No More Boomerang (1989)

In 1988 Australia celebrated its bicentennial, but the festivities disregard the existence of a culture of over 40.000 years old on that continent, that of the Aborigines. It is the implicit denial of their culture. This film reverses that approach: it disregards the festivities and the Aborigines themselves invite you to their daily existence. In Redfern, the black ghetto of Sydney - a holy place on a hill in the city; and in Warakurna, one of the seven small communities of the Ngaanyatjarra language-group in the Gibson Desert, 800 kilometers west of the small town of Alice Springs. Each confrontation with a different culture is a confrontation with our own culture. Then, the distance becomes tangible: values that are self-evident to us relate to those of the Aborigines like water to fire. Aborigines are ordinary people, but they have preserved faculties that we in the west have lost. After 2.000 years of extermination, subordination, and awareness of the permanent white presence on their land, they give a worthy and self-conscious token of their existence. Western culture has started a process that must convince following cultures of their ideas about good and bad. We can see that things are going wrong. We realize that the process has become irreversible.