Darkside star Deborah Mailman moves amid kindred spirits

IN her latest film, Deborah Mailman encounters ghosts - but that's nothing new for the actress who lives with her ancestors' presence.

Deborah Mailman

DEBORAH Mailman is a hugger. And hers are not rote affectations; they are genuine, mama-bear cuddles.

She bestows them upon friends, colleagues and the occasional stranger. Not indiscriminately, but liberally. Coupled with the powerful currency of her smile, each hug seems a curative, soul-soothing gift. If only she could scoop up all Australians in her arms, surely there'd be no racial divide, no misunderstanding; just black and white hearts pressing together in a harmonious clinch. Hugging it out.

"She's got a real, caring mother factor to her," says director Warwick Thornton, a vanguard figure in the recent push by indigenous filmmakers into the mainstream, who has worked with Mailman since her acting career took flight in the late 1990s. "You feel she will console you."

Today, however, it's the award-winning actress who needs consoling. She's crying. Sitting on a broad wooden veranda in northern Sydney, under a canopy of spreading eucalypts, she's talking about her latest role, in Thornton's The Darkside, a collection of tales about Aboriginal encounters with people who have died. Mailman, 41, is deeply spiritual; she believes strongly in the existence of spirits, good and bad, and lives with the whispers of her ancestors always a breath away. "When you consider how Aboriginal culture has been explained through Creation stories and through spirits, there is that knowledge within a lot of Aboriginal people of how significant the Dreamtime is," she says. "It's something unexplainable but very tangible. Certainly when you go out bush you can feel it. So it's not so crazy to say we have spirits walking by our sides all the time."

She's describing how the spirit of her late father Wally, a champion rodeo rider from Queensland, visits her at significant moments in her life, when tears catch her unaware. She pauses, struggles, as a chorus of lorikeets and screeching koels strikes up nearby. She rubs at her eyes with the heel of her hand. "It's OK, no, I just don't often think about it," she says softly. "It's just a part of ... I've never articulated it like this." Taking a swallow from a long glass of ginger beer, Mailman settles into her memories and goes quiet. Wisps of cinereal smoke from the Blue Mountains bushfires needle angry red skies in the distance, and a hot wind kicks up.

"Dad passed away in 2000 but he visits me all the time," she says eventually. "He comes to me in different ways. So I have that connection with him and that comforts me, to know that in time I can come back and still have that with my kids. It's not unfamiliar to me, that connection with the afterlife. I know it's real; I experience it all the time. I remember the first time he came to me, I had no idea. I think it was sort of frightening, but it wasn't, because I knew instantly it was Dad." Another calming sip. "I had to go, at first, 'Is this happening? Is this happening?' There is that idea of seeming crazy when you're seeing spirits or you're seeing dead people, you know what I mean? There's a certain sort of stigma, a sort of kookiness when it comes to that."

This actress, who has become a familiar face on local screens big and small since her debut in the 1998 film Radiance, is anything but kooky. She is so solidly earthed to the wide brown land she sprang from that she might as well have roots. A country girl, she calls herself. Born and bred among the spinifex and brick-red dirt plains of Mount Isa, in northwest Queensland, she's happiest when barefoot and alone in the bush. "It's just when I can breathe," she says.

Today's trip up the coast from her home in Bulli, on the northern fringes of Wollongong, to "the big smoke" necessitated shoes, but the tan leather sandals she's wearing are so insubstantial she may as well be barefoot. Loose black pants and a baggy striped T-shirt leave room to move, and she's wearing not a scrap of makeup. She looks comfortable.

It was her matter-of-fact quality that led Thornton to match her with a particular story in The Darkside, his long-gestating film made up of real, first-hand accounts of indigenous ghost stories collected by the director and related by a variety of Australian actors in one-take monologues. Her tale, about a Ouija board found at a rubbish tip and the chaos it wreaks, is one of the creepiest, and it needed the right deadpan delivery to put across.

