Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows excerpts from interviews with three siblings of Australian filmmaker Lawrence Johnston discussing their parents’ wedding. A range of societal reactions to interracial or 'mixed’ marriage are presented. The interviews take place in domestic settings, including a lounge room where there are family photographs in the background for the sisters’ interviews, and a veranda for an interview with Johnston’s brother. Colour photographs of the sisters as young women are also shown.

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.

• An example of opposition to so-called 'mixed’ marriages is described in the clip. In the 1940s when Colin and Gloria Johnston married, the so-called White Australia Policy, a result of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, was still in place. Indigenous Australians were not granted full rights as citizens until 1963 and in the 1940s were subject to restrictive regulations. In such an environment, racist attitudes gained support and the refusal of Gloria’s father to attend the wedding could have been based on the racial stereotyping of this period.

• More recent examples of racist responses to Aboriginality from the 1990s are described by the filmmaker’s sisters, Anne and Trish, illustrating that racism still exists in contemporary Australia.

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

• 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, Johnston graduated from the Swinburne Film and Television School in Melbourne. His 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 8 minutes into the documentary.

Trish, Anne and Garry are being interviewed separately.
Trish Mum’s dad didn’t go to the wedding.
Anne He did not believe in a white woman marrying a dark man.
Trish I think it’s very sad, very sad for her because I think every woman’s, well, most women who get married would love to have their father give them away at their wedding.
Anne I don’t think, um, colour should even come into it, but back in those days, colour played a very important part.
Garry Racism comes in stupidity. People are just stupid. As I said about inter-relations like Star Trek — we’ve got to live together because nothing can stop us inter-relating.
Anne I was at work years ago and a new man had started at work, um, and he was a lovely man, we’d have chats when I’d just go up to the printer or whatever, and one day he said to me, um, ‘You know, Annie, what nationality are you?’ and I said to him, ‘Well, what do you think I am?’ and he says, ‘Oh, Greek, Italian, Spanish…’ and he went through all of the cultures and then I said to him, ‘Well, I’m Aboriginal. I am part Aboriginal.’ And he turned around and he said to me, he stopped for a moment and he stared at me and he said to me ‘you’re too pretty to be an Aboriginal.’
Trish I remember coming home from school one afternoon and, um, you know, having my normal bath. We didn’t have a shower, we just had a bath, and filling the bath up and going in and getting a washer and soap and spending quite a long time in the bath, just scrubbing my skin, to try and get myself as white as possible, and I remember going into my room and I had a dresser where I’d just — in front of me, looking at my skin to see if I looked any whiter, and to me, I had looked whiter, you know. I’d felt a bit more comfortable that I’d scrubbed hard enough to get whiter and I felt a little bit better that that’s the effect it had on me.