Clip description
Wandjuk Marika, the great artist and poet of the people of Arnhem Land in northern Australia, speaks to the historian Geoffrey Blainey of being one with the land and of his passion for land rights to assist his people to preserve their nomadic culture.
Curator’s notes
The director carefully presents a key Indigenous figure to discuss the relationship between the inhabitants and their land. Wandjuk Marika was a great man and a great leader of his people. He’s now been dead for many years but his words, and the beautifully photographed footage of him and his family in the countryside, add a grandeur to the documentary. As do the extraordinary photos of the anthropologist, Donald Thomson, that capture the canoe hunt of the men of the Arafura Swamp region of the Northern Territory in 1937. These photos were recently shown to the director Rolf de Heer by David Gulpilil to persuade him of the need for a feature film about this pre-European era. The result was the remarkable Ten Canoes (2006).