Deadheart

Twice. Recently Australia Day spewed forth a million vague platitudes from the politicians about Reconciliation and the celebration of Multiculturalism, but the polies' panacea, grand words and bulk money, don't help much.

Mucking in with your mates and neighbours does, but most Aussie's don't even take the trouble to know the people living in their street, let alone the black family living in the house around the corner!

And most Aussies are certainly not likely to deal intimately with Aborigines living 600 kms west of Alice Springs where Deadheart's action happens, so the stage becomes set for the dynamic, forceful, interesting film that Deadheart has become after it's initial life as a stage play.

But Deadheart is much more than some dry, boring, anthropological study into Western Australian Aborigines. If you enjoy an exciting thriller that excells in both enthralling characters and in tight, terse, frantic script and direction then here it is.

If you add the bonuses of a beautifully filmed Australian outback and a lively appreciation of the spiritual nature of the Aborigines and of their appreciation of our country, then you've got a very entertaining film indeed and one that the Pauline (I don't like it!) Hansons on the planet would be well advised to see.

Pauline Hanson and her fans would actually find plenty of fuel to fire their prejudices in Deadheart, which is a further recommendation for all of us to see it, because with one possible exception, there's no attempt to declare any creed, skin colour or set of morality values as being the one correct way for the protagonists to behave.

Deadheart isn't about solving dilemmas. It's about conflict and about confusion. It's about being human. It's about challenging set moral systems, both ours and the Aboriginals'. It's about the damage rapid change can cause. It's about a people who have lost their way, and in this country those people are definitely not just Aborigines.

In Deadheart the whites are just as confused and just as much under stress.

Bryan Brown, in his most affecting performance to date, plays Russ Lorkin, the local copper, who tries to maintain some semblance of order in a tiny settlement called Wala Wala.

This white man is at first glance a screaming bigot and autocrat but like most characters in Deadheart he's much more complex. He allows the Aboriginals to enact "payback" after a death for example, the victim being a close friend of his.

Does he do this just to keep the peace, or does he respect the validity of tribal law? A lot of both I suspect. Lorkin also threatens to drag a white anthropologist off to jail during a murder investigation, but by that stage of the film, Lorkin, and the film, and this reviewer, was so frantic with the tension of the events that it must be suspected that madness has overcome the policeman's judgement.

But perhaps this policeman is that most fortunate of madmen; a passionate man who really believes in the value of law and order.

But whose law and whose order? The Aboriginals are described at one stage in Deadheart as being "hunters and gatherers. All they need to do is gather a few white men and they can then get what they want."

But what do the Aborigines want? They obviously aren't too happy with suicides in the lock up, or endemic petrol sniffing, but seem unable to find a way to deal with these disasters.

In Deadheart the whites have no solutions, the blacks have no solutions and everyone suffers, while we the audience are enthralled. The landscape, the climate and the black culture seem to overwhelm the whole lot of them, but still that same environment evokes moments of wonder from nearly all those involved.

Then that same culture brutalises them; bludgeons them about The contradictions and confusion of purpose in Deadheart are supreme.

The Aboriginals in Deadheart certainly aren't all saints either. Within their ranks there develops a classic confrontation between the old values and the new; even if the new morality seems to offer little more compared to the old other than the denial of free access to grog and a foreign religion and its associated welfare.

The black pastor is played enigmatically and tellingly by Ernie Dingo, who like the policeman is torn between two worlds.

But what of the old morality; the pre-invasion Aboriginal world? Deadheart, although it is infected with victims, supposes a triumphant image that most white Australians dismiss.

It suggests that there are still Aboriginals who live in the desert and follow the old ways, people with all of the pride and self identity that a culture nurtured for tens of thousands of years can develop.

And then Deadheart allows us to see a broken, terrified Aboriginal, in the harsh threatening hands of the white bureaucracy, become a triumphant master of the landscape; a man who in his element, the Australian outback, is almost invincible; a man who is so in tune with the earth, water and air that he has a supernatural link with his Gods, his Dreaming.

Now that's an image of which all Australians should be proud.