In the light of the disgraceful behaviour by stupid fucking white fellers during Welcome to Country at recent ANZAC Day dawn services, it appears the attitude to First Nations people hasn’t changed much in the last hundred years.
Unfortunately, these malignant mind sets make the actions of some characters in Warwick Thornton’s latest film, WOLFRAM, utterly contemporary.
Written by Steven McGregor and David Tranter, WOLFRAM is set on the colonial frontier of the 1930s, in the same universe as Thornton’s multi-award-winning Sweet Country, and follows two swaggering outlaws, the bad and the ugly, who roll into a mining town, their cruelty shattering a fragile community and driving three irrepressible kids to break free from their white masters and set off across the Australian outback in search of their mother.
The title sounds like a horror film, and it is in a very real sense a horror film full of murder, displacement and discrimination. The title doesn’t come from the myth of lycanthropy but from the wolfram (tungsten) mines where Aboriginal child labourers confronted colonial brutality and injustice.
It’s genre is the Western, and WOLFRAM has cinematic tones – over and under – of There Will Be Blood and the television series, Kung Fu.
Directed and shot by Warwick Thornton, WOLFRAM captures the terrible beauty of the Central Australian Outback, a backdrop of indelible landscapes and a forefront of frontier injustice.
The performances are real and robust from an ensemble that includes Deborah Mailman, John Howard, Erroll Shand, Joe Bird, Thomas M Wright, Matt Nable and Pedrea Jackson.
Fly blown and snake bit, born of bloodshed and disaster, WOLFRAM is a story of fight and surrender, subservience surmounted, survival secured and in a world – then and now- where no place is not perilous, the bonds of love are stronger than the chains of hate.
Resilience against racism, the good against the bad and the ugly. Welcome to country. Lest we forget.
