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When The War Is Over - Season 1 Episode 5 -
Australian Wars
Australian Wars
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00:00Growing up in Bayside, Melbourne, I was taught a history by riding my bike and
00:09playing in parks, just like this one, that were absolutely littered with
00:14monuments. Public artworks that mostly honoured the dead. Most of the monuments
00:22around here are memorials to the wars of the 20th century. Wars we fought overseas.
00:28But I was taught nothing about the bravery and resistance of the wars that
00:34took place on Australian soil. Indigenous men and women who were fighting for kin
00:39and for country. And I would have been hard-pressed to find a single monument
00:45across this whole landscape that marked the violence that happened here after
00:49the Europeans' arrival. Because for my generation and that of my mother's, it was
00:54as if the Australian wars hadn't happened at all. So what I want to discover is
01:01whether art can help us better understand the Australian wars, especially the
01:08Aboriginal resistance that's rarely discussed.
01:15I'm Rachel Griffiths and I believe that when it comes to understanding war,
01:22art is our secret weapon.
01:26So in this series, I'm putting this theory to the test, one war and one artwork at a time.
01:34Because while journalists tell us what happened. They left in scenes that are now part of
01:40television's history.
01:41It's our performance.
01:43When the song was released, it was banned.
01:45Yeah.
01:46Filmmakers.
01:48Peter Weaver.
01:49Writers.
01:51The narrow road to the deep north.
01:53Artists.
01:54I was the only one not carrying a weapon.
01:56And musicians.
01:57If it's too risky to say, sing it.
02:00Who help us make sense of it.
02:03Holy sh...
02:04This is incredible.
02:06Art's not just there to be pretty and admired.
02:11Art is the magnifying glass and the mirror.
02:15This was a pub rock song that changed our lives.
02:17That's what art can do.
02:19This is when the war is over.
02:24I'll never forget seeing this extraordinary work for the first time.
02:47It blew my mind.
02:50This was the first work that I saw where I recognised that art for First Nations artists
02:58was being used as a weapon.
03:03Blowing the viewer away, drawing them in with their incredible picture making.
03:09Bennett's work references a 19th century drawing of one of the countless wars that erupted across
03:17the Aboriginal countries that made up this continent before Europeans arrived.
03:23Together, these wars are the longest conflict in our nation's history.
03:28Claiming an estimated 100,000 Aboriginal lives.
03:33Almost the same number of Australian lives lost in all our overseas wars combined.
03:39This painting and the work of Gordon Bennett's and the people that were inspired by him.
03:48I mean, that completely changed my understanding of the country I live in.
03:55It's more than just depicting the violence that took place here.
03:58It's recognising that Aboriginal nations actively fought back.
04:03And one of these resistance stories has recently been brought out of the shadows by an artist.
04:10My name is Windra Dine.
04:25I am a radgerine.
04:28You may not know my face or my history.
04:33I was born on the plains before the white man come.
04:39With his cattle and his sheep, horses and guns.
04:45Acclaimed Goombangia and Bundjalung country music star, Troy Cassadaly,
04:51has been inspired by a little-known resistance fighter from Wiradjuri country.
04:56This is not my country, Rachel.
04:59But I've been coming through here for years, like, you know, on tour,
05:03making music for people.
05:05And it was only a few years ago I discovered a name
05:10which was tattooed on the back of my cousin's shoulders.
05:14And I said to my cousin, I said,
05:16Who's, um, who's Windra Dine?
05:19Or Windra Dine?
05:20I said, I didn't even know how to say it.
05:22And he said,
05:23Well, he was a great warrior from the Bathurst region.
05:27He was a staunch freedom fighter.
05:30I said, I'm a little bit ashamed that I actually don't know his name,
05:33don't know much about him.
05:34So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after seeing that tattoo.
05:38And that brought me here to Yarn to You.
05:41Windra Dine was just one of the freedom warriors who led the resistance.
05:48But he didn't just fight back against the colonists in his Wiradjuri country.
05:54He also tried to reconcile with them.
05:57And I think the thing that really drew me to him
06:00was that there was a story of someone that was not only staunch,
06:05but he was also a political man.
06:09He could actually negotiate as well.
06:12You know, he walked all the way from Bathurst to Parramatta.
06:14And he said,
06:15I'm just letting you know that I'm still here.
06:18We're still resisting,
06:20but we also want to try and find some middle ground.
06:24Yeah.
06:25So he was, he was also a negotiator.
06:31How did you come up with the kind of shape of the song?
06:35Cause it could have been a lament.
06:37Well, he was a strong enough character for people around here to document him deeply.
06:42And when people offer up a reward, you know, of 500 acres of land,
06:49if you can catch him, you know, he's a real deal.
