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00:00Growing up in Bayside, Melbourne, I was taught a history by riding my bike and playing in parks
00:15just like this one that were absolutely littered with monuments. Public artworks that mostly
00:24honoured the dead. Most of the monuments around here are memorials to the wars of
00:30the 20th century. Wars we fought overseas. But I was taught nothing about the bravery
00:37and resistance of the wars that took place on Australian soil. Indigenous men
00:42and women who were fighting for kin and for country. And I would have been hard
00:47pressed to find a single monument across this whole landscape that marked the
00:52violence that happened here after the Europeans' arrival. Because for my
00:56generation and that of my mother's, it was as if the Australian wars hadn't
01:02happened at all. So what I want to discover is whether art can help us better
01:08understand the Australian wars. Especially the Aboriginal resistance that's rarely
01:15discussed.
01:20I'm Rachel Griffiths and I believe that when it comes to understanding war, art is our
01:28secret weapon. So in this series, I'm putting this theory to the test, one war and
01:36one artwork at a time.
01:39Because while journalists tell us what happened. They left in scenes that are now part of
01:45television's history. It's our performance. When the song was released, it was banned.
01:49Yeah. Filmmakers. Peter Weir.
01:55Writers. The narrow road to the deep north. Artists.
01:58I was the only one not carrying a weapon. And musicians. If it's too risky to say, sing
02:05it. Who help us make sense of it. Holy sh... This is incredible.
02:15Art's not just there to be pretty and admired. Art is the magnifying glass and the mirror.
02:21This was a pub rock song that changed our lives. That's what art can do.
02:26This is when the war is over.
02:29I'll never forget seeing this extraordinary work for the first time. It blew my mind.
02:55This was the first work that I saw where I recognised that art for First Nations artists
03:04was being used as a weapon. Blowing the viewer away. Drawing them in with incredible picture
03:13making. Bennett's work references a 19th century drawing of one of the countless wars that erupted
03:22across the Aboriginal countries that made up this continent before Europeans arrived.
03:29Together, these wars are the longest conflict in our nation's history.
03:35Claiming an estimated 100,000 Aboriginal lives. Almost the same number of Australian lives lost in
03:43all our overseas wars combined. This painting and the work of Gordon Bennett's and the people that were
03:52inspired by him. I mean, that completely changed my understanding of the country I live in.
04:00It's more than just depicting the violence that took place here. It's recognising that Aboriginal nations
04:07actively fought back. And one of these resistance stories has recently been brought out of the shadows
04:14by an artist.
04:25My name is Windra Dine. I am a Rajereen. You may not know my face or my history. I was born on the plains
04:36before the white man come with his cattle and his sheep with horses and guns.
04:51Acclaimed Goombangia and Bundjalung country music star Troy Cassadaly has been inspired by a little-known
04:58resistance fighter from Wiradjuri country. This is not my country, Rachel, but I've been coming through
05:06here for years, like, you know, on tour, making music for people. And it was only a few years ago,
05:13I discovered a name which was tattooed on the back of my cousin's shoulders. And I said to my cousin,
05:20I said, who's, um, who's Windra Dine or Windra Dine? I said, I didn't even know how to say it. And he said,
05:28well, he was a great warrior from the Bathurst region. He was a staunch freedom fighter.
05:35I said, I'm a little bit ashamed that I actually don't know his name, don't know much about him.
05:40So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after seeing that tattoo. And that brought me here to Yarn to You.
05:48Windra Dine was just one of the freedom warriors who led the resistance.
05:53But he didn't just fight back against the colonists in his Wiradjuri country. He also tried to reconcile
06:02with them. And I think the thing that really drew me to him was that there was a story of someone that
06:09was not only staunch, but he was also a political man. He could actually negotiate as well. You know,
06:18he walked all the way from Bathurst to Parramatta and he said, I'm just letting you know that, um,
06:23I'm still here. We're still resisting, but we also want to try and find some middle ground,
06:30you know, so he was, he was also a negotiator.
06:33How did you come up with the kind of shape of the song? Because it could have been a lament.
06:42Well, he was a strong enough character for people around here to document him deeply. And when people
06:49offer up a reward, you know, of 500 acres of land, if you can catch him, you know, he's a real deal.
06:58And so I thought he just, he deserved something that was strong. So I tried to walk in his footsteps.
07:06I want to go back and deliver the song to Windredyne. And so my dream was to go to his grave
07:14and play it for him. Troy wrote Windredyne in 2024. But artists have been depicting the resistance
07:22since the Australian wars began almost 250 years ago. And some of it is on display in a major exhibition.
