First Nations Australians

Bran Nue Dae

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Broome

The gorgeous colours of Broome

You could hardly get two more different films than Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah and Rachel Perkins’ Bran Nue Dae. Both are directed by indigenous Australians and both address indigenous Australian issues but, wow, how differently they do it. While Samson and Delilah is spare and almost without dialogue, Bran Nue Dae is exuberant and highly verbal. Of course it is, it’s a musical set in 1969.

There’s nothing I would rather be
Than to be an Aborigine
and watch you take my precious land away.

You have to see it to fully appreciate the contrast between the joyful (in fact cliched-musical-style) presentation of this song and the sting in its tail. Bran Nue Dae started life as a set of songs written by indigenous Australian musicians about growing up in Broome in the 1960s. Some time later, these musically eclectic songs were transformed into a musical that was a hit at the Festival of Perth in 1990. Rachel Perkins has apparently long wanted to adapt it for film. I have not seen the original play and so cannot comment on how the film compares with the original. Others can do that if they wish: I’m not always convinced that it is a worthwhile exercise to compare originals and their adaptations. Judge each work on its own terms is, I think, a better policy.

Briefly, the plot. Willy’s devout mother has scrimped and saved so he can go to boarding school in Perth and train to be a priest, but Willy (newcomer Rocky McKenzie) has met a girl (Jessica Mauboy), in his hometown of Broome, and is not so sure that priesthood is what he wants. Following conflict with the school’s priest (Geoffrey Rush), he heads back home from Perth, more or less under the wing of newly met Uncle Tadpole (Ernie Sigley). They obtain a ride with a hippie couple (Missy Higgins and Tom Budge), and the rest as they say is …. The encouraging thing about the film is that it celebrates our similarities (this is, after all, a coming-of-age story) while at the same time recognising significant differences (specifically the cultural dislocation experienced by indigenous people).

Comedy always seems to me to be a little tricky to review. There is such a fine line between being funny and being cringe-making. This film has the odd awkward or cringe-making moment – it verges on vaudeville and has its share of stereotypical if not downright cliched scenes. But these moments are few – and in fact they are, I’m sure, self-consciously there. Perkins wants us to make the connections between traditional musical comedy and her movie so that we can see its subversiveness – and it is subtly (or not so subtly) subversive. I found it genuinely funny – but with enough satire and moments of pathos (such as the references to deaths in custody) – that I got the message as well.

This film is at the other end of the black-white dialogue in Australia from Samson and Delilah. It is also starkly different from Rachel Perkins’ other musical (but definitely not comedy) film, One night the moon, which deals tragically with the refusal to engage in dialogue. It too is a spare film. These are both great must-see films, but it is also good to see humour being used in this important but mostly oh-so earnestly explored area.

And so, if you like to have a laugh – but with a little bite in it – go see Bran Nue Dae.

Top non-fiction of 2009

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Is it cheating to do separate lists for fiction and non-fiction? Some people list their top books regardless of form or genre, while others created separate lists. I’m going to do the latter because – well, because I get to choose more books for a start. Actually, I didn’t read a lot of non-fiction this year so my top non-fiction titles will almost be all the non-fiction I read. As with my top fiction, I am listing them in the order I read them.

I didn’t nominate a top fiction for the year, but I’m going to here – and it is the one I read before I started blogging: Chloe Hooper’s The tall man and so I’ll do a little mini-review of it now.

Chloe Hooper’s The tall man

In a nutshell the book, which is best described as “true crime”,  chronicles the fallout that results from the death in custody on Palm Island of indigenous man Cameron Doomadgee, fallout which includes the autopsy report and ensuing riots, and the homicide trial of policeman Chris Hurley. Hooper explores the awful disconnect between people in the communities involved, between white and black, and within the white and black communities. She shows how women (particularly those on Palm Island) are caught in the middle. They believed the policeman killed Doomadgee but, when the riot occurred, they didn’t want the police gone because “who will protect us from the men”.

Throughout the book, Hooper manages to bring what is a very complex situation into rather clear focus…showing, not surprisingly, that in the end it’s the whites who have the power. For example, she attends a police rally organised to support Hurley and notes how they, the police, were fashioning themselves as victim. She comments that “measured against two hundred years of dispossession and abuse, the idea is fantastic, but no-one in that hall was thinking about historical relativities”! This point regarding “historical relativities” is well-made: this is not simply a case of white devil versus black angel, but we know where the real “victimhood” lies. The book also touches on the notion of power corrupting – or, questions at least how police officers are chosen and trained in the first place.

