Phillip Frazer

This year, Rolling Stone magazine is celebrating its 50th year on American newsstands. It’s also 45 years since I launched the Australian edition, still going strong.
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Back in 1967, I was publishing a pop-music tabloid called GoSet, selling 70,000 copies a week across Australia. America had no nationwide music paper until late that year when a uni dropout named Jann Wenner started Rolling Stone. Jann and his writers, designers, and photographers believed that, more than fun dancing music, rock n roll was an expression of an emerging youth culture that would change the world.

In 1970, I stayed for two weeks with Jann and his wife Janie in San Francisco, and apart from having fun we made a deal that I would publish an Australian edition, launching in January 1972. Working out of a group house in Glebe, a few mates and I coaxed the Aussie Stone toward sustainability then, in 1976 I sold the Australian franchise to a trio of Sydney gonzo publishers and moved myself to New York. 

My interests were in political, environmental, and cultural upheaval, all of which I was in favour of, so I kept up with Rolling Stone during my New York decades through occasional encounters with Wenner and by reading the infrequent outside-the-box political stories he published. 

On this 50th anniversary of Rolling Stone, these few major stories from the archives stay with me:
Tom Wolfe’s radical chic. When I arrived at the Wenners’ home in 1970, that night’s real dinner guest was Tom Wolfe, the writer of four books with long titles such as The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Jann and Tom talked about The Brotherhood of the Right Stuff, a story about American astronauts that Tom was writing for an upcoming issue of Stone, with photos by Annie Leibovitz on the biggest assignment of her nascent career. Wolfe’s stories, dubbed “New Journalism”, were rich in lively descriptions of characters, places, and cultures in motion, and major critics of media and literature loved that he inhabited the tripping brains of the heroes while containing them in a well-woven story. Given where we are now in terms of fact/fiction/faction, Tom might have been a mixed blessing to journalism.

Fear and Loathing. When we launched the Aussie Stone, Hunter S. Thompson, the chain-babbling trasher of all cultures, was cranking writing genre-bending up a notch with his epic reports on the 1972 US election and on convention events in Las Vegas. HST and his Samoan attorney (actually Mexican) famously travelled with suitcases of booze, pills and white powders, while attempting to unravel white racism toward Latinos. Thompson did a great job of trashing the suit-wearing, over-eating, know-nothing guys who run much of America, but his ferociously first-person reportage also may have inspired a million online ratbags. 

The reporter who died after killing the General’s career. In 2010 Michael Hastings, a 30-year-old freelance writer, spent time on the road with General Stanley McChrystal whom President Obama had put in charge of the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. McChrystal and his support crew let Hastings into diplomatic meetings, late-night booze-ups, and heavily armed visits to alienated Afghanis and disillusioned GIs. 

Hastings’ story for Rolling Stone faithfully reproduced the General’s no-bullshit repartee with everyone, making it stunningly clear that McChrystal and his fellow top brass were appallingly full of shit -- also ignorant, arrogant, crazy violent, and destined to fail at saving Afghanistan. 

After Obama read the article, he fired McChrystal and backed away from his “strategy” of having troops occupy villages to hunt down insurgents while uplifting the good citizens. 

US military and intelligence honchos don’t like being discredited by journalists (or black Harvard-educated Presidents), and they may have had a role in Hasting’s violent death in June 2013. Last month Wikileaks leaked documents on how the CIA can remotely control recent model cars. Hastings’ Mercedes hit a pole at full speed on a suburban street in LA at 4:25am.

Yes there is a theme in all this – it’s all about men behaving badly, sometimes the writers themselves. Jann always tilted his magazine strongly toward men as contributors, and readers (66% male). In a list of “50 notable current and former staff of Rolling Stone” on Wikipedia, there are only three women. One is a music journalist, one was publisher for seven years and is not well-remembered by the company, and the third is Sabrina Erdely, who wrote the notorious Stone investigative piece titled A Rape on Campus in 2014 which was subsequently adjudged profoundly flawed, costing Wenner Media millions of dollars in multiple defamation and libel cases (still ongoing).
I put Hastings’ revelations about just how crass the Masters of War really are at the top of Rolling Stones’ journalistic achievements. 
Me, I’m a little bit glad Wenner has published Stone for all those years -- and glad I didn’t.

