Protected: The Truth About Palm Island

One of the great deficiencies of Australian cinema during the “revival” are films made by Aboriginal filmmakers or from a First Nations perspective. Many claim that the short film, Wiradjuri man Bruce McGuinness’ Black Fire (1972), was the first to be made by an Aboriginal director, while Muruwari woman Essie Coffey’s extraordinary My Survival as an Aboriginal (1979) is the first long-form documentary. Phillip Noyce’s Backroads (1977) represents another important watershed as an angry, often polemical film that relies on a significant collaboration or co-authorship with Gumbainggir activist Gary Foley as actor, uncredited co-screenwriter, co-director of the Aboriginal actors and advisor on the overall “viewpoint” of the film.

Sitting alongside these landmark works are four long-form documentaries directed or co-directed by Italian migrant Alessandro Cavadini (alongside his brother and cinematographer Fabio and producer and co-director Carolyn Strachan) between 1972 and 1982 that develop a fascinating, respectful and deeply engaged model for collaborative filmmaking practice with Indigenous communities: Ningla A-Na (1972); Protected: The Truth About Palm Island (1975); We Stop Here (co-directed by Strachan, 1977); and Two Laws (co-directed by Strachan, 1982)¹. Each of these documentaries question many long-held assumptions about ethnographic filmmaking and also counter the perceived objectivity and distance of observational documentary. These four remarkable films don’t merely stage an encounter with specific Aboriginal communities but provide a significant opportunity for self-expression, cross-cultural dialogue and exchange, belonging and agency.

This is already in place in Cavadini’s justifiably celebrated first film, Ningla A-Na, documenting the operations of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra in 1972, but becomes much more central to Protected and its attempts to tell and demonstrate the stories of the 1957 five-day strike by Aboriginal workers and inmates on Palm Island. Interestingly, this also places Protected within the emerging “tradition” of the period film. But here we are a world away from the carefully designed and hermetic past of Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir, 1975) or even Sunday Too Far Away (Ken Hannam, 1975). The intimacy, urgency, sense of embodiment and blurring of temporality that characterise Protected speak to the deprivation of Aboriginal people on Palm Island in both the past and the present.

Cavadini became interested in journeying to Palm Island in northern Queensland after conversations with Aboriginal activists like Noonuccal man Denis Walker in Sydney’s Redfern. They spoke of the extreme poverty and deprivation still suffered by Aboriginal people on the Reserve and the ongoing practices of Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland Government in exploiting indentured labour and the policies of “protection”. As in Cavadini’s later films, the form of Protected gradually took shape in consultation with the local community after he was invited by them to make the film. The process of pre-production was particularly important. Cavadini, his brother and producer Strachan – a small crew essential to the sense of intimacy and collaboration – worked with the local community to determine the kind of film they would like to make as well as its subject matter. Video equipment was brought to the island to allow the local population to experiment with filmmaking and develop a comfort and familiarity with the process (though the final film was shot on 16mm) in development and rehearsal. The results of this were then shown – with much enjoyment – on a television monitor in the local pub. According to Cavadini and Strachan, the locals were particularly influenced by television – which was available on the island – and many of the younger participants banded together to create work inspired by the then popular American TV series, Kung Fu (1972-75). The crew were also commissioned by Henry Reynolds at James Cook University to record oral histories of those on the island, some of whom participated in the 1957 strike (though the key figures and their families were all quickly deported in the days and weeks following it).

