The soft power of Rachel Perkins, bringing Aboriginal stories into the mainstream

SHE grew up steeped in the firebrand activism of her father, Charlie. But Rachel Perkins is a torch-bearer in a different mould.

THE little boy wriggles his toes in the devil-red dirt as a convoy of honey ants swarms up his heel.

He sweeps the central Australian landscape with his gun’s sniper scope, brushing past ghost gums, picking out rocks vivid as ignited flames and scanning the mountain ranges of his ancestors’ Caterpillar Dreaming. He locates his target and shoots. Orange foam darts scatter across the spinifex like alien fruit and his mother looks sheepish as she bends to scoop them up. “I stupidly bought him a Nerf gun,” Rachel Perkins sighs. “I know I shouldn’t have bought him a gun, but boys… What can you do?”

Four-year-old Arnhem squirms, giggles and scampers around the corner of the sleek home newly built on this bush block outside Alice Springs. Foam-based weaponry aside, Perkins is happy to see her son running barefoot and free in the country of his people, the Arrernte, for whom Alice Springs and its surrounds are brimming with sacred sites and cultural secrets. It’s here that her firebrand father, the activist Charlie Perkins, was born; here that the seeds of rebellion were planted for his lifelong fight for indigenous equality and self-determination. It was Charlie who taught Rachel about life in the crosshairs.

The battles he fought and won on the streets and in parliament in the 1960s and ’70s laid the foundation for his daughter’s success as a film and television writer, director and producer. The slight but strong-willed 44-year-old continues the fight, a generational extension of his work, by serving on the boards that govern filmmaking and screen culture and by bringing Aboriginal stories to middle Australia through her Sydney-based production company Blackfella Films.

Prolific, high-quality output has elevated ­Perkins through the ranks of local filmmakers and cemented her position at the forefront of the indigenous push into the mainstream. From the multi award-winning documentary series First Australians, through to the ABC telemovie Mabo, the hit movie musical Bran Nue Dae, the prime-time TV success story Redfern Now, and the soon-to-be-screened documentary Black Panther Woman, Perkins is re-articulating Australian history and culture from a new perspective.

She is not a shouter. Nor a table-thumper. Perkins’ inheritance is dramatically increased funding, political representation and the attainment of formerly denied proprietary rights; her mission is to use entertainment to further awaken, agitate and ennoble. “Rachel is more of a person who is a lover not a fighter,” says Sally Riley, the head of the ABC’s indigenous department and her friend and colleague for more than a decade. “Her dad was very much of his time, when you needed an element of ­radicalism to get noticed. But she would much rather one of her shows go into the living room of someone’s house and move them emotionally. That’s how she gets her message across, rather than hitting them over the head with rhetoric.”

Perkins was born and raised in Canberra, the seat of her father’s pioneering political activism, but her first job, a traineeship with a newly licensed television station run by the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA), was in Alice Springs. She was 18. By 21, she had moved to Sydney and was working as the executive producer of the Aboriginal television unit at SBS, a job that set her on a career track countering poor anthropological representations of indigenous people.

The east coast is where the work is, so she has a home at Bondi Beach, “that Mecca of models”. But she is drawn to the continental red heart, the traditional land of her father who returned, in his post public-service life, to help establish the Arrernte Council of Central Australia. Here the urban obsession with materialism is absent, she says. Different values – “people, knowledge, family and community” – take a front seat.

“I bought a block of land when my father passed away [in 2000] and I thought our family needed an anchor,” Perkins says. It took her more than a decade to get around to building on it, but now she and Arnhem (Perkins is recently separated from the boy’s father, filmmaker ­Richard McGrath) have a base from which to maintain her connection to family.

She is working with the local Arrernte women on a hush-hush project. She can’t say too much (“it’s not my place”) but will divulge that she is using her filmmaking and fundraising skills to contribute to the area’s “cultural maintenance”. “That’s such a dry phrase, it doesn’t really capture it,” she says exasperatedly. Culture is both concrete and intangible out here. It’s in the leaves of the silvery mulga scrub, in the high trills that bubble up through the scree and spinifex; it’s in the capacity of the clear desert light to flatten, fragment and illuminate. “There’s all the indigenous knowledge and experience that just swirls around you,” she says. “Promoting Arrernte culture is something that has crystallised for me as the next thing I want to do.”

Sun-baked desert sands abut the rust-coloured cement floors of Perkins’ stylish shack; home life here bleeds into the outdoors. At dusk she lights a campfire and watches the improbably beautiful landscape change colour; the distant peaks flare briefly before the last light of day bathes them in shades of purple. “It’s lovely out here,” she says. “It’s like looking at an Albert Namatjira painting.” The celebrated Arrernte watercolourist, the first Aborigine to be listed in Who’s Who, used a western style to depict his sacred country, symbolically bridging two cultures. For a time he was held up as an assimilation success story. But Namatjira became a victim of racism, gave up painting and died in 1959, bewildered and broken.