07:31You have people who think Aboriginal art is just dot, dot painting, right? They know almost nothing
07:37about the great diversity of the Aboriginal art movements. Professor Marcia Langton is best known
07:44as a leading voice for Aboriginal rights. She's also an expert in anthropology, cultures and art.
07:53This is a complex exhibition. And one thing that we're doing is going to the artworks of Aboriginal
08:01artists from the actual frontiers, made during the colonial invasion, made during the wars.
08:14One of the most moving items is a sketchbook by an 18-year-old Aboriginal boy from Queensland during
08:23the 1880s. Oscar's 40 pages of drawings were found accidentally almost a century later at the
08:32National Museum of Australia, when staff came across a cardboard box. Buried at the bottom was an old
08:40exercise book labelled, drawn by Oscar. It is an incredibly important document because it is one of
08:52our first people telling us through his own eyes what he witnessed on his country and how it affected
08:59his life. You can see here what he's depicting the native mounted police. They're shooting and they killed
09:08wantonly. So you're talking about Aboriginal men who were used by the British to suppress Aboriginal
09:14resistance. Yes, this is common across the frontiers. They operated for several decades in Queensland.
09:22It was the most murderous, had the highest body count. A new estimate puts the death toll at 60,000
09:30Aboriginal people murdered in Queensland alone.
09:33The evidence of it is in the art. Look at this. They're murdering a mother and child here.
09:40Oh my God.
09:44Imagine being an 18-year-old and having seen these horrors and then drawing this extraordinary notebook
09:51full of sketches of what he saw. He saw the killings.
09:56The striking thing is, is that even in the middle of the Australian wars, even in the middle of invasion,
10:06even while their land was being taken from them, people kept making art.
10:14Growing up, I didn't see stories of First Nations people. Why was this not visible?
10:24Well, that's the great act of dehumanisation that colonialism brings. So throughout all of the
10:34confected histories of Australia, the school textbooks and the art history, until very late in the 20th
10:43century, you have these great absences. Where are the memorials to our dead?
10:50Only at Mile Creek, where the descendants have created a memorial, and in a few other places.
10:57We're human too.
11:01The massacres Marcia is referring to were not isolated bursts of violence.
11:06They were part of a series of wars fought across the continent.
11:09But the British refused to declare a former war, because that would have meant recognising Aboriginal
11:17sovereignty. And it's art that now shines a spotlight on the Aboriginal people who fought back.
11:25This is by contemporary artist Marlene Gilson to depict this first hanging outside the old Melbourne
11:37jail, just up the road here. In 1842, two Palawa men from Tasmania were the first people to be publicly
11:46executed in Victoria. Having grown up in the shadow of Tasmania's Black Wars, they were sentenced to death
11:58for the murder of two whalers. But their side of the story was never heard by the courts.
12:07And 5,000, a quarter of the population of Naam, turned out to witness the hanging.
12:24The judge made the point at the trial that this decision was to incite terror. Incite terror.
12:37Their names were Tanaminawe and Moaboy Hina.
12:49The lack of memorials to the frontier wars and to these histories is extraordinary, even today.
12:55In 2016, Wiradjuri and Ngungawalata's Brooke Andrew and his colleague Trent Walter created a new kind of
13:04monument, right on the spot where Tanaminawe and Moaboy Hina were executed.
13:11I just find the traditional Western monument incredibly violent. I mean, they are war objects,
13:18like cannons, people in uniform, where this is more for the people around community. It's more of an intrigue,
13:27a very different way of commemorating. I would walk past it thinking it was a swing. Obviously,
13:33that is also how we draw the gallows. Yeah.
13:37And then behind that, others might be drawn in to go, what's in those boxes?
13:50There's some images that draw from newspapers of the time. I mean, in here, you have this text.
13:57And I'll just read some of it.
13:58One of the whalers who was still alive, when the blacks came up, begged them to kill him,
14:03as he could not survive, and that it served him right, for he had killed many blacks.
14:08That's from the time. That's from the time.
14:13In other newspapers, it was reported that this hanging was intended to send a clear message to
14:19Aboriginal people, that their resistance would be met with the full force of British law.
14:26In front of thousands, Tanaminaway and Moorboihina hung for one hour,
14:36before they were buried in unmarked graves under what is now Queen Victoria Market.
