Tom Haydon 1938-1991

Jones
TOM HAYDON 1938-1991: FILM INTERPRETER OF AUSTRALIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
Rhys
ones
Well, you can go out into the desert and
l m k at the fireplaces on the ground where
people actually sat 20,000 years ago. The
landscape around is virtually unchanged. I
can't escape the feeling that gives me. I
want to feel I belong to this ... the real
history of the continent. And out there with
you is a station overseer who has been on
his job maybe five years, and professors
and geologists, and you can't escape the
feeling how ephemeral, how superficial the
European presence is, compared with, say
a 30,000-year-old skeleton extruding from
the sand. The Europeans seem irrelevant to
the landscape (Haydon 1977:372).
Thomas William Haydon died on 6 July 1991 of
cancer of the lymph system, aged 53. Many readers of
AA will have remembered Tom in apparently vital good
health at the Fourteenth Indo-Pacific Prehistory
Association meeting in Yogyakarta, Java in August
1990, when he presented a paper describing his recent
experiences with the Agta forest-dwelling hunting and
gathering peoples of northeastern Luzon. He described
how they had recently been dislocated from their prime
coastal estates by an unholy alliance of the self-styled
New People's Army, a plywood company and
land-hungry subsistence farmers. He saw the process as
yet another, perhaps close to final, episode in the
destruction of indigenous hunting and gathering
societies within the Southeast Asian-Australian regions
through the intrusive processes of colonialism and more
recently, what might be termed 'modernisation'. The
paper, with a tilt of the hat to Sandra Bowdler. was called
'Coastal de-colonisation' and evoked images drawn
from the Tasmania of the 1830s to the Philippines of
today. Yet Tom. with his instinctive grasp of prehistory
allied with an artistic freedom of thought, also felt that
what he had observed had deeper historical cadences,
with reflections back to the Pleistocene. In a bar down
the street from our hotel, over some excellent
1
Dutch-style B i t ~ t m gbeer and hot Suinatran side dishes,
he expounded excitedly, hands waving in the air, on
some vivid impressions he had had seeing for the first
time i n the bush, an Agta camp occupying a
semi-circular shelter of light timber wluch had been
thatched with palm fronds. 'They looked like
Melanesians' he said, 'in my imagination I was carried
back to an earlier time' (Rhys Jones' journal entry: 29
August 1990).
Tom Haydon, born on the 22 January 1938, was
brought up in one of the post-war northward expanded
suburbs of Manly and went to the newly established
selective Manly Boys High School, a distinction which
he shared with Jim Allen, a year or so his junior. Tom
often spoke highly of the academic standards of this
'school on the sand' as he tenned it and he retained a
deep love of Latin and of Classical literature which he
had learnt there. At Sydney University, he read History,
graduating in 1960, his Honours course being in
Australian history, then somewhat of a novelty in
Australian universities. His teacher was the late
Professor John Ward, who according to Haydon's
apocryphal story, managed at the end of a year' S course,
to get the First Fleet through the heads of Port Jackson
during the last quarter of an hour. This story had a
sharper point however, that like many sensitive people
of his generation, Haydon felt deeply about the problen~s
of a British-derived history which was still being
imposed upon an indigenous and independent
Australian identity. These issues were paramount to
Haydon's creative work and they were to engage him to
his final days.
He was briefly an entrepeneur in the lield o f private
education, when he founded the 'Haydon College of
Knowledge', as a matriculation cranmer on the North
Shore and wluch was opened, with full acadenlic gowns,
in a room above a newspaper shop. by the local nlember
W.C. (Bill) Wentworth. In 1960, he joined the
Australian Broadcasting Corporation as a ‘specialist
trainee' within the Education Ilepanment and was
Department of Prehistory. Research School of Pacific Studies. Australian National IJniversity,C l a ~ h x aACT 2601.
Australian Archcwology. Nltrdwr 35, l992
Tom Hqydon 1938- 1991
assigned in 1963 to producing a twice-weekly
programme for 'the educated layman' called University
of the Air. The appointment of Ken Watts helped to free
ABC television from its radio past, and amongst many
of the 'young Turks' given their head at that time,
Haydon became the first producer in the newly formed
Science Unit. In April 1967, the daily current affairs
programme TIzis Day Tonight was launched by Watts;
and Haydon formed part of a 'push', centred around the
Gladstone Hotel in William Street, Sydney which
creatively h e l m to sustain this and other investigative
programmes produced at the ABC, such as Four
Corners (founded l96 1) and Chequerboard ( 1969).
Haydon felt that these key programmes, together with
the documentaries which were made at that time, 'took
up a questioning and challenging posture towards
society which by contrast with past ABC practice was
almost revolutionary' (1982a:lSO). He looked back
upon a brief golden age between 1967 and 1970 when
Partly by accident, the ABC was operating
in documentary along lines that did
resemble the BBC at its best - an ad hoc
reliance upon informal, close relations
between film makers and management ...
Here was working that system of patron
and protigis which under Grierson (l), at
the BBC, at the National Film Board (of
Canada), wherever documentary has
worked, has been the way it works. Given
the imprecision and intangibility of
documentary it also appears to be vital that
the patron be at the top, with requisite
authority. Documentary in the formulation
stage, does not travel through bureaucratic
in-trays (1982b:17).
His first production in 1964 was called 71re Case
for Conservation where he made a prescient argument
for a rational use of Australia's resources without
causing ecological degradation. He returned to this
theme in Dig a Milliorr, Make a Milliorl (1969), a film
ostensibly about Lang Hancock and big mining interests
in Western Australia, but which in Haydon's inimitable
way, at one level wandered into coniedia buffo, and as
you were laughing at the burlesque, you got hit with a
savage comment, usually fiom the mouths of the authors
themselves. His approach had been influenced by a
Canadian National Film Board documentary on the
newspaper magnate Lord Thomson which had played on
a sense of ironic jwtaposi tion and it was a style which
Haydon was to develop.
In 1969 he went to London to join the BBC,
following a track to the old imperial metropolis that so
many of his contemporaries made: Clive James,
Gemaine Greer, Robert Hughes to name but a few.
Haydon was in the documentary section at the BBC,
arriving just at the end of the period under Huw
Wheldon's tutelage when Peter Watkins (Culloden, 77re
War Game) and Ken Russell were the young stars, and
he made several films for the distinguished Horizon
series. Initially he had a struggle to gain authorship of
his films, since apparently it was then the practice that
'the writing had to be done by established literary
figures. But I wrote my films in the end' (Haydon
1977:306). He found the British scene to be drifting
towards an orthodox endorsement of its own
triumphalist values; a celebration of the status quo as
exemplified by Lord C l a r k ' s Civilization and
Bronowski's Ascent of Man. Paradoxically, he found the
very richness of the British literary tradition to be an
impediment to a creative film culture, since
You move in a thick sort of soup of firmly
inscribed verbalised notions. They are also
very conditioned to sit and listen to the
film, rather than look at it.
By contrast in Australia
Because we don't have so rich a literary
tradition, the documentary filmmaker does
not really have to reckon with r=stablishc=d
ways of approaching a subject. Your film
could well be the first time the subject has
been tackled, in any lbrnl. You can just go
out and do the film, unaffected by any
predecessors. It's like being in a desert
(Haydon 1977:306).
