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Clip description
Two villagers explain the confusion they experienced upon the first sighting of white people in the area. Filmmaker Robin Anderson speaks about arriving in the village and the way the villagers remembered them. Footage from Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1988) is shown as Bob Connolly speaks about Joe Leahy wanting to accumulate wealth for his children and to be able to purchase things.
Curator’s notes
The late Robin Anderson states in this clip that the making of documentaries is like writing the script for dramas. She and her partner Bob Connolly made Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1988) and their subsequent documentaries (such as Rats in the Ranks, 1996, and Facing the Music, 2001) in an observational style. Other types of documentary, such as historical or performative, often have full-length scripts like a dramatic film.
There are a couple of amazing clips here from Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (1988). Joe Leahy was a mixed-race man with one of the gold-mining Leahy brothers as his father. He straddled two cultures as he had spent time in Australia, was educated and owned coffee plantations, unlike the Ganiga people who were steeped in their own tradition and culture. The Ganiga people always shared – accumulating wealth was a totally foreign concept to them.
