When The War Is Over Season 1 Episode 5
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Five Minute Recap brings you quick 5-minute summaries of the latest news, movies, tech, and trends. Stay informed and entertained in minutes with clear, engaging recap perfect for busy people who want to learn fast and keep up with the world.
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00:09Growing 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
00:24honored 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
00:43and 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
00:57generation 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
01:09understand the Australian wars. Especially the Aboriginal resistance that's rarely
01:15discussed.
01:21I'm Rachel Griffiths and I believe that when it comes to understanding war, art is our
01:28secret weapon.
01:31So in this series, I'm putting this theory to the test. One war and one artwork at a time.
01:40Because while journalists tell us what happened.
01:43They left in scenes that are now part of television's history.
01:46It's our performance.
01:48When the song was released it was banned.
01:50Yeah.
01:52Filmmakers.
01:53Peter Weir.
01:55Writers.
01:56The narrow road to the deep north.
01:58Artists.
01:59I was the only one not carrying a weapon.
02:02And musicians.
02:02If it's too risky to say, sing it.
02:07To help us make sense of it.
02:09Holy sh...
02:10This is incredible.
02:15Art's not just there to be pretty and admired.
02:18Art is the magnifying glass and the mirror.
02:21This was a pub rock song that changed our lives.
02:23That's what art can do.
02:27This is when the war is over.
02:45I'll never forget seeing this extraordinary work for the first time.
02:51It blew my mind.
02:55This was the first work that I saw where I recognised that art for First Nations artists
03:03was being used as a weapon.
03:08Blowing the viewer away, drawing them in with incredible picture making.
03:15Bennett's work references a 19th century drawing of one of the countless wars that erupted across
03:23the Aboriginal countries that made up this continent before Europeans arrived.
03:29Together, these wars are the longest conflict in our nation's history.
03:34Claiming an estimated 100,000 Aboriginal lives.
03:39Almost the same number of Australian lives lost in all our overseas wars combined.
03:47This painting and the work of Gordon Bennett's and the people that were inspired by him,
03:54I 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.
04:04It's recognising that Aboriginal nations actively fought back.
04:09And one of these resistance stories has recently been brought out of the shadows by an artist.
04:27My name is Windra Dine, I am a radgerine.
04:33You may not know my face or my history.
04:38I was born on the plains, before the white man come, with his cattle and his sheep,
04:47with horses and gum.
04:51Acclaimed Goombangia and Bundjalung country music star, Troy Cassadaly,
04:57has been inspired by a little-known resistance fighter from Wiradjuri country.
05:03This is not my country, Rachel, but I've been coming through here for years, like, you know, on tour,
05:09making music for people.
05:10And it was only a few years ago I discovered a name
05:16which was tattooed on the back of my cousin's shoulders.
05:19And I said to my cousin, I said,
05:22Who's, um, who's Windra Dine or Windra Dine?
05:26I said, I didn't even know how to say it.
05:27And he said, Well, he was a great warrior from the Bathurst region.
05:33He was a staunch freedom fighter.
05:35I said, I'm a little bit ashamed that I actually don't know his name,
05:38don't know much about him.
05:40So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole after seeing that tattoo,
05:43and that brought me here to Yarn to You.
05:48Windra Dine was just one of the freedom warriors who led the resistance.
05:55But he didn't just fight back against the colonists in his Wiradjuri country.
06:00He also tried to reconcile with them.
06:03And I think the thing that really drew me to him was that there was a story of
06:09someone that was not only staunch, but he was also a political man.
06:15He could actually negotiate as well.
06:17You know, he walked all the way from Bathurst to Parramatta.
06:20And he said, I'm just letting you know that I'm still here.
06:24We're still resisting.
06:26But we also want to try and find some middle ground.
06:30Yeah.
06:30You know, so he was he was also a negotiator.
06:37How did you come up with the kind of shape of the song?
06:41Because it could have been a lament.
06:42Well, he was a strong enough character for people around here to document him deeply.
06:48And when people offer up a reward, you know, of 500 acres of land, if you can catch him,
06:57you know, he's a real deal.
06:59And so I thought he just he deserved something that was strong.
07:02So I tried to walk in his footsteps.
07:06I want to go back and deliver the song to Windra Dine.
07:11And so my dream was to go to his grave and play it for him.
07:17Troy wrote Windra Dine in 2024.
07:19But artists have been depicting the resistance since the Australian wars began almost 250 years ago.
07:27And some of it is on display in a major exhibition.
07:30You have people who think Aboriginal art is just dot, dot painting, right?
07:36They know almost nothing about the great diversity of the Aboriginal art movements.
07:42Professor Marcia Langton is best known as a leading voice for Aboriginal rights.
07:47She's also an expert in anthropology, cultures and art.
07:53This is a complex exhibition.
07:56And one thing that we're doing is going to the artworks of Aboriginal artists from the actual frontiers.
