I find my eyes wet as the people weep for their boys who have 'died'. I see that it is mainly men who have made the film. When certain times arrive the mobs get ready and leave for their traditional country to initiate their boys into manhood and their girls into women's business, bearers and protectors of the law, year by year learning more, to become, eventually, respected elders. The white authorities call it, with pathetic, even deliberate, inaccuracy, 'walkabout'. Welfare and housing authorities visit the empty houses.
School teachers struggle to understand.
Unlike Two Laws , another documentary made by Aboriginal people on a similar topic, this one conforms to standard documentary practice. It doesn't, for example, have people speaking who are present but mostly out of shot while the camera roves over the feet or backs of other people, trees, sky, animals, in an unpredictable and original manner incomprehensible if you have no enculturation and eloquent if you have even a little. This one was designed for a non-Aboriginal audience as well. It is also divided, whitefella style, into four sections covering the law, dreaming, Colonialism etc, But there the similarities end, for this is an unusual documentary in a number of ways. Its chief strength is the Aboriginal voices - surely not the secret lore but enough to convey the treasure of cultures clinging tenaciously to survival.