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Clip description
When two Aboriginal men take her by the arms to lead her away from a contaminated waterhole, Clancy is initially scared. However when they offer her fresh water and something to eat at their camp she realises their good intent and relaxes. Finding a means of communication without a shared language, a tribe member draws a snake to show what she is eating. Politely putting the food aside, Clancy then draws a map to express the land features of the home to which she needs to return.
Curator’s notes
This episode was written in 1967, the same year as Australian voters recorded the largest ever ‘Yes’ vote (over ninety per cent) in a referendum to grant Aboriginal Australians the right to vote and the same citizen rights as other Australians.
Film historian Graham Shirley commented on producer Lee Robinson’s ‘absolute respect’ for Aboriginal people. Robinson, who had been a Second World War correspondent, started work as a director at the Commonwealth Film Unit (later to become Film Australia) in 1946 when 22 years of age. In an interview with Albert Moran, Robinson described his first assignment researching and writing a script on the Aboriginal painter, Albert Namatjira. ‘I went off to the Northern Territory with Axel Poignant in April or May and we spent quite a lot of time up there. We went out and lived with Namatjira as he toured the country painting … I was fascinated by the Northern Territory. And from then on I worked almost exclusively there.’
He goes on to describe the high adventure of being ‘two-man teams that were able to go in the bark canoes with the Aboriginal people catching crocodiles with their bare feet’. Apart from the subject matter, Robinson also believed that ‘the outback presented us with something that Hollywood couldn’t challenge’.
After the best part of four years spent making films in the Northern Territory, Robinson formed a production company, Southern International, with actors Chips Rafferty and John McCallum, going on to direct documentaries and feature films including They’re a Weird Mob (1966), Barrier Reef (1971–72), Boney (1972–73) and Attack Force Z (1982). Lee Robinson died in 2003 at the age of 80.
