Movie with poignant First Nations message opens Australia Day concert

Loading

“I feel honoured to have been invited to be a part of the Australia Day Warrane feature,” Thompson said. “It is an exciting and timely recognition of the First Australians whose land we live in and with whom we share a mutual future. In these uncertain times let us all embrace the responsibility we have for Caring for Country in this Great Southern Land we are so fortunate to live in.”

We continue our flight over Gadigal encampments, past the 11 ships of the First Fleet at anchor on the evening of January 26, 1788 and then we see the red-coated marines standing below a fluttering of the recently raised British flag.

The movie will be broadcast live at 7.30pm on the ABC. The film cuts to William Barton, Australia’s foremost exponent of the yidaki, or didgeridoo, playing the classic rock number Great Southern Land with Iva Davies as Indigenous meets Icehouse.

Barton said the song represents to him both hope and the mother earth. “There is music leading up to Great Southern Land which is my own work to symbolise the yearning of both cultures, of displacement and the journey of recognition and [the hope] that we can work together and open up a conversation for greater things,” he said.

Loading

The climax of the piece is the live performance of Great Southern Land on the Sydney Opera House stage performed (and written) by Iva Davies along with a choir and concert band. He said he had worked with Barton since 2009. “The song, almost 40 years on, remains as much as a mystery to me now as when people reacted to it straight away when it was just a demo tape on the second album,” Davies said.

Explaining how the song came about, he added: “I am actually quite a conservative songwriter, I have never overtly used songs as forums although quite a lot of my songs have little grenades buried in them. Even at that point I knew it was incredibly dangerous to try and write a song about your home country.

“I had just been away on our first international tour and I got incredibly homesick. It was the first time I had flown across Australia and it was a kind of lightbulb moment of the sheer scale of Australia. I just wrote three word phrases on pieces of paper and kept generating those until there was a great pile on the floor and then strung the best together. It’s kind of a mystery to me that it is as coherent as it really is.”

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian in her Australia Day message said the COVID-19 limitations didn’t detract from marking the importance of the day.

“Our national day also shines light on inclusion for all people, from the first Australians to new citizens. We can all draw on the strength of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who proudly represent the longest surviving culture on the planet,” she said.