He became executive producer of the British
Empire series, probably the most expensive that the
BBC had ever embarked upon up to that time, and
nothing that Haydon did lessened the expense. He was
the only producer-director actually to have come from
any of the Dominions and he wrote and directed three of
the programmes; to which he brought both his zest for
historical scholarship and a sense of irreverent irony.
The first programme Oh! 7he Jubilee (1972) caused
such a furore in the UK that it was debated in the House
of Lords, with one of the Peers of the Realm denouncing
him as a 'long-haired layabout from King's Cross'
(Haydon 1977:372). The programme Beyond the Bhck
Stump ( 1972) produced a similar response in Australia,
with the complaint that the complacent Aussie dream
had been depicted in terms of the violence of its history
and in a stoic and sardonic acceptance of the hard knocks
of nature and of man.
His film Epitaph to U Frierrclslzip was about Russell
Braddon, the London-based Australian writer, but
Haydon also saw it as a personal crisis point - 'I really
had to decide whether I'd become an Englishman, or
whether I'd turn into one of those classic Australian
expatriates in Britain' (Haydon 1977:372). A new sense
Australian Archaeology, Nuinber 3.5, 1992
of Australian nationalism had been given expression by
the election of the Whitlam Lahor Governments. This
and also a premonition that 'the sort of film wave which
was then building up might not last long. I really felt I
would like to have a go at catching it and becoming part
of it' (1977:372); brought Haydon back to Australia in
1975, when he was awarded a Creative Fellowship by
the Australian Arts Council. This enabled him to embark
on a career as a private film-maker with his own
company Artis Film Productions and during the next
fifteen years he played an important part in the politics
of Australian film, k i n g an especial advocate of the role
of the documentary.
In a tribute to his work, organised by the Australian
Film, Television and Radio School, on the Macquarie
University campus 5 June 1991, it was pointed out that
he had initiated the Australian Film Commission's
Documentary Fellowship Programme to encourage
excellence in documentaries and to support young
film-makers (Menadue 1984).He was Consultant Editor
for the Clznrzgirig Australia series on SBS TV (1983),
and for the Real Life series on the ABC. At Film
Australia, he was an Executive Producer between 1984
and 1986, and he regularly gave lecture courses on
documentary film-making at the Australian Film
School. Among recent collaborations, one can mention
his role as Supervising Producer of Joe Leaky's
Neiglzhours (1988) made by his friends Bob Connolly
and Robin Anderson in the highlands of New Guinea;
and his support for Dennis O'Rourke's controversial
film 73ze Good Wonurz of Burzgkok ( 1991), concerning
the ambiguities of prostitution in contemporary
Thailand.
Haydon was widely regarded in his role as
President of the Australian Film Producers Association,
and as having been one of the architects for gaining the
'10 BA tax incentive' status for documentary film
making. While this scheme had originally been intended
to give financial viability for indigenous Australian film
production; in the end it became rorted by the financial
cowboys of the late 1980s loolung for a tax haven. Tom
Haydon personally lived a relatively frugal life, and was
never corrupted by the ritzy end of the world in which
he lived. He consistently knocked back offers of
administrative jobs, asserting always his personal belief
in himself as a creative artist. In all, he produced or
directed 30 films, of which l ? were written or co-written
by him. He won three Logies for best documentary of
the year, and many other industry prizes and honours.
Australian archaeology: 1967-74
I first met Tom Haydon at the 39th ANZAAS
Congress in Melbourne on 16 January 1967, when he
was filming the Presidential Address of Professor
N.W.G. Macintosh, holder of the Challis Chair of
Anatomy at rhe University of Sydney, and universally
known, though seldom to his face, as 'Black Mac'. Peter
Pockley, Haydon's superior at the Science Unit,
introduced the programme which was televised as Fossil
Mar1 in Austmlicr (Haydon 1967 ). its text being
published in the Austrtrlitrr/ Jourritrl qf Scierlce
(Macintosh, 1967).Haydon, saw the potential for a great
drama here; the mystery of the finds, the personality of
the professor. On the one hand, here was an authority
figure of academia, a stone Conmicrrrhtore of
scholarship; and on the other, an apparent lam kin with
cigar swirled in mouth and deep in voice; a mate on equal
terms with any reprobate he might meet in the bush.
Beyond these theatrical flourishes however, there was a
serious game - that of attempting to decipher the deep
prehistory of the Australian continent.The result was the
film TIze Talgui Skull (1969). which won for Haydon the
iirst of his Logie awards. The film followed the attempts
of Macintosh and Edmund Gill to retrace the steps of
Edgeworth David in the early 1900s to discover the
original find spot of this fossil skull, on the southern
Darling Downs. This had originally been made in the
1880s, and its significance only realised after the
discovery by Dubois of the Pitlzecnntllropus erectus
skull on the banks of the Solo River in 1891. The film
also dealt with the efforts of Athol Rafter, founder of the
Lower Hutt radiocarbon laboratory in New Zealand to
date associated carbonates. The results, that the skull
probably dated in excess of some 13,000 years were
modest, given David's original estimate at the British
Association meeting in Sydney in 1914 that it might
have had a middle Pleistocene antiquity. Nevetheless the
film broke new ground in that it depicted the savants not
as figures of autl~ority, delivering some homilies in
white laboratory coats or as anonymous 'scientists', but
rather as people, accessible as bumbling triers, yet still
obsessed with the desire to know. With its images of
rural Queensland, derived less from the academy and
rather more from Delivertmce. i t gripped the
imagination of the Australian public and was a cause
ce'lt?Dre, the first time probably that issues of the
prehistory of the continent had ever had such a general
nledia coverage.
In 1974. Haydon returned to problems of Australian
prehistory in preparation for his tilm for the Horizori
programme, Tlze Lorrg Lorlg Wulknbout (1975,
BBC-ABC co-production. This was intended to be a
review of the situation as interpreted through the eyes
and opinions of Macintosh. who indeed carried the story
as narrator. Haydon however, quickly grasped that an
enorrnous revolution of knowledge had occurred within
Australian archaeology during the previous few years,
and that the torch of active research was passing to a
Tom Haydon 1938-1991
younger generation. He used this tension as a dramatic
device to create a dialectic in order to engage viewers
directly in the arguments as they developed. In the film,
there is a somewhat mannered scene, shot in the bar of
the tiny Hatfield Hotel situated between Balranald and
Ivanhoe, and the nearest watering hole to the Mungo site.
With filmic reference to the shoot-out in High Noon,
Macintosh flanked by his technical assistants, strode
through the bead curtains to confront the technocratic
'new chums' represented somewhat anachronistically
by Mulvaney, Bowler and myself. Strange to relate, but
it actually was a pub with no beer, since supplies only
came in once a month, and that had been at least a month
ago. From recollection, mine host could only supply us
with port and raspberry juice. An essential part of the
play-acting was that the climactic eye-contact should be
ameliorated by a toast; the grog being provided,
uncharacteristically by courtesy of film-props funds. For
some reason Haydon was particularly finicky that
afternoon about making aperfect shoot and we had about
eight takes at least. To John Mulvaney's growing
exasperation, some of us took our roles and rights
seriously and it was a slightly tipsy committee which met
the professor in the final version. Corny though the scene
was, it did somehow exemplify a dt=ejxrtruth that within
the context of a generational struggle of ideas,
systematic field archaeology now necessitated the
co-operation of specialists from many scientific
disciplines; the days of the lone scholar-savant were
over. Years later* during a stay at the University of
Edinburgh in 1991, some people learning of my
involvement in Australian archaeology, vaguely
remembered that they had seen a film about it some time
ago and 'that there was this scene in a pub ...'.