Footnote: Jeune Pritchard interviews Phillip on ABCTV in January 1972, about the showdown with Rupert Murdoch’s Southdown Press over the launch of the Australian Stone -- HERE
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Phillip Frazer still inhabits the mid-Pacific miasma, but on most days he sees clearly now, from coorabellridge.com

George Biron has been a chef in some landmark restaurants that he has owned or worked for,  His Sunnybrae Farm near Birregurra was always a pleasure to visit as the farm style rooms and the freshly picked home grown food formed the basis of a wonderful culinary experience. 
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My introduction to the cooking of wild fungi began in the early eighties in London where ceps, chanterelles, morels and other wild fungi were quite commonplace on restaurant menus. A decade later when we opened our restaurant Sunnybrae near Birregurra I was privileged to employ a young chef Craig Creasy who had been introduced by another older French chef to wild edible fungi growing in Australian that are quite common in the forests in and around the Otway ranges in Victoria. So began a passion for foraging for wild edible fungi. 

The notion that we are still a largely a white Anglo-Australian fungi phobic community has changed remarkably in these three decades. I believe we are now, due to the enormous interest in food and cooking, a largely neophillic society actively seeking out the new and exotic food experiences. An extreme manifestation of this lust for the new in relation to edible fungi has even seen Cordyceps used on Masterchef! [season 7 episode 52] with virtually no background or explanation. FFS? I wonder if Coles was inundated for Cordyceps after that episode?  

As we were also a cooking school I began to host fungi foraging excursions and fungi cooking classes often with expert guides. I did this as much to expand my own knowledge as for the benefit of the others on the hunt. I bought as many books on the subject that I could find and began a study that still fascinates me now.  These trips ended with a meal made with our finds on the day.
Many farmers’ markets and seasonal restaurant menus abound in the sale and use of wild fungi but in Victoria it is mainly two common varieties Saffron Milk Caps, Slippery Jacks and their variants. In South Australia large flushes of Boletus edulis in recent years have also entered the trading mix and are being seen at Victorian and other interstate markets. I have also seen Wood Blewits, Horse mushrooms, morels and a few other varieties offered for sale in markets and used in restaurants.

 In the forest I often encounter people from European and Asian backgrounds and also young and older Australian foragers picking all sorts of other fungi that I would not consider edible that they are familiar with and were comfortable with and using in their cooking. And I don’t mean the trippers although they are all also there. While some of these hunter gatherers have solid experience I have also seen baskets full of mixed fungi picked and disturbed by amateurs just because they look “cool” 

 The more I learned about wild fungi, its relationship to the environment and the dangers of indiscriminate foraging the more careful I became. There seemed to be an endless public appetite to learn more about fungi and especially edible fungi but there were very few if any in depth courses run by experts that were available. Eventually I gave up hosting forays even though they became more and more popular. The last forays that I conducted had the most experienced guides I could find to minimise the risks. I eventually realised even though we were very clear in our warnings someone who had been on one of our forays could inadvertently make a mistake and suffer the consequences. I also began to fear that an inexperienced forager-chef could after one of our classes mistakenly use a dangerous mushroom on a restaurant menu with catastrophic results.  I realised that a short half day foray and cooking class was just not enough. 
The other day while having lunch at my local café in Kyneton my partner alerted me to an interesting wild fungi exchange going on at the back of the café. I wandered out the back and discretely inquired as to what the fungi being discussed was? The forager was trying to sell truffle like fungi to the cook. It looked like a type of Melanogaster? I did not know what it was. On further inspection the smooth exterior rang warning bells but to an untrained eye the cross-section could easily have been  mistaken for a black truffle which it was very clearly not. I gave my two bobs worth and suggested they do a bit more investigating before thinking about cooking with it. 

The interest in all wild foods is undeniably increasing as is the interest in sustainable living and I believe we have an opportunity to develop a series of courses run by academically trained and professionally experienced people to promote an ecologically sound guide to fungi foraging in Victoria. 

The bulk of wild fungi sold into food service comes from private foragers selling directly to restaurants or to larger aggregating provedores. Farmers’ markets also sell a lot of wild fungi that is often in less than optimum condition. I believe the managers of these organisations would embrace courses of this nature for themselves and their buyers. 