Thornton, who won Cannes' Camera d'Or in 2009 for Samson & Delilah, worked with Mailman on Radiance, and he was cinematographer on The Sapphires, the jewel-bright charmer that became Australia's most successful film of last year and brought a degree of international fame for Mailman and its other indigenous stars. "He's a bloody genius, old Warwick!" says Mailman, her smile returning to its default setting after the tears. "That's why I'll always put my hand up to work with him."

She took a bit of convincing for this latest film, however. "Deb obviously believes in recognition of ancestors," Thornton says. "And when you talk about an entity or a spirit, it could be a nasty one, it could wake up, and so Deb had a major concern."

In fact, Mailman was spooked. "I know how real it is and how dangerous it can be when you're inviting stuff in, so I was just going 'Shit, shit, shit'," she says. "Warwick was really respectful and understood why I needed to go through these thoughts in my head and almost resolve myself. Because I wanted to do it; I just didn't know how to get around what I was feeling."

Mailman's scene was to be filmed on the veranda of a borrowed farmhouse on the NSW south coast, not far from where she lives with her husband Matthew Coonan and their sons, Henry, 6, and three-year-old Oliver. Thornton and producer Kath Shelper phoned around and tracked down a local elder who agreed to conduct a traditional smoking ceremony, a kind of spiritual house-cleaning to "purify" the site. "A local fella came out and told us the story about country, burnt the eucalyptus leaves and asked the spirits to look after us, protect us," Mailman says. "After that, I was fine."

Wally Mailman's old cowboy hat hangs on a wall inside his daughter's weatherboard cottage in Bulli. She'll often sit on the back deck there with a cup of tea and stare into the middle distance, raising her eyes just above the roofline of the neighbouring houses so uninterrupted bushland fills the frame. Perhaps she'll think of her dad. Perhaps he'll visit.

"I like solitude," Mailman says now. "I'm very good at being disconnected. I do a lot of disappearing." She cackles delightedly, as if at a private joke. "People who know me go, 'Oh yeah, Mailman, she's gone into her cave again.' I'm like that, a bit of a hibernating bear. Like that crocodile that just sits there in the water and doesn't do much. I was always a bit of a dreamer as a kid so that hasn't changed."

Though her father comes from Bidjara country, Mailman identifies as a member of Mount Isa's Kalkadoon mob, because "that's where all my memories are". Her upbringing was like something out of a kids' adventure tale, centred as it was on the famous Mount Isa rodeo grounds, where her dad worked as caretaker after retiring from the rodeo-riding circuit. He'd met Mailman's Maori mother, Jane, while competing in New Zealand and, after working on various cattle stations around Australia, the couple settled in the mining town known to locals as The Isa.

Deborah, the youngest of four, recalls a magical childhood backyard: "The rodeo only happened once a year, but it was also home to the Mount Isa show, so there was a Ferris wheel and sideshow alley. And, in between shows, there was this beautifully kept park with metal dinosaurs we'd climb on, a big slippery dip and an old-school merry-go-round with the wooden horses. If there's one thing I could wish for right now it would be to have one of those horses from the merry-go-round - they were the most exciting thing to go on as a kid."

Mailman's youth has taken on a nostalgic glow but, at school, she struggled with chronic shyness and was teased about her weight. A 10-year-old Deborah would sit in the car with the mercury topping 40 degrees while her mother shopped at Kmart rather than face the crowds inside. Strange, then, that she was drawn to a life as an entertainer. "I took drama at school because I didn't want to do Business Principles," she laughs. But then she fell in love with "the joy and the freedom and the sense of belonging" that acting provided. "I remember doing the school play and I played this character that was sort of linking all the acts together and I got a lot of laughs," she says. "A lot of people were clapping and cheering and there was this part of me that went, 'Yeah, I can do this'."

