Film review: Red Dog

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 A more succinct version of this review originally appeared on upstart, and is available here.

Much is made of whether or not Australian films say something about the national ethos. Red Dog does, even if it is mainly about the resilient strength and community appeal of a good dog, while making no claims to being a ‘big’ story. This is no sweeping epic like Baz Luhrmann’s Australia, a movie that turned the landscape into a stage for larger-than-life characters. The characters of Red Dog know this isn’t a story about them: it’s about the dog. It’s a love affair between two wanderers, and the story of the one who’s left behind.

Red Dog (played by Koko) is a wanderer of the Pilbara who shows up unexpectedly in the mining town of Dampier in the early 1970s. Through the combination of independence and friendliness that defines Red, he becomes the best friend and confidant of half the town – mainly men, working in physical jobs, without women or affection in their lives.

Red has no master, until John (Josh Lucas) rides into town on his motorbike. One of the best early scenes is on the highway out of Dampier, as John, on his way into town, passes Red trotting along the road in the other direction on a mission of his own. A look is exchanged between them, and the scene perfectly captures the meeting of two wanderers and the recognition of something of themselves in each other. John resists the pull of friendship with the dog for a while, but eventually he gives in, and thus these two travellers become inseparable best mates and finally have a reason to stay put.

The film, based on a true story, is told through the memories of those who knew both Red Dog and John, precipitated by the arrival in Dampier of a stranger (Luke Ford). It’s 1979 and Red, now greying around the muzzle, lies ill in a back room of the Mermaid Hotel. As the news spreads that the beloved Red Dog is sick, the pub fills and it becomes an impromptu wake as people take it in turns to tell the newcomer about what the dog means to them.

The first half of the movie, as Red Dog’s arrival in town is established and his friendship with John grows, seems to flash by. There’s no need for clunky voice-over narration; the narrators are instead the publican (Noah Taylor) and others in the pub. Their words set the scene to explain what’s going on early in the movie as Red hops in and out of trucks and cars across the Pilbara, hitchhiking. This part of the film is really funny, too – from the obsession of Vanno (Arthur Angel) with his hometown in Italy to the dog’s killer flatulence, points of humour are established early and they carry on throughout the movie.

The retrospective mode of narration leaves little time to do more than scratch the surface of the characters, but before long this ceases to matter. At the heart of the film is Red Dog, and not only does his character develop in depth but he also becomes the vehicle by which the other characters are revealed. The cast is superb, with a great selection of well-known Aussie actors including a brief cameo from the late Bill Hunter.

Red Dog is in part a story of the romance between John and Nancy (Rachael Taylor), but it’s the love story between Red and John that really tugs at the heartstrings. Red is at the centre of the community and everyone loves him, but he has his softer side and no-one except John really understands him. With John’s departure from the film, leading to Red Dog’s fame as he searched the Pilbara and beyond for his master, there are no easy answers. Red does not conveniently become Nancy’s dog (as much as I wanted him to); he is, once again, the community’s – and yet nobody’s, too.

At the very end, in a scene harking back to a similar one early in the movie, the community is brought together by Red – talking about him, sharing stories about his life. Yet he walks away from them, unnoticed, in search of something else. He is the community’s glue but he is also his own dog, and no-one else ever really understands him.

The movie gives a few indications early on that it might be a bit corny, but director Kriv Stenders successfully avoids over-sentimentality. The Pilbara red dust doesn’t turn the characters into caricatures, and the story, even the pathos, fits beautifully into the landscape. The soundtrack is brilliant – Eagle Rock and Way Out West overlay the red dirt, ’70s vehicles, ore trains and towering piles of salt, and it works. It’s uplifting, the sense of men seeking freedom from their pasts, of the girl from Perth seeking adventure in the north, of the dog making his home in this isolated mining community. Certainly the Pilbara is idealised, but it’s forgivable because Red Dog’s story is told by a group of people in a bar who love him, and who are nostalgic about his younger days.