Commercial foragers who I have spoken with, who also have a professional attitude to this activity, are very keen to be able to gain more experience in this area to safeguard their clients and their livelihoods. I have also spoken to Matteo Pingnatelli the National President of the Restaurant and Caterers Association who is also keen to see such courses being made available to his members. 

 On the other hand, as a lot of this activity is taking place in the cash economy and there will be resistance from that quarter but I believe if such courses were available, provedores, executive chefs and Farmers’ market managers would only be too happy to buy from dealers who have been through such a course.  I am not suggesting compulsory accreditation but commercial foragers who have been through these courses would become the preferred provider leading to a growth of knowledge and would develop a deeper respect for the environment where they grow. Interest in these courses will also come from many private individuals who have a strong interest in cooking, ecology and conservation.  Rather than create a “gold rush” like culture that has developed in some parts of Europe and the United States Europe an ordered well conducted series of fungi education courses would be able to explain the ecology and special relationships that fungi have with the environment and confront the limited knowledge that we have about the edibility of native fungi. Out of such courses and the interaction created with people currently consuming “not documented as edible” fungi can only add to the growing wealth of knowledge that academic researchers are undertaking.

The confirmation of the edibility of wild fungi is a very complicated area of study but the provision of solid well researched and delivered courses to understand the subject and the limitations of current knowledge can only direct this fascination for wild foods in a positive direction. 

Bob Weis

It's funny how connections work. I had seen Rosie Jones' marvellous film "The Family" on Monday and told her I was going to write about it that night.  In fact I wanted to let it sink in while the various connections and reverberations kept coming so I decided I would do it after my usual Tuesday morning swim. On the way to my car from Il Fornaio after breakfast I ran into Rosie's partner, Peter Tapp, and commented that I had seen the film and how  much I liked it.  Then Robert and I drove off to get his car from Mary St. 

We were chatting and as I had done a thousand times before signalled my turn from Park St to Mary St at the roundabout and almost got through it when a deafening noise accompanied by the side air bags and a swerve of the car alerted us to the tram that had hit the car.  

I was in shock, I now realise, and pretty soon I was being led out of the car by Robert, my swimming partner, and told to sit on the ground and an ambulance was called as well as a tow truck.  Pretty soon there was a crowd with all of the above, the car stuck on the roundabout blocking trams in both directions and now three trams sitting there immobilised.  

Two policewomen from South Melbourne station attended and they couldn't have been nicer or more helpful.  The ambo paramedics got me into the ambulance and cleaned me up, I had some blood from cuts around the nose and under one eye and eventually Robert drove me to my doctor who I was due to see but was running late for now! She took me in straight away and did all the tests to make sure I had nothing broken and that I had no internal injuries or bruising.  Blood pressure and so on. Finally I got home and thought about writing this piece but then though better of it.

When I was watching the film it brought back to me something else. In the sixties I went to Monash University and in my second or third year met Cypra Helmer and friends of hers  As it turned out I had come across her brother Michael who was at Scotch College when I was at Caulfield Grammar and although I didn't know him well we did both belong to a wider friendship group.  My one abiding memory of Michael was him facing me as I bowled him out in a school cricket match and him refusing to walk after the umpire raised his finger.  No big deal. He was annoyed. Not out!!

Cypra was a tall willowy young woman who was high spirited and loved to chat and laugh and sing. I don't think she finished University and when I did I went to London to go to film school so it was probably the early seventies by the time we caught up again. She had a few musician boyfriends and I think also went to live in London for a while with one of these who it was said was physically abusive to her. In any case by the eighties we had drifted apart and she was becoming, by reports, more involved with drug taking and behaving erratically. The sixties lifestyle, sex, drugs and rock and roll, was embraced by most of us but some didn't see the onset of latent problems.

