The Minister,
the Ambassador,
Roger
Sandall
Funny things happen in Canberra. But the happening staged by Mr W. C.
Wentworth and the Italian Ambassador 35 years ago was not just funny, it was to
have peculiar and fateful consequences. On Thursday November 28th,
1968, at the News and Information Bureau, the screening of a film took place
which had won First Prize for Documentary at the 1968 Venice Festival, Walbiri
Ritual at Ruguri. At the screening the Ambassador was to present an effigy
of the Lion of St Mark to Mr Wentworth as the minister responsible for the
organization which had produced the film, the Australian Institute of
Aboriginal Studies. Catering was arranged, invitations were sent, and a
number of members of the diplomatic community were invited. But at this point
the law of unintended effects took over and the outcome was not quite what was
planned.
The late sixties were a vexing time for the Minister. In Darwin Mr
Cecil Holmes—film director, part-time journalist, and full-time stirrer on the
Left—was gaining access to Aboriginal reserves and writing in The Australian
about what he found there. In Mr Wentworth’s view these reports were downright
scurrilous since they pilloried Mr Harry Giese, his hardworking and highly
esteemed Director of Welfare in the Territory. Giese’s jurisdiction embraced
thousands of hectares of Aboriginal Reserve and coastline. Very much a hands-on
man, he had a plane at his disposal and was given to descending at short notice
out of the sky for flying visits to sleepy desert settlements, arriving and
departing in clouds of dust and administrative consternation.
It should have been simple enough for Wentworth to keep Holmes away
from his Welfare Director (what point is there in being a Minister if you can’t
protect your own staff?) but Cecil Holmes was not wihout guile. Living in
Darwin, and at something of a hiatus in his life as a film director, he had
embarked on a new career as anthropological documentarian, and if the members
of an Aboriginal community invited him to come and record their lives there
wasn’t much a Minister could do. Into the reserves came Holmes with cameras and
cameramen, with boxes of film and audiotape, repeatedly gaining entry for what
in Wentworth’s view were entirely the wrong reasons. Whole film crews were
flying into secluded enclaves and staying for weeks at a time. What was he
telling them, Wentworth wondered—“Hunters unite, you have nothing to lose but
your chains”?
Cecil Holmes himself had made a familiar pilgrimage. As a member of the
Communist Party he first pinned his hopes on the working class. But everywhere
it failed to live up to expectations. Then it seemed to him that the torch of
proletarian revolution had been passed to the oppressed of the Third World, yet
with every passing year they seemed less and less fit to play this heroic role.
Lately he had come to feel that the only way forward was back—back before
capitalism, before commerce, before civilization itself—embracing the values of
the hunters and gatherers of the tribal world. Like others in Australia of this
persuasion Cecil was inclined to regard the sanctuaries where Australia’s
Aborigines lived as little better than concentration camps, and to see Harry
Giese as their Germanic Kommandant.
At first Giese had been able to use his powers as Welfare Director to
keep Holmes out of the reserves as an undesirable alien: visitors would always
need a permit, and that permit could always be refused. But then Cecil had run
into a Sydney university anthropologist, Professor W. R. Geddes, and a mutually
congenial alliance was formed. Though an amateur, Bill Geddes was also a
film-maker, and he listened with sympathy to Holmes’ complaints. He was also
sympathetic to Holmes’s plans for ethnographic film-making. Soon Cecil’s forays
into the closed Aboriginal areas in the Northern Territory were undertaken in
semi-anthropological guise, sponsored and paid for by an organization in which
Bill Geddes had a leading role—the Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies. Reinvented as a maker of ethnographic films Holmes would always
have an excuse for getting inside Aboriginal communities and winding his way
into the confidence of the Aborigines themselves. Dear old whiskery elders
would begin by innocently talking to him about their troubles—for example, the
shortage of child brides—and soon an exposé would appear in The Australian
about the shortcomings of the N. T. Welfare Department. That the Australian
Institute of Aboriginal Studies was also supporting Holmes did not go unnoticed
by Mr Wentworth, who was himself a founding father of that body.
Bill Geddes was a good and kindly man who found himself in charge of an
anthropology department at the height of the Vietnam War, and increasingly out
of sympathy with the political views of his colleagues. This situation was not
uncommon and different people handled it in different ways. Beleaguered and
isolated, Bill went underground. He appeared around the University of Sydney
more and more furtively, seeking human company outside and beyond an
increasingly hostile academic milieu. It was in this situation that he probably
met Holmes, and he must have been delighted to discover a man who shared an
overriding interest in making films. This passion is more widespread than one
might think, and as those who have followed the career of Kim Jong-il will
know, it can be very expensive. It has taken the resources of a private
goldmine and hundreds of millions of dollars to pay for the Dear Leader’s
ambitious ventures. Bill Geddes’s aims were of course more modest. He had no
interest in dramatic fiction: he wanted to make documentaries instead. Under
the spell of Robert Flaherty’s 1926 idyll Moana—the cinematic equivalent
of Margaret Mead’s romance about Samoan life—he spent years on a series of film
projects in Borneo, Thailand, and Fiji, where attractive brown-skinned people
lived benignly beneath the palms, dancing their ancient dances and honoring
their gods, these amiable epics being financed largely out of his own pocket
plus whatever academic funds he could find.