It was in February 1965, six years after Namatjira’s death, that Charlie Perkins galvanised the nascent Aboriginal rights movement with his famous Freedom Ride. As president of the Sydney University-based Student Action for Aborigines, Charlie led a bus tour of 29 students through a string of northwestern NSW country towns, confronting hostile, rock-throwing crowds while exposing segregation in the use of swimming pools, picture theatres, halls and hotels. With his wife Eileen Munchenberg – a descendant of German Lutherans – by his side, Charlie became the feisty, often controversial leader of a national movement, eventually rising to become secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the 1980s.

Perkins documented her father’s protest against what she calls “Australia’s version of apartheid” with her 1993 film Freedom Ride, part of a four-episode documentary series produced with Ned Lander. That film, in which her brother Adam played a young Charlie, kindled her interest in using archival footage as a way of retelling the country’s history from an Aboriginal viewpoint.

I show her a treasure from The Australian’s archives: a black-and-white photo of ­Charlie in front of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy erected outside Parliament House in 1972. He’s flanked by his son Adam and older daughter Hetti, now an arts curator and director of the Corroboree Sydney festival. Rachel, then a toddler, sits on her father’s knee; she’s holding a handmade sign that reads, ­“Aboriginal affairs to be run by Aborigines”. “See that!” she exclaims in delight, staring intently at the angrily scrawled words. “It’s the same thing we say about our filmmaking – Aboriginal stories to be told by Aboriginal people. That black power, self-determination, authorial autonomy is at the heart of the work we do.” She keeps looking at the photo. “I remember that time. I remember Dad mowing the lawn [at the Tent Embassy], going, ‘Oh, I’d better fix up the place, it’s looking a bit shabby’. That’s very him; it’s so straight to be mowing the lawn at a protest!”

The early 1970s were the beds-are-burning days of the Aboriginal rights movement. “We spent our whole time going to protests, making our own placards and land rights T-shirts,” ­Perkins says. It was a good childhood. “Looking back on it, I realise how really safe and protected we were, what a safe family home we grew up in and I’m very grateful for that. Mum was the centre of that; she was very dedicated to the family and to dad. We all understood that he had this other pressing, deeply important ­mission and that was the driver of what was happening in our home.”

Canberra was the centre of indigenous political activity – in December 1972 the Whitlam government upgraded the Office of Aboriginal Affairs to a ministerial department – and a steady procession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders streamed through the family home, strategising around the dinner table late into the night. Occasionally, the stress would get to Charlie and the family’s small appliances copped it. “He had a tendency to smash phones,” Perkins laughs. “We used to call him The Phone-Chucker. And every now and then he would destroy a toaster or a kettle. To be fair, when you’re on the front line of literally life-and-death politics for your people, it’s not something you can just casually deal with.”

Christmas holidays were spent driving in the family Kingswood on a dirt highway in 40-plus-degree heat, wet towels on the windows to cool the air, from the capital to Alice Springs to visit extended family. It was this connection that directed the young Rachel to Arrernte country, where she took the CAAMA traineeship and set her feet on an artistic path.

“I’ve got no interest in being a public figure in the way Dad was, being engaged deep in the political process, because I don’t have the thick skin,” she says. “And I don’t have the courage, actually. I saw what he went through and I know the sacrifices and I’m not cut from the same cloth in that way. I’m not the great orator – I like to have an editing machine.”

The offices of Blackfella Films are located in Gadigal country, central Sydney, in a two-­storey building tucked away in a leafy Paddington back street. There’s a map of Australia depicting the 250 indigenous language regions on one of the whitewashed walls, and a thicket of trophies in the foyer. Chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Perkins’ office is dominated by two worn brown leather armchairs that belonged to her mother. “It’s always a bit of a tear when I leave Alice,” says Perkins, who founded Blackfella Films in 1992 and was later joined by producer Darren Dale. “But that’s a good problem to have, I think.”

She enjoys bouncing between the Outback and the city and is wary of buying into the faulty stereotype that people of mixed heritage suffer an identity crisis. “There’s this whole cliché about Aboriginals who are [she assumes a dramatic movie-trailer voice] caught between two worlds! The poor half-caste. Nowhere to go!” She laughs. “That’s not necessarily a problem, it’s not like they’re these lost people who aren’t quite white and aren’t quite black. They’re both, and that’s part of the history of the nation and not a bad thing. It just had been seen previously as a bad thing.”

