Larry Schwartz
* Richard Frankland, Aboriginal Artist
WHEN Richard Frankland was a boy, his grandfather taught him to lay eel traps and catch freshwater fish. He heard stories about “old magic people”and of an island called Denmaar where the spirit goes when you die.
“I believe there’ll be old people,”he says of the afterlife. “So when you die, your spirit goes to them. And it’s up to you if you can look them in the eye or not. They may invite you to the fire to sit down or they may not.”
The award-winning film maker and singer-songwriter is wary when asked about the beliefs of his people, the Gunditjmara of the Victorian western districts. “I feel a bit funny talking, with native title being a primary issue at the moment,”he says, “because all of our religion is basically under
scrutiny.”
Frankland was just six when his father died. “My father, who was a non-Aboriginal man, said to me: ‘Have a good sense of right and wrong’.” At 34, he still values that counsel. But from his mother’s side he has drawn much of his world view.
“Mama, my spirits flyin’,” he sings in a recent song. “And I am driftin’ away’/ My dreamin’s calling from so far away … In my dreamin’, we are free.”
His AFI-award-winning short No Way To Forget dealt with deaths in custody. He is acting executive officer of the Abbotsford-based Mirimbiak Native Title Unit. He measures his frustration with the Howard Government’s 10-point plan against a broad sweep of an indefinite Aboriginal
presence in Australia beside which white settlement is a brief moment.
“I guess the easiest way to describe it is to says that if we use non-Aborginal anthropological terms of say 60,000 years and we ask how big is 200 years, we know it’s not very big. So our indoctrination period to our law and our culture and our ways is 60,000 years and you can’t knock that
out overnight.”
Though he feels a special affinity with Portland and the Condah Mission, where his family lived, the connection with the past is “in everything”, Frankland says. “My family. The fact that we’ve survived. The stories from the land that Mum told. Her contemporaries’ stories. The sense of
belonging; of knowing that you are part of something that is far more powerful than I’ll ever realise.”
Frankland says that before speaking publicly on reconciliation, on film or in music, he pauses to “ask the old people to make sure I speak … for the right reasons”.
His people have a special regard for nature. “The earth is an organic being, you know what I mean? It’s a deity in itself. People don’t treat it like that.
“Life’s not a rehearsal. You have one chance and you should go for it as much as you possibly can. Love and give as much as you can. If I didn’t believe that, after investigating deaths in custody, it would be a harder lot for me.”
Frankland believes that there is “an incredible good in the Australian people. That might be what sustains me.” He’s proud to be a nephew of Captain Reg Saunders, who was decorated for bravery in the Korean War, in the 1950s, and was the first Aboriginel commissioned in the Australian
Army. “I consider myself and many other Aboriginal people as probably the most patriotic of Australians because of the simple fact of what they’ve done to us and how we still fight on to try to resolve the issue and still plant seeds for the future.”
He is confident that his tradition will endure. “My culture will live on forever.
It doesn’t matter if the last Gunditjmara person breathes his last breath, we will always be here.”
The Age, 18th of April 1998
Larry Schwartz Writer 