06:53And so I thought he just, he deserved something that was strong.
06:56So I tried to walk in his footsteps.
06:58I want to go back and deliver the song to Windradine.
07:05And so my dream was to go to his grave and play it for him.
07:10Troy wrote Windradine in 2024,
07:13but artists have been depicting the resistance since the Australian wars began almost 250 years ago.
07:20And some of it is on display in a major exhibition.
07:25You have people who think Aboriginal art is just dot, dot painting, right?
07:30They know almost nothing about the great diversity of the Aboriginal art movements.
07:35Professor Marcia Langton is best known as a leading voice for Aboriginal rights.
07:41She's also an expert in anthropology, cultures and art.
07:48This is a complex exhibition.
07:50And one thing that we're doing is going to the artworks of Aboriginal artists from the actual frontiers.
08:00made during the colonial invasion, made during the wars.
08:11One of the most moving items is a sketchbook by an 18-year-old Aboriginal boy from Queensland during the 1880s.
08:19Oscar's 40 pages of drawings were found accidentally almost a century later at the National Museum of Australia,
08:28when staff came across a cardboard box.
08:32Buried at the bottom was an old exercise book labelled Drawn by Oscar.
08:38It is an incredibly important document because it is one of our first people telling us through his own eyes
08:50what he witnessed on his country and how it affected his life.
08:55You can see here what he's depicting the native mounted police.
08:59They're shooting and they killed wantonly.
09:03So you're talking about Aboriginal men who were used by the British to suppress Aboriginal resistance?
09:10Yes, this is common across the frontiers.
09:14They operated for several decades in Queensland.
09:17It was the most murderous.
09:19They had the highest body count.
09:21A new estimate puts the death toll at 60,000 Aboriginal people murdered in Queensland alone.
09:28The evidence of it is in the art.
09:32Look at this.
09:33They're murdering a mother and child here.
09:35Oh my God.
09:38Imagine being an 18-year-old and having seen these horrors,
09:42and then drawing this extraordinary notebook full of sketches of what he saw.
09:49He saw the killings.
09:53The striking thing is, is that even in the middle of the Australian wars,
09:58even in the middle of invasion, even while their land was being taken from them,
10:03people kept making art.
10:05Growing up, I didn't see stories of First Nations people.
10:16Why was this not visible?
10:19Well, that's the great act of dehumanisation that colonialism brings.
10:26So throughout all of the confected histories of Australia, the school textbooks, and the art history,
10:36until very late in the 20th century, you have these great absences.
10:42Where are the memorials to our deed?
10:45Only at Mile Creek, where the descendants have created a memorial, and in a few other places.
10:52We're human too.
10:55The massacres Marcia is referring to were not isolated bursts of violence.
11:00They were part of a series of wars fought across the continent.
11:05But the British refused to declare a formal war, because that would have meant recognising Aboriginal sovereignty.
11:13And it's art that now shines a spotlight on the Aboriginal people who fought back.
11:20This is by contemporary artist, Marlene Gilson, to depict this first hanging outside the old Melbourne jail, just up the road here.
11:33In 1842, two Palawa men from Tasmania were the first people to be publicly executed in Victoria.
11:43Having grown up in the shadow of Tasmania's Black Wars, they were sentenced to death for the murder of two whalers.
11:58But their side of the story was never heard by the courts.
12:03And 5,000, a quarter of the population of Naam, turned out to witness the hanging.
12:09The judge made the point at the trial that this decision was to incite terror.
12:27Incite terror.
12:29Incite terror.
12:30Incite terror.
12:31Incite terror.
12:32Incite terror.
12:33Incite terror.
12:34Incite terror.
12:35Incite terror.
12:36Incite terror.
12:37Incite terror.
12:38Incite terror.
12:39Incite terror.
12:40Incite terror.
12:41Incite terror.
12:42Incite terror.
12:43Incite terror.
12:44Incite terror.
12:45Incite terror.
12:46Incite terror.
12:47Incite terror.
12:48Incite terror.
12:49Incite terror.
12:50Incite terror.
12:51Incite terror.
12:52Incite terror.
12:53Incite terror.
12:54Incite terror.
12:55Incite terror.
12:56Incite terror.
12:57Incite terror.
12:58kind of monument, right on the spot where Tanaminaway and Mubohina were executed.
13:05I just find the traditional Western monument incredibly violent. I mean they are war objects like cannons,
13:14people in uniform, where this is more for the people around community. It's more of an intrigue,
13:21a very different way of commemorating.
13:24I would walk past it thinking it was a swing. Obviously that is also how we draw the gallows.
13:31Yeah. And then behind that, others might be drawn in to go, what's in those boxes?
13:45There's some images that draw from newspapers of the time. I mean in here, you have this text.
