Imagination

In the video I don’t wanna be a bludger (1999), Michael Riley plays the part of Harold, a disabled cousin of Delores (Destiny Deacon), who visits her house in Brunswick where Delores is throwing him a birthday party. Michael has thick black-rimmed glasses, wears a pink shirt and bow tie, trembles in his wheelchair, and is generally at the mercy of this afternoon escapade in Delores’ Koori world. In the video, Riley’s camera lovingly envelops the character of Delores, allowing her the freedom to dig herself into more and more strife as she attempts a career in fortune telling, has an excruciating interview with a social worker, applies for a study grant and babysits three children at the end of a long day trying to make something of her life. Riley’s camera stays with Delores’ improvisatory humour, sometimes almost daring Destiny Deacon to go further. As a collaborative team of writer and director, Deacon and Riley find in this work an exquisite balance between excess and narrative; satire and kitsch; improvisation and script.

The key themes of this video are how we treat the ‘outsider’ or ‘other’ and how we respond to difference. The larger-than-life Delores meets her match with the silent, helpless Harold. Delores’ humour depends on reaction: as an audience, we wait in anticipation for what she will say or do next, and how her chosen foe will respond. A typical conversation with the social worker goes:

Social Worker:  How far did you go in school?
Delores:  Far enough.
Social Worker:  What is your date of birth?
Delores:  Old enough to know better.

Harold is, however, Delores’ foil: all he can do is dribble. As she spoons green jelly into a quivering mouth, gives him a box of magic tricks with which he clearly can’t play, and dances with him around the lounge room, her slapstick humour is met with pathos. The ‘troublemaker’ comes face-to-face with the ‘hapless victim’ in a sequence that has audiences laughing aloud.

The media frequently depicts Indigenous people in perpetually negative circumstances, often as either ‘making trouble’ or being ‘bludgers’. Aboriginals are regularly referred to in terms of types, in dehumanised and degrading language.  Deacon and Riley’s characters use the devices of satire and humour, through the conventions of the soap opera and reality television, to utterly unravel what it means to be an Indigenous person in the Australian suburbs. We are faced with a complex and varied scenario, one that makes fun of stereotypes in the most politically incorrect way possible. In this video, everyone is ‘mistreated’ to one degree or another. Delores has no empathy for anyone, including cousin Harold or the youngsters she is babysitting. She views the welfare system with a wry and cynical attitude, almost revelling in the tap dance she has with the welfare officers. Deacon and Riley reclaim ‘politically incorrect’, archival cultural forms in order to forge a larger and more complex understanding of black identity.

Michael Riley and Destiny Deacon had worked together before, in the early 1990s, on a sequence of videos known as Welcome to my Koori world.Delores first appeared in these five short vignettes – only four of which were screened as part of ABC TV’s Blackout series – in her Brunswick kitchen. We see Delores pining for the boyfriend who abandoned her, Gary – who is represented by a Rastafarian statue on top of the fridge. She compares him with the great Dr Charles Perkins AO, Aboriginal activist, whose photograph she keeps by her side. She feeds her children, in the form of black dolls, in a high chair and almost chokes one of them on popcorn. She devises a poem for a NAIDOC Week talent quest to win a trip for two on the Murray River:

they still call us Abos, Coons, Gins and Dags
and there you are, lighting up my fags …

The final section presents Delores as chef, wearing an Aboriginal Australia T-shirt, and instructing us on how to make meatballs in a microwave oven. Delores wishes that we could sleep in microwave ovens, so that in three minutes you could get eight hours.

Michael Riley’s videos with Destiny Deacon find a way to go to the heart of Aboriginal Australia by cutting through any expectations we might have over what Aboriginal people look like, how they behave, what their dreams are made of, what they eat, drink and listen to. In Welcome to my Koori world and in I don’t wanna be a bludger, Deacon takes on various roles – cook, poet, wife, mother, bludger – in order to reveal the inadequacy of categorisation.

In Riley’s films and videos there is an accumulative, unforced style of editing that slowly and deliberately builds a picture. He can switch from short fragments to long sequences, in order to build up a momentum. The short sequences have as much power and meaning as the longer ones. In this, we see the photographer at work within the structure of the moving image. As such, one comes to love the characters in Michael Riley’s films, whether they are real or fictional, because we are encouraged to share their stories, and their journeys, past and present. This is as true for comic Delores, as it is for the men and women interviewed in the documentary,
Tent boxers (1997).

In the much more abstract film Empire (1997), Riley’s camera focuses on the detail of the Australian landscape with a similar structural format. The film opens with an eye inside a cloud. It moves through a montage of images from the Australian landscape: ants, a carcass, a lizard, drought-stricken clumps of earth that barely soak up the rain, a dead parrot. In these troubled sequences, life has been squeezed out of the earth. Such elegiac imagery is juxtaposed with scenes
of a hawk freely soaring through the blue sky and time-lapse imagery of clouds, light and shadow shifting across enduring desert boulders. This is an Aboriginal landscape that propels us into a deep past. The camera roams over black and white rocks, along the crevices of dead trees and then zooms out to reveal
a majestic sunrise or sunset. The play between an abstract stillness in the landscape and an endlessly shifting symphony of weather signals a continual shuttling between symbolic image and narrative sequence.

The tone of Empire encompasses a love of the landscape, a respect for its harshness, a mistrust of colonial influences and an ambivalence towards Christianity. With an image of two hands, in water, with stigmata, the film meditates upon the missionary infiltration into the Aboriginal landscape. As in the photographic series, flyblown (1998), the Christian cross is depicted as a mirror, reflecting the sky and clouds around it to the extent that they become one and the same – God is everywhere. In another scene, the cross has been lit up in flames. These sequences are followed by an image of a very old British flag and, further on, a sign that says ‘Slaughterhouse Ck’. With this slow montage, Empire suggests that with the introduction of Christianity came destruction of both the landscape and its Indigenous people. There is, however, a decaying beauty, as if the British hopes for the urban and rural landscapes of Australia have fallen into a languid and languishing dream.