Hooper manages to walk a fine line. You know where her sympathies lie (particularly as the book progresses and she teases out the evidence) but she takes an analytical approach encouraging her readers to also do so. This begs comparison with Helen Garner who takes a far more heart-on-sleeve approach to her subjects in her books, The first stone and Joe Cinque’s consolation.

Finally, she makes an important point when she describes Hurley’s trial as “a false battleground”. Truth and justice – those universal concerns – do need to come out, but the trial is not going to solve the underlying problems. The tall man is a highly readable book about some significant concerns (for Australia at least)…and, in my mind, well deserves the awards it has won. I have only one quibble with it: I wish it had an index!

POSTSCRIPT: Thea Astley also dealt with troubles on Palm Island in her novel The multiple effects of rainshadow. It deals with the event which occurred on Palm Island in 1930 when the supervisor at the time ran amok and killed his children, something which Hooper refers to in the book when she provides a little rundown of Palm Island’s history.

Chloe Hooper
The tall man: Death and life on Palm Island
Camberwell: Penguin Books, 2008
276pp.
ISBN: 9780241015377

The magnificent River Red Gums

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River Red Gum

River Red Gum, Valley of the Winds Walk, Kata-Tjuta

River Red Gums, or Eucalyptus Camaldulensis, are among our most ubiquitous of gum trees, but that doesn’t mean they’re a boring tree. As their name implies they grow along watercourses – including ones that are very very dry such as those you find in Central Australia. They are also a significant part of what makes the Murray River such a gorgeous old river. Apparently, though, they are not found in Tasmania.

One of the well-known places to see these gums is the beautiful Barmah Forest of the Murray-Darling Basin. It boasts trees that are over 500 years old. Sadly, though, there are concerns that due to the extended drought that area has been experiencing, many trees are threatened, if not already dying. I’ve been to this forest and it is a treasure – it would be tragic to lose it.

Being ubiquitous – and beautiful – they feature regularly in Australian arts (in poetry, song, fiction, and art). Of course, they feature in Murray Bail’s captivating novella Eucalyptus:

River Red Gum

Warty River Red Gum, Jessie Gap, East MacDonnells

Over time the River Red Gum (e. camaldulensis) has become barnacled with legends… there’s always a bulky Red Gum here or somewhere else in the wide world, muscling into the eye, as it were: and by following the course of rivers in our particular continent they don’t merely imprint their fuzzy shape but actually worm their way greenly into the mind, giving some hope against the collective crow-croaking dryness. And if that’s not enough the massive individual squatness of these trees, ancient, stained and warty, has a grandfatherly aspect; that is, a long life of incidents, seasons, stories.

River Red Gum

River Red Gum, Bond Gap, West MacDonnell Range

Too many poets to mention have written about this gum. I thought I’d choose just two. First is David Campbell, who addresses the threat to their continuation. Here are some lines from his poem “The Last Red Gum”:

So we stand, me and my brothers, just the bones of ancient trees
that have lined the riverbank since time began.
In a bare and barren landscape, fed by red dust on the breeze,
we’ve been ravaged by the careless hand of man.

Second is Lisa Bellear, an indigenous poet who, in her poem “Beautiful Yuroke Red River Gum”, uses the Gum to symbolise the post-colonial history of Aboriginal Australians. The poem starts:

Sometimes the red river gums
rustled
in the beginning of colonisation
when
Wurundjeri
Bunnerong
and other Kulin nations
sang and danced
and
laughed
aloud

Not too long and there are
fewer red river gums, the
Yarra Tribe’s blood
becomes
the river’s rich red clay

If this isn’t poignant enough, the poem concludes with:

Red river gums are replaced
by plane trees from England
and still
the survivors
watch.

What more can I say?

Price Warung, Tales of the early days

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Tales of the early days (Cover: Courtesy Sydney University Press)

Tales of the early days (Cover: Courtesy Sydney University Press)

Okay, I admit it, I have convict ancestors (plural even!). Consequently, I was particularly interested to read Price Warung’s 1894 collection of short stories, Tales of the early days, when I discovered it was part of the Australian Classics Library recently published by the Sydney University Press. My convicts include John Warby who, with another labourer, stole two donkeys and was transported to Australia on the Pitt in 1791, and Sarah Bentley who stole several items of clothing from her mistress in 1795 and was transported on the Indispensable. In 1796, John married the 16-year old Sarah. Fortunately (for me and for them), they were a hardworking pair. John had been given land by Governor Phillip in 1792, and he and Sarah made a good life for themselves, so much so that there is now a primary school named after him, the John Warby Public School in the Campbelltown area west of Sydney.

