What a time for the Yolŋu – surely the most traditional people in NE Arnhemland. They’ve just won a huge compensation case in the High Court for land handed to miners, they’ve had major tribute exhibitions in the US and imminently in Sydney, and now some of the essential roots of their existing culture are to be seen on film as one of their troubled heroes, David Gulpilil is buried.
Buried? A far too short a word for the necessary ceremony for this great actor and dancer who died in 2021. Sorry Business has never been such a business before – starting in South Australia where Gulpilil was exiled, involving planes to get him to the North with ceremonial stops or fly-overs wherever Yolŋu live, months in a funeral parlour in Gove to wait for the Wet to become Dry, then any amount of manoeuvring to plan for his transportation from Ramingining – his community – to remote Gupulul, his outstation, for he’d declared the need to return to the sacred waterhole of Marawuyu, from which his spirit had originally emerged.
It must have seemed a crazy idea for film-makers Maggie Miles and Anmatyerr woman, Trisha Morton-Thomas (co-directing) to have taken on the task of recording this saga. It must have felt even madder as time went on, the weather finding them sodden in the Arafura Swamp (so memorable in the film Ten Canoes), while the wild mourning passions of Yolŋu men and women wherever they went threw any predictability out of the window. The Sydney Film Festival program, where Journey Home : David Gulpilil received its world premier, hails their “skilful chronicling”. That suggests a control! What there was is brilliant improvised camera-work (by two cinematographers), a masterful editor, and a surprisingly calm tale explained by both cultural adviser Baker Boy (a classificatory grandson) and a mysterious adopted brother for David called Wayne.
It was Wayne who made the teeny passing reference to the cultural transgressions that lead to Gulpilil being absent completely from the Yolŋu Ten Canoes story that he’d brought to director Rolf de Heer, the man who surely gave him his greatest role in The Tracker. I believe it was wrong skin relationships that lead the man who came to our notice as a boy in Walkabout and ended up starring in two autobiographies – one fictional (Charlie’s Country), and one documentary (My Name is Gulpilil) – to be exiled from Arnhemland to make films, star on stage, win the Red Ochre Award from his peers, party with John Lennon, live in the long grass in Darwin and go to prison for domestic violence. But way back, significantly, his mother is quoted in the film as fearing, “I’ve lost him for ever”.
Should more of this conflicted background – apart from a few film clips and posters from Gulpilil’s films in his house – have appeared in Journey Home? I suspect it would have got in the way of the sheer love that there was for him at home – so many tribute dances related to his totems, the water goanna and the sugar bag honey bee; women hurling themselves to the ground in tears, men singing passionately and clap-sticking furiously; so many people coming to the party to raise funds, supply barges and helicopters, clean up and paint derelict houses, and fight their ways through unknown bush to get to Gupulul; and so much deep mythology as the Djang’kawu Sisters foundation story is replayed before his burial. We even get insight into the initiation of David’s grandson that’s brought forward to add a new life to the community as he departs.
So, if nothing else, Journey Home is a wonderfully chaotic way of experiencing the intensity of the living Yolŋu rituals that may see a spirit safely into eternity, but are just as important in ensuring that society functions properly for people on this side of the grave.
Journey Home : David Gulpilil was produced for NITV with local distribution by Madman Entertainment. Principal production funding came from Screen Australia in association with Screen Territory and VicScreen. Journey Home : David Gulpilil will air on NITV in 2026.
It can also be seen on Sunday during the SFF at 2pm in the State Library.