Historians wishing to analyse how the emerging
knowledge of Australia's prehistory was being
transmitted to a broader mass public via television
during the late 1960s and the early 1970s, might like to
compare Haydon's approach with that of Bob Raymond,
who had had extensive ABC experience in the founding
of Four Corners in 1961. During 1971, Raymond filmed
many of the same archaeologists, in some of the same
locations as in Haydon's film, but Raymond, working
for a series called 'Shell's Australia' had a much smaller
budget and operated within what was effectively a TV
journalist style, with the interviewer asking questions
directly to the 'talent', cut with general shots of the site,
excavation or landscape concerned. Bob Edwards, then
of the South Australian Museum, also shot extensive
film footage at several key excavations of the time,
including Koonalda, Kow Swamp and Mount Cameron
West, and some of this material was incorporated witllin
Raymond's film, which was called me Origirr of the
Australiarrs and televised on commercial Channel 7 in
1972. Rayinond has more recently combined with Alan
Thorne in the major series Man on the Rim (1989),
shown internationally and investigating issues of the
prehistory of the entire Pacific basin.
The last Tasmanian
It is possible that the film for which Torn Haydon
will be most remembered is The Last Tasmnicrri ( 1978).
Tlus was a feature documentary deemed by O'Regan
(1985: 127), who has written probably the most detailed
critical analysis of it, as 'by far the most ambitious and
controversial Australian documentary in the past
decade'. It was given cinema release, and on television
i t appeared on prime time; in the U K on BBC 2
(C/irotiicle series 23 May 1978; Raven 1978 ), in
Australia on the commercial Channel 10 (4 October
1978), and on the national channels of more than 20
other countries. It won the Logie for the best
documentary in 1979. The film had several origins.
Haydon had played Bevorid the Black Stump as a satire
upon the triurnphalist late 19th century Bulleth view of
the British colonisation of Australia. Within this
'national mystique', as Russell Ward had put it in his
Australian Legend (1958: 12), there were neither women
nor Aborigines except as peripheral characters; and
accordingly, in the Black Stump there were only four
seconds out of a total of 55 minutes depicting a woman,
and the Aborigines were really white people dressed up
as such in a histrorical re-enactment for the Queen
(Haydon 1977:372). In a review in 73e Listener (UK),
Clive James had suggested that there should have been
helicopter shots of the landscape of Tasmania, with a
voice reading out a rdl call of the names of all the
Aboriginal people who had d i d as a result of the British
colonisation. This suggestion stirred in Haydon the idea
that 'the story was so big and mind-bending that it
deserved a whole film'( 1977:372). Working on the Long
Long Walkaboutin 1974, took us to the Tasmanian sites
of Rocky Cape and West Point, and Haydon thought that
the new perspectives offered by these archaeological
discoveries could be married to an analysis of the events
of European colonisation during the last century. Rather
than being merely an updated version of Turnbull's
Blrrck War ( l948), he saw that a story concerning a way
of lift: with its antecedents established over a time period
of more than ten thousand years, being effectively
destroyed within the span of a single generation, had
immense moral and emotional power.
The late withdrawal of the A B C from
co-production meant that Haydon had to fund privately
the only filmed record that was made of the public part
of the official State cremation of Truganini on 30 April
1976 (West 1984:87-8). He considered that the
scattering of the ashes of her skeleton onto the waters of
the Derwent on the centenary of her death 1 May 1976,
by representatives of the Aboriginal community in the
presence of the Premier, senior police officers and
medical scientists was not only a highly significant
historical and political event, but also one which was
loaded with deep ironies and ambiguities. It became the
central point of the proposed new film, produced by
Haydon's company Artis in association with the
Tasmanian Film Corporation, the Cadbury Company of
Claremont, Tasmania, the Australian Film Commission
and the French State T V company, the Socie'te'
F r m p k e de Production. I remember in September
1976, walking with Haydon down the Avenue Wagram
near the Arch de Trionzph in Paris to try and persuade
the commissioning editor of the latter organisation, that
they fund a film in French to be shot substantially in
far-distant Tasmania. Paradoxically, such an llcrute
forlctiorwire instantly understood my stumbling
references to Montesquieu and D'Entrecasteaux, and
agreed on the spot; much more difficult was a grudging
world-weary a c c e p t a n c e from the BBC in a
rain-smeared London.
Because I was on study leave in the UK, and
Haydon was partly based at his London office, planning
the structure of the film tcwk place in a farm house, Ty
Gwesyrl: in central Wales and it was here that Betty
Meehan suggested that if there were to be two language
versions, why not also a third, namely in Welsh? Haydon
agreed to what reviewer Elizabeth Riddell (197854)
saw merely as 'an amiable eccentricity', but there was
also a serious implicit historical allusion that to me at
least, Truganirli was an allegorical representation of
Dolly Pentraeth, the last native speaker of Cornish, who
died in 1776, exactly a century before Truganini. She
was also the apocryphal 'old woman of Bala' in Islwyn
Ffowc Elis' futuristic science-fiction novel Wytlitlos yrzg
Ngynzru Fydd (A Week in the Wales to Come,
1957:2 1 1- 14). Here a narrator from the present, moves
to a totalitarian future and travels with an archaeologist
and a professor of lost languages through an empty
landscape of army training grounds, national parks and
State forest in what used to be Wales but which is now
'West England Province', a place devoid of cultural
memory. Eventually, they find an old, half-senile
woman who gabbles a few words of the 26th Psalm in
Welsh, and the narrator says that 'he had seen with his
own eyes the death of the language' (Elis l9S7:2 1). To
me. t h ~ sgave an additional reflexive meaning to the
'spectre' that Bernard Smith in lus 1980 Boyer kctures.
felt 'has haunted Australian culture. the spectre of
Truganini' ( 1980:9).
The film's title - The Lrsr Tcrsnrtrrritrtl - was
Haydon's, and he had intended to have within it, several
layers of literary allusion, referring to late 19th century
Australian A rchueologv. Nun&er 35. l992
'projections of melanchology' (Maynard 1985 ), from
novels such as Fennimor Cooper's 7714 filst of t l ~ e
Moliicnris, to Charles Woolley's searing accusatory
photograph of 1866. It is unfortunate that these subtleties
became lost in an issue wlucli eventually turned out to
be so controversial and even offensive to some
Aboriginal people seeking to re-affirm an identity with
their past. n7ere were tluee different versions made of
the film, with the French L e s Derrliers des
Tnsnimims '2' and tlv Welsh Y Tmnr(rtu'd Olnf (";
each being shot in the field with separate sync-sound
pieces to the English one and having different emphases
in their editing. Since the English language version has
apparently been subjected to several
'deconstructionalist' essays (O'Regan p m . comm.),
students wishing to unravel embedded meanings within
it, might also consider the mu1 ti-lingual and
multi-cultural context of its original construction.
The film was based around a search by Jim Allen
and me across the landscape of Tasmania to the places
where the historical events had actually taken place.