13:51And I'll just read some of it. One of the whalers who was still alive, when the blacks came up,
13:56begged them to kill him, as he could not survive, and that it served him right,
14:00for he had killed many blacks.
14:03That's from the time.
14:06That's from the time.
14:08In other newspapers, it was reported that this hanging was intended to send a clear message to Aboriginal people.
14:15That their resistance would be met with the full force of British law.
14:23In front of thousands, Tanaminaway and Mubohina hung for one hour.
14:28Before they were buried in unmarked graves under what is now Queen Victoria Market.
14:37I grew up coming here to do my weekly shop and had no idea that the market was built on an old cemetery.
14:45And right under this car park to this day are thousands and thousands of graves.
14:52And I just wonder how different my understanding of our own history would be.
14:58If on the way in there to get the fish and carrots, I had to pass a monument to these two men.
15:05Then I might have realised earlier that the Australian wars didn't just take place in remote parts of the country.
15:17Our cities were also battlegrounds.
15:21Because for newly arrived colonists, this was the frontier.
15:27This really is the site of the frontier wars.
15:30It's not indigenous people coming to this country, to someone else's land, which has its own law, its own way of living, its own language.
15:39And the kind of murders that happened here.
15:42So we just wanted to kind of create a narrative where people could come and sit and commemorate, but can also learn.
15:48Like Brooke and Troy, the current generation of First Nations artists use art not only as a celebration of culture,
16:01but also as a tool of resistance.
16:07For them, the battlefield is not in the past, it's in the present.
16:12Here in the 1820s, there was a war.
16:14We're going to give our last word to Maine White, so to you, Maine.
16:21And it's for the hearts and minds of every Australian.
16:26I'm always going to be a black friend, aren't I?
16:29That's all anybody ever sees.
16:31I'm never just an actor, I'm always an indigenous actor.
16:34Hey, I love reppin', but I don't hear old Joe Bloggs over here being called white Anglo-Saxon actor, blah-de-blah.
16:38Maine White's monologue from his 2019 play went viral.
16:43Being black and successful comes at a cost.
16:45You take a hit whether you like it or not, because you want your blacks quiet and humble.
16:49It racked up more than 3 million views and put him onto Time magazine's list of emerging leaders in 2021.
16:56How did you come to perform it that night and just capture the national conversation?
17:09So I'd written City of Gold. I performed it in 2019.
17:14The play is based on my life and my experience of growing up in Kalgoorlie.
17:17But I wanted to ask you something.
17:19Sure, what is it? Coorda?
17:21You know that's an indigenous word from WA, it means mate.
17:24Yeah, Coorda.
17:26That week it was Black Lives Matter, it was 2020.
17:28They wanted to talk about how that movement internationally had now recontextualised that in Australia.
17:36I think that week I saw a lot of Aboriginal people online say,
17:41if you're going to go and talk about black lives or Aboriginal lives, you're going to have to bring it.
17:47I was nervous, I think, because I could feel the weight of everything that day, that whole moment.
17:55I just went as hard as I could possibly go.
17:58Sometimes I just want to be seen for my talent, not my skin colour, not my race.
18:02I hate being a token, a box to tick, part of some diversity angle.
18:06Oh, what are you whinging for? You're not a real one anyway.
18:08You're only part. Well what part then? My foot? My arm? My leg?
18:13If one was to judge the effectiveness on opening a conversation, it went viral.
18:20I was overwhelmed with the response that was so positive that the negative was outweighed.
18:26People were saying things like, I never thought about it like that.
18:29I think people want to hear the truth, and when you give them the truth, it's undeniable.
18:34You know, it used to be that, in your face, you bong, you black dog coon kind of shit.
18:40Gonna chase you down the ditch with my baseball bat skinhead shit when I was 14 years old.
18:44But nah, we come forward, we're progressive, we're gonna give you that small subtle shit.
18:49What's the power then that art has? What is it about the performer that can cut through?
18:54It's showing something that is fiction to show the truth, and I think that's an artist's duty and an artist's responsibility.
19:04I think as Indigenous people, we have an oral history, an oral way of teaching, and I think performance is one of our ways that we do that.
19:13There's this line in the monologue, silence is violence. Here we are a few years later, deaths in custody, the voice didn't work, that moment of resistance.
19:31How important are artists in that fight?
19:37He's the messenger. It's showing the mirror to the audience.
19:41Unfortunately, a lot of things that I say, or an artist today says, it's still the same story, it's just got different coating, different coat of paint.
19:50And I think that Australia hasn't rectified that conversation, and you just have to continue telling that story and holding up that reflection.
20:13It's foggy. It's gonna be a beautiful day.
20:15Storytelling is really a big part of my life. I come from a lot of old uncles and aunties that are great storytellers.