Originally, she wanted to be a jillaroo, but her father pushed her to get a tertiary education and so, in 1991, she caught the bus to Brisbane, a 26-hour journey, to begin her studies as an actor. "Dad had a quality that shook off on all us kids, we just have that drive," she says. "It's something Mum and Dad really instilled in us - if you wanna get it, you gotta work for it."

After graduating from the Queensland University of Technology in 1992, she spent six years in Brisbane, saying yes to everything from community theatre to theatre-in-education before landing bigger roles with the Queensland Theatre Company, including One Woman's Song, in which she played Aboriginal writer and activist Kath Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal), and a part as feisty party girl Nona in Louis Nowra's Radiance. When she heard a first-time filmmaker named Rachel Perkins was casting for a film version of Radiance, the timid girl from outback Queensland went full tilt for the part. "I didn't know Rachel from a bar of soap," Mailman says. "But I tracked her down and said, 'Hi, my name's Deb Mailman. I'm actually playing Nona on stage, I'd love you to come and see my performance'."

The director made the trip to Brisbane, along with her friend Warwick Thornton, and cast her that night. "We met her after the show and immediately asked her to take the role," Perkins recalls. "She was that good." In 1998, Mailman made her screen debut in the richly textured film about three Aboriginal sisters reunited after the death of their mother. "Deborah Mailman steals every scene," one critic wrote at the time, taking particular note of "a mischievous smile" that would "thaw an ice cube". That year she beat Cate Blanchett and Rachel Griffiths to win the Australian Film Institute's best actress award, and moved to Sydney.

She did it tough for a while, sleeping on friends' couches and taking cash in hand for making ceramics, but soon the work began to percolate. "Certainly the AFI for Radiance was a turning point," Mailman says. "It got my name in people's minds in the industry. Until then, I was happy to be in Brisbane doing theatre." She took a twirl with Big Ted on Play School ("There's nothing easy about being a Play School presenter") and starred in Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence. She would go on to re-team with Perkins on the screen musical Bran Nue Dae, an effervescent celebration of Aboriginality, and on the ABC telemovie Mabo, playing Eddie Mabo's wife, Bonita, her most overtly political role to date.

"She's such a great actress she makes me look good, so whatever I'm doing I try and get her in it," Perkins says. "She's got a massive range, and a great truth about her. I think she has this rapport with her audience - there's something about her on-screen presence that allows the audience to see the beauty inside of her."

Landing the role of bubbly flatmate Kelly in the hit apartment-block TV drama The Secret Life of Us in 2001 was another pivotal moment for Mailman. "The whole idea of being popular and having a profile was such an absurd idea for me," she says. "I'd done theatre for so long and then suddenly, bang, you're on a successful television show and suddenly everyone knows you."

Stares from strangers unnerved her. Even weirder were the fans who'd follow her down the street yelling, "Kelly, Kelly, Kelly!" as if her beloved character had leapt out of their TV screens and into real life. "People coming up like they know you, it is quite confronting," she says. "But over time I got used to it; it's just about being nice. And now, it's no big deal; it's actually lovely that people come up, that my work resonates in a way. It's fantastic."

Deborah Mailman has a lot to smile about, the excellent state of her teeth for one thing. On film, that full-beam grin, a classic "duchenne smile" that always reaches the eyes, is close to captured sunshine. Thornton recalls it lighting up the dawn during filming of The Sapphires. "We'd all rock up on set at 4am for a cooked breakfast, hundreds of crew, trying to wake up for an incredibly long day," he says. Mailman and her fellow leads Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens and Miranda Tapsell would start crooning Motown hits as the sun burnt the edge of the horizon "and there was that beautiful smile - that's when you knew why you were there".

The Sapphires changed things. Though it touched on issues such as the Stolen Generations, Wayne Blair's 1960s-set film about four indigenous women whose powerhouse voices propelled them from a Murray River mission to war-torn Vietnam was pure entertainment. The film's easy humour and playful bounce drew a 10-minute standing ovation during its world premiere at the 2011 Cannes International Film Festival, and it went on to gross more than $14 million at the Australian box office. Indigenous cinema had finally gone mainstream.