Early in our planning, we had rejected the idea of having
staged, 'period' reconstructions as being cliched, and so
the evocation of the past had to be done through
reference to buildings, ruins, tlie reading of documents,
interviews with local people and so on. Often there were
n o tangible remains and Haydon had his
cinematographer Geoff Burton turn his camera onto the
empty landscape itself. This became a metaphor for a
lost history - 'the only witness to most of what
happened. To comprehend this history calls for an act of
imagination to make the landscape speak' (Haydon and
Jones 1 9 7 7 3 ) . The Tasmanian filnling took place in
March and April 1977, with further work being done in
museums in Oxford, Le Havre and the Dordogne.
Editing was done in Dean Street, Soho and the film
gained enormously through being narrated by Leo
McKern, then a little-known London-based Australian
actor in his pre-Rumpole days.
The sub-title to the film was 'A story of genocide :
how British colonists exterminated a whole race in one
generation', and the intent had been to expose what we
felt was a hidden history, that in Tasn~aniaat least. there
had not been a quiet act of British settlement, but rather
one of violent usurpation; later given legitimacy by an
extrapolation of the social evolutionary theories of the
late 19th Century. Such views of Australian history may
be acceptable or even orthodox nowadays, but they
certainly were not in tlie mid 1970s. Bernard Smith, even
a s recently as 19XO(p.9)wrote that 'It was an area to
whch our historians have as yet paid little attention'. In
Haydon's ( 1977:377) view,
What has been deliberate in this country is
the ef'on to forget our o.wn lisrory. It
Tom Haydon 19-38-1991
hasn't just been forgotten ... it has been
deliberately hidden from people. You can
go to several sites in Tasmania where the
last Aboriginals were taken and where in
place after place, they died. The buildings
have been destroyed, levelled, ploughed
over. To rediscover these concentration
camps of our recent past you have to go in
for painstaking detective work There is an
absence of a sense of history in this country
that is deliberate'.
In 1978, when it was first publicly released, the film
had an immediateimpact. In the UK, the London Sunday
Times based its colour supplement of the 2 1 May around
it, with some of the original gouaches of Tasmanian
Aboriginal people made by Petit and Lesueur on
Baudin's e x w t i o n of 1802, being published in colour
for the first time (Raven 1978). Such is the eclectic
conjunction of images associated with modern mass
communication, that the editorial page of this issue had
a black and white photograph of Truganini cheek by jowl
with the PLO leader Yasser Arafat - as if both were
partners in the same liberation struggle; which maybe
they m. In a review for the same paper a week later,
Dennis Potter (1978) saw the film as coming 'face to
face with genocide'. In Australia, Keith Comolly'S view
in Citrenm Papers (1978: 143), was that the film was 'a
shattering experience ... logical, didactic of tone and
ironic rather than emotional in presentation (1978:143).
The W Times (5- 1 1 August, 1978)' not a publication to
which one turns naturally for historical comment ran the
headline 'Tasmania' S Holocaust !'; and another paper
representing possibly a slightly different political
perspective, the Worker's News, Journal of the Socialist
Labour League (6 July 1978), felt that the film 'cast a
harsh light on the origins of Australian capitalism'. In
the Melbourne Age (19 June 1978) Colin Bennett wrote
that 'Words don't come easily to describe a film that
documents, step by step, the total elimination of a people
by our great-grandfathers'. Finally and probably most
importantly, on the occasion of the film's first public
showing in a cinema in Tasmania, the Hobart Mercury
(21 June 1978) recorded that
for more than a minute, several hundred
Tasmanians sat in silence last night. Their
minds had been cast back 100 years to the
bleak days of which no-one can be proud.
But this time instead of convicts, the
subject matter was genocide.
order to gain this kind of response
It had ben
that Haydon and I had madt: the film in the first place.
Aboriginal protest
Yet outside that theatrical launch and later at the
Sydney Opera House, the film also came under fierce
56
and sustained opposition from some Tasmanian
Aboriginal people and their supporters. The original
attacks had come as early as March 1977 while the film
was still being shot in the field. B. Phillips (1977) wrote
to the Melbourne Age on behalf of 'Aboriginal Action',
but from the context of her letter it is clear that she was
neither Tasmanian nor Aboriginal; nevertheless her
view was that I had
not bothered to ask the Aborigines about
their own ancestors, but has preferred to
study them as extinct scientific wonders.
He denigrates their non-materialistic,close
affiliation with nature ... Now (that) Rhys
Jones continues to dance on the graves of
the Aboriginal people, the film he and Tom
Haydon plan to make should be stopped at
all costs and the (money) should instead be
given to the Aboriginal people to make
their own film ... to remind us they are still
alive, calling for justice and our
ucceyturlce of them as people, not
dispensable pawns (my italics).
This prompted the late Stephen Murray-Smith
(1977), historian of the Bass Strait and its various island
communities, to comment 'that it almost seems that
nothing can now be said about Aboriginal people that
does not raise hysteria and rancor from those who are
often self-appointed spokesmen f'or these people'.
Michael Mansell, then State Secretary of the Tasmanian
Aboriginal Information Service wrote in May 1977 to
Survival Internatiottul, a London- based journal
dedicated to issues of Third World politics and liberation
movements, to state his objections to the film. These
included the title and the fact that 'We strongly oppose
people like Tom Haydon and Rhys Jones who say that
the identification problem is not their area but ours. They
maintain that they can touch on Aboriginal issues such
as our past without affecting today's problems'. The
letter ended with a brief summary of a land rights claim
which was probably published here for the first time and
which is discussed later in this paper.
- The criticisms were centred on the iilnl's title and
the accompanying claim of 'genocide', both of which
were interpreted literally as implying that modern
Tasmanian Aborigines had no existence and thus had no
political legitimacy (e.g. Daniels and Murnane 1978).
The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, in a public document
opposing the film (1978), and distributed at the Hobart
premiere, stated that it 'perpetuates past myths and
injustices and undermines the current struggle of
Aboriginal Fopit: for rwog*tion of their rights and
identity'. A sticker, with no authorship, placed on
posters advertising the film in Sydney, had the crude
insult 'Racist! This film denies Tasmanian Aborigines
Australian Archaeology. N ~ u n l w r35. I992
Jones
their Land Rights', and this was reproduced without
further comment by Ryan in her book 77le Aborigirral
( l98 1 ; 254). This was ironic, since Haydon
Tasrrintriclt~s
had used Ryan's original Ph.D. thesis as the basis for
much of his historical research. The Australian Union of
Students produced a broadsheet entitled Racism iri
Tasmania (Gaby and Marion eds 1978),which included
several informative articles by Mike Mansell, Clyde
Mansell and Heather Sculthorpe on topics such as the
economic exploitation of Tasmanian Aborigines in the
contemporary Mutton bird industry, inequality in the
application of law enforcement, an account of
discrimination during tJlls century; and also a critical but
nevertheless balanced review of the film by Mike
Mansell (1978a). The editorial however had no such
restraint. Opposition to the film, described by one of the
editors. Gaby, as being 'dangerous racist propaganda',
was seen as part of an ongoing 'battle against white
supremacy ... How dare Tom Haydon seek out
Aborigines and get them to say they weren't
Aborigines'. With a sensitive regard for tolerant debate,
Aborigines and what were referred to as 'activists' were
exorted to 'Leaflet the people swing the movie, boo
through it, yell out your protests and make sure our voice
is heard' (1978: 1). The issue had rapidly become so
polarised in some quarters that both Haydon and I came
not to recognise the kind of film or its political
affiliations that we were supposed to have made.