In 1988 I was shocked to hear that she had died after jumping from the top of the Trak building on Toorak Rd. She was naked and there was a note. She had been diagnosed as schizophrenic before this some time before this event but I hadn't heard about the involvement of The Family at this point.  I also don't know if it was a Family doctor who had made the diagnosis,

As is Jewish custom I went to the home of mourning that night which was Cypra's parent's home also In Toorak Rd.  The parents, Maurice and June were overcome with grief. Cypra's two brothers were studies in opposite reactions.  Her elder brother John said to me "what do you think happened?", and I was too shocked to answer only having heard the mental illness suicide version at that point. Michael on the other hand looked calm and smiled the beatific smile that was on display in Rosie's film where he was the only sect member who spoke positively about Anne Hamilton-Byrne. He said, "she's gone to a better place" and continued smiling while holding my look which must have been one of complete disbelief.

Rosie has crafted a feature length documentary that thriller or film noir style takes us through the setup of the cult that became known as The Family through reconstructions, interviews with both survivors and the two main policemen, Lex de Man and Peter Spence who led the task force and whose lives were changed and affected by the four year process and which still showed through years later both in the film and in the follow up Q&A at the Melbourne Film Festival following the screenings - of which there were four after the scheduled two had created more demand.

As it turned out I saw it at the Nova at a 1pm screening that was so full that the seat I had been removed for a wheelchair at a previous screening and so I saw the film from the discomfort of the stairs.  Anyway the film was so engrossing and disturbing I noticed the postural issues less than the horror story unfolding before me.

The end credits revealed two more connections.  I was on the Council of the national film school, AFTRS, and one of the two student reads on that council was Anna Grieve the Producer.  Anna showed then that she was and is very bright and had great values, and the film was beautifully shot by James Grant who I met when he was a tertiary student and then we worked together on Pure Shit which I produced and he was the camera assistant for.  Round and round.

Rosie came to directing from the cutting room and has made a number of films now.  The previous doc of hers that I saw was a chronicle of the community battle in St Kilda with developers and the Council against the Triangle development next to Luna Park, a battle which was ultimately successful and which saved the Palais and the site for community use.  The film was inspiring and as a long time resident of St Kilda it was a boost to my love of the place.  The film was The Triangle Wars and I recommend it too.

Bob Weis

I read Magda's book on my iPad and it is available from the iBook store.  I read it in the period over the past year or two of reading memoirs including Oliver Sacks, Jenny Diskin, Caro Baum and now this.
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Magda Szubanski was born 12 April 1961 in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. Her mother Margaret is Scottish-Irish and came from a poor family. Her father, Zbigniew Szubanski, came from a well-off Polish family and, as recorded in the Official Archives of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, was an assassin in a counter-intelligence branch of the Polish resistance movement in World War II. She attended high school at Siena College, Melbourne, and later studied fine arts and philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

In 1976, as a year 10 student, she captained a team on the television quiz It's Academic. - Wikipedia entry

What the Wiki entry for Magda doesn't say in as many words is that she is a multitalented individual with abilities across a number of disciplines that most of us don't possess or even come close to hoping to have.

Bob Weis

In my experience, and increasingly in that of many other Melburnians and travellers, it is the name of a complex, in the Burnley area, which includes a restaurant, gym and wellness centre and all the creation of a remarkable young woman, Emillie Hazell, 26.

​When you walk into the restaurant, Serotonin, you are greeted by any one of the staff and if you are lucky taken to a table. The first time I went I thought the staff were impossibly friendly and nice but over time I realised that it is genuine because the people who work there are proud of what they do and confident of their product, the food and the environment.

​The menu, in typical Emillie fashion, is not only by and large vegan it is also local, organic and complex. So no white flours, white sugars or processed foods. The food is tested in-house before ever being served to paying customers and Serotonin has scientific advisers who have an input to the final product.

Back in 1991 the “Iceman” was discovered in the snow high in the Alps on the Italian/Austrian border. His well preserved body was more than five thousand years old. Who was he? How did he live? What did he eat? What could he tell us? What could we learn from him? The world was quite excited, as was I.

It was crushingly disappointing, but unfortunately not surprising to learn two years later that he had been killed with an arrow in the back. How I had hoped he had died from natural causes, or fighting off a predator, or from experimenting with a food source; but alas, he was murdered. The oldest naturally preserved body in Europe was a victim of foul play at the hand of another human being.
 