Enough about my family, though. What about Price Warung? He was, in fact, William Astley, and was born in Liverpool, England, in 1855 but came to Australia with his family in 1859. He became, according to the succinct little biography at the back of the book, a radical journalist and short-story writer, with particular interests in transportation (or, convict) literature, and the Labour and Federation movements.

Now to Tales of the early days. This was his second published collection, and comprises 8 stories set in Norfolk Island, Hobart, Sydney and London. They explore various aspects of convict life, and many draw on real people and events. In fact, my city’s new (and first) prison is named after the penal reformer/prison commandant, Alexander Maconochie, who features in the first two stories. The eight stories are worth listing for their titles, most of which convey a strong sense of personality:

  • Captain Maconochie’s ‘Bounty for Crime’
  • The Secret Society of the Ring
  • In the Granary
  • Parson Ford’s Confessional
  • The Heart-Breaking of Anstey’s Bess
  • The Amour of Constable Crake
  • The Pegging-Out of Overseer Franke
  • At Burford’s Panorama

These stories can be described as “historical fiction”. In a new introduction to this collection, Laurie Hergenham quotes Thomas Keneally, who has written a deal of historical fiction. Keneally says:

the novelist need not prove his reliability to scholars … the only warrant a writer needs for his ideas about the past is that they reek of human, poetic, dramatic, symbolic veracity and resound in his imagination.

Like many writers of historical fiction, Warung draws on documentary fact. He writes largely in the social realism style that was typical of the nineteenth century. A strong theme runs through the book, and it can be best described by quoting Robert Burns’ “man’s inhumanity to man”. Warung’s particular argument is that this inhumanity is worse in the “System” (aka The Establishment) than in the convicts.  As one of the convicts says in the longest and, generally regarded to be, the best story, “The Secret Society of the Ring”:

Th’ System finds orl its orf’cers men, an’ leaves ’em orl brutes. Orl o’ we don’t get ‘ardened, but there ain’t one o yer wot doesn’t.

And so Warung, with his own apparently anti-British sentiment in the lead up to Federation (and Australia’s independence), perpetuates the myth that the convicts were poor souls turned bad by the System: “the beast-nature with which the System had superseded that granted unto him by his Creator”. It is true, if you read the histories, that some (many?) convicts were victims of poverty in Britain and were transported for comparatively minor offences, but there were also many who were violent, serial offenders. It is also true, though, that the treatment of convicts in Australia was, overall, very harsh – particularly in the secondary penal establishments like Norfolk Island and Hobart (at nearby Port Arthur). It’s not for nothing that Warung, with the fire clearly in his belly, chooses these as the settings for most of his stories of horror.

The first story, “Captain Maconcochie’s Bounty of Crime” serves as a useful introduction to the longest and most complex in the book, “The Secret Society of the Ring”. It introduces us to Maconochie and his desire to improve “the monstrous conditions of penal life at Norfolk Island” but, we are told, the System does not want him to succeed because his failure would mean “that the System was right and its administrators were wise”. And so, the cynicism (or is it simply realism?) starts:

Therefore the failure was only to be expected. Men do not care about being proved wrong, even if it could be shown that a few dozen souls were saved in the process of correction.

This truth, as Warung conceives it  and which encompasses related truths relating to the behaviour of men in power, is played out again and again in the stories that follow – but it is no more ironically conveyed than in “The Secret Society of the Ring” in which the Ring, which is the convicts’ own “system”, turns out to be every bit as cruel and inflexible as the System that controls them. Maconochie’s attempt to appeal to convicts’ (“society’s wrecks”) sense of fraternity and loyalty to each other – and along the way provide them with a more comfortable prison life – is undermined by the loyalty demanded of the Ring. This is a devastating story – and the most sophisticated in the collection in terms of style and structure.