14:44I grew up coming here to do my weekly shop and had no idea that the market was built
14:50on an old cemetery. And right under this car park to this day are thousands and thousands of
14:56graves. And I just wonder how different my understanding of our own history would be
15:03if on the way in there to get the fish and carrots, I had to pass a monument to these two men.
15:15Then I might have realised earlier that the Australian wars didn't just take place in remote
15:20parts of the country. Our cities were also battlegrounds. Because for newly arrived colonists,
15:29this was the frontier. This really is the site of the frontier wars.
15:36Non-Indigenous people coming to this country to someone else's land, which has its own law,
15:41its own way of living, its own language, and the kind of murders that happened here.
15:46So we just wanted to kind of create a narrative where people could come and sit and commemorate,
15:52but can also learn.
15:57Like Brooke and Troy, the current generation of First Nations artists use art not only as a celebration of
16:05culture, but also as a tool of resistance. For them, the battlefield is not in the past,
16:15it's in the present. Here in the 1820s, there was a war.
16:24We're going to give our last word to Maine White, so to you, Maine.
16:28And it's for the hearts and minds of every Australian.
16:32I'm always going to be a black friend, aren't I? That's all anybody ever sees. I'm never just an
16:37actor, I'm always an Indigenous actor. Hey, I love reppin', but I don't hear old Joe Bloggs
16:42over here being called white Anglo-Saxon actor, blah-de-blah.
16:47Maine White's monologue from his 2019 play went viral.
16:52Being black and successful comes at a cost. You take a hit whether you like it or not,
16:56because you want your blacks quiet and humble.
16:58It racked up more than three million views and put him onto Time Magazine's list of emerging leaders
17:05in 2021. How did you come to perform it that night and just capture the national conversation?
17:14So I'd written City of Gold. I performed it in 2019. The play is based on my life and my
17:20experience of growing up in Kalgoorlie.
17:22That week it was Black Lives Matter. It was 2020. They wanted to talk about how that movement
17:36internationally had now re-contextualised that in Australia. I think that week I saw a lot of
17:44Aboriginal people online say, if you're going to go and talk about black lives or Aboriginal lives,
17:51you're going to have to bring it. I was nervous, I think, because I could feel the weight of
17:57everything that day, that whole moment. I just went as hard as I could possibly go.
18:03Sometimes I just want to be seen for my talent, not my skin colour, not my race. I hate being a token,
18:08a box to tick, part of some diversity angle. Oh, what are you whinging for? You're not a real one
18:13anyway. You're only part. Well, what part then? My foot? My arm? My leg?
18:18If one was to judge the effectiveness on opening a conversation, it went viral.
18:25I was overwhelmed with the response that was so positive that the negative was outweighed.
18:31People were saying things like, I never thought about it like that. I think people want to hear
18:36the truth. And when you give them the truth, it's undeniable. You know, it used to be that
18:42in your face, you boom, you black dog coon kind of shit. Gonna chase you down the ditch with my
18:46baseball bat skinhead shit when I was 14 years old. But nah, we come forward, we're progressive,
18:52we're going to give you that small subtle shit. What's the power then that art has? What is it
18:57about the performer that can cut through? It's showing something that is fiction to show the truth.
19:06And I think that's an artist's duty and artist's responsibility. I think as Indigenous people,
19:11we have an oral history, an oral way of teaching. And I think performance is one of our ways that we do
19:19that. There's this line in the monologue, silence is violence. Here we are a few years later,
19:32deaths in custody, the voice didn't work, that moment of resistance. How important are artists
19:40in that fight? He's the messenger. It's showing the mirror to the audience. Unfortunately, a lot of
19:47things that I say or an artist today says, it's still the same story. It's just got a different
19:54coating, different coat of paint. And I think that Australia hasn't rectified that conversation.
20:04And you just have to continue telling that story and holding up that reflection.
20:17It's foggy. It's going to be a beautiful day. Storytelling is really a big part of my life.
20:25I come from a lot of old uncles and aunties that are great storytellers. And all I've really done
20:31is taken that skill and added music to it. Troy's dream is to sing his new song for the first time at
20:40Windradine's grave. The Wiradjuri warrior is buried on this station near Bathurst.
20:50So we do this in honour of our land and our law and our ancestors. And we ask creator to keep you
20:58strong in mind, body and spirit. Put that on for a little while.
21:06Pass call. Oh, that's beautiful.
21:16This is a special campfire with Uncle Bill, a descendant of Windradine, and Dave Sutter,
21:24a descendant of the station owner who offered a safe haven to the Wiradjuri warrior.
