Richard Frankland is a Gunditjmara man who works for the Willin Centre at VCA, and has been directing and producing short films and documentaries for decades. He’s also an activist and singer/songwriter. We interviewed him on September 16th 2015.
My name is Richard Frankland, and I am a Gunditjmara man. Let me tell you a story. I have always been an advocate for Aboriginal lives and an activist for deaths in custody. It was a hard job. I was at a dinner party and a woman knocked over a glass of wine and asked “How come your people are killing themselves in jail?” Three things struck me, one was the assumption that it was this cultural abuse, your people, we weren’t human. The second one was the fact that people were dying seemed offensive to her, and the third thing was the assumption that everyone was killing themselves. I realised at that point that what we were fighting was attitudes, as attitudes perpetuate legislation, attitudes perpetuate policy. Attitudes incarcerate many people in many instances. So I started music and film, and I already played a couple of instruments because I’d been a soldier, an infantry soldier. But I went to the military band for a bit and learnt to play the flute and saxophone.
One day I made a film, and it was called Clanging Doors. It was about being incarcerated. My brother was part of the Australian Film Commission, his name was Wal Saunders. I didn’t know anything about the film industry and he helped me get the film finished. Anyway, everyone wanted to see this film, then my brother engaged my company, Golden Seahorse Productions, to conduct a cross cultural awareness course. At that time apparently, there were ten thousand hours of film footage with Aboriginal subject or content matter, that means you’d have to sit down for a couple of years non-stop watching it to see it all. And the three power positions of the films were generally held by non-Aboriginal people for 95 or an incredible percentage [of the time], the writing, the directing and the producing. Although some of the films were brilliant, some of them were absolutely horrific. And again it was the other culture’s interpretation of us, and the other culture, the colonisers, had been socially indoctrinated to have a perception about us and quite often that perception could become a negative self perception.
So my brother Wal said we want to tell our story through our eyes. There’d been a couple of filmmakers, Brian Siren, Tracy Moffat, Bruce McGuinness, there were others, I can’t think of them at the moment. I was asked by the elders at that time to set up the Mirrimbiak Nations Aboriginal Corporation, the first Aboriginal land organisation in 25 years in Victoria. It was very difficult to set up, it was under extreme political duress, and I was attacked very viciously by the Howard government. Anyway, the Australian Film Commision, which was run by Cathy Robinson, a wonderful woman, at the time and my brother Wal Saunders, put together a program. That was at a time when you would go to film meetings and people would shout you down because you were Aboriginal. They were quite aggressive, there were some supporters but not many. Anyway there was a whole heap of people who did support, and they advertised, the Aboriginal mensch advertised, for storytellers to write a film. I had a broken arm at the time, and I was setting up Mirrimbiak and under political duress. In between meetings I’d go out where my producer was and I’d dictate the film, and the film was No Way To Forget. We hired John Hughes to be the script editor. Seventy six stories were submitted and ten got picked to go to the workshop. And we went to the workshop and it was amazing. There was still this massive cultural divide, but these very brave people, black and white, guided us through being able to tell our stories. Six of us were selected and I was one of them. The films together were called Sand To Celluloid. They were the most successful short films ever out of Australia, in fact mine was nominated for three or four AFI awards and won two. It went to Cannes, then we did the next ones and i was selected again and I wrote Harry’s War and directed that, which was a film about Aboriginal service; my mother’s brother who died on the Kokoda. His eldest brother was the first Aboriginal commissioned officer.
