Bill Onus: Rediscovered Images Shine New Light on Revolutionary Life and Legacy | Movie

“Ongoing mythologies have arisen around Bill,” explains his grandson Tiriki Onus. Born 12 years after Bill’s death in 1968, Tiriki would “constantly be told as he grew up how much I looked like him”; an aunt even informed him approvingly that he had a “beak-shaped head.” Bass-baritone, Tiriki was chosen by Deborah Cheetham to play her grandfather in the 2010 opera, Pecan Summer.

Tiriki knew his grandfather was making films, but had no idea of ​​the depth and breadth. One day he was rummaging through an old suitcase in his mother’s basement, which contained photographs of Bill – some taken by Bill’s wife, Mary, who had married Bill against the wishes of his wealthy white family. One photo showed three Aboriginal boys in ceremonial painting looking at a 32mm Bell and Howell camera, on location in Heidelberg, Melbourne, in 1946.

Some time later, filmmaker Alec Morgan, known for the 1983 documentary Lousy Little Sixpence, called Tiriki to introduce himself and ask, “Did you know your grandfather was the first Indigenous filmmaker? Onus replied, “I know he filmed stuff, but all these films were burned, they were lost.”

Morgan replied, “I found this movie in the archives which I think belonged to Bill.”

While Bill Onus had appeared as an extra in Charles Chauvel’s Uncivilized of 1936 and Harry Watt’s The Overlanders a decade later (getting little credit for his role as cultural advisor to Watt), family tradition held that he had also made his own films, which were destroyed in a caravan fire in the late 1950s. Tiriki is not sure what the films contain, but there have been stories of him filming the debates in “Important meetings of Aboriginal activists along the east coast”.

Now here is a black and white silent film, rediscovered in a metal box at the National Film and Sound Archives, that an ancient archivist had simply marked “Aborigines in the community” – showing the same boys in the photos of the suitcase dancing around a gum tree and Bill throwing a boomerang, recalling his youth in a traveling show.

The story of this rediscovered, albeit untitled, nine-and-a-half-minute postwar footage – footage from a possibly longer documentary or newsreel – is told in the documentary Ablaze by Alec Morgan and Tiriki Onus, which will premiere at the Melbourne International Film Festival in August.

The rediscovered film also shows Tiriki’s Great Aunt Wynne and Great Uncle Eric performing in a dance drama titled White Justice in 1946 at the New Theater in Flinders Street, Melbourne, in which Aboriginal performers re-enacted Pilbara’s Strike of Hundreds. of aboriginal pastoral workers earlier. this year.

At one point, performing artists are chained to each other by the neck, something Bill Onus himself said he saw while filming The Overlanders in northern Australia in the same decade. . Other scenes were filmed in the terraces of the Fitzroy slums and on a Melbourne tram.

Tiriki Onus and Alec Morgan saw the strong political nature of Bill Onus cinema. It was clear that Bill wanted to present his film to a cinema audience, tell the story of the impoverished life of Indigenous Australians, and fight for equal rights. They learned that he even made a deal with a distribution company for a theatrical release.

“He was running stuff designed to work in a very specific way for the causes he fought for,” his grandson explains. “It wasn’t a hobby; it was a powerful tool in Bill’s arsenal.

The documentary postulates that political pressure was exerted on the film society to abandon the UN film, for which he likely recorded a voiceover narrative that is now lost. His activism and his 1947 marriage to Mary McLintock Kelly, whom he met at a Communist Party rally, caught the attention of Australian security agencies: Mary was a member of the party, but not the UN.

Later, when Onus wanted to travel to the United States to talk about the plight of Australian Aborigines as part of the burgeoning civil rights movement in the United States, his passport was suddenly canceled. It turned out that the Australian Security Intelligence Organization had turned over its surveillance file to the US Embassy.

“There is strong evidence of the cancellation of the passport and the steps taken to remove Bill,” Tiriki says. “This is one of the great gifts Asio gave us: they set some really good records… Bill has a big Asio book.”

The burden of proof has pursued the equality of Aboriginal people in other ways. In 1951, for example, he helped produce and starred in the hit Out of the Dark: an Aboriginal Moomba at the Princess Theater in Melbourne – an innovation for the use of Indigenous artists in an era of blackface. He established a shop in the Dandenong Ranges in which he sold boomerangs and other memorabilia, attracting visitors by demonstrating his boomerang skills.

But Onus was quickly brought back to town for one final campaign, lending his eldest status to the yes campaign for the 1967 referendum, at that time as the first Aboriginal president of the Aboriginal Advancement League, as well as his representative on the Aborigines of the Victorian era. Wellness advice. The burden of proof has lived to see 90.77% of Australians vote for the inclusion of indigenous peoples in the national census and to allow the federal government to enact laws that include indigenous peoples. He died of coronary occlusion in 1968, at the age of 61.

Can he definitely be called Australia’s first Aboriginal filmmaker?

“As it stands, yes, it looks like Bill is the first Aboriginal filmmaker,” says Tiriki Onus, who sings the Yorta Yorta Ngarra Burra Ferra language song while wearing an opossum skin. at the end of the documentary.

“But it doesn’t excite me or particularly interest me, the idea of [his] being the first. What really turns me on is the way [his legacy] has grown – the fact that now I am here like his grandson, 70 years later, able to tell his story, to continue in his footsteps.

“There’s something exciting about me being in a much larger company like that, being a grain of sand on the beach.”