Aboriginal identity
The 1970s was a time of turmoil in the politics of
Aboriginal e~nanci
pation and of identity, especially
within those communities located in rural and urban
Australia who were culturally distant from the
traditional life of some of their forebears. Some people,
following the political actions of the early 1960s, such
as the 'freedom rides' organised by Charles Perkins and
the result of 1967 referendum, took the opportunity to
assimilate, at least econonlically into the mainstream
society. Others felt the need to identify strongly as
Aborigines, to assert their sense of difference and of
survival over the privations of what they saw as having
been an oppressive colonial occupation. When the film
was being made, these issues were passionately being
debated by many people of Aboriginal descent i n
Tasmania, including those who appeared witlun it.
While planning the film. Haydon had carried out
extensive liaison work with members ofthe Cape Barren
Island conlmuni ty and elsewhere on the Furneaux
Group. He felt that many people saw themselves as
'Islanders' or 'Straitsmen', with a distinctive history and
a sense of independant identity extending back to the
early decades of the 19th Century (see also
Murray-Smith 1979). Issues of pan-Aboriginality were
at that time at least, treated with hesitation and
confusion, with several people expressing on the one
hand a rejection of such a uniform label bci ng i~nposed
on them frcm the outside. and on the other ;Idwp sense
of anguish at a vaguely felt sense of loss of language and
custom in some distant time. There was also dctiance.
Errol West ( 1987) has written a poignant pcxnl:
There is no-one to teach rile the songs that
bring the Moon-Bird, the fish or any other
thing that makes me what I am.
No old woman to mend my spirit by
preaching nly culture to me No old man with the knowledge to paint my
being.
The spectre of the past is what dwells
within The poet's soul is also possessed by a wamor of ages
who rises with righteous indignation but
I do not want blmd -just opportunity - to
be,
But even with him within, there is no-one
to teach me the songs that bring the Moon
Bird, the fish or any other tlung that makes
me what I am.
In what became a controversial scene in Tlie Last
Tasninniclrr, Amette Mansell, then Chair of the Cape
Barren Comnuni ty Council, made a powerful statement
that
Just compare the Aboriginals that were
here to the way of living of the descendants
today. There's a hell of a difference. They
just wiped the old fellas off, they' ve got no
chance of doing that to the ones that art:
descendants.
The visual material for this section was filmed
entirely on the remote Steep Head Island. west of Hunter
Island during the operations of a mutton bird shed, with
shots of the birds being killed, plucked and skunned.
With the sound track turned down, it might have b e n a
classic demonstration of an unbroken continuity of
Aboriginal foraging custom; indeed nowhere else in
southeastern Australia is there anything remotely
matching the mutton bird industry as a hunting and
gathering activity. The people looked and acted like
Aborigines. yet what they said had within it ambiguity
and doubt. This was Haydon's way of creating a
dramatic tension between the visual and the spoken
halves of the film rnediunl. He wanted h s audience to
engage in debate and to do this, he planned not only to
provide them with enough information, but also to
provoke a dialectic tllrough creating a tension of
apparently contradictory messages. A point of
contention fronl the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, and
also from the Aboriginal Legal Service lawyer Pierre
Slicer (Monday Conference 1978:20), was that the last
sentence of Rosalind Langford's obituary speech at the
Truganini cremation had been omitted - namely that 'the
fight has just begun'; the editing being seen as trickery
and misrepresentation (Mansell 1978a). I questioned
Haydon about this on several occasions and his response
was an artistic one, that he considered films in which
political or social messages were preached at an
audience in a simplistic manner were usually
counter-productive. He pointed out that the propaganda
films of totalitarian states were h11 of such examples.
?he self questioningthat he wanted to stimulate was well
expressed by reviewer Connolly (1978: 146)- who saw
Premier A.D. Lowe's remarks at the cremation, that
'Tasmani ans today appreciate the significance of
extinguishing a race of people', as being full of
unconscious irony, which in the audience created
a lingering doubt - As a lone wreath floats
on the Derwent, one wonders?
Aboriginal political action in Tasmania
With hind-sight, ~ a ~ d was
o n less perceptive as to
the positivist political aspirations and sensitivities of a
growing urban Aboriginal community in Hobart,
Launceston and the northwest towns, who for various
economic and other reasons had left the islands in the
post-war period to join the broader comnlunity (West
1987; Mansell 1978b). Within the school environments,
their children had experienced being taunted by their
peers as being 'black', and yet the curriculum appeared
to say that no Tasmanian Aborigines still existed (West
1987:33; Milliken 1978a:22-3).It was from this milieu
that grew a group of political activists who in the 1970s
began articulating a strong identification of being
Aboriginal. During the Whitlarn period, an Aboriginal
Information Office was set up in Hobart and some
designated Aboriginal funding was initiated. Detailed
genealogical work by Mollison and Everitt, which was
set out in their book The Tasmanian Aborigines and
their Descendants (1g%!), gave many people access for
the first time to their own family histories; which
because of a climate of prejudice over generations, had
in some cases resulted in a suppression of knowledge,
or at least an acknowledgment of Aboriginal descent.
Re-claiming or re-affirming an Aboriginal ancestry was
for many people a radicalising experience. There were
also external influences such as the immigration into
Tasmania of some politically aware Aboriginal people
from the mainland states who brought with them a sense
of a national Aboriginal movement (Milliken 1978a;
Langfotd 1983).
In November 1976, a land-rights street march
occurred in Launceston - 'the first time ever that
Tasmanian Aborigines en masse became visible and
58
vocal over the struggle ... From now on it was to be a
concerted and ongoing effort to publicise the Land
Rights issue and win white support' (Sculthorpe
1978:6). A visit by Her Majesty the Queen to Hobart
early in 1977 presented such an opportunity when
Michael Mansell dodged the security cordon at the
Wrest Point Casino and confronted a somewhat startled
Monarch with a land rights petition (West 1987:86).
'This and the subsequent police harassment had the result
that 'Tasmanian Aborigines were heard about all over
Australia for the first time' (Sculthorpe 1978:6). The
Neilson Labor Government was further embarrassed in
November 1977 with a tent embassy in front of the
Tasmanian Parliament, where a list of land claim
demands was set out. In addition to the mutton-bird
islands, Cape Barren Island and all unalienated Crown
Land, claim was also made for the sites and ruins of the
19th Century government Aboriginal stations of
Wybalenna and Oyster Cove and to 'the rock carving
areas at Rocky Cape, Sandy Cape, Cape Grim, Mersey
Bluff, Mount Cameron and all other areas where rock
carvings exist' (Sculthorpe 1978:6). Cabinet agreed to
consider these and set up a task-force committee which
met periodically during 1978 and reported backlater that
year; yet even half way through the process, the
Aboriginal architects of the claim felt that the agenda
had been high-jacked by bureaucrats, and that divisions
within the Aboriginal community in Tasmania had been
widened (Sculthorpe l978:6). This land claim together
with the addition of late Pleistocene occupation and art
sites such as Kutikina, Ballawinne and Judds Cavern or
Wargita Mina, which were discovered by archaeologists
in the forested wilderness of south-western Tasmania
during the 1 9 8 0 ~
has
~ consistently been asserted by the
Tasmanian Aboriginal community. It formed part of the
formal 'Accord' between Premier Michael Field's
Labor Government and the Green Independants in 1989,
which was passed in the Lower House but eventually
became defeated by one vote in the Tasmanian Upper
House in 1991. The impasse remains.