The third story, “In the granary”, is no less devastating, and turns on the irony of a granary, designed by “a genial officer”, being put to far from genial purposes. This story has an interesting, given Warung’s own work as a journalist, discussion of the power of newspapers. “Parson Ford’s Confessional” is the only one of the collection that doesn’t focus on convicts. Rather it explores corruption among those in power just, I suppose, to make sure we know that this corruption does not only occur in relation to convicts. The next three stories chronicle events in the life of a particular character: Anstey’s Bess, a convict woman whose maternal love nearly brings her down; Constable Crake whose lust does bring him down; and Overseer Franke, the ironically nick-named Cherub who selects the architect of his downfall (but the triumph here is rather Pyrrhic). The final story is set in London and nicely shows us what those “at home” were seeing of the colony while also providing a final opportunity for corruption and power to again ensure that the downtrodden remain that way. (It is also the only story to refer to the Aboriginal people of Australia – and the reference is surely ironic when he describes the “Savage King” Bennelong’s recognition of “the new era of civilisation”!)

Warung’s style is not subtle – he uses irony heavily, foreshadowing, symbolism, some wordplay, the occasional repetition and understatement, and authorial intrusion – and he can over-explain at times, not trusting always that the reader gets it. It would be a very dull reader, though, who didn’t! The tales are, it has to be said, pretty black and white. The System is demonstrated again and again to be corrupt and cruel, with no attempt made to explore the privations those in power also suffered. That said, the stories are powerful and, despite their lack of “balance”, convey enough truths to make reading them worthwhile for both their narratives and the messages underpinning them. It is good to see them brought to life again.

(Review copy supplied by Sydney University Press)

Craig Silvey, Jasper Jones (Review)

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Jasper Jones cover (Courtesy Allen & Unwin)

Jasper Jones cover (Courtesy Allen & Unwin)

What is is about coming-of-age novels? Why do we like to read them long after we’ve (hopefully) come of age ourselves? Is it because we like to compare our own experience with that of others? Whatever the reason, it is clear that we do like to read them because they sure keep being written and published. In my few months of blogging I have already written about two, and have now read another, Craig Silvey’s Jasper Jones.

Like many, though not all, such novels, Jasper Jones has a first person narrator. It is set in a small country town in Western Australia in the late 1960s, and the protagonist, Charlie, is the nearly 14-year-old son of a high school literature teacher. He is a reader and therefore, almost by definition in the world of teenage boys, not “cool”. The book opens with the town’s bad-boy, Jasper Jones, knocking on his window in the middle of the night and, to Charlie’s surprise and delight, asking him for his help. The plot revolves around the shocking help that Jasper wants, how Charlie responds and the impact on him, his friends and family.

It is  a pretty dark and gritty story, and Silvey, mostly, controls it well, though there are times when he pushes the melodrama button a little too heavily. Silvey teases us at the beginning with the notion that the book will be a re-setting of Harper Lee’s To kill a mockingbird. There’s a death, an indigenous person likely to be blamed for it, a much maligned apparently “mad” person,  an apparently thoughtful and wise father AND Charlie’s own regular reference to the book and to how Atticus Finch might think in particular situations. However, fortunately I think, Silvey is a little more sophisticated a writer than that and Harper Lee’s book functions more as a frame for the story and the ideas being explored than as a direct model for the plot.

One of the things I like in the novel is the friendship between Charlie and his Vietnamese refugee school-mate, Jeffrey Lu. I’m not a teenage boy but I have known some in my time! The dialogue between the two boys rings pretty true – their puns, their ribbing of each other, their jokey arguments. True too is their uneven burgeoning interest in the opposite sex – Charlie is attracted to classmate Eliza Wishart  and to enjoying some “sassytime” with her, while Jeffrey’s focus is on making the town cricket team.

The novel is neatly plotted – and while some of it is predictable it is not all so. The fact that Charlie fears insects seems to be resolved when we discover that his love-interest Eliza has a similar fear – but it reappears again, cleverly, in the denouement. The story is well-paced, and it deals with a range of side issues, such as racism (against the Vietnamese refugee family, and the “half-caste” Jasper Jones), on top of the usual coming-of-age ones, such as loss of innocence (in several meanings of the word). Many of the characters could be seen as stereotyped – the “bastard” cricket coach who aligns himself with the “boorish” bully boys, and the cold-hearted status-seeking shire president, to name two – but most of them work despite this. Charlie’s mother though stretches the imagination a little too much: she has married down, she has been forced to live in a country town too small for her, and she has lost a child. This does seem a bit of overkill and the panning out of her part of the story feels a bit like one too many layers in the book.

One of the concepts that Charlie explores is that of “timing and chance”. He learns that despite your best laid plans, time and chance sometimes take over and there’s not much you can do about it. Another issue that runs through the book is that of reading, words and language. Early on Jasper Jones tells Charlie he trusts him because:

But I hope you might see things from my end. That’s what you do, right?  When you’re reading. You’re seeing what it’s like for other people.