The fact that the landscape is not overdone is a key part of the film’s success. Cinematographer Geoffrey Hall makes brilliant use of the unique Western Australian light – the shadows, the intensity of the sun, and the influence of the ocean on the tone of the evening light. But he does not dramatise the land: it is big and beautiful, especially on a cinema screen, but it is not presented as a stage.

The landscape that becomes important in Red Dog is not a majestic scene of sweeping roads or coastlines or red desert, but rather it’s a rocky dirt track cresting the small hill by John’s place: a spot that becomes the emotional location of the film as Red Dog watches the track, waiting stoically for his master to come home. Just as in reality the places that come to mean something to us are rarely majestic or even beautiful, so too in the film the important place is one that is simple, familiar and symbolic.

Red Dog is a strong, powerful story with a bunch of great characters. I’ve heard it described as a feel-good film, but it’s better than that. It made me laugh and cry, and made me want to go back to the Pilbara, even though it has changed so much. I hope to see the movie again before it leaves the big screen.

A few days after I saw Red Dog, I can’t get it out of my head.

Capture the light

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.
We were all rugged up against the cold
Scarves and coats and woollen socks
The sun came out, bright and glaring
Not warm, just sharp.
Casting light-shadows across our faces
Across the close dark weave of his coat.
.

In the south a storm brewed
But we were safe, here
In our slab of sharp sunlight
Surrounded by the cyclone fence
The graffitied wall, the empty showroom
The locked gates, the cracked carpark,
The weeds shooting through the bitumen.

We came for no thing, no solid
Thing to hold in our hands
We came for the light, the sunlight
Or, when the storm came, the cloud light
That fell in streaks between the rain.
We brought what we needed with us
And took only the light home
It is not a thing that you can hold.

But we will try, anyway.
It was yet another day that we could not hold
By mid-afternoon it felt all but over
It spilled away from us easily, too easily
We went to try and slow it down.
Only the capture of light, the taking-home of light,
Could slow it down, pause it for a moment.

We went home together in the rain.
The sunlight was gone
But we carried the light with us
Between us, around us, beneath the black umbrella
It’s not a thing you can hold
But we carried it, all the same.

Photo: Melbourne, winter 2011 (film: Kodak T-Max 100)
Text: Stream-of-consciousness in response to the photo

Review of Rising Water on Crikey

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Yesterday my review of Tim Winton’s play, Rising Water, went up on Crikey’s theatre blog, Curtain Call. It’s the first review that I’ve pitched anywhere apart from upstart and I have lots of respect for Crikey, so I was delighted!

The review is here if you’d like to read it.

The play received a bit of flak in a review in The Age last week; in contrast, the review on PerthNow of the WA showing was largely positive. One of my friends suggested that, as a Western Australian myself, it was compulsory that I like Winton’s writing (and the play is very Winton)… I reckon I could mount an essay-length argument against that statement, but perhaps my sandgroper upbringing gives me an emotional attachment to Winton’s WA-located writing. Certainly Dirt Music, Breath and the Lockie Leonard series struck me for their powerful evocation of place.

As a writer, I am drawn to place; so perhaps it is to be expected that as a reader, I am drawn to writing which captures place as powerfully as Winton always does. Of course, the other element present in so much of Winton’s writing is an attachment to the ocean, and this invariably draws me in.

Rising Water is showing at the Playhouse, Melbourne, until September 10. Tickets available here… and yes, I would whole-heartedly recommend it.

Stories Unbound

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It’s not only the stories that matter, but what they are made of: pages that fall from a book with no spine, or the sheets of a newspaper coming apart in the breeze. There’s postcards and letters crossing the airspace above me, and the tales that travel far on the lips of a city. There are stories of mine that I cannot own, and stories of yours that you may lose on the tide.

There’s the stories you made and the memories you lost; there’s the dreams I once had that now seem so real. There’s the journeys we shared that become their own narratives. There is one unfurling on the current, another unsure of itself in the wind. There is one drifting across treetops, and another curving silver on the roads of the city. They are stories unbound and they come from all over. They have mountains to cross and rivers to ford, they have so far to go – and yet not far at all, for they are all here, waiting to be found.

