break into the refrigerator to steal Cokes and Cherry Ripes -- a local delicacy in the confection aisle at the supermarket -- and Willie is the only one who comes forward to admit he was part of the group, to save an innocent boy from being punished. When Rush punishes him severely and begins to insult him -- "I should have known one your Aborigine kind would be worth nothing," he says -- Willie escapes on foot and starts to make his way back home, on an adventure that will have lots of twists and turns and feature lots of compelling characters.
Among these are a drunken Aboriginal elder, "Uncle Tadpole" (Ernie Dingo), who originally just wants Willie's money to buy drink before softening and trying to get him back to Broome. Then there's the pair of hippies in their VW van, whom Uncle Tadpole pretends to have been hit by in order to guilt them into driving the pair to Broome. Just when you think it's the sort of story where Willie will just get passed from one pair of hands to the next -- some of them more well meaning than others -- the same group of characters are hard to fully get rid of, as they continue together on this road trip, accumulating a character played by another Australian acting treasure, Deborah Mailman, along the way. The whole time, Rush's priest is in hot pursuit, following just a few hours behind them at all their stops.
It's hard to describe how much fun and joy Bran Nue Dae packs into scarcely 85 minutes -- really only around 78 when the credits start rolling. This is also, remember, a musical, and though few of the songs are longer than about 90 seconds, it's not easy to fit all that in without shortchanging us somewhere. But no, this is just an economic package of good vibes, silliness, and yes, a few moments of more profound contemplation about the treatment of indigenous people in this society.
Bran Nue Dae does not need to dwell on this last, though. Even with giving Rush the above line of reprehensible dialogue, the film is not all that eager to make him a one-dimensional villain, and it ends in quite a nice place for his character.
But these things are still clearly on the film's mind. The cheeky song that follows that line of dialogue by Rush contains the lyric
"There's nothing I would rather be
Than to be an Aborigine
And watch you take my precious land away."
It's said with a song and a dance and a smile on everybody's face, maybe so that white Australians in the audience won't feel too bad about being complicit with that. But it needles them nonetheless. It's a little bit of secret protest thrown in within the context of a cheery musical, which maybe just makes it all the more subversive.
Nor does the film shy away from the sad realities of the indigenous Australian experience, even if their bite is lessened by coming within the context of a comedy. The two significant indigenous elders who appear in this film -- those played by Dingo and Mailman -- are both portrayed as alcoholics. Alcohol has ravaged the Australian indigenous communities, such that some heavily indigenous areas are entirely dry as an attempt to lessen the deleterious effects of the drug.
One thing personally that I really enjoyed about watching this movie was that it contains a scene set in the same iconic movie theater that I visited when I was in Broome in 2023. You may recall from this post that my younger son, my sister-in-law and I attended Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem when we were there on vacation. I was enthralled by this open-air theater, and seeing it in Bran Nue Dae really brought up positive memories of that trip. The movie the characters are watching in "the world's oldest picture gardens" is interrupted by a torrential rain, which is a very real risk you don't get in a lot of other cinemas, and part of the charm I found in the place.
Bran Nue Dae ends on a very silly note that relies on highly coincidental connections between a bunch of characters who had just met each other randomly, which is a moment that places the film squarely within the realm of fantasy. Though it's an optimistic sort of fantasy that speaks volumes about the filmmakers' hope that this can, one day, really just be one happy country, where people recognize, acknowledge and embrace the ways that they are more similar than they are different.
That the film is set in 1969, and that we haven't nearly gotten there yet, is a bit more sobering.
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