It is generally accepted we ‘evolved’ from ancient ancestors to our modern form around 200,000 years ago and there is evidence of a skull from China believed to have been crushed by another human, that is almost that old. It seems we have been bashing each other to death for as long as we have been standing on two feet.

For me it begs the question ‘why’? Given the amazing brain we have developed we had the potential to be the greatest of creatures – a magnificence – a guiding and protective light for other creatures on the planet and perhaps beyond.

How and why has humanity failed to get even close to its potential is the question I am asking and readily confess I don’t have the answer? It is a question that has been asked before of course, but I haven’t seen an answer that has any real currency. I am not talking about individual magnificence, because many humans do rise above these limitations and there are plenty of self-help gurus urging us to discover our untapped potential, but they are dealing with individuals. Why, as a species have we failed?

Peter World wrote to me earlier this year - "I'm am studying a degree in Indigenous Studies through UniSA and am currently enrolled in a paper titled "Being and Belonging: Culture and Identity" under the guidance of Dr Rosie Roberts.
I have an assignment to select a TV series or film as a case study to answer the question, discuss connections between language, culture and identity.
I have chosen Women of the Sun as my case study."
I asked if I could publish his work on this site and what follows is his piece.

by Peter John Worland

Language is a fundamental part of personal and group identity and can provide information about a person’s nationality, culture, religion, age, gender, level of education, profession or socio-economic class. Drawing upon appropriate academic literature and using one or two TV series or films as case studies discuss the connections between language, culture and identity.

Introduction

This essay presents a case study of the historic, four-part Australian television dramaseries Women of the Sun as a way to discuss the connections between language, culture and identity. The 1981 series signals dramatic shifts for Indigenous voices, national television broadcasting and academics writing on Indigenous culture of the time, as well as presenting a historical perspective heretofore unheard or seen by a mass audience.

Widely acclaimed as ground-breaking television, screening a representation of colonisation in Australia from first contact to the present day (early 1980’s), Women of the Sun is a unique collaboration between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people for which
the experience of making continues to resonate today. It has the authenticity of Aboriginal voice and a rich Indigenous philosophy that emanates authority, wisdom, truth and power. Twenty-five years later a followup documentary shifted the Women of the Sun narrative on from it’s original, historical basis to deeper conversations around how the series came to be, consolidating the series it to it’s current position as a highly respected exemplar of Indigenous knowledge transmission, relational responsibility and interconnectivity.
Throughout this essay I acknowledge the diversity of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ of modern-day Australia and respectfully use language-group and traditional names of people and places where possible. In the making of movies we have to consider not just the narrative in the production, the storyline, but the narratives about production, what "we" think we are doing. (Muecke 1994, p. 5)

Inheriting Stories

​Women of the Sun was the inspiration of Yorta Yorta/ Wurundjeri woman Hyllus Maris who returned to Australia in the late 1970’s after studying social policy and community development with sociologist Richard Hauser, in London (FNAWN 2017). Maris was a visionary leader following in the footsteps of her Elders to fight for Aboriginal rights, to walk off the Aboriginal reserve of Cummeragunja and to realise her own dream of building the first independent Aboriginal school in Victoria, Worawa (eagle in Aboriginal language)
College, which opened in 1983 (Dept. Premier and Cabinet 2014). As Huggins (2005, p. 1) states, “Maris’ achievements were all about using relationships between people to improve communities for everyone” and the five-year collaboration with television writer Sonia Borg on Women of the Sun was no exception. McCallum (2009, p. 266), writing about theatre in the late 70’s and early 80’s, recounts that the era heralded “stories focused on communities and individuals who had previously been the Other in Australian drama which challenged ideas about identity and culture” and “opened up new conceptions… about multiculturalism.” This was the environment into which the Women of the Sun scripts arrived on the commissioning editor’s desk at the newly formed public broadcaster SBS
and into the hands of television producer Bob Weis who, although never having met an Aboriginal person, committed to making the series as a matter of personal and national importance.

