Where to begin with David Gulpilil

From the reinvigoration of feature filmmaking in the 1970s to the flourishing of Indigenous work in the last decade, no individual has had a greater impact on Australian cinema than Yolŋu actor and dancer David Gulpilil. His death, late in 2021 at the age of 68, brought an untimely end to a miraculous but tumultuous career.

If you’re new to Gulpilil, however, knowing where to start can be tricky. His appearance in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) – leading two lost (white) children out of the Australian outback and back to ‘civilisation’ – helped to kickstart Australia’s filmmaking revival and was a landmark for Aboriginal representation on screen. But Roeg’s internationally celebrated film is also filled with typically dense symbolism and relies heavily on particular stereotypes about the mystical, mysterious and ultimately tragic Aboriginal. Some of these stereotypes were busted, and others underlined, by Gulpilil’s other famous appearance as Mick Dundee’s mate in Crocodile Dundee (1986), an international smash that once again sent Gulpilil’s face around the globe.

Although he took great pride in sharing his culture with the world, it is a mark of Australia’s settler national culture that Gulpilil was never really allowed to play anything other than an ‘Aboriginal’ man. So, how does one navigate a career where familiarity with context may be just as important as appreciating Gulpilil’s truly magnetic screen presence?

While it might seem logical to go back to where it all began with Walkabout, it is a much later performance that truly demonstrates Gulpilil’s quiet brilliance. An understanding of context can certainly help to illuminate Charlie’s Country (2013), but Gulpilil’s masterful performance – in what is perhaps his one, true leading role – manages to carry the entire film regardless. This understated, realist drama was co-written by Gulpilil and based loosely on his own life, caught between traditional and modern cultures in the remote Arnhem Land community of Ramingining, in Australia’s Northern Territory. Delivered with quiet, devastating force, and punctuated by flashes of Gulpilil humour, it is no surprise that – while his intuitive acting style had been winning plaudits for more than 40 years – it was for Charlie’s Country that Gulpilil was recognised with the Un Certain Regard award for best actor at Cannes.

The third in a trilogy of feature collaborations with the Dutch-Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer – a partnership that began with the masterful 1920s-set outback drama The Tracker (2002) and continued with Yolŋu pre-contact tale Ten Canoes (2006) – Charlie’s Country emerged after de Heer went to visit Gulpilil in jail, where he was serving a short sentence for domestic abuse. The resulting project emerged as a suite of films, with Charlie’s Country sitting alongside the documentary Another Country (2015). Narrated by Gulpilil, this companion film is an equally important aid to understanding the disastrous effects of government policy, and the ongoing disenfranchisement of Aboriginal people across the country.

Gulpilil’s collaborations with de Heer are certainly worth tracking down, but there are plenty of other treats in store from across his career. While Walkabout is perhaps his most famous role from the 1970s, Australia’s settler cinema was completely invested in creating a national mythology largely resistant to Aboriginal representation, with Gulpilil the most consistent presence throughout the decade.

His range of talents – as actor, dancer and storyteller – are on full display in Storm Boy (1976), adapted from a children’s book, but a powerful watch for audiences of all ages. Although focused on a young boy and his friendship with a pelican, its true heart is Gulpilil’s Fingerbone Bill, who teaches the boy (and a nation of children) about how Aboriginal people relate to the land on which they stand. This was followed by a key supporting role as the sidekick to Dennis Hopper’s titular bushranger in Mad Dog Morgan (1976), and a brooding performance in Peter Weir’s mysterious quasi-folk horror The Last Wave (1977).

A life spent struggling between worlds meant that Gulpilil’s appearances in the 1980s and 90s were patchy and sporadic, and he only really returned to prominence again in the early 2000s, as Australian cinema finally began to reckon with the true nature of its past (and present). Here, despite playing a succession of Black Trackers, Gulpilil brought nuance, humanity and even humour to what was once a mere stereotype.

As well as the title role in de Heer’s The Tracker, Gulpilil went on the hunt for three Aboriginal girls in Rabbit Proof-Fence (2002), an adaptation of Doris Pilkington Garimara’s personal account of the Stolen Generations, the brutal, systematic removal of Aboriginal children from their families (a practice that continued right up to the 1970s). His near-silent performance is exemplified in one key moment, when a quiet pride in the girls’ tenacity ripples across his weathered face. 

Gulpilil’s cameo as another tracker momentarily lit up John Hillcoat’s bleak but brilliant revisionist western The Proposition (2005). That film also starred Murrungun man Tom E. Lewis, best known for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), and these two Aboriginal actors, members of adjacent Yolŋu clans, helped pave the way for Indigenous storytelling on screen. As well as starring together as estranged brothers in Dunghutti director Darlene Johnson’s short film Crocodile Dreaming (2007), they also appeared in Gamilaroi filmmaker Ivan Sen’s Goldstone (2016) – the sequel to outback crime thriller Mystery Road (2013) – as two members of a local Aboriginal land council who find themselves on opposite sides of a mining dispute. 

This would be Gulpilil’s last major film role, so it’s fitting that he should appear as an elder, passing down knowledge to Aboriginal detective Jay Swan, another character struggling to navigate two worlds, and played by one of a new generation of Indigenous stars, Arrernte/Arabana actor Aaron Pedersen.

Gulpilil’s screen presence is never less than mesmerising, but even he can’t overcome the wild stereotypes swirling around in Baz Luhrmann’s overblown epic Australia (2008), from white saviours to Aboriginal mysticism. Nowhere is that mysticism more troubling than in Gulpilil’s elder, who just wants to take his grandson on walkabout but who is reduced to a postcard view of Aboriginality that is almost a century out of date.

Across a career spanning five decades, Gulpilil lent his unmistakable nuance to the full gamut of Aboriginal types, from that mystical stranger in Walkabout to a variety of trackers, tricksters and downtrodden elders. From his stunning debut, right up to the recent documentary My Name Is Gulpilil (2021) – which traces both his career and his health battles – his is a truly captivating screen presence worth exploring.

The life and career of David Gulpilil will be celebrated with a mini-retrospective at the Chichester International Film Festival, which runs throughout August. A second Gulpilil retrospective will form part of the London Australian Film Festival in November.