To do this required much ingenuity. His manipulation of the
departmental finances in order to buy cine-cameras and tape-recorders was the
stuff of legend. The obscurity of his operations, and the skill used to shift
expenses from one budget category to another, were something his colleagues
could only marvel at; while his almost invisible presence on campus led to his
being called “the ghost”. Those surprised to find thousands of university
dollars spent on film equipment said he was unscrupulous. But this was surely
unfair. Anyone who took a large view of the matter could see that Bill was
genuinely in love with his subject, that he was an artist at heart—and all’s
fair in art and war.
But the expense of film production continued to soar, and the price of
the required equipment got further and further beyond his professorial reach.
Arriflex cameras and Nagra tape recorders cost far too much for even the most
ingenious academic to purchase from petty cash. At the same time the ongoing
expense at the Institute of Aboriginal Studies of paying for Holmes’s cameramen
and for equipment-hire (both of which had to be flown from Sydney and
maintained on location for weeks at a time) was getting to be a worry. A
solution would have to be found. Holmes and Geddes put their heads together—and
they soon came up with an answer. Where was there a golden vault of cash? At
the Institute for Aboriginal Studies. And who had the key to the vault? The
Principal. If the Institute’s Principal could be persuaded to buy both an
Arriflex and a Nagra, then two almost priceless items might be obtained without
the university becoming involved. Cecil could borrow the Institute’s machinery
for a month or so up in the NorthernTerritory when he wanted, while Bill Geddes
might draw on it for excursions to Thailand when required. They were reasonable
men: it was hard to see why their needs should clash, or their activities be a
source of concern to anyone.
Mr W. C. Wentworth, however, was extremely concerned. He had observed
the link between the Sydney professor and the Darwin journalist with mounting
fury. When Bill Geddes was on one of his periodic field trips to southeast
Asia, the Minister audaciously appointed a full-time film-maker to the
Institute’s staff from overseas, directly under his and the Principal’s
control. No longer would it be necessary to hire a known Darwin subversive to
make the Institute’s ethnographic films. No longer would this man be able to
use his privileged access to Aboriginal reserves to attack Harry Giese. No
longer would the Minister have to watch helplessly what was happening to the
Institute’s funds. Under the supervision of the Institute’s Principal, Mr Fred
McCarthy, the Institute’s own employee would make the Institute’s films,
vigilantly watched by the Institute’s redoubtable accountant, Mrs Alks.
* * *
Looking down on Australia from a plane at 20,000 feet the arriving
film-maker wondered what he would find. It was a most singular fact that an
nondescript research organization on the backside of the planet should have
just bought one of the world’s most advanced professional movie cameras, along
with the most coveted and costly of Swiss tape-recorders, and on top of this
was now paying a foreign cameraman flown in from America to use them. There
must be money to burn. It soon transpired however that I was wrong about this.
My cutting room consisted of a derelict and unsalubrious wing of an abandoned
building at the University of Sydney—premises formerly occupied by the deaf,
the dumb, and the blind, and now occupied only by crows. My staff (if that’s
the word I want) were in the process of being fired. But I’d come a long way
and decided to make the most of it. The camera was ready. A capable
anthropologist had been assigned. Without further ado I ordered and equipped a
Toyota Land Cruiser, drove it to the Northern Territory, and started work.
In the next two years anthropologist and film-maker went together to
communities on the coast of Arnhem Land and visited the islands nearby; drove
west of Alice Springs and saw ancient rites in caves and filmed ancient dances
performed amidst spinifex and desert sand. When the films were edited they
seemed interesting enough to be entered in documentary film competitions
overseas, so I packed one up and sent it off to the Venice Film Festival.
What exactly went through the head of the
Italian Ambassador to Australia a few months later, when he received a letter
from the Venice Festival authorities informing him that they were about to send
him a Lion of St Mark, is hard to say. But I imagine he sensed an opportunity.
Not only was the Venice Festival an important event, this might be a chance to
advertise a nobler aspect of Italian life than marijuana growing by Calabrian
criminals. Italy as the land of Donatello and Michelangelo, Italy as an arbiter
of taste, Italy as the source of much that Western civilization properly held
dear. In which case it would be a pity just to wrap the Lion in brown paper and
send it off to Sydney. More ceremony was needed—perhaps even a screening of the
film. It might be a photo opportunity. There would be food and drink, and the
event would be reported in the press. Moreover, clippings and pictures could
accompany the report he would send back to head office in Rome.
