Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country

By Catherine Kevin

'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' newly locates the story of the genesis of the iconic 1955 film ‘Jedda’ (dir. Chauvel) and, in turn, ‘Jedda’ becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells. It spans the period 1930–1960 but is focused on the 1950s, the decade when Charles Chauvel looked to the ample resources of his friends in the rich pastoral Ngunnawal country of the Yass Valley to make his film. This book has four locations. The homesteads of the wealthy graziers in the Yass Valley and the Hollywood Mission in Yass town are its primary sites. Also relevant are the Sydney of the cultural and moneyed elites, and the Northern Territory where ‘Jedda’ was made. Its narrative weaves together stories of race relations at these four sites, illuminating the film’s motifs as they are played out in the Yass Valley, against a backdrop of Sydney and looking North towards the Territory. It is a reflection on family history and the ways in which the intricacies of race relations can be revealed and concealed by family memory, identity and myth-making. The story of the author, as the great granddaughter, great-niece and cousin of some of those who poured resources into the film, both disrupts and elaborates previously ingrained versions of her family history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Aug 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781785273520

Book preview

Dispossession and the Making of Jedda

Dispossession and the Making of Jedda

Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country

Catherine Kevin

Anthem Press

An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company

www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2020

by ANTHEM PRESS

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or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK

and

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Copyright © Catherine Kevin 2020

The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above,

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

(electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise),

without the prior written permission of both the copyright

owner and the above publisher of this book.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020940671

ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-350-6 (Hbk)

ISBN-10: 1-78527-350-7 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.

This book is dedicated to Julie Mackey and to the memory of Eric Bell.

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Jedda (1955): Cultural Icon and Shared Artefact of Mid-Twentieth-Century Colonialism

1. Financing Jedda

2. Hollywood in the ‘Fine Wool Hub’

3. Making Jedda

4. Viewing Jedda

Epilogue: Bogolong Memories and the Conceit of Family History

Index

Figures

1 Jedda . Image of poster daybell

2 Still from Jedda . Betty Suttor (Sarah McMann) bandages the hand of George Simpson-Lyttle (Doug McMann)

3 Scene from The Birth of White Australia (dir. Phillip Walsh, 1928)

4 John Julian at the wedding of his sister Patricia Julian and Kevin Fagan. St Columbas Catholic Church, Bogolong, Bookham, New South Wales, 1935

5 Woollenwealth street parade, Comur Street, c. 1960

6 Queen Nellie Hamilton, 1893

7 Queen Lucy (née Hamilton) and King Ned Carroll of North Yass, 1912

8 Hollywood Mission, Yass. Christmas 1952, published with permission of Loretta Halloran Bell (pictured) and Jude Barlow and Caroline Hughes, descendants of the Bell, Shea and Freeman families

9 Hollywood Mission, Christmas 1952, published with permission of Loretta Halloran Bell. Bishop Young with residents of Hollywood Mission including Lorraine Bell, Ossie (Son) Brown and Kenny Simpson

10 Still from Jedda . ‘Ngarla’ Rosalie Kunoth ( Jedda ) and Paul Reynell (Joe)

11 Charles Chauvel discusses scenes with cinematographer Carl Kayser and Bill Harney, circa 1953

12 During pre-production tour for Jedda , circa 1950

13 On location at Kangra Walls, Blue Mountains, circa 1954

14 Jedda premiere, Star Theatre, Darwin, 1955

15 Liberty Theatre, Yass New South Wales, 1970

16 Bogolong, circa 1958

17 Mary Julian (senior) with John, baby Richard and Patricia, 1912

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Without Eric Bell and Julie Mackey Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country would not have been written. Their friendship created the context for the dialogue at its centre: between Ngunnawal and white residents of the Yass Valley, and between past and present. I thank them both for their rich conversations with me over a number of years. I have often felt the absence of the gentle, quick-witted and insightful Eric Bell since he died, too soon, in December 2015.

A decade ago, at the National Library café, Ann Curthoys and John Docker convinced me that this was a story worth telling. Over lunch I began to see the shape it could take. After I’d left the project languishing for some years, Ann then re-engaged and offered to read every chapter in draft form. This commitment was an essential ingredient to the process of completion. I can’t think of a greater privilege than to have had Ann bring her extraordinary expertise as a historian and writer to this project.

