Tracks

Although nowadays anyone with a passport and a computer is able to blog about their travels, travel writing and adventure memoirs were relatively new prior to the 1990s. Writers made new places and people accessible to audiences who would otherwise never have encountered them. It gave writers a chance to share their experiences, internal struggles and external journeys as well as supply social commentary on the events and places they witnessed.

Tracks is Robyn Davidson’s commentary on political and social issues of the day including Indigenous Australian issues of land rights and racism, gender inequalities and feminism. Despite the prevalence of racism and misogyny of the time, countering this was the 1970s rise of social and political activism.

In 1972, after a long struggle, the Alice Springs ‘town camps’ were legalised and Indigenous people had more freedom to camp around the urban centre. Still in existence today, these semi-formal suburbs of family groups are able to accommodate travelling relatives of the family groups. In 1976, a thousand people marched in Alice Springs in support of land rights. Davidson comments on the treatment of Indigenous Australians and the emergence of activism as she observed it during her time in Alice Springs.

Davidson is acutely aware of the subject of misogyny and gender discrimination as she travels further away from the cities. She comments on the lingering of a man’s eyes on her and of the crude attempt at a pick-up on the train journey to Alice Springs. Determined to cast-off female stereotypes, Davidson presents through her experience a modern, empowered woman and in doing so, contributes to the second wave of feminism which arose in 1960s and 1970s Australia. Davidson is conscious of the many ways in which her gender draws attention to her journey and this irony is discussed.

Public fascination with the journey was evident at the time with the National Geographic article and Davidson’s memoir both well received. Both nationally and internationally, the memoir was seen as an excellent insight into gender and race issues coupled with a tremendous personal achievement. It won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award in 1980.

Charlie’s Country

Indigenous Australians have experienced the process of colonisation since 1788. With the desires of the incoming culture outweighing the needs of the traditional occupants, the end result, in nearly all cases, has been the dispossession of land, the removal of rights, the diminishing of culture and exclusion. The breakdown between white and black Australia has led to struggles, battles and even genocide with the massacring of Indigenous people recorded as late as the 1950’s.

Remote areas such as Arnhem Land, the setting for this film, were largely spared from the initial conflict. However, as pastoralists expanded they invaded traditional Aboriginal lands with wars fought that saw heavy casualties on the Indigenous side. In 1931, the National Missionary Council of Australia and others proclaimed the whole of Arnhem Land an Aboriginal Reserve, thereby affording its people significant protections and avoiding their dispossession of lands. Consequently, more of Arnhem Land people’s traditional culture and languages remain than in most parts of Australia. Despite this, the ongoing pervasiveness of European culture continues to threaten traditional lifestyles.

In 2007, the Australian Government announced a ‘national emergency response to protect Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory’. This grew to include changes to welfare provision, law enforcement, land tenure and other measures. It also included the power for government to take possession of Aboriginal land and property and a ban on alcohol and pornography in Aboriginal communities.

Charlie’s Country, released in 2013, came at the end of the intervention. Signs of the increased controls and power can be seen throughout the film and de Heer and Gulpilil explore the repercussions of the intervention as well as wider colonisation issues. Charlie’s Country won the Audience Award in Adelaide and was nominated for AACTA awards for its screenplay, direction and overall production.

Glossary of terms from the Charlie’s Country press kit

Humpy: A small, occupant-built shelter, usually of corrugated iron, that can serve as an indefinite temporary home for one or more people.

Ganja: Marijuana.

Yolngu: The literal translation of Yolngu is simply ‘person’ or ‘people’, but it is used nowadays as a term to describe the group of Australian Indigenous or Aboriginal people living in or originating from north east Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory.

Balanda: A word meaning ‘white person(s)’, coming from the word ‘Hollande’. The Dutch were the first white people to come into contact with the Yolngu.

Arnhem Land: the north-eastern part of the Northern Territory of Australia, around 100,000 square kilometres, an area larger than that of Belgium and the Netherlands combined.

Ramingining: A town of about 800 Yolngu people in the northern part of central Arnhem Land. The town was created in the early 1970s when Yolngu people from different areas were brought to live together, some quite a long distance from their traditional lands. There are 15 or 16 clans represented in Ramingining and about eight different language groups.

Arafura Swamp: A large area of freshwater wetlands just south and east of Ramingining. The swamp extends to 130,000 hectares during the wet season and is home to an incredible variety of bird, plant and animal life, including possibly the largest biomass of crocodiles in the world.

The Intervention: On 21 June 2007, the then Australian Government announced a ‘national emergency response to protect Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory’ from sexual abuse and family violence. This became known as the ‘NT intervention’, or more commonly, ‘The Intervention’. In the weeks that followed, the Intervention grew significantly in scope, with changes to welfare provision, law enforcement, land tenure and other measures. Though supported by numbers of Aboriginal people, not a single prosecution for child abuse arose from the Intervention. It has since been replaced by the very similar ‘Stronger Futures Policy’.

Dry Community: In the past, some remote Aboriginal communities themselves chose to ban the sale and consumption of alcohol within them. Since the Intervention, many Aboriginal communities have had an enforced alcohol-free status.

Longrasser: an alternative culture of Aboriginal people who choose to live in the city and surrounds (particularly in Darwin) and outdoors, as opposed to in a physical dwelling such as a house, in a perceived parallel style to how they used to live before white people came.