In its wake, Aboriginal director Ivan Sen (Toomelah) sent Mystery Road to the Toronto International Film Festival and then into local cinemas; Jessica Mauboy sang at the Governor's Ball after the Emmy Awards; and the first season of the landmark TV show Redfern Now, the first drama series written, acted and produced by indigenous Australians, became a primetime success story. Meanwhile, Mailman was "hugely thrilled" to be asked to stand beneath the sails of a national icon and host the Sydney Opera House 40th anniversary concert last month. "We revel in each other's success as indigenous artists," she says. "There's this groundswell of pride and 'Yes! We're doing this and doing this!'?" Her voice drops: "We're just saying that we are good at what we do."

Much like the road to political reconciliation, it's been a slow passage, beginning with funding investment in indigenous artistic endeavours in the early 1990s and continuing today with a new generation of filmmakers confidently exploring different genres. The stylish inner-city ABC drama Redfern Now, in its second season, unites many of these talents, including Leah Purcell, Perkins, Wayne Blair, as well as Mailman and her Sapphires co-stars Sebbens and Tapsell - behind and in front of the camera.

Crucially, the lines have begun to blur when it comes to casting. The Turning, the compendium film based on Tim Winton's collection of short stories that's now in cinemas, has Aboriginal actors playing characters Winton had written as white, while The Darkside features Bryan Brown and Claudia Karvan telling indigenous ghost stories alongside Aboriginal actors such as Purcell and Aaron Pedersen. "Indigenous ghosts aren't racist," quips its director, Thornton.

"As indigenous and non-indigenous people, we have a shared history and a shared experience of this country," says Mailman, who has always left the activism to others. "Obviously, that being reflected in films is really great. It shows nothing's really exclusive in what our stories are about, who we are as people. When it comes to all those great themes and all that human emotion, none of us escape that. That's why I love the arts and have so much passion and belief in the arts, because it's easier to come to information when it's in an emotional context."

If colour-blind casting is the ultimate goal, Mailman's already there. "She's being cast because she's bloody brilliant, not because she's indigenous," Thornton says. "And that's a really empowering thing to be happening in cinema and TV in this country." Like her Secret Life of Us character, Mailman's role as nurse Cherie in Ten's offbeat Melbourne-set drama Offspring was not written with an Aboriginal actress in mind. Nor was her part as Toni Collette's cuckoo lesbian mate in PJ Hogan's 2012 comedy Mental. "It doesn't matter if my skin's black, white, red or yellow, as an actor, I've got to make the scene work somehow," she says. "But it's a great privilege for me to shift between different roles that either require something of me as an Aboriginal woman or not."

These days, her choices are dictated mainly by how far work takes her from home and her two sons. She'll sometimes stare at them and marvel at their differences. Henry, the older one, is a gentle boy, "loves his reading," while Oliver is a firecracker, "a destroyer of things". She loves to take them camping: grab a tent, throw it in the back of the car and head to some place that has no mobile phone reception. And none of those "iPad-y things". She'll stand in the scrub, gum trees all around, under a sky that is endless and filled with stars, and breathe. "That, for me, is my place," she says. "There's a smell that comes with that that brings me completely home and I'm absolutely at peace."

Not in a million years would the shy, awkward kid from Mount Isa have written this version of events for herself. "It's not the life I imagined for me, but it's the life I wanted it to be," she says. "I've got a great family, a gorgeous husband. I'm happy." She stares out past the treetops. "I'm happy." With that, the girl from the bush ambles over to a shiny black sedan, where a chauffeur waits to whisk her away for a designer dress fitting.

The Darkside opens in NSW, Queensland and SA on November 28; Victoria, ACT and WA in February 2014