In adapting and presenting these testimonies, a decision was made to draw on the forms of television drama as well as documentary reenactment. A particular model for the filmmakers was Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965), but the local community was more influenced by what they were watching on local television along with the central importance of reenactment to Aboriginal storytelling and wider cultural practice. In consultation, a decision was made to focus on the 1957 strike as a pivotal moment of resistance and communal collaboration, one that countered common perceptions of the local island community as despondent, impoverished and even docile. Established in the late 1910s, the Palm Island Reserve – which largely displaced the local Manbarra people as well – was essentially a prison colony or concentration camp set up to house unruly or dissident members of Queensland’s Aboriginal population. It went through a particularly repressive period during the reign of Superintendent Roy Bartlam between 1953 and 1965. One of the difficulties confronted by the filmmakers was the diversity of the island’s population representing over 40 separate tribes or nations and at least 57 different language groups. This dispersed, displaced and incohesive population was created by government design and aligned with the wider practice of assimilationism. Those exiled to the island were prohibited from speaking their own language or returning to Country. All aspects of life were closely monitored: food was rationed, wages rarely paid or, if they were, at well below award rates, and living conditions were significantly impoverished.

The film was devised to bring together these disparate and displaced groups and individuals in pursuit of a shared cause that rhymed with the actions of the 1957 strike (which only five of the Aboriginal population of around 1400 didn’t support) and the contemporary Aboriginal rights movement. Further production decisions were also made in support of the community and their desires and needs rather than the dramatic form or verisimilitude of the film. The actors were chosen not because of their physical resemblance to a particular strike participant or due to their acting ability, but in relation to the lines of kinship. According to one story, Eddie Koiki Mabo was invited to play one of the key participants in the strike but declined due to being the wrong “skin”. The drama enacted in the film speaks to both the events of the past and the ongoing life of the community. This also carries over to the film’s white actors, all of whom had to be recruited from Townsville.

The local community felt that more conventional forms of historical documentary involving onscreen interviews and testimony were not best suited to their purposes. As Strachan has stated, “In this case, the oral act of storytelling was not powerful enough. The people wanted the average Australian to live through their drama and feel what it was like to live on that island; they wanted an emotional impact… Very few white Australians had any idea of what the Aboriginal people had suffered and Protected was going to show them.”² Made for the local community, Protected was also designed to confront and inform the wider Australian public. Watching the film is a curious experience. There is a constant slippage between past and present, between dramatisation and a less realistic mode of performance. But a central aspect of the film is this hybrid mode of address. As the opening titlecard indicates, this is a film constructed around the testimonies “told and demonstrated” by the Aboriginal community of Palm Island. Although the participation of Strachan and the Cavadini brothers was central and enabling, the key purpose of Protected is to give voice to the experience, stories and memories of the community. What many viewers might see as failures of storytelling, unembellished style or acting are, in fact, the outcome of radically different processes and expectations of communal expression. There is an unadorned integrity to the way in which the community expresses its history and identity that is partly demonstrated by the slippage between actor, character, kinship, community and the fragmented nature of the storytelling itself.

Protected is an important step in Aboriginal and cross-cultural filmmaking in Australia. It premiered on Palm Island on 11 November 1975, before being selected as a finalist for the Greater Union Awards at the 1976 Sydney Film Festival. Most of its screenings were restricted to the film co-ops (where it was programmed regularly), community showings and other non-commercial outlets. It went on be shown alongside We Stop Here at the 1977 Oberhausen Film Festival, was celebrated by documentary filmmakers like Jean Rouch, and opened the 1978 Anthropology conference at the Australian National University in Canberra. It was a controversial choice for the latter as its mixed mode of truly collaborative, cross-cultural filmmaking and re-enactment ran counter to common ethnographic practices of the time (though it was in line with a core tradition that runs from Robert Flaherty to Rouch). It also reflects the constantly shifting processes of adaptation and collaboration embraced by Cavadini and Strachan: “We were evolving, rethinking film-making all the time.”³ Somewhat overshadowed by the two celebrated and much-discussed films that bookend Cavadini and Strachan’s extraordinary “series” – Ningla A-Na and Two Laws⁴ – it is time that Protected takes its place as a key film of 1975 and the wider “revival”.

Protected/Protected: The Truth About Palm Island (1975 Australia 55 mins)

Prod: Carolyn Strachan Dir: Alessandro Cavadini Phot: Fabio Cavadini Ed: Ronda MacGregor Narr: Don Brady, Robert Hughes

Endnotes