It can be seen that Tlze Last Tasmanian film was
being made and shown during the very time period when
the radicalisation of the Tasmanian cause was occurring.
From my perspective now, some 15 years later, I wonder
whether any film which had not cleaved closely to an
explicitly approved political agenda would not also have
been opposed. The very act of opposition became one of
those events which served to consolidate a sense of
solidarity as modern Tasmanian Aborigines, and the
controversy gave sustained national publicity to the
cause. While I do not object to these consequences, 1
would however like to see in contemporary comment,
some recognition that the film was not merely a
Australian A r c k o l o g ~ N&r
,
-3.5, 1992
a fair viewing of the film itself. In many cases we were
attacked for the film by pcople who had never seen it.
Politically, it is clearly lhe case that the assertion of
an unambiguous and unbroken continuity from an
Certainty and ambiguity
Aboriginal cultural past has won the debate. Mrs Ida
A report for the Federal Oftice for Community West (1987:87)has made the case with dignity when she
Relations in Melbourne in February 1978, investigated said that
complaints of racial discri lnination in Tasmania
I would like to thank Mr Mick Mansell for
(Milliken 1978a and b). Its author, Lorna Lippman
he called us Aborigines instead of using
'emphasised the particular need to encourage children
those words 'halfcast'. and 'quarter-cast' .
to affirm their Aboriginality' (Daniels and Murnane
Terrible words. We know that we are
1978:10), and also stated that 'One of the gravest causes
someone of Aboriginal descent. It makes
of concern is the use of racist text and classroom books,
us feel a lot better, makes us feel that we're
especially those which maintain that there have been no
all sonieone.
Aborigines in Tasmania since Truganini's death. Such
There can be no argument with this. The question
denial is surely the worse form of ignominity' (quoted remains however, to what extent can a sense of
in Milliken 1978a:22). Presumably, Lippman might
Aboriginality or indeed any other kind of ethnic identity
have classified as 'racist texts', both Manning Clark's
in a modern cosmopolitan and derciciru!industrial world,
(1983:86 ) illustrated edition of his Short History of
still tolerate ambiguity and doubt; or must it always
Austruli~r, where he said concerning the Tasmanians - cleave to orthodox certainties'! Does dissent always have
'So the race became extinct. Both on the mainland and
to be treated as heresy? These issues. in terms of the
in Van Diemen's Land the expansion of settlement with
politics of pan-Aboriginality during tlie past twenty
the increase in the number of squatters had spelt doom
years, have so far received little critical scholarly
to the Aborigine'; and Bernard Smith's Boyer Lectures, attention. However Beckett's (1'388) edited volunle Tile
concerning Truganini, that 'When she died in 1876 the
Corlstructiorl of Aborigirztility, and an entire recent issue
last of the original Tasmanian Aborigines died'
of The Ar~strcrlicrrlJormal of Arltltropolngy, entitled
(1980:9). It is also possible that Illese humane scholars Recorlsidering A borigirlcdit?.)(Tlliele ed. 199 l ) indicate
of impeccable left-wing credentials might also have
that the developments wluch I have tried to sunimarise
been trying to say something more subtle and moving. here for Tasmania had similar resonances on a national
Unfortunately the ugly tag 'racist' became as easy to level. An article by Archer (1991). draws interesting
apply in an indiscriminate manner during the 1970s and conlparisons with constructions of Irish national history
1980s,as 'communist' had been previously in the 1950s. and with Salmon Rushdie's (1988) satire on the
'folkloristic straitjacket' of a timeless Indian 'authentic
Controversy over these issues struck a chord in the
identity'.
Tile Last Tusr~icrrii(~ri
in its treatment of some
national psyche such that the ABC devoted to them, its
of' ambiguity, and
of
these
issues
opted
for
a
degree
weekly current affairs programme Monday Cor~ererlce,
unfortunately,
in
some
contexts,
it
has
h e n pilloried for
chaired by the late Bob Moore (4 September 1978).This
tllis.
took the form of a debate between Haydon and Michael
Mansell, who stated that 'We are the only race of people
Who tells the story?
on Earth who daily have to justify our existence'
Another critique was derived from what I klieve
(hurtcestorl Exunlirrer, 5 September 1'378). The debate
to have been a misinterpretation of my own
started off with conciliatory comments by both main
archaeological speculations concerning what I
speakers, Mansell saying that 'there are some good
postulated were limitations placcd on the destiny of
points in the film', and Haydon that 'it' S trenlendous that
prehistoric human societies in the Bassian region due to
people today want to resurrect and use the name
Tas~nanianAborigines' (Monday Conference, 1978:2). the isolation imposed by the Post-Glacial rising sea;
what Bickford ( 1979:12) referred t o as my 'apocalyptic
However under the adversarial structure of the
programme, they and various members of the audience; vision'. T h ~ swas i n some quarters pamdied as a 'dying
race' theory, (Boys 1978; Sykes 1979:11; O'Kegan
scholars. Aborigines and political activists were
1985:135) that even if the British had not come to
polarised into stereotypic sloganeering. It is possible that
Tasnlania,
the cle~riiseof thc Aborigines would have
this and later confrontations, soliditied a view positing
oc'curred
anyway
and thus there could be no guilt at the
the film as expressing an entrenched opposition to the
extirpation.
1
have
never said this. Some of the
recognition of contenlporary Aboriginal aspirations in
nlisunderstanding Inay come from my use of the word
Tasmania. This was the reverse of our intention and I
'doom' as when I sptlculattld on the rising sea cutting off
believe that no such llidden implication can be read from
commentator on these events, but was also an integral
element within their formulation.
Tom H+n
19-38-1991
the people to the south, from their relatives on the
continental side of the divide - 'Tasmanian history ...
ends in catastrophe ... in a sense their doom was sealed
by that event' (Haydon and Jones 1978:25). My images
and language were drawn from classical Greek tragedy
as exemplified by the eighteenth century German
literary critic G. E. Lessing who considered that
'compassion' meant the 'capacity to be struck and
moved by the fortunes and vicissitudes, by the
dilemmas, challenges and errors of another's life (Lange
1982:25). Perhaps we should have flagged our intent
more obviously and indicated fornlally that our film was
intended to be a 'tragedy' in this literary sense.
Haydon shone a harsh light on what he saw as the
amoral basis of some scientific research carried out in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries concerning the
racial origins and the 'evolutionary status' of the
Tasmanian Aborigines. Several of his images of the
official obsessiveness in recording the dying and the
dead at W y b a k ~ and
a elsewhere, the rows of skulls on
museum shelves, and the bombing of some of these
collections during German air-raids in the Second World
War, had clear visual allusions to the European
Holocaust, as indeed did the sub-title of the film. In a
scene taken at Le Moustier, I am shown emerging from
the Upper Cave and gaze down upon the village; in my
own mind I was simply trying to imagine the place in
some past Ice Age. Haydon however had the narrator
saying that 'the Tasmanian Aborigines had suffered
perhaps the ultimate indignity. They'd become a puzzle;
a subject for scientific papers'. An additional question
was also implicitly raised in the viewer's mind - was
modern scholarship also devoid of moral scrutiny?.