Thirty years before Empire was made, the British filmmaker Nicholas Roeg made Walkabout (1971), a feature film that has become an ‘Australian’ classic. There are some stylistic similarities between the two films. In Walkabout, there are moments of parched brightness in the desert, passages of intense light and dark, scenes where the desert offers up hallucinations of past explorers riding camels across the sand, and imagery of deserted mines and abandoned housing that depict a strange, angular, inhospitable environment. At times the soundtrack mixes radio frequencies with the voices of absent people and the sound of ants scratching in the sand. The photography alternates between close-ups of lizards, snakes and ants in the bush, quick shots of a butcher at work in the city, and long sequences depicting the majestic vastness of the Australian bush. Though underpinned by this fragmented imagery, the film is not in itself fragmentary (unlike Riley’s Empire). Rather, there is a strong narrative which takes the disorientated characters through a series of spatial thresholds, often marked by blazing light and intense darkness – from city to desert to bush to farmland to an abandoned mine and, finally, to the bitumen road that leads back to the city.

Walkabout relies on binary symbols as it traces the journey of an English teenage girl and her younger brother lost in the Australian desert after their father shoots himself. The young Aboriginal man (played by David Gulpilil) who helps them find their way back to the bitumen road is depicted as ‘primitive’ – silent, ritualistic and dangerous. The Australian landscape is revealed as tormenting and harsh. During the film, the Aboriginal man makes advances to the girl. Rejected, he kills himself, echoing the death of the father at the beginning of the drama.

In comparison, Michael Riley’s Empire has no narrative. Rather than relying on binary opposites to paint a picture of Aboriginal Australia as the ‘other’, Riley’s film folds in and through references to colonisation, British values, Christian symbols, the Australian landscape and the Aboriginal relationship with ‘country’. Through Riley, the viewer ‘reads’ the Australian landscape with subtlety, tenderness, circumspection and ambivalence.

The reason why Riley was able to structure Empire in the way that he has is at least twofold. First, his training as a photographer meant that he had facility with both still and moving imagery. As such, he did not need to rely on narrative to tell a story, but could do so through iconic visual forms. Second, Riley’s freedom with editing was no doubt informed by changes in the moving image itself. The moving image has interpenetrated the worlds of art and popular culture. Once confined to the houses of cinema, moving images can be found in galleries, museums, and metro stations, on street screens, the Internet and mobile phones. As a result, the ways in which the moving image is treated by artists and filmmakers have also changed. For example, the advent of the multi-screen video installation has meant that parallel sequences are simultaneously screened. Narrative is thereby broken and, instead, meaning emerges from the recombinant poetic connections between the screens. Although it is a single channel film, Empire’s structure works in a similar way: it is composed of sequences that connect over other sequences. In the larger context, cinema and art are cohabitating. In Riley’s films/videos, they are equally at home with one another.

Watching I don’t wanna be a bludger is haunting for those of us who knew Michael Riley, because the image of him disabled in a wheelchair predicts his own failing health a few years later. Equally haunting is the film Poison (1991) which features a young Russell Page, whose untimely death in 2002 also rocked the visual and performing arts worlds. A gifted dancer, Russell Page performed with Bangarra Dance Theatre, and was at the opening of Australia’s pavilion at the 1997 Venice Biennale. His body was painted by the artist Judy Watson and he trailed through the streets of Venice much to the dismay of passing Venetians, tourists and the art cognoscenti. For them, he represented a completely unknown world – one where dance, art, belief, custom and landscape combine in the body of the performer.

The ‘poison’ referred to in the title of Riley’s film is not only the consequence of drug and alcohol abuse, but also the ways in which western society has failed Aboriginal people. Poison has no dialogue: the entire film relies on sound, movement and a shift between black and white and colour for meaning. The film oscillates between a high-key colour stage set, where Aboriginal men, women and children sit by a lagoon, in harmony and visual symmetry, and black-and-white sequences in a bar and its urban, gritty surrounds. The same characters occupy both places. There is a contrast between an atmosphere of celebration and joyousness in the Indigenous landscape, and the sense of loss, lack of control, and hopelessness in the urban environment. In this place of confusion and substance abuse, there is no guidance from the elders, no familial connections, no love, no belief. The Christian cross and Bible appear in momentary flashes throughout the film.

The relationship between the urban and desert worlds is complex. The Indigenous landscape simultaneously represents memories of the characters, dreams that they might have had, and fragments of a parallel life in the desert. At the end of the film, the two worlds become entangled as the main character, Raylene, stumbles through both the streets of the city, unaided, and through the desert, assisted by her friends. In the city environment, she arrives at a telephone booth in order to call her mother for help, but collapses and dies as the phone rings unanswered. Her slumped body encapsulates the tragedy of Aboriginal Australia. Yet the final scene of the film shows a presumably young Raylene embracing her mother on the edge of the lagoon. In this sequence, the Indigenous landscape takes on the form of an afterlife – there is redemption and hope.

Michael Riley forged a unique and independent Indigenous voice through his films and videos. These works are not only visually imaginative and captivating, they are also testaments to the turbulence and beauty of a contemporary Aboriginal Australia. They conjure a mixture of wonder, allure and comedy along with heartbreak, frustration and anger that, I hope, we all feel when faced with the triumphs and plights of Indigenous people in
this country.

Victoria Lynn