There are some who find and catch these stories and make them into journalism; for others it is history; for still others it is fiction, poetry, film, theatre, dance, music, and so on . . . The boundaries between the expressions of stories grow thin these days, and rightly so, for stories do not choose one way of expression and remain there cocooned in their form.

Anna Krien is a journalist, and the author of Into the Woods. I met her a few months ago, and she seems quite unbound by definitions and genres. She told me that she sees no reason why one cannot be both or several: a journalist, a poet, a writer of fiction. And I felt inspired, for I realised I had been restraining the stories I had, trying to be just a journalist, or just a writer of fiction.

Geraldine Brooks is another who appears unwilling to allow the stories that she meets to be restrained forever in one genre or another. The material she gathered as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East later became her non-fiction work, Nine Parts of Desire. Yet it also made its way into the end of her fictional work, Year of Wonders. In a sense, these stories have taken on many shapes through the one writer and they have had many lives. In Caleb’s Crossing, as with Year of Wonders, her stories are not bound by the limitations of history or by the passing of centuries.

So let the stories come in any way they will, through words or experience, from near or far. Let them be bound only by ethics and not by genre or tradition or habit, so that they may take whichever form of expression they choose.

This post was written in response to the theme of this year’s Melbourne Writers Festival, ‘Stories unbound’.

Book review: Caleb’s Crossing by Geraldine Brooks

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The latest novel by journalist and author Geraldine Brooks, Caleb’s Crossing (2011), is aptly named, for it is full of crossings: the crossing between life and death, between island and mainland, between faiths, between one life and another. Yet these crossings are by no means restricted to the character of Caleb.

Caleb’s Crossing is based on the few facts known about the first Native American student, Caleb Cheeshahteaumauk, to graduate from Harvard College in the 1600s. On this scant historical record, Brooks has built a novel that revolves not around this young man, but around the fictional character of Bethia Mayfield, the novel’s narrator.

Growing up in the Puritan settlement of Great Harbour on the island that is now Martha’s Vineyard, off the coast of Massachusetts, Bethia is the daughter of a missionary minister. She is steeped in an environment of conflicting cultures, for she is at the coalface of one culture’s encroachment onto the physical and spiritual territory of another.

As a girl, Bethia is not allowed to take part in the lessons that her father gives to her older brother, even though she is brighter and more interested in ‘scholarly matters’ than he is. This discrimination rankles, but her rebelliousness is tempered by its conflict with the teachings of her religion. She learns in spite of her exclusion from formal education and, listening in on her father’s attempts to learn the local language of the Wampanoag people, she becomes fluent in Wampanaontoaonk.

It is because of her language skills that she strikes up a secret friendship with Caleb, the son of one of the island’s chieftains, and thus their two cultures meet and each begins to influence the other.

Later in the book Bethia asks herself if it would have been better for Caleb had she never met him, if she had never taught him English or shown him a Bible, so that he might have lived as his ancestors had before him. She makes much of the fact that she has changed his life, but he also changes hers, challenging her faith and further making her question the path that her father and brother have laid out ahead of her.

The story is powerfully told, achieving what could be seen as a key aim of the historical novel – evoking a sense of a world that is long past and that is utterly foreign to the reader. It does this not only through creating a unique voice for a fictional young woman who is constrained by her gender, her religion and her times, but also by not neglecting the reality of day-to-day existence.

Life in the 17th century is hard work, and Brooks does not neglect this in her storytelling – there is the endless drudgery of domestic work for the women, the challenges faced by settlers in a new colony, and the consistent influence of religion on every part of their lives. There is also the continued presence of death in the Mayfield family – at first, I wondered if this element was overdone, but its purpose in the shaping of Bethia’s story becomes clearer towards the end of the novel.