21:30So this is kind of mind blowing because we've got two descendants of this extraordinary story.
21:37So how did your ancestor meet and become friends with this warrior? My family's history with the
21:46Wiradjuri in this area is probably a bit different to a lot of others in the sense that my great,
21:51great-great-grandfather George was a humanitarian and his view was that, well, you know, everyone
21:57has to get on. So he brought that same ethos over here when they came over the mountains and instilled
22:03that in his son. So William's a 17-year-old man left in Bathurst to look after the sheep and stuff
22:08that they'd brought over the mountains. So he was under specific instructions from his father
22:14to make friends with the local aboriginals. So luckily he met Windradine.
22:18And he learnt language? He learnt language. Like, I doubt that he was fluent in it,
22:22but he could obviously, you know, communicate. Communicate. Yeah.
22:25So he would have learnt words and stuff like that. So they had a friendship.
22:30It's an important thing to understand his story, first of all, your family's story,
22:37but also the fact that coexistence can happen. Yeah.
22:40And that's one thing that I think was really inspiring for me when I started writing the song
22:45was that not only was he a staunch warrior, but he was also a diplomat.
22:49So when the year I heard the song and that, you know, it was, like I said,
22:54it made me heart go and, you know, made me feel really proud.
22:57So tell me about how important art is in terms of our reconciling that history.
23:07Well, the three forms of art, dance, art and song, is how our stories are all passed on down.
23:15So even today we've got all the different mediums of how we tell stories through movies and television
23:23and everything else, you know, so a lot of our people can do those things
23:28because acting was actually part of the dance, what you did.
23:30Oh, I never thought of that. Right?
23:33So because when you dance, you're mimicking, you're telling a story about an animal,
23:38so you're mimicking that animal and that's all part of acting.
23:42There's a, there is a power to tell a truth to people who don't necessarily want to hear it
23:49that I feel that art does.
23:53You're totally right. Buddy Guy, the old blues artist said,
23:55if it's too risky to say, sing it.
24:01And I have to say, I reckon I might have almost manifested today in my heart.
24:07Yeah.
24:07Because I was very, very heavy with Sorry Business last year and I was broken.
24:13And to be able to deliver this song back was a little part of my healing to, to this area.
24:18To Wiradjuri people.
24:20And to people in Bathurst because we love everyone as family when we go through.
24:24And then my full circle moment today will be to deliver this song back to that man over there.
24:31And if I can do that, then that means that my, my journey with the song is complete.
24:37And so all I need to do now is grab the ganjo.
24:40Let's do it.
24:42And just like every story, this one has an end.
24:55And just like every story, this one has an end.
25:10Without all the glory, mistold on other men.
25:15But my people who fought with me, they never gave me up.
25:26My name is Windradine, they call me Saturday.
25:33Come Sunday I'll be gone, in the bush I melt away.
25:39I fought for my people, on this country where I lay.
25:44My name is Windradine, remember me that way.
26:06It's arrived.
26:07Meeting the descendants of Windradine and William Sutter is a powerful reminder
26:18that these stories live on in the bloodlines of this country.
26:23Thanks, Joy.
26:24Thank you, brother.
26:25Fantastic.
26:26Honestly, just amazing.
26:29Amazing to be able to come back here.
26:31Thanks, Roger.
26:31This entire journey has reaffirmed for me the power of art.
26:39Art isn't just an expression of culture.
26:42It's an act of resistance.
26:45Exposing truths that official histories and public memorials have tried to erase.
26:53And that art of resistance continues proudly to this day.
26:58I don't want to be what you want me to be.
27:01I want to be what I want to be.
27:02Never trade your authenticity.
27:04What the artists are doing is honouring the ancestors and saying,
27:08these people are human beings.
27:10They're re-humanising them and they're bringing them out of the dark corners.
27:15You've got a responsibility as an artist to continue that fire, go and collect the wood,
27:21that's the songwriting, and then you've got to keep it burning for the next generation.
27:28I don't want to be quiet.
27:29I don't want to be humble.
27:30I don't want to sit in.
27:41I want to be humble!
27:42I can say goodbye!
27:43I hope you've got to stay in here,
27:56But let's watch the world for those of you.
27:56We'll see you in a minute.
27:57Thanks, everybody.
27:58Although you're into power fiction,
28:00we'll just be Rogue Today.
28:00Stay tuned to crowston.
28:02The Three Universe
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