This is, in part, a history of my mother’s family. Margie Kevin, two of her sisters, Julie Mackey and Tishie Fagan, and their cousin Tess Julian have been on hand to provide support and to encourage me to keep writing the story of our part in the dispossession of Ngunnawal people. I am grateful for the trust they placed in me and their willingness to know.

Thanks to the Dymphna Clark Fellowship, which gave me a number of opportunities to spend weeks at a time in Canberra and Yass. Thanks to the series editors Nicole Moore and Kath Bode, whose enthusiasm and advice for the book proposal were crucial in the initial stages of the project. In addition to the recommendation from Sue Sheridan, it is the quality of Nicole’s and Kath’s scholarship that attracted me to Anthem Press. Thanks also to the peer reviewers who read the manuscript and made excellent suggestions.

Ric Chauvel Carlsson always returned my calls and e-mails and readily gave permission to use materials in the book. I appreciate his commitment to maintaining and sharing a significant collection of family records. Staff at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia and volunteers at the Yass Historical Society provided crucial assistance. Tim Bonyhady and John Snell generously shared their wonderful photographs with me, and Basia Zagala gave her time and research acumen to follow threads and chase up loose ends in Canberra.

Studies in Australasian Cinema published two articles related to this project, sections of which I have repurposed for this book. Thanks to Anthony Lambert, the journal’s editor.

There are many friends and colleagues who encouraged me to keep this project alive over a long period of being pulled away from it by other research, teaching and children – thank you all. I was pregnant with my eldest child when I met Eric Bell for the first time, and I brought my second child to Yass as a newborn to continue the research. Paddy and Eliza are now 11 and 8 and have been astounded by how overdue something can be. I thank them, and John Lattin, for keeping me company from beginning to end.

As well as those in existing oral history records, this book brings together the stories of the people who agreed to talk to me. While Eric’s and Julie’s stories form its backbone, I am also grateful to Loretta Halloran Bell, Sister Frances Browne, June Cummins, Dorothy Dickson, John Garry, Ronnie Henderson, Mary Julian, Tess Julian, Mandy Reed, Patricia Wallis Smith and Russell Whitehurst for their important contributions.

INTRODUCTION

JEDDA (1955): CULTURAL ICON AND SHARED ARTEFACT OF MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY COLONIALISM

In 1955 Jedda was launched in Australian cinemas and around the world, starring the young Arrernte Alyawarre woman Rosalie Kunoth, and Melville Islander Robert Tudawali. That year Eric Bell watched the film in the cinema in Yass, New South Wales, while local graziers drove to Sydney’s celebrated first screening. The name of the Yass cinema was the Liberty Theatre and the reserve where Eric lived was called Hollywood. These names, evocative of freedom and glamour, belied the racial segregation of the cinema and the discomforts and controls on the reserve that was set on the side of a windy, arid hill and managed by the New South Wales Aborigines Protection and Welfare Boards. Fourteen years after seeing Jedda, Eric was dismayed to read a newly erected plaque in the main street of the Yass Valley village of Bowning, not far from Binalong or Bookham. It plainly stated that the Ngunnawal people, on whose country these villages stood, had been wiped out by an epidemic of influenza in 1846. The local Goodradigbee Shire Council was responsible for the plaque; they also employed Eric’s father. The Bells were Ngunnawal people.

The central paradox of this book is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community for a film that directly addressed the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism– a legacy that was playing out in their own relationships with the local Ngunnawal people at the time of their investment in the film. While the local Goodradigbee and Yass Shire councils and state government agencies collaborated to minimize the visibility of Indigenous peoples and the memory of the colonial violence at the heart of European prosperity, a number of wealthy and high-profile wool farmers actively sought involvement in a film that would bring into focus the aftermath of colonial violence, the visibility of its survivors and the tensions inherent in policies of assimilation and segregation that had characterized the treatment of Ngunnawal people in their lifetimes. Jedda was a five-year project that culminated in the first film starring Aboriginal actors in Aboriginal roles, the first Australian film to be screened at the Cannes Film Festival and the first Australian feature film in colour (Figure 1).¹ This was made possible, in part, by the financial backing of Yass Valley pastoralists who had made their wealth on Ngunnawal country.