08:15One of the most moving items is a sketchbook by an 18-year-old Aboriginal boy from Queensland during the
08:231880s.
08:25Oscar's 40 pages of drawings were found accidentally almost a century later at the National Museum of Australia when staff
08:35came across a cardboard box.
08:37It is an incredibly important document because it is one of our first people telling us through his own eyes
08:56what he witnessed on his country and how it affected his life.
09:00You can see here what he's depicting the native mounted police.
09:04They're shooting and they killed wantonly.
09:09So you're talking about Aboriginal men who were used by the British to suppress Aboriginal resistance?
09:15Yes, this is common across the frontiers.
09:19They operated for several decades in Queensland.
09:22It was the most murderous. They had the highest body count.
09:27A new estimate puts the death toll at 60,000 Aboriginal people murdered in Queensland alone.
09:34The evidence of it is in the art.
09:37Look at this. They're murdering a mother and child here.
09:41Oh my God.
09:44Imagine being an 18-year-old and having seen these horrors
09:47and then drawing this extraordinary notebook full of sketches of what he saw.
09:55He saw the killings.
09:59The 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.
10:21Why was this not visible?
10:24Well, that's the great act of dehumanisation that colonialism brings.
10:32So throughout all of the confected histories of Australia, the school textbooks,
10:39and the art history, until very late in the 20th century, you have these great absences.
10:48Where are the memorials to our dead?
10:51Only at Mile Creek, where the descendants have created a memorial, and in a few other places.
10:57We're human too.
11:01The massacres Mars here is referring to were not isolated bursts of violence.
11:06They were part of a series of wars fought across the continent.
11:10But the British refused to declare a formal war, because that would have meant recognising Aboriginal sovereignty.
11:19And it's art that now shines a spotlight on the Aboriginal people who fought back.
11:28This is by contemporary artist Marlene Gilson, to depict this first hanging outside the old Melbourne jail, just up the
11:38road here.
11:40In 1842, two Palawa men from Tasmania were the first people to be publicly executed in Victoria.
11:53Having grown up in the shadow of Tasmania's Black Wars, they were sentenced to death for the murder of two
12:00whalers.
12:03But their side of the story was never heard by the courts.
12:08And 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.
12:33Incite terror.
12:43Their names were Tanaminaway 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 Nungawalada's Brook Andrew and his colleague Trent Walter created a new kind of monument,
13:05right on the spot where Tanaminaway and Moaboy Hina were executed.
13:11I just find the traditional Western monument incredibly violent.
13:15I mean, they are war objects like cannons, people in uniform.
13:22Where this is more for the people around community.
13:25It's more of an intrigue, a very different way of commemorating.
13:30I would walk past it thinking it was a swing.
13:33Obviously, that is also how we draw the gallows.
13:37Yeah.
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.
13:55I mean, in here, you have this text, and 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.
14:09That's from the time.
14:11That's from the time.
14:12In other newspapers, it was reported that this hanging was intended to send a clear message
14:19to Aboriginal people.
14:21That their resistance would be met with the full force of British law.
14:28In front of thousands, Tanaminaway and Moaboy Hina hung for one hour.
14:35Before they were buried in unmarked graves under what is now
14:40Queen Victoria Market.
14:43I grew up coming here to do my weekly shop and had no idea that the market was built
14:50on an old cemetery.
14:51And right under this car park to this day are thousands and thousands of graves.
14:57And 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
15:10two men.
15:14Then I might have realised earlier that the Australian wars didn't just take place in remote parts of the country.
15:22In the country, our cities were also battlegrounds.
15:26Because for newly arrived colonists, this was the frontier.
15:32This 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,
15:42its 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,
15:53but can also learn.
15:57Like Brooke and Troy, the current generation of First Nations artists use art not only as a
16:04celebration of culture, but also as a tool of resistance.
16:13For them, the battlefield is not in the past, it's in the present.
16:17Here 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?
16:35That's all anybody ever sees.
16:37I'm never just an actor, I'm always an indigenous actor.
16:39Hey, I love reppin', but I don't hear old Joe Bloggs over here being called
16:43white 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.
16:54You 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
17:01and put him onto Time Magazine's list of emerging leaders in 2021.
17:06Come on, man.
17:07How 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.
17:19The play is based on my life and my experience of growing up in Kalgoorlie.
17:23But I wanted to ask you something.
17:25Joe, what is it, Coorda?
17:26You know, that's an indigenous word from WA, it means mate.
17:29Yeah, Coorda.
17:30That week it was Black Lives Matter, it was 2020.
17:33They wanted to talk about how that movement internationally
17:37had now re-contextualised that in Australia.
17:41I think that week I saw a lot of Aboriginal people online say,
17:47if you're going to go and talk about black lives or Aboriginal lives,
17:51you're going to have to bring it.
17:53I was nervous, I think, and I could feel the weight of everything,
17:58that day, that whole moment.
18:01I just went as hard as I could possibly go.