Speaking of Others

In his 2006 documentary Women of the Sun - 25 Years Later, Weis shared that his natural empathy toward the Aboriginal people of Australia was akin to the pain he felt for his own family who experienced persecution in the Holocaust of World War II. It was this sense of connection, responsibility and justice that propelled him to bring the history of colonisation, and it’s continuation in Australia, to public attention by producing Women of the Sun (Weis et al., 2006). From an Indigenous standpoint there are risks in such cross-cultural
representations of Aboriginality, and, as Muecke (1994, p. 2) points out, can be “whitefella obsessions - romantic love of difference, the exotic, the mobilisation of knowledge, liberationist politics, [or] guilt trips”, particularly when being intersubjectively negotiated in
collaborative, creative pursuits such as television.

Goldman (2000, p. 9) adds that “we are all participants in historical and contemporary colonial clashes, falling into one or more of the categories: survivors, perpetrators, and bystanders [and] no person who is resident in Australia can claim ignorance or neutrality in
this struggle.” With both Women of the Sun productions Weis did not shy away from his intersubjectivity instead proceeding with “a dialogue situation in which both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people participate in a mutual construction of identities (Langton in Muecke 1994, p. 3)” and heeded Langton’s advice that “[Whitefellas] should analyse their comings and goings around Aboriginal communities (Langton in Muecke 1994, p. 3)”.

The Sources of Knowledge

In 1985 Nancy Peck filmed interviews with Hyllus Maris and her mother Mrs Geraldine Briggs for the Victorian Women’s Film Unit production, Return to Cummeragunja. The interviews reflect the deep connection between generations of Aboriginal women and
illustrate the lived experiences contained in the storylines of Women of the Sun. Within two lifetimes we hear first-hand accounts of when fluent Wemba Wemba and Yorta Yorta language was heard, when Aboriginal people answered the prayers of and fed starving
missionaries, when Briggs stood up against the tyranny of mission-station matrons and when together they walked off Cummeragunja Mission Station in a sign of defiance and autonomy (Peck 1985).

The frequency of references by both women to their ancestors and ancestors’ ancestors are presented in a process akin to Martin’s (2003) Indigenous Ways of Knowing, Being and Doing. It becomes apparent that the narratives of Women of the Sun come from the ground-up, from what Maris (1985) describes as a “spiritual culture… [that] can never be broken down, as it’s part of the land.” This example of Aboriginal identity-creation stands in stark contrast to what Goldman (2000, p. 6) describes as the desire for many Anglo-Australians to “try and forget the past, or easily gloss over [it], so as to get on with the future.” Indeed McAuley’s (2006, p. 289) book of academic essays called Unstable Ground illustrates too that there was a priority for intellectuals to remedy the colonial past and reach a ‘conciliation’ between “Anglo mainstream and the Aboriginal minority… to achieve… [a] kind of social order that all can comfortably live with.”


Timing and Politics

​Although the Australian socio-cultural environment of the early 1980’s was hostile to marginal voices “timing, as well as a political and broadcasting climate… played a part in the production of the original [Women of the Sun] series (Kalina 2006).” The formation of
Australia’s second, non-commercial television broadcaster SBS (Special Broadcasting Service) early that decade was the result of 30 years of post-war immigration policy and the next multicultural step in answering the high proportion of middle-class, Australian
voters from non-English speaking countries (Smaill, 2002, p. 396). Apart from screening foreign language programs SBS also purchased and commissioned content from independent producers, pushing it to the “forefront of social, cultural and aesthetic transformations (O’Regan 1989, p. 13).” It seems ironic that multiculturalism, in replacing the failed assimilation, should also provide a screen-home for Australia’s First Peoples and awaken White Australia to Aboriginal history with Women of the Sun.

​Bob Weis (2006) recalls SBS’s founding manager Bruce Gyngell, with Maris’ and Borgs’ finished scripts in hand, being asked by a senate committee hearing ‘what are you doing about Aboriginal Australia?’ and replying 'I just got these scripts that I'm going to do’ (Kalina 2006). Couple this uncanny timing with a recent merging of talent between feature-film and television production creatives, and Women of the Sun acquired a vanguard status “becoming an important sign that innovative, cultural and socially important work was being done in TV (O’Regan 1989, p. 15).” Apart from being the first time an Aboriginal language had been heard on mainstream television Langton (Weis et al., 2006) says the series was way ahead of it’s time, before historians, anthropologists and sociologists confirmed the
veracity of Aboriginal accounts of Australian history, and the series sparked a nationwide discussion (see Appendix B).