With this coming near the beginning of the book, it’s not surprising that Charlie’s ability to empathise, to see things from other points of view, is pushed to the limits as the story progresses. Charlie, whose ambition is to be a writer, also learns about the limits of words, about when they are useful and when they are not, and about finding the right ones to use when they are.

There are many thematic and stylistic things that can be talked about in this book, making it a good one for discussion but, in the end, it is a fairly traditional coming-of-age story in its style, tone and structure. That said, if you like such stories, as I do, there’s a good chance you’ll find this a compelling and entertaining even if not a particularly challenging read. And is there anything wrong with that?

Craig Silvey
Jasper Jones
Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009
368pp.
ISBN: 9781741757743

Australian Battle Cry, circa 1941

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Dame Mary Gilmore, 1948 (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia)

Dame Mary Gilmore, 1948 (Presumed Public Domain, from the State Library of NSW, via Wikipedia)

Somehow I would not have thought of socialism and patriotism being combined in the same person but, logically I suppose, there’s no real reason why they shouldn’t be. And it does appear they were combined in Dame Mary Gilmore, a famous Australian poet and journalist who was also well-known as a socialist.

How do I know? Well, today in my reading of The ABC Weekly (issue of 22 February 1941), I came across the words and music for a song titled “Australian Battle Cry”. I’m not sure what the copyright situation is for reproducing a song, but I’m going to take a risk and quote the lyrics in full – anything less (and you will soon see why) would seem rather ridiculous:

We’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders,
Sons of the Boomerangland !
We’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders, we’re the Boomeranglanders,
We fight for the Boomerangland !
Boomerang, Boomerang, Boomerang*, Boomerang!

(* Pause for effect – as per instructions on the score).

The music was set by Madame (I suppose if you’re not a Dame, Madame will do!) Evelyn Grieg.

Now, the introductory notes to this, Australia’s first, “national battle cry”, calls it “a deep-throated and rousing theme calculated to stir a nation to action in war and effort in peace”. It goes on to say that Gilmore based it on an “Aboriginal corroboree cry” she heard as a child in 1872 in central New South Wales. These notes also inform the ABC Weekly’s readers that copies of the words and music have been sent to “our fighting forces in Africa and Palestine” and have been published in The Education Gazette so that schools can use it “to rally the rising generation in Australia”.

And so now I bring it to you. Consider yourselves (well, the Aussies among you anyhow) rallied!

Aboriginal women – sacred and profane

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A regular column in The ABC Weekly, about which I have blogged a couple of times in recent days, was written by Australian writer Vance Palmer. I have only read one novel by Palmer – The passage – and have been feeling recently that I’d like to read it again partly, but not only, because Vance and his wife Nettie were significant players – and mentors – in Australia’s literary scene of the 1930s-50s. Anyhow, back to the topic in hand … Palmer’s column is basically a weekly book review column and on 4 May 1940 the book was anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry’s published thesis, Aboriginal women: Sacred and profane (1939).

Waterhole in the Kimberleys

Waterhole in the Kimberleys

Now, while I did fancy myself a bit of an anthropologist  for a time in the early 1970s when my university anthropological studies excited and challenged me, I don’t pretend to be anywhere near across the subject now. I won’t therefore go into great detail about this work – or its anthropological ramifications. I will say though that it was groundbreaking in its time as, based on her research in the Kimberleys, Kaberry argued that there was not a clear division in Aboriginal society, as proposed apparently by Durkheim, in which men focussed on the sacred and women on the profane. She argued that women had their own sacred ceremonies and, further, that women’s role in their society was not inferior to men’s but complementary.

This is interesting and was of course moreso in its time, but it is not what I most liked about Palmer’s review. What I liked was the fact that he saw Kaberry’s work as making a significant contribution to our understanding of indigenous society. He says that it is not necessarily an easy book to read, particularly as parts of it can be technical, but that it is an important one. He concludes the review with

But knowledge once gathered, gradually sinks into the general mind, and it is necessary that we should understand the pattern of living involved by the people we are displacing on this soil, both for our own good and theirs.

That was in 1940. How well do you reckon we have done since then?

Kath Walker aka Oodgeroo Noonuccal

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I fell in love with Kath Walker, as she was known then, in my teens and bought her book of poems, My people. I loved her passion for her people and the intensity but accessibility of her poems. Every now and then I look at them again. Today, however, my mum gave me a dear little illustrated book produced by the National Library of Australia called Little book of dogs. It contains a small selection of Australian poems on, well, dogs. One of them was also in My people, and is called “Freedom”. It’s a powerful little poem about man’s (and the implication is white man’s) desire to tame “all things wild and tameless”.