So the film industry now, I went on to direct Blue Heelers and other things, it was the only white films I’ve ever done. Back then you were only given scripts with Aboriginal subject or content matter. But a very brave man called Gus Howard who was the supervising producer for Blue Heelers, hired me as a man, not as a black director. Which was a very strange feeling for me, I wasn’t used to it. The world I was used to was very racist. Then I helped inspire some people, people like Wayne Blair who did The Sapphires. He directed a play about me recently called Walking Into The Bigness, and he acted as me in a play called Conversations With The Dead. It evolved, filmmaking evolved in my lifetime which was amazing. We went from telling sad stories, which again my brother Wal said we’ll tell the sad stories first then we’ll do action films and horror films and so on, and they’ll have our cultural nuances. And he was right, so we evolved, and now we’re starting to do those films. We’ll end up with people in Hollywood. Bernard Boyre, of St Tropez, predicts that the next major wave of filmmakers to take Europe by storm will be Aboriginal filmmakers because of the particular world we come from.
Us: There was a switch from being the in front of the camera to behind the camera, which is one of the main points we are researching.
RF: And also a switch from being a consultant, to real positions of power and real positions of Western Euro-centric skills combined with our storytelling techniques.
Us: Films like The Sapphires (directed by Wayne Blair) and Samson & Delilah (directed by Warwick Thornton) were popular here but also huge internationally, do you have any suggestion of why this may be?
RF: For one they’re good stories, I think Samson & Delilah was huge because it was told without much dialogue, the dialogue was in action plus Warwick’s a wonderful filmmaker. So’s Wayne, Wayne’s a wonderful filmmaker; the story he told was dynamic and rich and full and the people who are in it are still alive. It’s a story that crossed cultural boundaries, not just once but three or four cultural boundaries, so I think that’s why. I made Stone Bros but that was for an Aboriginal audience really, for people in the know, so it was a comedy. I’m not sure if i’ll do anymore films myself.
Us: Do you see any upcoming trends in the Indigenous film industry?
RF: I think now that there’s a whole heap of people who have grown up around the digital world, that there’s going to be all these stories coming out, that I think it’s hard for young people. They have access to anything the world at the click of a button, there’s designer drugs, there’s gangs, there’s all these subcultures, there’s all this voice out there. There’s a myriad of issues that they may or may not want to represent. They’re staggering under this enormous weight. So i think that what’s going to come out, a trend, this is generally speaking, there’s a whole heap of voice going to come out that the world’s not going to be able to keep up with. I think that there’s going to be more genres that develop. I think that there will be an Aboriginal genre that will be made of of Aboriginal horror movies, Aboriginal action movies and these will be very specific genres. When I was young you didn’t see Aboriginal people on TV, now there’s a station. We will eventually see Aboriginal people on Neighbours and Home & Away. I think Australia is ready for that cultural shift, I think young people will bring about a cultural shift to the fabric of the national identity of the country by its diversity and I think the stitching to hold it together will be the way we utilise multi media and the way we incorporate other cultures. I think what will happen is the Western Euro-centric hold of media in Australia is broken now and I think it eventually will be shattered. I think what will happen is we’ll be a richer people for it, I mean that as Australians. We will be so wealthy in cultural diversity that we will form a new culture in time to come. I think our storytelling as a people, as an Aboriginal people, will contribute to that. I think our storytelling as Australians will contribute to that. I think that’s the trend that will happen… These times will be missed, people like me will become old dinosaurs that you’ll dig up occasionally to tell an Aboriginal story.
[In regards to funding], at the moment, the access point to the wealth and power of filmmaking is generally in the shape of the dominant culture. But what will happen, is that will change. People are now making films with their iPhone. I think that will continue to happen, the cost of filmmaking will decrease, except for your big Hollywood blockbusters and television series. I think that it will become more commonplace. When i was young, and I sound very old, there were two TV stations and they’d turn it off at 10pm and they’d play the national anthem which was God Save The Queen, and everyone would go to bed. And now, how many stations can you get? It’s endless. So we’ve got a general market thing of, we have 24 hours to fill up on lots and lots of stations so we need lots of product. Funding will change, already has changed to suit that, I think it will become specialised. There’ll be specialised films, there’ll be a boys club that people will fit in for the big money spinners, I mean it’s already there. I like the fact that there’s a lot of voice out there; out of order comes chaos.