When the Ambassador put this to the Australian Minister responsible for
the Institute of Aboriginal Studies, Mr Wentworth may have sensed an
opportunity too. There is usually very little to celebrate in the portfolio of
Aboriginal Affairs and a bit of favorable publicity was probably welcome. Along
with others Mr Wentworth had been one of those instrumental in setting up the
Institute. He was therefore grateful that the Venice Festival should have
honored one of the Institute’s films, and thought it appropriate that the
Ambassador should recognise his own contribution by inviting him to publicly
receive the award. He in turn would pass on the Lion of St Mark to the Chairman
of the Institute, who would hand it to the Principal, who would put it on the
mantelpiece in his office—this being routine procedure for successful
government-sponsored film productions at the time.
A date was fixed. A hall was hired. The catering was arranged. A copy
of the film was made ready for projection—then just as the guest lists were
being finalised it was fatefully decided to expand them. Shouldn’t two of the
men who appeared in the film be included? Wasn’t the film in a sense really
theirs? It would be a treat for them to be brought to Canberra and honored, and
it would make the Minister look good too. The Minister consulted the
anthropologist, who meditated for a day or so before sending an invitation off
to the settlement where they lived. But just when the Minister and the
Ambassador were about to complete their arrangements by inviting Canberra’s
diplomatic community, certain difficulties were foreseen.
It was pointed out by the anthropologist that the ceremony was
something Aboriginal women were not allowed to see. Shouldn’t this prohibition
apply equally to the Ambassador’s wives? Why should such women be privileged
while others were not? Secondly, in Darwin Cecil Holmes had already been making
a nuisance of himself because of the publicity these films by an upstart
foreign filmmaker were enjoying. If he were now to learn of a screening planned
as a political benefit for the Italian Ambassador and Mr Wentworth things might
get very ugly indeed. Lastly there was a matter touching anthropology itself.
If the old men invited down from Alice Springs were to go back home and report
that women had been present at the screening in Canberra, where might this
lead? The elders of the tribe might be shocked. Young and promising
anthropologists could be banned from working in Aboriginal communities for
ever.
For one dreadful day it looked as if the show would be called off. But
where there’s a political will there’s a way, and at the last minute a novel
solution was found. If the wives of Canberra’s diplomatic community couldn’t
see the film—so what? They could be expelled from the auditorium. The main
point was to ensure the show went on, and by making only the slightest of
changes this could easily be arranged. First Mr Wentworth would give a short
speech about the Institute and its achievements. Then the Italian Ambassador
would explain the importance of the Venice Festival, the honor of receiving one
of its awards, and the cultural significance of Italy. After which the
Ambassador would hand the Lion of St Mark to a grateful Minister, and the
screening of the film would be announced.
But at precisely that point the Minister would dramatically intervene.
The film, it would be explained, was of the profoundest religious significance,
and in the religion of the Walbiri Aborigines it was considered
inappropriate—downright sacriligeous in fact—for women to see the exclusively
male rituals it contained. It was with the greatest regret therefore that the
Minister, mindful of the religious sensibilities of the Aboriginal people, was
obliged to ask all women present to leave the auditorium when the film was
shown.
And so it came to pass. The reception was a success. The exclusion of
the diplomatic wives went smoothly. According to Mr Wentworth (with whom I
confirmed these details two weeks before he died) the Prime Minister’s wife was
asked to leave, and departed taking the wife of the Ambassador with her. The
two elders from the desert were reassured that no women had been allowed into
the theatre, and returned home confident their secrets had not been betrayed.
Miraculously, all the interests involved had been smoothly reconciled.
All save one. For a precedent had now been set. In future the mere
photographic simulation of events (the shadows, so to speak, on the walls of
Plato’s cave) would be treated as exclusive, closed, secret—as indistinguishable
from the events themselves. Hundreds of thousands of federal government dollars
had been spent so that a documentary record of an ancient culture should be
kept, and knowledge and understanding of that culture could be brought to a
wider world. Now that could not take place—indeed, quite the opposite. Along
with all similar films made at public expense for educational purposes the
award-winning Walbiri Ritual at Ruguri was withdrawn from public view,
placed under prohibitive restrictions, and finally deep frozen in a vault for
ever. In the ensuing thirty-five years Australia’s journalistic guardians of
artistic and cultural freedom would noisily express their outrage when their
right to see even the most degrading piece of pornography was challenged, but
unless I’m mistaken (which of course is always possible) not a voice has ever
been raised against this censorship.
Oct 27, 2003