While Bethia pushes boundaries and in doing so is a character who readers of the twentieth century can easily identify with, she ultimately remains within the confines of her own world view, and does not stray too far from the path that her culture has shaped for her. She is unable to attend college with the men in spite of her intelligence, and she remains, throughout her life, a product of Puritanism. Nonetheless she manages to live in a way that does not leave her downtrodden under the boots of men. Her story seems, because of this, both realistic and uplifting.

Alongside Bethia’s struggle against the confines of her role as a female is the clash of cultures that is going on all around her. In Caleb’s Crossing, the Native American culture on the island is irrevocably changed in less than two generations. The Wampanoag’s spirituality has been replaced with Christianity. It is frightful to be confronted with the complete alteration of a culture in such a short space of time, and the novel allows no easy exit from the imagining of this reality.

Bethia aids and abets in this change through her friendship with Caleb, and so the novel offers no easy moral answers. This unusual young woman may be intelligent, kind and fair, seeing the Wampanoag people as equals and battling to be sure of her own faith, but in the end she does not become part of their culture – they become part of hers.

This review originally appeared on upstart.

Eclipse of the moon

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This morning, just before sunrise, there was a total eclipse of the moon.

We were woken at 4.50am. I went into the bathroom and the moon was shining bright in a refracted hexagon through the frosted glass. I opened the louvres, and saw a disc of darkness moving across its face.

We went outside and stood on the grass. The big gum tree diagonally behind our back fence loomed against the sky. All around the sky hazed upwards from light into darkness. The circle of the Earth moved slowly across the moon, leaving a shadow of dark gold against the sky.

The section of the moon that was not yet shadowed grew brighter, and brighter still the smaller it became. First it was a crescent, then the crescent grew so small and bright that its edges blurred, until it became an oval. The cold reached straight through my coat to my skin. We stood there in silence on the wet grass, until finally, the unshadowed part of the moon was a sliver of light and colour. Then it too was gone, and the moon was round and whole again, dark and darkly red against the sky.

An early tram rattled past the junction, and we wondered if the tram driver could see the moon grown red with the ash of Chile’s volcano, passing through the sky above Melbourne. A plane flashed its lights low on the horizon. We shivered, waiting. At this point it was as though the moon had a stain encroaching into it from above – the shadow of the Earth, still moving across the moon’s face, the Earth still not quite dead centre between sun and moon. Earlier, the shadow was a clear, circular disc, sliding its way gently across the moon’s glow; now it was the progress of darkness spreading inwardly through the red circle of the moon.

The moon was much lower now; forty minutes had passed since we woke up, and it was moving into the rim of the sky that glowed with the lights of the city. So as the shadow spread deeper and deeper into the moon it became harder and harder to see it. Directly above the sky was much darker. A shooting star sliced across the space between the rooftop to my right and the trees to my left, ever so briefly dividing the sky. The moon was not quite red anymore; it paled. We watched until it disappeared against the glow of the sky, and then we went inside.

A little while later I came out again, to see if I could see the moon once more as it emerged from ‘totality’. When I opened the door onto the night it was not the cold I noticed but the noise of traffic; it swept into the house from far away. I looked into the space between the trees where the moon had been heading all night, and I thought I saw it, a gentle circle of cream or pink or white against the yellowish glow of the city. I thought I saw it, but if I looked directly at it, it vanished into the sky.

Reading, and writing, on paper

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Today I published a piece on upstart about the impact of the internet on reading (thanks to Meanland for the inspiration), and about the evolution of reading habits across twenty years of reading life. There is so much talk about how the internet will change everything – how we read, write, communicate, live – but sometimes I think our reactions are a little hysterical. Reading habits will change, but the internet is not the only factor.

The early draft of the piece, before it went on upstart, had a bit about writing in it too, about how I prefer, when there’s time, to write with blue ink on paper, instead of tapping away on a keyboard.

Most of the time it’s more efficient to type, but the day this photo was taken there was time both to read (a novel, in real book-form), and to write, with pen and ink on paper.

Photo: Melbourne, 2010 (Minolta XG2, Fuji Superia 400)

Whose ABC? My ABC.