She launches into what she will later apologetically call a “rave” about the doomed race ­theory popular in early 20th century Australia and posits that it’s time to revisit the hopeful, rainbow-coloured future that Xavier Herbert proposed in his novel Capricornia. “Quite a few artists I know go between different worlds,” she says. “A lot of people are trying to have this hybrid life, where they live and work in a place and then go back to their community. It’s ­challenging but I don’t think it has to be the big problem it’s painted as.”

Perkins is a straight-shooter with an unyielding poise. Large, expressive eyes glitter with barely suppressed amusement at the world and its foibles. “She is a dynamo,” says Riley, who worked at the Australian Film Commission and, later, Screen Australia when Perkins sat on those boards; they were also both founding directors of National Indigenous Television (NITV). “She probably has the most energy for work of anyone I’ve ever met. She’s got that history with her dad and I think she’s driven to make Australia a better place for indigenous people. She can go from making films, to doing a festival, to talking to government ministers about funding, or she can go to Alice Springs and talk to mob there. She can move between creative thought and writing bureaucratic documents.”

As a boardroom activist, Riley says, Perkins is cool-headed and calm, a master negotiator who tailors her argument to her audience. “She’s a huge driver within the indigenous sector of the [arts] industry, in terms of pushing for more funding, more recognition, coming up with ideas for initiatives and documentaries,” says Riley. With the team at Blackfella Films, Perkins created an indigenous media and arts directory called The Black Book and an indigenous arts news­letter, The Black Mail, and curated the Message Sticks Indigenous Film Festival for a decade.

In between, she makes films and television programs that win critical plaudits and, crucially, attract an audience. Her 1998 family drama Radiance won a number of festival awards and launched the screen career of Deborah Mailman. One Night the Moon, starring singer-songwriter Paul Kelly, won acclaim at Sundance in 2002. The seven-part SBS documentary series First Australians screened to 2.3 million viewers in 2008 and has since become a best-selling educational DVD. “People say culture has to innovate to survive and I think the mix of the best of European and new technology and innovation into Aboriginal culture is a great thing,” Perkins says. Her feel-good musical film Bran Nue Dae (2010) marked a major shift into the mainstream; its subversive lyrics alluding to forced assimilation and deaths in custody were delivered in the guise of toe-tapping country-rock tunes. Redfern Now, the first TV drama series written, directed and produced by indigenous Australians, was another game-changer, winning Logies for its first and second series. A telemovie, intended to tie up the various story strands, begins pre-production this month.

It’s a good time for indigenous creatives. ­Samson and Delilah writer/director Warwick Thornton, who trained with Perkins, is in Bulgaria working as cinematographer on a thriller, Septembers of Shiraz, directed by The Sapphires’ Wayne Blair and starring Salma Hayek and Adrien Brody. David Gulpilil last month won a best actor prize at the Cannes Film Festival for his work in Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country. Closer to home, Scarlett Pictures has just wrapped a new all-indigenous sketch comedy show called Black Comedy for the ABC, and an Alice Springs-set comedy series, 8MMM Aboriginal Radio, is in production.

“The great thing in Australia is we have such great support for indigenous people now in the arts,” Perkins says. “People might say I’ve had this privileged position, because I know other people struggle to get access to funds. But the reason I get funded is because of my track record and the quality work we produce. So that sounds very big-noting but that’s been our way of operating in this company.”

Quality production values were the reason industry friends steered novelist Frank Moorhouse in the direction of Blackfella Films when he was looking for a production house to bring Edith Campbell Berry, the heroine of his grand League of Nations trilogy, to the screen. The series will be Blackfella’s first non-indigenous themed project. In the works, too, is a character- driven drama series for ABC TV about the European arrival in Sydney in 1788. “We want it to be edgy and high-end and make history exciting, like Game of Thrones [does],” says Riley.

Rachel Perkins is about to step into the crosshairs again, but this time the salvo may be fired by her own people. On Thursday, a new documentary she wrote, directed and produced will premiere at the Sydney Film Festival. Black Panther Woman is a deeply personal story in which indigenous woman Marlene Cummins recounts her experiences as a member of the Black Panther Party in 1971. Cummins, now an accomplished blues musician, breaks a 40-year silence to detail her own abuse, hoping to spark a conversation about violence against black women within their own community. “It’s very controversial and we’re both quite worried about how people are going to take it,” Perkins says.

“It’s going to open up some old wounds and bring up some issues that have previously not been out there in the public domain,” says prominent activist Sam Watson, who appears in the documentary. “But I think it’s critically important that the national Aboriginal community should have the guts to sit in front of this film and accept that there is business we need to do within our own camps. This is an epidemic, a horrific reality for Aboriginal women right across Australia.”

Perkins has on her mental Kevlar. “We’re not trying to bring down the movement,” she says. “We’re trying to start a conversation.”