Against Cultural Hegemony

According to Smaill (2002, p. 394) public broadcasting in Australia shares the principles formed by John Reith for the BBC, to provide equality of access and education, making it a place where viewers can measure themselves against national narratives. Even in
multicultural Australia the “prevalent mode of identification has functioned… to foster a sense of unity and oneness (Smaill 2002, p. 394).” Maddison (2012, pp. 701 - 703) adds that “both settler and immigrant Australians derive pleasure in feeling that as a nation we
share the values of equality and ‘mateship’”, connected via television in the comfort of our own living rooms.

Australian commercial television in the 1980’s reflected the attitude of the times, “greed was good” (Television.au 2017), and produced a host of Anglo-Australian, saturated shows including A Country Practice (1981), Sons and Daughters (1982), Neighbours (1985) and
Home and Away (1988) that reinforced a “narrow citizenship and… left the nation as a whole ill-equipped to deal with contemporary diversity (Maddison 2012, p. 701).” Even though Women of the Sun was first broadcast in this cultural setting it’s impact suggests
the mainstream audience was ready to move from what Hall (in Longhurst et al., 2008) calls a ‘dominant-hegemonic’ reading to a ‘negotiated’ one. As Kalina (2006) points out Women of the Sun’s “accounts of the stolen generation, of the dispossession of Aboriginal
homelands, of challenges to white Australia's laws and customs… put the untold history of Indigenous Australia on the agenda.”​

A Negotiated Representation

As the work of historians, anthropologists, linguists and cultural scientists now attest the veracity of Women of the Sun’s screen content is bonafide but also a negotiated representation. Episode 1, Alinta - The Flame depicts first contact between the ‘Nyari' people and the shipwrecked convicts and early settlers from Great Britain. For producer Bob Weis there was no argument about making the film in Aboriginal language (Weis et al., 2006) and, despite the concerns of the Yolngu community portraying the original inhabitants, the men and women wore traditional dress meaning partial, if not shameful, nudity. Twenty-five years after playing the character of ‘Alinta’, Nakalyan of the Yolngu people shared that “she is still being taught culture by her Elders” and lamented that “Yolngu and Balanda (Yolngu language for white man) laws are on their own” not knowing if they will ever come together (Weis et al., 2006). The making of Episode 1. on the coast of Princetown, Victoria, traditional Gadubanud country, was viewed by the visiting Yolngu tribe as a respectful reenactment of the Gadubanud people’s survival and was portrayed in memory of their ancestors and on behalf of their surviving relatives (Weis et al., 2006). Non-Indigenous farmer Matt Bowker recalls, as a nine year old, the cast and crew of Women of the Sun coming to Princetown and staying at his parents camp Kangaroobie, and the significance of the Episode’s narrative relative to his own family story (Bundle
2014).

Bowker (Bundle 2014) shares that the Aboriginal midden sites on the property where the episode had been filmed have been scientifically dated to thousands of years eclipsing his own family’s 150 year connection to the site, a similar realisation of Goldman’s (2000, p.
167) that he is more deeply connected to the struggle and history of Indigenous Australians than he had previously thought.

The Uses of Language

Actress Justine Saunders shares that she was encouraged to follow her own instincts as a black woman when portraying the character ‘Nerida’ in Episode 3. of Women of the Sun and to let the words of the script tell their own story, as “honesty was so important” (Weis
et al., 2006). As mentioned previously one of the greatest achievements of the series was the respect for and listening too other voices which also highlights the centrality of language in the formation of group culture and individual identity. When convicts ‘McNab’
and ‘Findlay’ are washed up on the lands of the ‘Nyari’ people, in Episode 1., they are given Aboriginal names, translating as ‘Man of the Sea’ and ‘Hair of Fire’, their presence explained in Aboriginal terms as being ‘displaced from their people… lost’. Unable to
speak ‘Nyari' language they are dependent on the goodwill of their hosts for nourishment and safety, and quickly learn that without a shared understanding their lives are imperilled. Language is centre-stage again in Episode 2. with the insistence by church missionary
'Mrs McPhee’, played by Julia Blake, that English is the only language to be spoken on the mission, the rationale being that it is the language of the Lord, the result however being cultural genocide; control the language and you control the people. Later in the year of
1890, the time setting of Episode 3., the Aboriginal people interned on ‘Koomalah Aboriginal Reserve’ turned the colonisers’ language against them petitioning the government for Indigenous rights with a command of English. Today, language is still the
site of contestation over sovereignty on the international stage (Berson 2009, p. 43).

