Miranda Tapsell, Shari Sebbens and Jessica Mauboy in a scene from The Sapphires.
IF THE showering of AACTA awards on The Sapphires has had the air of a long-awaited coronation about it, half a world away a very different celebration of Australian cinema has shown just how far indigenous stories on screen have come.
The Lincoln Centre in New York has this week hosted The Last New Wave, a program of 16 Australian feature films from the 1970s (the title is presumably borrowed from David Stratton's 1980 book of the same name). This was the first decade of the ''new'' Australian cinema, made possible by the creation of the Australian Film Development Commission under Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton, a period charged with a fierce yearning to tell thoroughly Australian stories.
The program was curated by the chief film critic for the Village Voice, Scott Foundas, with the assistance of the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra. The Last New Wave is dedicated to the memory of late Australian producer Jan Sharp (Echoes of Paradise, The Wide Sargasso Sea), described as a ''great friend'' of the film society.
Race looms large in 1977 film Backroads.
The line-up is predictable, but properly so. Newsfront is there, as are My Brilliant Career, Mad Max and Alvin Purple. All told, it's a useful primer in that first powerful flowering of Australian stories on Australian screens, and a reminder that sometimes the best way to grab the attention of the rest of the world is to not even try.
There are some terrific films there, but none better than Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, in which Tom E. Lewis (credited at the time as Tommy Lewis) plays an Aboriginal man of mixed parentage in the late 19th century who goes on a killing rampage after suffering relentless racial humiliation at the hands of whites. The portrait of Jimmie as a man caught in between - belonging to both black culture and white, and yet to neither - remains powerful, but the sense of threat he embodies seems a thing of guilt-induced hysteria today (never mind that the story was based on actual events).
Aboriginal identity is front and centre in Backroads, a road movie in which Bill Hunter and (real-life) activist Gary Foley exchange radically different views of a world in which race looms large. Director Phil Noyce would, of course, later go on to make Rabbit-Proof Fence in 2002, in which similar debates played out in a vastly different form.
In Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock, Aboriginality figures only in the margins, as a kind of ghostly or unknowable presence on the fringe. The landscape in Weir's film seems to thrum with a mysterious energy that is utterly unknowable to the whites, a seeming rebuke to their lack of real sensitivity (no matter how much gushy poetry they spout).
There are no indigenous characters in most of the films in the Lincoln Centre program, but where they figure at all it is as threat or outcast (Jimmie), as problem or 'troublemaker' (Foley), or as pure spirit (Hanging Rock).
Each of these depictions was in its way ground-breaking at the time, and they remain compelling now. But it is doubtful that even the most visionary of our 1970s filmmakers could have imagined a scenario in which indigenous characters would be at the centre of the story - laughing, loving and even singing - with the issue of race little more than a curiosity, rather than a curse or a cause.
Whatever the other virtues of The Sapphires, that is something worth celebrating.
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