In 1978, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal
Studies held an ethnographic film conference where a
code of ethics was discussed; with a 'guiding principle'
being proposed 'that the outcome of all film-making
projects amongst Aboriginal people be i n the first
instance of benefit and contribution to the contemporary
Aboriginal society'. How this was to be assessed , or
more to the point, who was to do the assessing was not
elaborated upon. There is still enough of the cynic in me
to say that one person's code of ethics can sometimes be
another's political agenda. Sykes ( 1979),writing about
The Last Tasnzanian from what she stated was an
Aboriginal perspective, challenged the very legitimacy
of non-Abriginals understanding Aboriginal culture
and history if they themselves did not have what she
called 'blood relationships'. This question of who tells
the story became in O'Regan's view the critical
question, or as he put it 'who possesses the Tasmanian
arc hive, the white anthropologist or the black
descendants?' (1985:136). It is a broader issue, which
now permeates much of contemporary debate about the
legitimacy of, and political control over researching the
prehistory of indigenous peoples within the boundaries
of what in some areas of discourse are seen as
white-dominated post-colonial states, and there are
sharply divided views (see Mulvaney 1991, as opposed
to McBryde 1992:260-1). In versions of the film
distributed in the early 1980s to schools, by various state
education departments and in the USA, the two sections
on the archaeology and the question of contemporary
identity were cut out. As O'Regan (1 985: 136)put it 'The
fact that they were controversial tells something about
the differing and evolving ways in which Australians
understand the Aboriginal question'. In the late 1980s,
Haydon regained artistic control of his film, which he
reissued in a 104 minute version wllich he considered
to be the definitive edition of his work(4'.
I would like to end this section on a positive note
and indicate the political intent with which Haydon had
set out in making his film. The Melbourne Age editorial
of 22 February 1979 had the headline 'Aborigines: the
debt remains'; and it began by acknowledging that
'Discoveries in Aboriginal archaeology are coming
thick and fast. Australians are these days Icnking on the
aclueveinents and cultures of the ancient Aborigines
with a great deal more pride'. The opinion of 7?zeAge
was that recent discoveries of prehistoric human
cwcupation on King Island and other islands of Bass
Strait had made a large public impact which could be
'traced back to the ... documentary film T4e Last
Tasmanian. The story of Truganini ... was tragic, violent
and ultimately pathetic ... Recent (archaeological )
research results ... have added to the appreciation of the
cultures that were brutally destroyed'. There was also an
irony that the newly-found interest in the past was not
being articulated into the present; that 'While our respect
for the Aboriginal heritage is growing, our attitudes to
the descendants of the old tribes remain ambiguous. The
editorial finished with the analysis that given the
realisation of atrocities coirmitted on Aboriginal
societies in the past;
if the acceptance of these things is to be
anything other than hollow, we must
ensure that today's Aborigines are given a
much more generous social, economic and
medical deal than they have received to
date. We cannot undo the past, but we can
do our utmost to ensure that they have the
opportunity to live in dignity in the future.
Battle for the Franklin
The climax of the Gordon-Franklin conservation
struggle, brought Haydon back to Tasmania in Autumn
1983. With his customary 6la.n and cheek, he hired a
black steel-hulled abalone boat and moored it in the
ncxiiic recession. likely 10 be niade niuch worse by the
middle of the Gordon River, just off Warner's Landing,
stopping of dam-building. Although both lalter tilnis
the scene of the major confrontations. Slung under the
boat, he had a steel-mesh cage full of beer cans; a were made, Haydon was dissatislicd wilh them since he
felt thal he had k o m e too e~nolionallyinvolved. His
Cascade currency. For reasons into which we will not
detailed notes on lhe editing thar 111. was contc~nplaling.
delve too deeply. Haydon's boat had immunity from
give g a d prospects that these changes can be made.
arrest and it also served as a neutral point for all the
This trilogy will constitute a detailed record and analysis
protagonists. After their 'actions', some of the green
activists would come on board and thcn, as if by some of perhaps Australia's greatest conservation struggle.
which he regarded as marking a decisive turning point
pre-arranged signal, would leave, and the police. having
in
the Australian people's identification with their land.
finished their evening meal would take their place. In
Haydon
also saw it as a tragic confrontation between two
this way, Haydon obtained first hand footage from both
sets
of
values,
the one held by a rural working class
sides. Accompanied by a police escort, to make sure that
he was not colluding with, or surreptitiously feeding an imbued with a sense of taming and of improving wild
nature, and the other that of a city-based niddle class,
advanced post of 'greenies', h e filmed our
idealistic and with internationalist horizons but largely
archaeological work at the Deena-reena cave on the
unaffecled ecolower Franklin (Fig. 1).
nomically by the
The result was a
consequences of
trilogy of films, only
their conservation
the first of which, Beethic.
yond the Dcm (1985,
At the time
90 mins), has been rewhen
he was struck
leased (see review by
down
by his termi'Strat', 1986). Shown
nal
illness,
Haydon
on the SBS television
(n.d. =19XX) had
channel, this film exbeen working for
plored the history of
several
years
hydro-electrification in
developing a 'docuTasmania, and its reladrama'
film
tion to the doctrine of
tentatively called
futurism and of indus'Child Dreaming'.
trial progress; a case of
originally intended
Marinetti among the
a s a film for
snow gums. He anachildren
and consislysed the aesthetic, scitently supported by
entific and finally
Penny Spence, the
political opposition to
innovative commisw h a t f r o m t h e mid
sioning txlilur fur
1960s onwards seemed
c h i l d r e n ' s prolike an endless
grammes
on
mechanical destruction
Channel 9. Hayo f an environmental
don's later thinking
jewel. When the old
had in mind an amLake Pedder was fi- Figure 1
Tom Haydon (left) and Rhys Jones outside k n a - r e e n a Cave.
b i t i o u s project
nally dammed. conserlower Franklin River. southwest Tasmania. February 1987.
involving an iniagivationists placed a bust
of Truganini on a plinth on the drowning beach. The two native re-creation of archiieologically attested prelustoric events, linked with an evimlion of 'dreaming'
other tilms included in his provisionally tilled 'The Fight
for the Franklin' were more personal; one cc~nceming ancestral nlyths, using the most recent developn~entsin
the 'vigil' of hard-core green activists who maintained cornputer graphic lechnology. To research this lil~n.he
had embarked on a series of long travels. In s o ~ n eways.
their position. contrary to Wilderness Society instructions in forest camps in the lowm Franklin valley during this is what he had always wanted to do - to be an
anthropologist. He accompanied Kim Akernlan and
the early winter until the High Court decision in July
1983. The other concerned the attitudes of miners, log- Scott Cane to Balgo to meet Pintuhi people; re-visited
gers, hydro-workers and their fanulies. faced with eco- old Aboriginal friends on the Cobourg Peninsula and
Torn Haydon 1938-I99 I
Maningrida; travelled to West Irian and the Philippines;
and in the convivial company of Colin Jack-Hinton,
sampled the politics of the oranglaut of old Macassar. It
was from here that he came to Yogyakarta, and visited
with all the rest of us, Dubois' original Pitlieccrrrtliropus
erectus find-spot on the banks of the Solo River in
August 1990.