Towards the Culture of Sharing

As actress Eva Johnson (nee. Birrit) who played ‘Alice Wilson’ in Episode 4. recounts, it was the viewing of Women of the Sun that led nurses on the ward of her dying mother to initiate a turbulent, real-life, mother-daughter reunion, a not uncommon story for Aboriginal
peoples of the stolen generations (Weis et al., 2006).

Johnson’s lived experience of that event, as recorded in Women of the Sun - 25 Years Later, is well-equal to the emotional impact of the analogous, fictional drama in which she plays, and ironically she “was afraid of not taking the opportunity to do the film on behalf of
the women who did have their children taken from them (Weis et al., 2006).” The connections that Women of the Sun made between history, people and place was not lost on Weis and extended to the male and non-Aboriginal directors of the series (McNiven
2017) acutely illustrated by a photograph of director Geoffrey Nottage and Johnson in ATOM's (Australian Teachers of Media) study-guide (see appendix A). The photograph illustrates a knowledge-relationship resonant with the character ‘Findlay’ and the ‘Nyari’
people of Episode 1.; Nottage captured with all the intensity of a non-Indigenous, first-time viewer of cultural practice and Johnson poised with Indigenous percipience. Despite the cross-cultural learnings of the past, Indigenous women still struggle to pave the way for the
next generation as Lisa Flanagan describes of playing the first Indigenous female character in Home and Away in 28 years of the show’s history (Rawsthorne & Byrnes 2016), a decade and 473 episodes of which were also directed by Nottage, without female
Indigenous representation (IMDb 2017).

Conclusion

The words of ‘Doug Cutler’ warning his daughter ‘Lo-Arna’ against contacting her Aboriginal birth-mother, in Episode 4., “why… the highest jail rate, terrible social problems, drink, the lot”, could well be the language used tomorrow by Australia's media to describe
Aboriginal culture, some 35 years hence. As Hyllus Maris and her mother Mrs Geraldine Briggs illustrate we inherit stories over generations, stories in the Indigenous sense that need telling and retelling to maintain culture and connection with the past, to guide our
future. The cultural abyss between the world’s oldest peoples, Aboriginal Australians, and the world’s most invasive coloniser, Great Britain, is bound to confound personal identity, contest language and blur cultural boundaries, but as Women of the Sun illustrates,
connection, understanding and shared histories are possible if not crucial for everyone’s wellbeing. As Bob Weis’ personal journey of longing and belonging and Eva Johnson's family reunion both attest, reconnection with the past is rarely pain-free, but more often
than not the resulting clarity of purpose and place (identity) outweighs the mediated, hegemonic culture which numbs our humanity.

In today’s contexts of reconciliation, treaty and sovereignty Women of the Sun continues to question how we relate to each other through language, how we propagate our culture on and off the screen and how we view ourselves, reflected and through each other, to form
our identities, in the endless process of becoming.

ABT17: Being and Belonging: Studies in Culture and Identity, University of South Australia - Lecturer Dr. Rosie Roberts

Appendix 
Women of the Sun - Broadcast Dates (SBS - Channel 0/28)
Episode 1. Alinta - The Flame, first broadcast - 5th July 1982
Episode 2. Maydina - The Shadow, first broadcast - 12th July 1982
Episode 3. Nerida Anderson, first broadcast - 19th July 1982
Episode 4. Lo-Arna, first broadcast - 26th July 1982

Awards
1982 United Nations Association of Australia Media Peace Prize
1983 AWGIE (Australian Writers’ Guild) Outstanding Script of the Year
1983 AWGIE Best Original Writing for Television
1983 Grand Prix - Banff Television Festival
1983 Penguin Awards x 5 - Television Society of Australia

References
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www.imdb.com/name/nm0636616/

Kalina P, 2006, Return to women of the sun, The Age - Green Guide, 3rd August 2006.
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