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The front page of the Inquirer in Saturday’s Australian was devoted to ‘Whose ABC?’, an article by journalist and former political staffer Chris Kenny. Attacks on the ABC re-emerge with such regularity that it is almost tiring, and most such articles exhibit a stubborn willingness to admit that the ABC might actually be of immense value to sectors of society. Kenny’s piece is no different.

The article questions the appeal of the ABC to the ‘mainstream’, or to ‘middle Australia’. If the ABC were to adapt accordingly, in order to appeal to Kenny’s conception of these groups, one assumes that ABC 1 would end up looking like the commercial television stations. If so, then people like me would have nowhere to turn except to SBS for media content that interests them.

Commercial television has nothing for me. News and current affairs programs on the commercial stations are sensationalised, insular and often downright offensive in the assumptions they make about their viewer’s values. I have little interest in the AFL, and few of the ‘mainstream’ movies that screen on Channels 7, 9 and 10 appeal to me. I have no interest in ‘reality’ TV, Dancing with the Stars, or MasterChef. Nor would I waste my time watching American crime drama. The commercial channels represent few of my interests (even in their advertising), don’t examine issues that I consider important in any depth, and frankly bore me.

So I watch the ABC and SBS. Admittedly the ABC is not for everyone, which always prompts questions about the use of taxpayers’ money. However, a core part of the ABC’s aim is to fill a gap in the market. Kenny suggests that the ABC isn’t fulfilling this aim, drawing on comments about The Drum website, but in my view, programs such as Q&A, Four Corners and Media Watch certainly do fill a gap in the market.

These programs contain content that does not ‘dumb down’ the audience. They contain content that encourages critical thinking and that seeks both to inform and to challenge viewers; content that, in my view, cannot reliably be found on the commercial channels.

While Kenny lampoons the supposed Left-wing bias of the ABC’s Kerry O’Brien, Channel 7 and 10 give Right-wing presenters such as David Koch and Andrew Bolt free rein to state their biased opinions on national television. Sunrise, one of Channel 7’s flagship programs, featured ‘Kochie’ beckoning to viewers in the wake of a news report on protests at Villawood Detention Centre in Sydney.

‘If you’re watching at Villawood,’ said Koch, ‘come in close: Australians have a great sense of fairness – when you do things like that, we say, on your bike fella, get back out again, don’t take advantage of us.’

It’s a prime example of a presenter telling the audience what they should think, and it completely lacks any in-depth analysis of the issue. Admittedly Sunrise is an entertainment show more than anything else, but that kind of overt bias exhibited immediately after a news item is definitely not quality TV.

I also disagree with Kenny’s argument that the ABC offers nothing for rural audiences. For my family in Victoria’s high country, the radio in the kitchen is permanently tuned to ABC, and it is a lifeline of support each summer when fire danger is high. ABC 1 also presents Landline, a long-running program that comprehensively examines a variety of rural issues. Landline was a regular part of my media diet as a child, and it made me aware of the incredible complexity and diversity of rural life in Australia, outside of the rural environment that I was already familiar with.

I am also worried by the use of terms such as ‘mainstream values’ and ‘suburban values’, with the ABC apparently being out of touch with the groups that represent these values. ‘Mainstream values’ is a term thrown around on a regular basis, but defining what it encompasses is impossible. Who gets to say what these values are? Who belongs to the category of the so-called ‘mainstream’? It is incredibly short-sighted if ‘mainstream’ is defined by images such as the nuclear family and a house in the suburbs – images that dominate the commercial media’s prime-time advertising.

Early in the article Kenny puts forward the assumption, supposedly ‘for argument’s sake’, that the critics are correct and that the ABC’s content and analysis is skewed to the Left. This point of view (analysed in more depth by Queensland journalist Derek Barry) persists throughout the article, with no attempt made to challenge it, nor to consider an opposing angle. Thus Kenny’s piece of writing, attacking the relevance of the ABC and accorded a prominent position in Australia’s only national broadsheet, operates on a mere ‘assumption’ throughout.