David Gulpilil dancing again - Thanks Rolf De Heer

I went to see Charlie's country this week and found myself completely immersed in the films mood for days. As usual Rolf de Heer has done a brilliant job with David to produce a film that depicts some fundamental issues for us white Australians. Sitting in the comfortable cinema on a cold rainy Melbourne night, one felt very 'white'. This is the brilliance of the film. It pushes the vast gap in experience and understanding between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people, in the faces of we who completely take for granted our place in this country.

David in Charlie' Country

It was also interesting for me on a whole other level, as I just recently returned something to David Gulpilil that I had kept for nearly 30 years. When I was working on the Koorie mural he came down to Melbourne with his dance troupe and they were staying at the Bert Williams Hostel in Northcote. We were trying to raise attention about the project, so they agreed to come and dance for the media in front of the mural.

David, Don, Peter, Bobby and George 1983

This was a great thing and it meant that we then followed them around during their tour of Melbourne. They hung out with us at the flat that Bear and Les had opposite the mural. We had a party that lasted a week. I remember David playing  the Chuck Berry song 'Johnny B goode' in language, on the balcony of the flat at 5pm one night as all the council workers came out of the big white building across the road and got into their cars that were parked in front of the mural and drove home. I wondered what they thought. There were dancing lessons for the some of the mural team and so many lessons for me that my head burst.

Bear and Bobby dancing in the flat 

David dancing in the flat

David sang a song for the mural which was recorded somewhere.
At some point he and I became involved which was odd for me as he was someone who I had idolised since childhood when I first saw the film Walkabout. He fulfilled all of the classic romantic, noble savage stereotypes that I had grown up with. He asked me to marry him which seemed bizarre to me as our ideas of that were so different. We only had a brief relationship as I understood that the gap in our lives was too great for me to contemplate bridging. We saw one another when he came back to Melbourne on a few more occasions, one of which I took him out to visit my vaguely hippy roots at St Andrews where the gap was ever so slightly lessened.

David and my dog Indigo at St Andrews

David Evans and David Gulpilil at Kangaroo Ground Tower 1984

He delighted my friends and my brother who was as entranced by him as me.
I can't remember when he gave me his dancing belts. I expected him to come and collect them at a later time but I guess he got involved somewhere else and lost contact with me.
They were something that I just kept wrapped up in some red satin, knowing they were special as one of them was made from human hair. They moved with me from house to house and each time they emerged from my stuff I wondered what to do with them. A good friend recently told me to deal with them as they had power.

When I recently read a review about Charlie's Country the reviewer wrote that he lived around the corner from David so I wrote to him to ask for a contact. He gave me an address to send the parcel after curiously asking what it was (suggesting it might be a child). I retuned it to David with photos of him dancing in front of the mural looking 30 years younger as did I. I also sent him cards about my project confronting colonisation from my own families point of view.

It was so strange seeing the story in Charlie's Country after this as in some odd way it seemed to echo my journey of the return of the belt.

Life is so mysterious. Perhaps it is just mysterious to my western mind which is patterned to try to understand. I know that the more I use my artists brain which is intuitively based, the closer I feel to the world of David Gulpilil and his people.
Thanks to Rolf De Heer who bridges that gap so well.