Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows scenes that illustrate Australian filmmaker Lawrence Johnston’s early life. His brothers and sisters are also featured discussing the meaning of love and intimacy in their lives. Photographs accompanying the narration by the filmmaker show a 1965 black-and-white class photograph, the filmmaker in 1980, and a shot taken at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. The scenes that follow show film of family members grouping themselves for family photographs. Four family members speak to camera and then photographs of the filmmaker’s parents on their wedding day and film of them in the present illustrate the narration.

Educational value points

• The clip is from the film Dream of Love (2005), one of four documentaries in the series Loved Up. According to Sally Riley, Manager of the Indigenous Branch of the Australian Film Commission, the series was the result of leading Indigenous filmmakers being invited to respond to the question 'Do Blackfellas love the same way as everyone else?’ All four films engage with themes of Indigenous love, family and identity. In his film Lawrence Johnston explores the dynamics of his parents’ 'mixed marriage’ and the effect of this relationship on the romantic aspirations of his brothers and sisters.

• The life of Australian filmmaker Lawrence Johnston is featured in the clip. Lawrence grew up as one of six children of an Indigenous father, Colin, and non-Indigenous mother, Gloria. They were raised in Gloria’s home town of Wynnum, a suburb of Brisbane.

• Love and relationships are explored in interviews and in images focusing on members of filmmaker Lawrence Johnston’s family. Johnston wanted the film to explore his parents’ relationship and its effect on his brothers and sisters. Johnston confesses that asking his family personal and intimate questions about their experience of love and relationships was one of the hardest things he has ever had to do. The fact that the family members are shown grouping themselves for their first-ever family photograph is an indicator of the family’s history.

• Linking marriage with romantic love and ideas of romance in general is essentially a Western preoccupation deriving from the courtly love tradition of medieval Europe. The globalisation of Western culture has spread such ideas of romance more widely.

• The clip refers to the marriage of an Indigenous man to a non-Indigenous woman in the 1940s. Colin Johnston was born in Cunnamulla in Queensland, the son of an Indigenous mother and a non-Indigenous father. Gloria Johnston was of Anglo-Irish parentage and grew up in a suburb of Brisbane. The couple met in the 1940s and, at the time of the film, had been married for 59 years.

• The way in which the filmmaker can exert control over his subject, even when interviews are incorporated, is well illustrated in the clip. The questions that provoked the responses of the interviewees are not heard. The filmmaker’s voice-over introduces the segments and thus, he can shape the subject matter as he chooses.

• The work of award-winning writer, director and producer Lawrence Johnston is shown in this clip. After working as a film repairer at Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corporation, he graduated from the Swinburne Film and Television School in Melbourne. Johnston’s first film, Night Out, was an official selection at the 1990 Cannes Film Festival. His later films Eternity (1994) and Life (1996) won prestigious awards. Johnston’s work has been shown in a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2000 he was engaged by the Australian Film Commission as a project manager in film development.

This clip starts approximately 1 minute into the documentary.

We see the ocean, shimmering in the sunlight.
Lawrence Johnston At the end of the street where I grew up was the sea and further on, an island. Off the coast of Brisbane were the islands of Green, Santalina and Stradbroke. They seemed far away but it was somewhere I dreamed of disappearing too, of running away, or becoming something else. I never dreamed I would one day make films. I never dreamed I would one day tell this story.
Lawrence and his family are outside, posing for the camera.
Here I am coming back to be part of this picture. Throughout the many years of our lives, we have been together and apart in various ways. But my family have never been in the same place at the same time to ever have a family photograph taken together. This is the closest we’ve come and we all know what we know of each other’s lives through making contact and sharing our stories. This is a story about marriage, it’s a story about commitment and it’s a story about love.

Anne, Garry, Barry and Trish are being interviewed separately.
Anne Romantic love means to me to be able to kiss and hug somebody and to passionately love them um, and to spend every moment with them, to be able to sit on a couch and to be able to put your arm around somebody and mean it.
Garry It was probably a dream I think. They wanted to talk about the first one, that would’ve been romantic love. Yeah, but that’s — I haven’t seen her since. It stays in my memory. Good to have it there.
Barry I love to be loved, you know. I love cuddles and kisses and hugs and all that sort of stuff.
Trish Flowers and chocolates and ah, candle-lit dinners and all that kind of thing.
Barry Well, I’ve got that now, you know, we cuddle and kiss all the time. We hug one another in front of people. Walk around the streets holding hands, you know, and all that. People look at you and they go, you know, ‘whatever’. I say ‘ah, I don’t give a rat’s ass’, you know.
Garry In this world today, romantic love is only for the young dreamers because life is a bit harder than that, you know.

We see an old photograph of Lawrence’s parents.
Lawrence This is mum and dad on their wedding day. Mum and dad have been married for 59 years. In this day and age I wondered why they’d been together so long. There were so many things we didn’t know about them growing up and so many things we wanted to ask, so I’ve asked them now. I’ve asked them to tell me their story.