The secret life of Deborah Mailman

SHE came to prominence in The Sapphires, via The Secret Life of Us. But Deborah Mailman is now on an entirely new level.

Deborah Mailman

SHE came to prominence in The Sapphires, via Play School and The Secret Life of Us. But Deborah Mailman is now on an entirely new level.

She 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.

She used it well in The Sapphires, the story of the four indigenous women whose powerhouse voices propelled them from a Murray River mission to war-torn Vietnam in the 1960s. Director Warwick Thornton recalls Mailman lighting up the set: "We'd all rock up at 4am for a cooked breakfast, hundreds of crew, trying to wake up for an incredibly long day... and there was that beautiful smile - that's when you knew why you were there".

Mailman's latest project, The Darkside, also directed by Thornton, is about to be released. It is a collection of tales about Aboriginal encounters with people who have died. Mailman, 41, believes strongly in the existence of spirits, good and bad, and lives with the whispers of her ancestors always a breath away. ""It's something unexplainable but very tangible," she says. "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, when tears catch her unaware. She pauses, struggles, 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.

"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. 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."

"She's got a real, caring mother factor to her," says 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."

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."

Read the full story in tomorrow's Weekend Australian Magazine.