One was the ultimate diplomat: clever, multilingual, charming – and with an equally accomplished wife. One was an agent of chaos, and proud of it. Others were master strategists. Several went on classic hero’s journeys, overcoming challenges that changed them forever. More than one displayed endurance that makes Rambo look like a wuss. They’re all real-life characters in an incredible story of courage and resistance that for more than 100 years has been hiding in plain sight.
“There are so many incredible individuals that were caught up in this huge change in their world,” says filmmaker Rachel Perkins. “How they manoeuvred and responded to it, and the incredible feats of resilience are amazing.”
Rachel Perkins directs and presents the three-part series The Australian Wars.Credit:Dylan River
She’s talking about the First Nations resistance to the settlement/colonisation/invasion of Australia that forms the subject of her latest series, The Australian Wars. It’s an extraordinary yarn, made even more extraordinary by the fact that most of the information presented will be totally new to most Australians, despite it once being common knowledge.
“As all the historians say in this show, people used to always talk about this stuff,” says Perkins, who also created and co-produced the groundbreaking documentary series First Australians. It wasn’t hidden away in secret government documents. It was hotly and publicly debated – the climate change of its day.
“It was part of everyday conversation. It was in the newspapers. It’s only recently – recently in the big sweep of history – that we’ve stopped talking about it.”
It’s a point Perkins stresses – that this is not new information. “I think that’s important for people to know, because it makes it easier for them to understand that this is actually part of our history. We have always known it. It just became – as Henry Reynolds calls it – the forgotten war.”
The reasons for that forgetting are complex. One is obviously that it’s just a very sad, sometimes horrifying tale of bloodshed and brutality. It’s human nature to want to look away.
There are also enormous legal and social ramifications from accepting that Australia was colonised, not peacefully settled – that there was active, organised resistance from day one.
“And we’re still all living with the legacy of it,” Perkins says. “That’s the terrible thing. We can’t access our own country. That’s the legacy. And that’s at the core of people not wanting to acknowledge what really happened.”
Perkins chooses not to directly tackle that aspect of the frontier wars, but the human impact is very much front and centre. And given the often-confronting nature of the material, striking the right tone was crucial.
“The starting point is that this is not just an Indigenous story to tell,” she says. “Because in any war there are different sides. So even though I’m an Aboriginal person, I didn’t just want to tell the Aboriginal side. Non-Indigenous Australians are bound up in this as well, we all live in this country together.”
She’s hoping viewers will realise this history is a shared burden. “But I also really tried not to weaponise this, if that’s the right way of expressing it. I wanted to invite people in. That was my intention – to try and welcome people in to the story.”
The starting point is that this is not just an Indigenous story to tell.
She also wanted to make clear that she wasn’t an objective observer. Each episode opens with her and her crew in shot. It’s clear that she is making a TV show, and that she is part of the story. It was important to her that the production was, in her words, “honest”.
“I wanted to make it transparent, so people can see the construction of it, how it was made. It’s not like I’m an objective journalist. I was going on the exploration myself – there were things that I didn’t know, that were revealed to me in the process of researching and shooting.”
Many of those things were deeply personal. At the end of the three-part series Perkins listens to a recording of her grandmother’s voice, a recording she’d never heard before. She unearthed details of a heartbreaking family history. “I knew a lot about what happened in Tasmania because I’d made a film there,” Perkins says, “but some of the personal experiences of our own family I hadn’t fully grasped.”
The series is meticulously composed of input from Australia’s pre-eminent experts on the subject – Indigenous and non-Indigenous – as well as First Nations educators and descendants, and colonist descendants too. (There’s often quite a bit of cross-over between those categories.) And for people worried that they’re expected to feel guilty, the attitude of the non-Indigenous historians is instructive.
A still from First Australians, which Rachel Perkins created and co-produced.Credit:Museum Victoria
No one’s beating their breast but everyone is moved by these stories. Frequently they’re in awe of the courage and resourcefulness of the First Nations fighters. Mostly people are compassionate and curious. They’re wanting to further their own and other people’s understanding of this important aspect of Australian history.
Then the question becomes: what do we do next. “First we must hear it and receive it,” Perkins says. “Then what do we do about it? Right. You’ve been presented with this history. Now what do we do about it, in the time that we have? Obviously we can’t go back. So what do we learn from it, and what do we take forward?”
And Perkins feels that maybe this is a moment in time when more and more people are ready to hear, to learn, and to think deeply about those next steps.
“Certainly, in the movement towards truth-telling, treaty and voice to parliament, those are substantive, nation-changing political shifts that our country is right on the cusp of for the first time,” she says. “And that’s a very promising change. I myself, personally, think we’ve turned a corner in the big sweep of history. Where we might be ready to hear this stuff again.”
She hopes so. Because it’s not just important for the future of Australia and its people, black and white. It’s also an absolutely cracking yarn that everyone should know.
“Incredible characters doing amazing things – this story is chockers with it!” she says. And it’s a story she’s barely scratched the surface of. “Yes, it was hard to make. Yes, it’s difficult material. But the most difficult thing of all was that it (The Australian Wars) just cannot tell the scale and the epic nature of this story. All we could do is give the broad brushstrokes. But this isn’t the last of it. This is just the start of the conversation.”
The Australian Wars is on SBS and NITV, Wednesday, 7.30pm.
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