So often people go into Aboriginal communities to talk, not to listen. Most fly in, fly out, usually within a couple of hours. But when representatives from South Australian unions along with John Hartley as cultural intermediary and film-maker David Salomon sat down with senior people at Pukatja in the APY Lands in 2009, they were there to listen. That's unusual. You hear people referred to as "pina pati", that means, blocked ears, implying that they're either deaf or won't listen.  Read More...

Tags: Byron Bay Film Festival

I love to listen to ABC radio documentaries while driving, especially NPR summer series, and yesterday I was not disappointed on hearing part of Grammar, Identity, and the Dark Side of the Subjunctive. It got me reflecting on how Murray, John and I went about making Two brothers Walking.

We made the documentary with very little. We had sponsorship for travel and accommodation and some funding for post production and launch. I approached various funding bodies early on but since we were working along cultural lines I was confident though not certain that we would complete a film for a general audience. We intended to film significant cultural material so final approval would be up to the people responsible for that Tjukurpa. I knew the my Anangu friends looked at the world wasn’t the same as my english speaking western way, and I suspected there were things I didn’t know that weren’t even on my radar.
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I was raw with grief from the sudden death of my mother when I first visited a traditional desert community. I lived in Newcastle and worked as a school teacher at the time and had the opportunity to spend a week in desert country during the school holidays. The Sydney Olympics were on, and I wasn’t the least bit interested.

I got a flight on the four seater mail plane and touched down around mid day. As I walked the half kilometre to the community I came across kids playing on the road, riding bikes, eating bush tomatoes that grew prolifically after an unusually wet season, then moving on with their games. Some girls were playing a marriage partner game based on the elaborate kinship system that preferred certain combinations of skin names. I wasn’t to understand the significance of this until much later. No one spoke more than a word or two of English. I knew nothing of Aboriginal languages. Read More...

Harmony Day 2013 from David Salomon on Vimeo.