Keeper of the archive
Haydon inadvertently became of one of the most
knowledgeable archivists and historians of the
development of Australian prehistory especially in the
time period between 1966 and 1983. Some of this
archive is held in off-cut shoots, extensive audio and film
interviews, transcripts and diary entries. Haydon had
intended to use some of this in a film history of the
subject and its personalities, and it was towards this end
that he was awarded a Visiting Fellowship in
Department of Prehistory in the Research School of
Pacific Studies in the ANU in 1980. Graham Shirley, the
film historian, has already produced a partial catalogue
of this material, and it is intended that it be made
available for future scholars "l. Its potential value was
brought home to me during a workshop at Lake Mungo
in June 1989, intended to bring together the scientists
who had worked on the site and also the Aboriginal
people having traditional affiliation with the place.
Haydon showed a video Murrgo Discussions which
consisted of material which he had shot in 1974 in the
old shearer's quarters. This was an extended and at times
heated discussion on such issues as heritage rights,
claims of cultural ownership, and the role and
responsibilities of the scholar. Viewed in exactly the
same place and 15 years later, what struck me was how
persistently these issues have remained, and also how
little of what was being thought and argued about
politically during the early 1970s had actually been
recorded in the conventional written
A short time before his death, Tom Haydon
converted back to the Christian belief of his youth, when
early in his university days, he had considered entering
the Ministry. An assessment of his savage treatment of
the Methodist lay preacher and 'conciliator',
G.A. Robinson, in 71ze Lrst Tasniar~icrr~
must also take
into account these personal facts. On 7 June 1991, he
recorded a remarkable interview with Caroline Jones for
her ABC radio programme 7Xe Secrrclz for Mecrtzitrg
which was broadcast posthumously on 20 July 1991,
discussing frankly and calmly his experiences about the
process of dying and the perspective that he had gained
on his own life. I drove Tom to that interview which was
held i n the warren of temporary sheds, added-on
buildings and bits of terraced car parks defended by
booms, manned by elderly uniformed gentlemen, high
above the southern edge of Willianl Street. By a strange
CO-incidence,it happened to be the very last day that the
ABC would use it, before moving to some new,
gleaming post-modern corporate building. Tom
suddenly remembered that it was to this samc car park
in the late 1960s that he and some colleagues had
staggered a bit tiddly, after a session at the Gladstone
Hotel. One of his mates had turned to him and said, 'Tell
me Tom, what d i d happen to the Tasmanian
Aborigines?' and he had thought, 'there's a film in there
somehow'.
Notes
1. The Scotsman, John Grierson made Drifters
(1929), and he is widely regarded both in his role
as a social realist within the British tradition, and
also as appreciating the possibilities of film in the
projection of state or other ideology. He visited
Australia in 1940under the auspices of the Imperial
Relations Trust, and advocated an enlightened
government sponsorshp of the media. His realist
style of public service documentaries has
sometimes been criticised as giving covert support
for such out of date values as the 'work ethic' and
'national virtues', seemingly embedded within the
culture of the ABC documentary style of the 1960s,
and also that of the National Film Board of' Canada
and of Film Australia. An equally fashionable
critique latterly has been that his influence seems
'designed to perpetuate inequalities and
hierarchies, and to keep at bay that dreaded
European sin, theoretical investigation' (Dawson
1982:141).
2. Tfus title alluded to the French anatomist Paul
Topi nard's Etude sur les Tasrrianieris of 1869,
where he began his classic paper by stating that 'Les
3.
jourrraux rious orit tippris que le derrlier des
Tasnumiens est nwrt il y ci cirlq ou six nwis et que,
de ces irisulaires, au nonibre de sept nzille lors iie
Irr dkcouverte de L'ile de Vmr-Dienlerl, il rle reste
p 114s ciujourd ' h i qu 'rme fenune; je crois nlenie
qu 'elle vierlt de succoniber. I1 ni 'adorrc senzhle' que
le nlonlerrt etait arrive' d 'e'tudier les quelques
crc2tzes de cette race russenlble's uu Musccunr de
Pcrris, sctrls n2e pre'occuper de ce qui ci yu Ztre k r i t
cr ce sujet (Topinard 1869:24).
For the record , Tlze Lcist Tcrs17uirricrrrwas reviewed
extensively by Bennett 1978, Bickford 1979,
Christiansen 1979, Connolly 1978, Haubold 1979,
Hutton 1980, Levy 1982, Mansell 1978a, 0'Regan
1985, Perkins 1978, Raven 1978, Kiddell 1978 ,
Ryan 1980, and Sykes 1979.
Broadcast by BBC Wales, 2 1 May 1978; Keviewed
in Y. Cynlro, 30 May 1978. According to the
Guirirress Book of Filni Fcrcts c r r d Feats (P.
Robertson 1979: 170; see also Jeffrey 1982), Y
Tnsniariiid Olnf was the first feature film to be
made in the Welsh language. This is not true since
that distinction goes to the social-realist
documentary Y Chwarelwr (The Quarryman ),
made in the mid 1930s; and there is also the
bilingual film Tlie Last D q s of Dol~yrl(1949),
starring one Richard Jenkins (later Burton). The
tri-lingual context of Tile h s t Tasnurrlinrl was a
major point of discussion when the film was shown
at the 1978 Cannes Film Festival. Ciriinicz de
Frcrrtce. in its Cctnries Inurges 1978 comnlented that
this was not only the 'preniiere CO-production
al~str~lo-frarrco-brita~11iique,
c'est aussi Le premier
filni tounre' err triple versiorifmripise, anglaise et
... galloise ' (25 May, p.22). The US based Screen
Iriterrtcltiorial got the whole thing a bit confused
when they quoted Haydon as saying that 'Our deal
with the BBC meant that we had to deliver a British
language version and a Welsh language version'
(18 May 1978:lO).
This version is available on VHS videcxassettt:
together with teaching notes and aids from Artis
Film Productions Pty Ltd, P.O. Box 1608, North
Sydney, NSW 2059.
In accordance with Tom Haydon's wishes, his
widow Suzanne is organising deposition of both his
written and film archive material in appropriate
public institutions for access by borie fide
researchers.
Another film B h c k Mari's Houses has recently
been made ( 1992) concerning the Aboriginal
station and graveyard at Wybalenna, and the
broader question of the survival and resurgence of
Tasmanian Aboriginal identity. Made by
English-born Steve T h o ~ n a snow based in
Melbourne, the publicity for the film specifically
distanced itself from Tlze Last Tusrrumiun, both in
terms of content and ideology (Davis 1992).
Thomas, was regarded by a spokesperson of the
Hinders Island Aboriginal Association as being
'spiritually with us' (Davis 1992); and being aware
of the difficulties of white people telling the story
of Aborigines, he involved members of the
Aboriginal Association in all stages of the tilm
production, including a re-enactment where
Aboriginal people blackened their Paces to take the
parts of their nineteenth century ancestors. He
stated that the 'film belongs to the Aboriginal
conwunit y ' (Davis 1992);within it, the Aborigines
tell their story and it is one with wluch they are
happy
Obituaries
Film-maker wit h passion for import ant issues.
S?driey Monlitly Hertrll, X July 199 I .
Film-maker kept eye on '11w big picture'. '7710
Austrcrlitir~,8 July 199 l .
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