18:04Sometimes I just want to be seen for my talent, not my skin colour, not my race.
18:07I hate being a token, a box to tick, part of some diversity angle.
18:11Oh, what are you whinging for? You're not a real one anyway.
18:14You're only part. Well, what part then? My foot? My arm? My leg?
18:19If one was to judge the effectiveness on opening a conversation, it went viral.
18:26I 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.
18:34I think people want to hear the truth and when you give them the truth, it's undeniable.
18:40You know, it used to be that in your face, you bong, you black dog coon kind of shit.
18:45I'm going to chase you down the ditch with my baseball bat skinhead shit when I was 14 years old.
18:50But nah, we come forward, we're progressive, we're going to give you that small subtle shit.
18:54What's the power then that art has? What is it about the performer that can cut through?
19:02It's showing something that is fiction to show the truth. And I think that's an artist's duty
19:08and an artist's responsibility. I think as Indigenous people, we have an oral history,
19:14an oral way of teaching. And I think performance is one of our ways that we do that.
19:23There's this line in the monologue, silence is violence. Here we are a few years later,
19:33deaths 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
19:48things 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.
20:18It's foggy. It's going to be a beautiful day.
20:23Storytelling is really a big part of my life. I come from a lot of old uncles and aunties that
20:28are
20:28great storytellers. And all I've really done is taken that skill and added music to it.
20:36Troy's dream is to sing his new song for the first time at Windradine's grave.
20:42The 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
20:58keep you
20:58strong in mind, body and spirit. Put that on for a little while.
21:11Oh, 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?
21:43My family's history with the Wiradjuri in this area is probably a bit different to a lot of others,
21:49in the sense that my great-great-great-grandfather George was a humanitarian. And his view was that,
21:56well, you know, everyone has to get on. So he brought that same ethos over here when they came
22:01over the mountains and instilled that in his son. So William's a 17-year-old man left in Bathurst to
22:07look after the sheep and stuff that they'd brought over the mountains. So he was under specific
22:12instructions from his father to make friends with the local Aboriginals. So luckily he met Windradine.
22:18And he learnt language?
22:20He learnt language. Like, I doubt that he was fluent in it, but he could obviously, you know, communicate.
22:25Yeah, yeah.
22:26So 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 co-existence can happen.
22:40Yeah.
22:41And that's one thing that I think was really inspiring for me when I started writing the
22:45song was that not only was he a staunch warrior, but he was also a diplomat.
22:50So when I heard the song and that, you know, it was, like I said, it made my heart go
22:56and,
22:56you know, made me feel really proud.
22:58So tell me about how important art is in terms of our reconciling
23:06song. That is true.
23:08Well, the three forms of art, dance, art and song, is how our stories are all passed on down.
23:16So even today, we've got all the different mediums of how we tell stories through movies
23:22and television and everything else, you know, so a lot of our people can do those things
23:27because acting was actually part of the dance, what you did.
23:31Oh, I never thought of that.
23:33So because when you dance, you're mimicking, you're telling a story about an animal.
23:38So you're mimicking that animal.
23:40And 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
23:50that I feel that art does.
23:53You're totally right.
23:54Buddy Guy, the old blues artist said, if 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, because I was very,
24:08very heavy with sorry business last year, and I was broken. And to be able to deliver this song
24:16back was a little part of my healing to this area, to Wiradjuri people, and to people in Bathurst,
24:21because we love everyone as family when we go through. And then my full circle moment today
24:27will be to deliver this song back to that man over there. And if I can do that,
24:33then that means that my, my journey with the song is complete.
24:38And so all I need to do now is grab the ganjo.
24:41Let's do it.
25:04And just like every story, this one has been. Without all the glory, mistold on other men.
25:15Well, they increased the reward to try and change my luck. But my people who fought with me,
25:24they never gave me up. My name is Windredine, they call me Saturday.
25:34Come Sunday, I'll be gone, in the bush I melt away. I fought for my people,
25:42on this country where I lay. My name is Windredine, remember me that way.
25:50My name is Windredine, remember me that way.
26:06It's arrived. Yeah. Finally. Thank you.
26:12Meeting the descendants of Windredine and William Sutter
26:16is a powerful reminder that these stories live on in the bloodlines of this country.
26:22The sanctuary. Thanks, Joy. Thank you. Fantastic.
26:26Honestly, just amazing. Amazing to be able to come back here. Thanks, Roger.
26:33This entire journey has reaffirmed for me the power of art. Art isn't just an expression of culture,
26:42it's an act of resistance. Exposing 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. I 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,
27:20go and collect the wood, that's the songwriting,
27:22and then you've got to keep it burning for the next generation.
27:28I don't want to be quiet. I don't want to be humble. I don't want to sit down.
27:32I don't want to be who I am.
27:33Punktium!
27:33Punktium!
27:35Punktium!
27:45Punktium!
27:50Punktium!
27:52Punktium!
27:56Punktium!
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