Word: arafura
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...making a film." From its first frames, Ten Canoes announces itself as a film like no other. At bird's-eye level, the camera glides across a watery landscape rarely seen other than by the 800 Yolngu inhabitants of Ramingining. We're in the heart of the Arafura Swamp, and over the alien sounds of chirrups, croaks and slithers, the laughing narration of Gulpilil can be heard describing how the landscape was formed by the Great Water Goanna, Yurlunggur. When De Heer's regular sound designer first saw a three-minute rough-cut, he knew they were on to something...
...other part of Australia's frontier is as closely watched by authorities as the Torres Strait, a shallow sea spanning the 150 km from the tip of Cape York to the coast of Papua New Guinea and flanked by the Coral Sea to the east and the Arafura Sea to the west. Scattered across the Strait like stepping stones are 138 islands, only 17 of which are inhabited. This region, many of whose 8,000 Australian residents follow traditional indigenous lifestyles, seems a tranquil tropical idyll. But for professional border-watchers - officials of the Australian Customs Service, Federal Police, Quarantine...
...form a priceless ethnographic collection at Museum Victoria.) They document the vanished world of a self-sufficient and proud nomadic society: a solemn young widow receiving a ceremonial staff topped with a bundle of string and her husband's finger bone; hunters gliding stealthily on canoes through the giant Arafura Swamp. Particularly powerful are the portraits, so different from the era's stiff poses? of Aborigines like clan leader Wonggu: lively, strong people, clearly at ease with the photographer. Back in Melbourne, Thomson urged segregation for the region - to no avail, despite his warnings about European and Japanese fishermen bringing...