Interview with Rachel Landers, director of A Northern Town
- Posted: 24th Mar 2010
- Category: Articles
Kempsey is an Australian town haunted by the ghosts of its past. As the white witnesses to this history have grown old, many have found themselves doing what they never could have imagined: moving in with black people. Yet, at Booroongen Djugun aged care facility, white people and Aboriginal people are living together… and they’re talking. A Northern Town peels back more than 100 years of history as the residents of Booroongen - both black and white - relate tales that lay bare the truth of history and break the tragic divisions of the past.
Director Rachel Landers completed a PhD in history at the University of Sydney and a post-graduate directing course at the National Institute of Dramatic Art. Working in theatre after graduation she then moved into film as a writer and director of both drama and documentary. Her multi-award winning films have screened all over the world theatrically, at festivals, and in broadcast. Most recently, she has added to the list a prestigious AFI award for best cinematography for her camera work on A Northern Town.
DFG's Deborah Kingsland spoke to Rachel after the film screened at the 2008 Sheffield Doc/Fest.
Can you talk a bit about your move from theatre to film? How does your theatre work inform your documentary work? It's an unusual move. The expectation would be that you would move into drama.
Yes I started out as a theatre director and then moved into film as a drama writer/director. My primary reason for the move was that at that time in Australia a person could get film productions up fairly independently whereas in theatre you really had to wait to be invited to work with an existing theatre company which tended to be (at least when I graduated from the National Institute of Dramatic
Courtesy of the filmmakersArt) a bit of a conservative and closed shop – and to be frank - a bit of a boys club. I like the freedom that film affords. I sort of fell into documentaries and swiftly became hooked. I don’t do theatre anymore as there simply isn’t the time but I do try to keep my hand in film drama and will probably do more next year.
My theatre work does inform me in the sense that I am always seeking to create arresting drama within the frame. This translates into my shooting as well where I try to imbue the literal frame with resonating drama. I think theatre did train me to have a strong sense of story and, obviously, to work collaboratively with people. Other than that, ironically, it defined for me what I really wanted to do which is work in the real world with real people and get away from rarefied neatness of theatre.
How did you decide to make a film about Kempsey? Do you have connections with the area?
My father’s white family lived in Kempsey from about 1870 on and I spent a great deal of my childhood in the town staying with my grandparents. I remembered it as this kind of quiet, dusty place where nothing much happened. I imagined it was a place where nothing had ever happened – what is really bizarre is that I don’t even remember seeing many Aboriginal people – which is pretty odd given they represent about a third of the population. I never really gave the place much thought in adulthood. My grandparents died, my family moved away.
A few years ago I met up with an Aboriginal man called George Ellis while I was working on another documentary. As we were chatting it turned out that George and I were the same age, that his father was raised in Kempsey, and that our fathers must have been at Kempsey High together. The thing was that this town George described to me was something out of a Dickensian nightmare. His father was bussed to the high school from the infamous Kinchela Boys home which housed Aboriginal boys forcibly removed from their families. It was a place of sadistic horrors – rapes and murders. He told me about the missions that triangulated the town – but set far enough out of eye shot that the town folk never had to view their third world conditions. He told me about covered up massacres, stealing of farms, segregation and on and on. It was so disorientating to have this physical place so fixed in my mind and have to do this gestalt switch as I heard his descriptions. What I found most disturbing was the fact that I had a Phd in history and yet I knew nothing about my own family’s past and these stories (that turned out to be hard facts) were so seldom openly discussed or acknowledged. I began to realise that the visits my brother I had growing up were always orchestrated in subtle ways – we’d be whisked out of town to the local beaches where my grandfather had a beach hut where any curiosity we may have had would be washed away the surf.
I realised that not only was the past another country but in Australia, according to racial lines, it was a parallel universe. The more I researched, Kempsey became a kind of ground zero for all that had occurred between black and white Australia from settlement onwards. That it had the highest NO vote in the 1967 referendum as to whether Aboriginals should be included in the census – in effect whether they should be counted as citizens - made it a fascinating place to document. It’s also an iconic country town home of Australia’s most famous country singer Slim Dusty and Akubra hats and is also emblematic of a 1000 similar country towns across Australia, so it was an intriguing place to start exploring.
Courtesy of the filmmakers
I notice you have a lot of funders on board. Can you talk a bit about the fundraising process. How long did it take?
While it appears that we have many financial sources, the investors on A Northern Town are (or were as things have recently changed) a fairly typical cluster for an Australian domestic documentary. Even so raising finance was a fairly protracted process (as I imagine it is anywhere). Development was financed by what was the Australian Film Commission (now a department of Screen Australia) and then secured a presale from the broadcaster SBSi (now just SBS). The producer Dylan Blowen and I then applied to the Australian Film Finance Corporation (which has now merged with the AFC to from Screen Australia) for the bulk of the finance and to the NSW Film and Television Office for top up production investment. The one additional source of finance we were able to secure was a grant from the NSW FTO Regional Film Fund which, as the title implies, is an incentive for increasing production in country areas.
The style is unusual and very effective. I loved the way you slowly introduced the old people's home and how the history was interwoven. Did you plan it from the start ? Have you been influenced by other filmmakers in the evolution of this style?
There was a plan and there wasn’t a plan. We were definitely seeking a style that was heightened and lush, where the old people’s home with black and white residents acted as a crucible of shared tragedy or hardship that rippled out through the town haunting the people and the landscape. I was trying as much as possible to find images that did not explicitly illustrate the stories that were being told but rather added other meaning or other resonances. For example hearing (white) Joan’s story about her mother’s poverty in South Kempsey during the Second World War and being terrorised by welfare officers, delivered by her sitting on the porch of a rather stagy looking settlers cottage cut together with scenes of contemporary South Kempsey which is now a very poor black area.
Another example is using the images of these huge glass plate negatives of beautifully dressed 19th century white children from Kempsey over stories about the massacres of thousands of Dunghutti up river. Another decision was to get as much movement as we could in the shots – so we used the dolly a lot. Of most influence to me, especially in the portraiture which is a key element of the style, was not other filmmakers but photographers Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans - and for landscape William Eggleston. We found the aged care facility on a research trip. The fact that it had 50% white (many old racists from the town) and 50% Aboriginal residents (and Aboriginal owned and operated) made it the prefect place to tell a shared history. As someone remarked at the time – it was a bit like stumbling onto a film set.
Director Rachel Landers
How long did it take to shoot and edit?
The shoot took about five months. We moved up to Kempsey and got a house in town. It took a long time as some of our subjects were very elderly and some very frail and we had to film them when they were feeling up to it. It was not a film we wanted to rush. Our cut was extremely intense and took about 15 weeks with a two-week break in between.
The history side of things was truly shocking. It reminds me of Kate Grenville's The Secret River. What has been the reaction locally around Kempsey to the film and the history particularly?
We showed the film to the residents of the aged care facility just after it was finished and they loved it. However just before the film screened on Australian TV their pre-publicity had most of white Kempsey up in arms - the historical society said they thought we should be ashamed of ourselves as they had thought we were doing a ‘straight’ i.e non-indigenous history of the town. However the wonderful mayor Betty Green got all the various groups together - black and white - sat them down in the Town Hall together and had a screening. The reaction was very powerful and very cathartic. I think the residents are rather relieved it’s all out in the open finally. Nearly everyone loved it. The mayor wants us to do a sequel!
When the film screened nationally we had some extraordinary positive reviews which surprised me as I thought the style might be off-putting.
A Northern Town is available to buy on DVD and can be purchased through Pony Films: www.ponyfilms.com.au