Brumbies on the run in Central Australia

Brumbies on the run in Central Australia

For copyright reasons I don’t believe I can quote the whole poem – it only has four verses – but here is the first verse:

Brumby on the wild plain
All men out to break you,
My warm fellow-feeling
Hopes they never take you!

Simple stuff really but, if you have a message you must get across to as many people as possible, simple is sometimes best.

Some thoughts from Centralia

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With daughter and dog minding the fort, Mr Gums and I headed out last weekend to Central Australia where we are spending ten or so days escaping the wintry south.

It is an interesting place to visit, geologically, botanically and culturally; it is where we urban Aussies come across more indigenous people than we usually do in our daily lives. This rather makes us (re)think. Is it shame or is it guilt? Whatever it is, I feel a little sad wandering through Alice Springs and noticing the number of local indigenous people who seem to be at loose ends. It seems unreasonable that I, the newcomer, should be living a comfortable life while they, whose land it is, live a displaced life. Alice Springs is the setting of the central part of the recent Aussie film Samson and Delilah, about which I posted a couple of months ago. The Todd River, over which we drive a few times each day, is where Samson and Delilah “live” when they come to Alice after escaping the brutality of their own community. It’s not a pretty story. Alice, we are told – and we can see – is being “cleaned up”. In recent years, Dry Town Legislation has been enacted which applies strict controls on the sale of alcohol to white and black customers. And a couple of years ago there was the infamous “Intervention” instituted by the previous conservative government which rather ham-fistedly tried to “fix” violence and dysfunction in indigenous communities. Our tour guide on a day tour we did told us that these things have made Alice Springs a “quieter” place BUT the question is whether it has just pushed the real problem of displacement and dysfunction underground or is actually resulting in a better life for our indigenous compatriots? I don’t know. All I know is that I feel a little guilty and a little helpless. Should I buy some artwork from a street hawker? Or are there better ways we can help? What is better? Helping personally on the street, or impersonally through a “reputable” indigenous organisation? The problem is everyone has a different answer, including indigenous people themselves…more later.

A day of gritty viewing

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I went to two films today: Mary and Max this afternoon and Samson and Delilah this evening. Hmmm…both films are named for their two main characters. What an interesting coincidence. Both films are also slow-paced aiming, I think, to give a sense of “real time” but, while Mary and Max is a highly verbal film, Samson and Delilah is almost silent. Both are powerful though.

The claymation Mary and Max is Adam Elliot’s first feature. If a film could be called an epistolary film then this would be it, as the film is primarily about the penfriend relationship between Mary in Australia and Max in New York, and much of the story is carried through their letters and voice-over narration. At the start of the film, Mary is 8 and living in a rather dysfunctional family, and Max is 48 and living alone. Max, it also becomes clear, has Aspberger Syndrome. The thing, though, that draws them together is that both are lonely and want a friend. Mary and Max’s individual lives are beautifully realised – exaggerated and yet real at the same time – in gorgeous claymation detail. The music – including Elena Kats-Chernin’s rather eerie Russian Rag (introducing Max’s life in New York) and Pink Martini’s jangling Que sera sera (at Mary’s crisis point) – is perfectly chosen to convey the darkness behind the comedy. While the film makes you laugh, it is not a cheery film – and yet, it is also strangely affirming. Its point at the end is that we are all imperfect but that if  we accept our own flaws and tolerate/forgive the flaws in others we can have meaningful relationships.

Samson and Delilah is another thing altogether. It is an amazingly sustained movie in which little is said and in which both a lot and at the same time very little happens. It is set in a tiny indigenous community in central Australia and tells the story of two teenagers and the relationship that develops between them in an atmosphere of dislocation and cultural breakdown. When circumstances result in Samson and Delilah hitting the road together, things go downhill rapidly as they struggle to survive in a town (Alice Springs?) unfriendly to those who appear to have nothing. The film covers a lot of ground including petrol sniffing, homelessness, violence, and exploitation of Aboriginal artists. While it has some light touches at the beginning, it is pretty unremittingly bleak: it is hard to retain dignity when you are given little respect and have nothing meaningful to do. Interestingly, the message seems to be that women are the strong(er) ones, and that they are (might be) the key to the future. But the film’s resolution is a qualified one – you do not leave this film thinking all is, or even will in the near future be, well.