20:24And all I've really done is taken that skill and added music to it.
20:30Troy's dream is to sing his new song for the first time at Wintradine's grave.
20:37The Wiradjuri warrior is buried on this station near Bathurst.
20:45So we do this in honor of our land, and our law, and our ancestors.
20:51And we ask Creator to keep you strong in mind, body, spirit.
20:58Put that on for a little while.
21:01Pass cold.
21:02Oh, down.
21:06Oh, that's beautiful.
21:07This is a special campfire with Uncle Bill, a descendant of Wintradine, and Dave Sutter, a descendant of the station owner who offered a safe haven to the Wiradjuri warrior.
21:23So this is kind of mind-blowing because we've got two descendants of this extraordinary story.
21:31So how did your ancestor meet and become friends with this warrior?
21:37My family's history with the Wiradjuri in this area is probably a bit different to a lot of others in the sense that my great-great-great-grandfather George was a humanitarian, and his view was that, well, you know, everyone has to get on.
21:52So he brought that same ethos over here when they came over the mountains and instilled that in his son.
21:58So William's a 17-year-old man left in Bathurst to look after the sheep and stuff that they'd brought over the mountains.
22:05So he was under specific instructions from his father to make friends with the local Aboriginals.
22:11So luckily he met Wintradine.
22:12And he learnt language.
22:13He learnt language.
22:14Like, I doubt that he was fluent in it, but he could obviously, you know, communicate.
22:18Communicate.
22:19Yeah.
22:20So he would have learnt words and stuff like that.
22:22So they had a friendship.
22:24It's an important thing to understand his story, first of all, your family's story, but also the fact that coexistence can happen.
22:34Yeah.
22:35And that's one thing that I think was really inspiring for me when I started writing the song was that not only was he a staunch,
22:41warrior, but he was also a diplomat.
22:44So when the, you know, I heard the song and that, you know, it was, like I said, it made me heart go and, you know, made me feel really proud.
22:52So tell me about how important art is in terms of our reconciling that history.
23:02Well, the three forms of art, dance, art and song, is how our stories are all passed on down.
23:10So even today we've got all the different mediums of how we tell stories through, through movies and television and everything else.
23:19You know, so a lot of our people can do those things because acting was actually part of the dance, what you did.
23:25Oh, I never thought of that.
23:27Right? So because when you dance, you're mimicking, you're telling a story about an animal.
23:32So you're mimicking that animal.
23:34Yeah, right.
23:35And that's all part of acting.
23:37There's a, there is a power to tell a truth to people who don't necessarily want to hear it, that I feel that art does.
23:47You're totally right. Buddy Guy, the old blues artist said, if it's too risky to say, sing it.
23:56And I have to say, I reckon I might have almost manifested today in my heart.
24:01Yeah.
24:02Because I was very, very heavy with sorry business last year, and I was broken.
24:07And to be able to deliver this song back was a little part of my healing to this area, to Wiradjuri people.
24:14And to people in Bathurst, because we love everyone as family when we go through.
24:19And then my full circle moment today will be to deliver this song back to that man over there.
24:25And if I can do that, then that means that my, my journey with the song is complete.
24:32And so all I need to do now is grab the ganjo.
24:36Let's do it.
24:49And just like every story, this one has an end.
25:05Without all the glory bestowed on other men.
25:10Well, they increased the reward to try and change my luck.
25:16But my people who fought with me, they never gave me up.
25:23My name is Windredine, they call me Saturday.
25:29Come Sunday I'll be gone, in the bush I melt away.
25:34I fought for my people, on this country where I lay.
25:39My name is Windredine, remember me that way.
25:44My name is Windredine, remember me that way.
26:01It's arrived.
26:02Yeah.
26:03Finally.
26:05Global.
26:08Meeting the descendants of Windredine and William Sutter, is a powerful reminder that these stories live on in the bloodlines of this country.
26:16Thanks, Troy.
26:17thanks joy thank you fantastic honestly just amazing amazing to be able to come
26:25back here thanks this entire journey has reaffirmed for me the power of art art
26:35isn't just an expression of culture it's an act of resistance exposing truths
26:42that official histories and public memorials have tried to erase and that art of resistance
26:49continues proudly to this day I'm gonna be what you want me to be I want to be what I want to be
26:57never trade your authenticity what the artists are doing is honoring the ancestors and saying
27:03these people are human beings they rehumanizing them and they're bringing them out of the dark
27:09corners you've got a responsibility as an artist to continue that fire go and collect the wood
27:16that's the songwriting and then you got to keep it burning for the next generation I don't want to
27:23be quiet I don't want to be humble I don't want to sit down
27:39you
27:42you
27:46you
27:50you
27:52you
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