LARRY SCHWARTZ
HE FETCHES one of two steel-string guitars propped up against the wall and begins to strum a new song.
“Me and Harry walking down Three Waterholes Road,” Richard Frankland sings, “and he says, `don’t the moon cast an eerie type of glow?’
“I closed my eyes so he wouldn’t see the tears, threw my face up to southern skies …”
He sings of an imaginary conversation at the Condah Mission near Portland, with an uncle who was still in his late teens when he died in action on the beaches of Gona in Papua New Guinea in World War II.
The Melbourne film maker and singer-songwriter wonders what it might be like to meet Uncle Harry and walk alongside him, had he survived the war. “I guess I was putting him the position of an elder,” he says, “because he would be if he was here.”
Had he lived, Frankland muses, Uncle Harry would have observed this world with a strong sense of right and wrong. “He’d see those things.”
He cradles his prized Maton six-string in the dining area of his northern suburbs home and sings: “He said `poor man goes to court seeking justice under law’, He says I must be blind, `there ain’t no justice here at all’ …”
At 35, Richard Joseph Frankland has waited on tables at a Chinese restaurant, worked as a deckhand, laborer, steelcutter, clerk and more.The 1996 drama, No Way To Forget, based on his experiences as a field officer during the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. He had
explored the circumstances of one death in Who Killed Malcolm Smith? in 1992.
A personal and communal ethic that informs his work is apparent also in his latest film, an imaginative account of the wartime experience of his uncle, who volunteered for action despite harsh iniquities in Australia, decades before Aborigines were first granted citizenship.
Harry’s War has been nominated for best screenplay in a short film in this year’s AFI Awards.
With Ivan Sen’s Wind and Saturday Night, Sunday Morning by Rima Tamou, it is one of three new films by indigenous Australian film makers being screened together nationally as Crossing Tracks.
“I like those blokes,” Frankland says of Sen and Tamou. “They’re men of good integrity and I like being with them. I think it’s important that we stand together and have a voice.
“But I also like the fact that I’m an individual. I mean, there’s 500 different Aboriginal tribes. Some people I’ve been at war with for 40,000-plus years. And we’re going to have a different voice and a different genre and a different style … Just like Aboriginal music. There’s hundreds of genres.”
Frankland’s maternal grandfather, Chris Saunders, had fought in France during World War I. Harry was one of two brothers who served overseas in World War II. Uncle Reg was the first Aborigine commissioned in the Australian Army. He went on to command 300 men in the Korean War
in the 1950s and received a United States presidential citation for bravery.
Frankland was just six when his father died. He followed the example of his grandfather and uncles and joined the army in 1983. “I was an infantry soldier and I got sick of the racism and joined the military band and played flute,” he says.
He played saxophone and sang in a band called Interaction in the late 1980s before forming his own 10-piece band in 1989, calling it Djaambi, meaning “brother”. (His sister, Amy Saunders, later co-founded the band Tiddas, the word for “sister”). His solo debut album, Down Three
Waterholes Road, was released in 1997.
When he was a boy, his uncle Banjo called him Djaambi. He later learnt this had been Harry’s nickname.
The film centres around the close relationship between soldiers Harry (AFI award-winning actor, David Ngoombujarra) and Mitch (Peter Docker), based on a man called Alan Avery, who served with his uncle in the 2/14th battalion in PNG.
Early in the film, Mitch defends the right of Harry and another Aboriginal soldier, Thomas Green (Glenn Shea), to defy laws of the time and drink beer in an Australian pub. In the barracks, he ingenuously asks if black people also go to heaven when they die. (A priest has told him that black
people and animals have no souls).
Though Harry responds initially with anger, it doesn’t sour their relationship. “A lot of non-Aboriginals want to know about us,” Frankland says. “But they’re not game enough to ask for fear of offending; and sometimes when they ask, they do offend.
“I think when a couple of mates are going to go somewhere where they’re going to face death, then you can ask questions, and say, `What is the difference between us?’ In my opinion Uncle Harry and White Jaambi (Avery) reached a level of mateship that went beyond anything that I could
begin to understand.”
He spoke to Avery on the phone. But Harry’s friend died before he could ask him to relate his memories of the war. “This isn’t a completely accurate account. It’s my interpretation of what happened …”
Frankland’s mother, Christina Saunders, has a role in the film. She plays Harry’s (and her own) mother. He respects her courage. He was just a boy in the 1970s when she took Alcoa to the High Court and stopped it building an aluminium smelter on Gunditjmara land. Her example inspired
the film’s Maude Green (Kylie Benning), incensed that her husband, Thomas, should be prepared to go off to war and risk their lives for a country that offered no semblance of equality.
“Maude is the political, pivotal point in the film,” Frankland says. “I got sick of seeing koori women as victims and I thought of the things my mother did bringing us up under the assimilationist policies. I mean, when I was born I wasn’t a citizen. That’s had a profound effect on me.
“Mum, she brought us up and fought Alcoa and won and did all these amazing things as a single black woman …
“I remember stories that Auntie Iris told me and my nan, and I thought these were women of quiet dignity. They would speak out where it was strong to do so. And if it was hurting, they’d say.”
He’d heard about the exploits of his grandfather and uncles. “Being a former soldier myself, I kept hearing about this Uncle Harry … I tried to imagine a blackfella back then, a koori whose father had an amazing military history and whose older brother was overseas fighting. With no
citizenship and living on a mission and all the wrongs being done.”
He went to watch the 2/14th march on Anzac Day and approached some of the veterans to find out if they remembered his uncle. “I couldn’t believe how they held him in such high regard.”
There has been a strong response to Harry’s War from 2/14th veterans. “I’ve got all these letters from all these phenomenal people … He was their mate.”
“They would able to teach this Federal Government a lesson or two about what mateship is,” Frankland says. “I’d rather see the preamble for a constitution based on them. They took a cultural clash and they made it into a brotherhood. They become more than brothers in arms.”
Frankland has reappraised the past. “The true historians,” he says, “are not those who are paid by the government to write things down in history books. They’re the poets, the lyricists, film makers and so on.”
His vision is not bleak, even if the two primary Aboriginal characters, Harry Saunders and the fictional Thomas Green, die in action, and there is no pretence they would have enjoyed equality had they survived.
Harry’s War gives a fresh insight on the notion of mateship: he gives a vivid account of bonds in adversity that transcend the racial divide.
“I think Uncle Harry and his mate, White Djaambi, painted an incredible scene,” Frankland says. “I’m so honored to be in a position to tell their story.”
The Sunday Age, 19th of September 1999
Larry Schwartz Writer 