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A Tale of Two Legends

Charlie Ward January 26

The idea of the Australian Legend has long been a fixture in our national consciousness – from early visions of pioneers and battlers to Hugh Jackman’s ‘Drover’ in the Baz Luhrman epic, Australia. Yet beneath the seemingly righteous rhetoric of ‘mateship’ and a ‘fair go’ lies a narrative that has, for years, been used to suppress the stories of our Indigenous populations and migrant communities. In the December issue of Meanjin, Charlie Ward dissects this popular myth and traces the rise of the Legend from his father Russell Ward’s own book to the brutal politics of the Howard era. You can read a brief extract below. The full essay is also available on our editions page.





On the parched landscape of the Australian arts in 2008, the movie Australia was the country’s Uluru: enormous, iconic and recognisable for its six-for-the-price-of-one populist aesthetic. From its initial set-scouting in the north-west Kimberly to its Sydney premiere, the scale of the film was as big as the allusions contained in its title. The budget was Packeresque: the production cost the equivalent of 80 per cent of the Australia Council’s entire annual grants funding for the same year. Of more interest than the pre-release shenanigans, though, was what came afterwards. By tackling a subject so dear to our hearts—one that includes 7,617,930 square kilometres of land, 60,000 years of history and 23 million cattle—Baz (can we call him Bazza now?) Luhrmann ensured that the real entertainment began after the credits rolled, as everyone from Germaine Greer to former treasurer Peter Costello felt entitled to turn their hands to the business of reviewing the movie. Most of the commentary was predictable: for those incapable of viewing history outside the prism of contemporary politics, the stolen generations theme provided an irresistible opportunity for cooption as another front of the nation’s still-simmering ‘history wars’.

In his Sydney Morning Herald film review of December last year, ex-treasurer Costello held himself short of contesting—as Andrew Bolt and others might—whether indigenous children were ever taken away from their families as a matter of policy. When Costello derided Luhrmann for his ‘lofty ambition’ of ‘telling the story of indigenous Australia’ in the movie, he failed to recognise that there are as many stories of indigenous Australia as there are indigenous Australians. Costello seemed to be hoping for a narrative that catered to his own political position. Notwithstanding its Herculean attempt, Lurhmann’s production house had no chance of weaving in a storyline to suit each of the movie’s millions of prospective viewers.

Like all policy, the assimilationist doctrine of the mid twentieth century that created the stolen generations was general in its conception and particular in its application. The broad outline of the story involving the boy Nullah in the film—that of an accidentally drowned mother, murderously destructive white father, interfering, well-meaning step-mother—is no more improbable in its particulars than the dozens I consider every day. The stolen generation clients I serve as a caseworker in the federally funded Link-Up program are long tired of others denying or contesting the reality of their experiences—something Lurhmann could not be accused of. Costello might like to know that regardless of the accuracy or otherwise of ‘the story of Indigenous Australia’ contained in Lurhmann’s script, there were a few quiet tears shed by some elderly ‘stolen gen’ members of the audience at Australia’s first screening in Alice Springs.


 

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