Indigenous Storytellers Broaden Their Reach

The Message Sticks festival is returning to its roots, including music, dance and visual arts alongside its popular film program, writes Emily Dunn.

When the first Message Sticks festival launched in 2000, organisers of the fringe event claimed a counter-revolution to the ”tyranny of dot painting”.

”It seems that if you have a suntan and can drop a dot onto anything, you must be an Aboriginal artist. Just ask the white (and black) entrepreneurs who’ve made a bloody big quid exploiting just that,” digital media artist Peter McKenzie raged in the foreword to his exhibition at Annandale’s Boomalli Aboriginal Arts Gallery, which was part of the festival in 2001.

Launched by the Opera House, the early Message Sticks events encompassed a range of contemporary art forms including dance, music, theatre and film.

Over the next 12 years the festival attracted the attention of mainstream audiences. In 2006 it was condensed from three weeks to three days and renamed the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival with a new focus on the screen.

The filmmaker Rachel Perkins has curated the film component since the festival’s inception, and says there is now an unprecedented interest in contemporary indigenous stories.

”Message Sticks began as a multi-arts festival but the film festival has become the constant thing. Ten years ago we found it difficult to get an audience for an indigenous film, now we have packed houses and some of the most successful Australian films at the box office in recent years have been indigenous,” says Perkins.

Perkins’s second film, One Night the Moon, about an Aboriginal tracker in the 1930s, premiered as part of the festival in 2001. The festival has also hosted the premiere screenings of Ivan Sen’s AFI-winning Beneath Clouds and Warwick Thornton’s Samson & Delilah, which won at Cannes, along with documentaries such as Footprints in the Sand, the story of a couple from a remote tribe in Western Australia who eloped and lived in the Gibson Desert for 40 years.

This year the festival is expanding again to include non-film events.

For younger audiences, the Opera House’s Babies Proms will host its first indigenous music and dance productions. Each evening after the free film screenings, singer and actress Ursula Yovich will perform her musical cabaret, Magpie Blues. The show is Yovich’s story about growing up in Darwin, the daughter of an Aboriginal mother from Arnhem Land and a father born in Serbia, and her struggle to hold on to her mother’s Burarra language.

”My mother left when I was eight, so it is about trying to keep that language alive,” Yovich says. ”It is an ongoing journey. I recently got hold of a Burarra dictionary but it is not the kind of language you can take classes for.”

The show, which she first performed in 2009, includes a mix of cover songs of the music of her childhood, including Tina Turner and Cold Chisel, a version of the Boney M song Brown Girl in the Ring sung in Burarra and a version of Somewhere Over the Rainbow, with a verse sung in Burarra and another in Serbian.

While music, dance and visual arts are part of traditional Aboriginal culture, for Yovich stage and screen are ways of telling the story of contemporary Aboriginal Australia.

”Whatever the art form, the stories will always be about us,” she says.

Film makes up the bulk of the festival program, which includes films by indigenous filmmakers from Canada and New Mexico and Shifting Shelter 4, the latest in Sen’s documentary series following a group of Aboriginal teenagers, now adults, from 1995 to the present.

The opening-night film is Beck Cole’s debut feature, Here I Am, the story of a woman released from prison and attempting to reconnect with her mother and daughter. The film comes at a time, Perkins says, when interest in indigenous films is at an all-time high.

”When these stories are told from an indigenous point of view it is something no one else can do,” Perkins says.

The head of public programs at the Opera House, Ann Mossop, says the festival films are a reflection of the talent of today’s indigenous filmmakers.

”Other venues such as Belvoir [theatre] are also committed to telling indigenous stories,” she says. ”What we are trying to do is give these films a chance at a wider audience.”

While the Opera House attracts mainstream audiences, Message Sticks is also engaging with remote communities. This year the film program will travel to 13 locations across the country, including Broome, Alice Springs, Cairns and Yirrkala in Arnhem Land.

”We screen to about 10,000 people on the tour,” Perkins says. ”In Arnhem Land last year the audience sat there talking for five hours, under the stars, after the screening of a Canadian film about the misrepresentation of Canadian people.”

Message Sticks runs at the Opera House from Thursday to Sunday. All film sessions are free, except for opening night, and screenings will be followed by Q&A sessions with the films’ subjects and directors.