The Furnace: fired on the bones of the outback
Cameleers had a significant presence in colonial Australia, and period thriller The Furnace explores their important role in this journey across country.
For Roderick MacKay, a single photograph changed everything. His debut feature The Furnace, which was selected for this year’s Venice Film Festival, had begun as a gold rush drama set in his home state of Western Australia in the 1890s – an extraordinary, chaotic time, he says, when Kalgoorlie’s Golden Mile was “the richest square mile on Earth”.
In the early stages of his research he came across an image that he didn’t immediately recognise, a photograph of an Afghan camel driver. “He was in traditional garb, flanked by his camel train, but standing in the otherwise very familiar Australian Outback. And I had no idea what I was looking at,” MacKay says.
It didn’t take him long to discover that cameleers, whom he knew little about, had had a significant presence in colonial Australia. They came in their thousands from places such as Afghanistan, India and Persia; they were often indentured workers, taking supplies to the farthest reaches of the Outback under duress and in harsh conditions. “Not only were they here, and in those numbers, but they had a really important role to play,” MacKay says. “So at that point, it felt like there had been a huge historic omission.”
His goldfield screenplay began to take on new characters and perspectives, not to mention languages. The film’s central figure, Hanif (played by Egyptian actor Ahmed Malek) is an Afghan cameleer who came to Australia to work.
He and a close friend Jundah (Kaushik Das), a Sikh cameleer, have formed a bond with local Indigenous communities – an early scene shows him hunting kangaroo with Woorak (Baykali Ganambarr), a young Badimaya man.
Opening scenes of camaraderie and optimism are soon cut short by violence, and Hanif’s world is transformed by the actions of a murderous settler. Desperate to leave Australia and return home, Hanif is prepared to throw in his lot with Mal (David Wenham), a mysterious stranger who has been wounded in circumstances that are not entirely clear.
Mal, it turns out, has stolen gold bars in his possession, stamped with the Crown’s mark; he has a plan to melt down the bar, but in his injured state he needs help to carry it out. Reluctantly, Hanif agrees to assist him, and their dangerous, unpredictable journey begins. A band of troopers, led by the brutal Sergeant Shaw (Jay Ryan) are soon on their trail. It’s a story that contains some familiar cinematic ingredients, echoes of Westerns and tales of the lure of gold that have animated everything from The Gold Rush to The Treasure of The Sierra Madre to Da 5 Bloods. But it’s a specifically Australian narrative too, underpinned by the bleakest elements of recent history.
Wenham had been involved with the project at an early stage, after he and MacKay met at Western Australian film festival CinefestOz. “David took a shine to the story we were trying to tell and the sort of issues it was commenting on,” MacKay says. “He then read a first draft of the script, which was a pretty embryonic version of the story, and he came on board on the basis of that.”
The figure of Mal was written especially for Wenham, he says. “I think he’s an incredible character actor and wanted to give him a role that audiences hadn’t seen him play before.” Mal is an unnerving, secretive figure with a dark past; MacKay thinks of him as being “at an arm’s length from the audience”. Hanif is the character MacKay wants viewers to identify with and feel close to. But he didn’t have an actor in mind for the role, and it wasn’t until a few months before production began that he found Ahmad Malek.
Making a random internet search, he stumbled across a scene from an Egyptian soapie that Malek appeared in. MacKay couldn’t understand any of the dialogue.
“But I was glued to the emotional content of his performance. He just struck me as a very emotionally generous, and accessible actor. So I emailed this clip to my producers and they saw the same things in this clip and thought he seemed incredible,” he says.
When Malek was contacted, MacKay says: “He read the script and he loved it from the get-go. He saw a tremendous amount of parallels between himself and Hanif. He was keen from the first Skype meeting we had.”
Malek, 25, was born in Cairo and has been a performer since the age of eight. He has made blockbusters, TV shows and independent films, as well as festival titles, such as Mohamed Diab’s Clash, selected for Un Certain Regard at Cannes. In Toronto in 2018, he received one of the festival’s rising star awards.
“We were very lucky to find him,” MacKay says, “because it’s a tough role to fill, and we needed someone who brings some degree of profile to the project.” Malek gives Hanif a memorable mixture of resolve and vulnerability, the sense of a character finding clarity in the midst of desperation.
As well as Wenham, there were other actors MacKay had had in mind for some time. He had seen Ganambarr and Wakarra Gondarra when they were members of the Elcho Island dance company Djuki Mala, before Ganambarr made his acting debut in Jennifer Kent’s The Nightingale, and won a best new talent award at Venice Film Festival in 2018.
“I’d never really entertained anyone else for those roles. And then The Nightingale came out and basically blew up and I thought, geez, I hope I can get (Baykali),” MacKay says. They were both, it turns out, happy to be involved, and Ganambarr was pleased to be part of another movie that was invited to Venice.
MacKay also planned to involve Pitjantjatjara-Nyoongar actor Trevor Jamieson (Cleverman, Storm Boy), whom he’d known for many years. “We have a really strong relationship with Trevor. He’s just extended family. And we’d been talking about the film with him for a very long time.”
MacKay’s wife, artist Tessa MacKay, painted Jamieson’s portrait and entered it in the Archibald Prize in 2017; a year later, her portrait of Wenham won the Packing Room Prize at the Archibald.
The Furnace is a period thriller, but it is also a 19th century road movie, a journey across country. MacKay, however, was never going to have a big budget and the capacity to move his production around from one place to another; he had to find a base with different-looking locations within easy reach.
He was also keen to film in a genuine goldfield setting. Mount Magnet, north-east of Perth, is one of the region’s oldest gold-mining settlements, and it also gave him exactly the variety he needed. Apart from one location – a gorge, where they made a special detour that stretched the budget – everything was within range.
Mount Magnet is on the traditional land of the Yamitji Badimaya people. “So if we’re going to represent an Aboriginal language group at this time in history on this country,” MacKay says, “it’s got to be the Badimaya people. Any scenes between Aboriginal characters and the cameleers have to be spoken in Badimaya.”
The language is regarded as endangered, but the community has been working for many years to preserve it. Consultation was vital, MacKay says, when it came to language and cultural elements in the film. There are five main languages used in the film: English, Pashto, Punjabi, Cantonese and Badimaya.
Several characters speak more than one. As well as English, Malek also had to deliver lines in Pashto and Dari (a language spoken in Afghanistan), as well as Badimaya. “We had fantastic language coaches,” MacKay says.
“And the actors took the responsibility of speaking in these languages so seriously, they did such incredible work to get that right.” As a filmmaker, he says, he found it easier than he had anticipated to direct scenes in languages other than English. Preparation was key. “Obviously, we would talk extensively prior to filming about character and theme, and everyone was on the same page. So luckily, amid the flies and dust and 44-50 degree heat, it was relatively straightforward.”
Wajarri Badimaya man Godfrey Simpson was one of the main language consultants. “Godfrey would be on set with the actors rehearsing Budimia delivery and when we would do a take. I would look to Godfrey and make sure he was happy. He would say yes or no and we would only move on once Godfrey was happy. He built a real rapport with the cast, because he spent so much time with them on set, and he was really, really proud of them.”
The Furnace runs as part of Perth Festival’s Lotterywest Films, UWA Somerville until December 6, with wide cinema release from December 10.