Contact

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this post may contain names or images of people who have died.

Warning
This guide and all of my reviews contain occasional bits of rude language,

and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.

                    Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.

As hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.

 

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Contact - Documentary 2009 Australia - DVD or free on Kanopy

If you are even mildly curious about the world we live in, you have to see this at least once.

There won't be many reviews of documentaries posted on this site, despite the fact that I’m a documentary nut, so if you see a review of a documentary here I hope you trust that it’s pretty special.

This one includes genuine footage from 1964 when 20 Martu people, who had never in their lives seen white people before, finally made contact for the first time in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.

This is the story of how and why contact was finally made, what happened since, and how the people involved felt about it all.

An engineer who helped build the roads into the Great Sandy Desert between 1947 and 1963 described it as 1 million square miles

“which hadn’t been touched by anybody since the world began”

 

That’s a direct quote from a talk he gave in 1991. He seems to have been a kindly, affable and intelligent bloke who saw Aboriginals as human, which is exactly why this is the sort of hurtful, ignorant comment he shouldn’t have made. (On the other hand, if this is the sort of comment that comes from the good guys, it should provide a clue about the sort of shit Indigenous Australians read, see, hear, find and so on all the time.)

Most of the British and Australian overlords in charge of the post WWII nukiller/space program did not really expect to find any “Natives” at all in the Percival Lakes target area by the time the Blue Streak test program was scheduled in 1964, let alone Indigenous Australians who had never before had any contact with white people.

When I first heard the Martu people at the centre of this story gave a couple of Native Welfare Patrol Officers a run for their money, I was rather chuffed. It was not until I saw this documentary that I appreciated how truly terrifying the first contact experience must have been for them.

For those who are not Australian, a quick and nasty guide to provide some context:
*Australia is just a bee’s dick smaller in size than the lower 48 States of the U.S.
*The population of Australia 12 March 2018 is 24.6 Million (Yes, about 7 and ½ % the size of the population of the U.S.).
*Even though we have one or two mountains where it snows and a few rainforests quite a distance from the mountains, Australia is actually the second driest country in the world – after Antarctica.

Most of the population is dotted around the coastline, while a great deal of the mainland/ inland would not support population stress of any sort at all.

*This story is about people in the path of a planned rocket launch from Woomera in South Australia, towards Percival Lakes in the Great Sandy Desert of Western Australia.

The stars at night might be big and bright deep in the heart of Texas, but they’ve never seemed anywhere near as bright in the Northern Hemisphere to me as they do “at home”. In the outback or in the bush, the stars are awesome as there are no competing lights or other infrastructure to dim them.
No wonder, then, that amongst the many firsts of Australia’s First Peoples, we can list astronomy. (Yes, folks, structures that pre-date Stonehenge. But I digress).

Plenty of opportunities in this documentary to see there can be two completely different ways of interpreting a single event. And after you’ve seen this doco, make a note of the question “What does a lack of eye contact mean in a non-Western world view?” The question is only posed between lines of dialogue in this documentary, so no one bothered to try and answer it here.
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It seems from this music video the stars are very important to the Martu People.
Lyrics of this song Ruka Ruka (Sunset) from the Wild Dingo Band's web page.

I'm getting homesick,
I want to go back,
Home is still living by itself,
For a long time I haven't been back,

There is a place I grew up in the East,
and every sunset in a different place somebody else's land,
I'm standing by myself wondering,
Sun is going down and the night came,

I'm lying down in my bed thinking about my homeland,
Punmu Parngurr Kunawaritji,
Its our home for martu people,
(Kartugarra warnmun margiljarra)
Its Our Home