True Colours: It feels like a privilege to observe this world

Revelatory: a scene from True Colours

The hands are tender and strong with the laying on of ochre. Women sit on the ground and rock and keen, hair is ceremonially cut with supermarket scissors. It is a mourning ceremony. A teenage girl, freshly ochred, suddenly leaves to look at a TikTok video on her mobile. It’s old footage of a mate who’s come to grief after entering a men’s ceremonial area – strictly forbidden for a female. No one knows why she would have risked such a transgression.

The scene is from a new series, True Colours, which dives deep into a hidden world rarely seen by white Australia. Texting and TikTok exist alongside strict kinship observances, payback rituals and the mystery of being sung. It’s NITV’s first foray into long-form drama in co-production with SBS, and what a debut it is for National Indigenous Television. The four-part series is set in Alice Springs (Mpartnwe), in language as well as English, with a richness of detail from bush communities and town camps – places white people usually can’t enter. No whitefella could tell this story. None would dare attempt to.

I wish we watched mini-series now like we did in the past, when we gathered around the box in eager households to devour tentpole stories of who we were as a nation. A Town Like Alice, The Dismissal, Bodyline, all those narratives that told us about an Australia we didn’t quite know, or remember, that were dissected over back fences and workplace water coolers for days. True Colours is landmark Australian drama and it deserves a wide audience.

Co-creators Erica Glynn and Warren H. Williams grew up in central Australia and their series feels deeply, generously authentic. This is a world of laughing, cheeky kids who grow up to be men who never smile. Of camp dogs and bush mobs. Dusty footy pitches. Of frozen roo tails encased in plastic from the supermarket. Of strong women holding their bush communities together. Of complicated spiritual observances. Art trips to Paris and dialysis. “No entry. Mens ceremonial business” warns a large sheet of tin out bush.

It’s also a world of dodgy whitefellas overlording. Exploiting. Of the complexities of indigenous/whitefella couplings and of kids with a foot in both cultures. A world where the institutionalised racism can feel stingingly personal. A professional indigenous woman with a successful career, out on the town with a white colleague, tries to buy alcohol from a white peer and is swiftly knocked back; the cruel little dynamics of power and control are inflicted again and again. There’s blackfella humour – “You’re like a f..kin’ mining company, can’t take no for an answer” – alongside offhand comments from a glamorous white art centre administrator – “these people are still essentially primitive”. A shocking insult, and the series is a magnificent rebuke to it.

Co-writer Erica Glynn: “We wanted to connect Australian audiences to complexities of contemporary Aboriginal culture in a way that wasn’t led by prison, poverty, or dysfunction. Almost every Australian home has a piece of First Nations art hanging somewhere. Art seemed the obvious way to share some of the truths of our culture and demonstrate just how sophisticated we are.”

True Colours is revelatory, groundbreaking. It feels like a privilege to observe this world. Knowledge, of course, leads to understanding, to empathy. Those who close themselves off, who barricade their hearts, seem the loudest naysayers against a treaty, a statement from the heart, reconciliation; surely basics within a modern nation. Why are we so angst-ridden about this? What an extraordinary country we live in, what amazing local stories are embedded within it. I wish the big streaming companies were forced to tip more of their revenue into our local coffers for series like these. True Colours is showing from Monday. It’s a gift to us all. Happy NAIDOC Week.