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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Wandjina! – Childrens’ Sci Fi TV Series – 1966 Australia 7 Episodes
No Longer Available
You can't watch it, but here is what it was about:
The original synopsis tells us this is about some teenagers who discover a group of cave paintings which were sacred to Aborigines. The paintings depict mythical alien beings. Mysterious creatures wearing back packs who look like the mythical alien beings in the paintings wander around in the mountains/ rocks/ bush killing animals.
Notice the synopsis says the paintings were sacred – past tense – they have been lost or forgotten. How careless of the Aborigines to lose them. The paintings have now been found by 3 teenagers.
(There are actually four teenagers in the story but three of them are white and the fourth one is Aboriginal. I guess the fourth one does not count because this is 1966 and we have not yet had the (1967) referendum to change the Constitution so, literally and legally, Aboriginals are not counted yet.)
The fourth/ Aboriginal teenager is played by a white actress wearing blackface. This was a common practice for the era. Colour television transmissions did not commence in Australia til 1975, but blackface still looked pretty chat in B & W. The colour picture at the top of this review is a still from the series and shows Julianna Allan in blackface (with a rather young Jacki Weaver).
I have specifically chosen this still because the images of the “mythical alien beings” shown in this still are absolutely nothing like the original Wandjina images from the Kimberley area in Western Australia. I don't want to disrespect the peoples who hold (present tense) the original images to be sacred.
Yes, I’m guilty of sometimes referring to God as a “mythical alien being” but I'm usually only disrespectful of the beliefs of others when they are used to disrespect me - in a context where words attributed to God have been used to oppress, or to limit someone's freedom. The producers of this show were disrespectful to speak of the Wandjina in the past tense and to speak of them as mythical alien beings, I can see all that – now.
To use sacred Aboriginal images in a story
that talks about destruction of the environment
is a whopping great fucking lie,
and a massive act of erasure.
Given how cavalier Australian governments are about the environment, it's also more than a touch ironic. And while you are here, why don't I take this opportunity to slip a pro-environmental message from our sponsor? What good is a federation that has no power to preserve the environment? Oh wait, it does, but no federal politicians give a flying frack.
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| Underground Water? Frack It, Why Not? |
When Wandjina! first aired in 1966, I found it riveting for several reasons, not the least of which was the relative poverty of local shows, and the lack of intelligent content on TV generally – a medium then barely ten years old in Australia. I don’t think many (white) kids living in predominantly white areas who watched the ABC or saw it weren’t blown away by it: What “we” knew about Indigenous Australia was very little, and even that was a concoction of propaganda and half-truths that had not changed since my grandmother went to school.
We were astonished to learn there might be more to Aboriginal culture than boomerangs and digeridoos – even the idea of Australian rock paintings was a revelation to many of us. Except for the referendum campaign, we rarely even thought about Aboriginal Australia from one month to the next. (Presumably governments deliberately planned to keep us ignorant because it’s hard to feel sympathy for people who aren’t “real”.)
There are two short clips from this series available for viewing here on the National Film and Sound Archive website. (If these clips are from a show we thought was exceptional, it just shows how chat most Australian content was):
I’ve listed this show here for the sake of completeness.
I can’t remember an outcry, nor can I find a record of when it happened, but I believe the ABC eventually erased the original tapes because they accepted the show was offensive to peoples from the Kimberley region in particular, and insensitive on several other levels as well. It is true that broadcast quality tape was commonly recycled in those days, but this series was extremely popular both in Australasia and in the UK (where it was screened under the title Wandjina Magic) so it might possibly have stood a good chance of being preserved if not for recognition of its insensitivity.
In retrospect, I can see that the show was offensive, though if I and many others had never seen it we would have had no early clue that the bullshit in our schoolbooks concealed a huge great history of a rich and complex world.
Here's a bit more social history - 18 years later...
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