Figure 1. Jedda . Image of poster daybell

Source: National Film and Sound Archive Australia. Courtesy of Ric Chauvel Carlsson

In recent decades historians of Australian race relations have pointed out that the intricacies of Indigenous–settler contact are much more visible and detailed in localized histories than in histories of national policymaking and the broad shifts in ideology that shaped their development over time. For example, Victoria Haskins has drawn attention to the value of family history for its potential to expose the sometimes uncomfortable, domestic and intimate dimensions of race relations in Australia.² Haskins has demonstrated this in her use of family records and memories to tell the story of her grandmother’s relationships with the women she employed in domestic service through the Aborigines Protection Board.³ Tanya Evans has worked closely with genealogists, recognizing the value of their archival work for uncovering the history of illegitimacy, and their attention to the everyday lives that tell larger stories of motherhood, employment relations and much more.⁴ Natalie Harkin has written about Aboriginal people’s intimate knowledge of the labour conditions experienced by family members – men and women – ‘whose vital contributions were the backbone of Australia’s economic prosperity, yet largely invisible’.⁵ This use of family stories to explore complex histories is not confined to Australia. Victoria Freeman’s Distant Relations and Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Blood are two examples of books that seek to understand the author’s family history in the contexts of dispossession and slavery in North America.⁶ Merging postcolonial perspectives with attention to the reflexive historical voice, these works of history contribute to developing approaches to understanding the legacies of dispossession and exploitation in the present.

I came to the story this book seeks to tell through family connections. I am the great granddaughter, great-niece and distant cousin of some of those who poured resources into the making of the film Jedda. In the mid-twentieth century, Bogolong, a grazing property on Ngunnawal land, was the home of three generations of the Julian family who were major shareholders in Chauvel Productions Ltd. During my childhood between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, it continued to be a centre of social life for my extended family on my mother’s side. Not quite 2 hours’ drive from Canberra, where I lived with my parents and siblings, it was the site of celebrations and wakes, impromptu afternoon teas and tennis games. During school holidays while staying at my grandparents’ property nearby, we would visit regularly. It was a place of warmth and gentility, both grand and homely, a house built in a period and on a scale that rendered it unlike anything in the red and brown brick suburbs of Canberra. For my immediate family, Bogolong was a happy place where my grandmother Pat and my great aunt Paddie gossiped and remembered and planned. They didn’t speak of Jedda then, or of the Bell family or the Hollywood Reserve, but their truncated stories, the details already intimately known to them both, and their passing references to people and events, reinforced my sense that this had long been their home, the place of my grandmother’s birth and her father’s before that. It was the site of our family’s history, but it was not a history I understood in terms of dispossession.

I became aware of the importance of the Yass Valley to the story of Jedda when my childhood sense of belonging to the Valley was confronted with the history of colonization and, eventually, a historical detail left hanging in a conversation. My aunt, Julie Mackey, spent a period of her childhood at Bogolong after her father joined the Australian Army Medical Corps during World War II. One day at Bogolong, Elsa Chauvel told Julie that because of her radiant, thick red hair she wanted to cast her in a film. When Julie mentioned this to me, it was the first I’d heard of any family association with the film-making couple and this book is the follow-up to that conversation. In it I have revived and pursued fragments of family stories in order to tell new stories that link Bogolong and the society that played out there with a larger history of Ngunnawal dispossession and national imaginings.

Jedda was Charles and Elsa Chauvel’s eighth and final feature film and is now their best remembered. When Chauvel died in 1959, his film Forty Thousand Horsemen was regarded as his most successful work. While this earlier film inspired Peter Weir’s runaway success Gallipoli (1981), and despite the enduring nature of its Anzac theme, it is Jedda that has drawn sustained attention in recent decades. When the film was released, the combined publicity machine of the Chauvels, who were well-practised in the art of promotion, and Columbia Pictures generated a striking level of response to the film. In its promotional rhetoric, Jedda claimed its status as unique in its depiction of the ‘real Australia’, projecting an idea of authenticity apparently epitomized by its setting in the Northern Territory and by the casting of Kunoth and Tudawali in the lead roles. The film both draws on and undermines official imaginings of assimilation in the