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He made a lot of other films – as early as 1962 he made Dances at Aurukan, in 1978 he made Narritjin in Canberra, and added Conversations with Dundiwuy Wanambi in 1982 in a strand which tends to focus on the formal arts. The largest was The Yirrkala Film Project, which extends to 22 separate titles. He was perfecting the art of the longitudinal project which could extend over years and generations.
GRANT AND LAVERNA DUNLOP OBITUARY SERIES
This resulted in the publication of a long (19-part) series of films made over the next six years entitled People of the Australian Western Desert.
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He took two newly-arrived families from a government ‘settlement’ back to their country and they showed him various aspects of their life in the desert. Dunlop came back from the Giles trip and arranged (with AIAS providing funding and acting as producer) to return in 1962 to make ethnographic films. Pressures fuelled by tourist development concerns and military needs, and the extension of bureaucratic control over formerly remote areas, saw round-ups of Aboriginal people and their removal from their lands to government camps and settlements such as Kintore, Papunya and Yuendumu. That whole story is outlined in The History of Australian Ethnographic Film, from the National Film and Sound Archive, which is an excellent read. At the same time, the medium traversed all the possible technologies, though Ian Dunlop’s world was celluloid.
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He was steadfast in the evolution of ethnographic filmmaking in Australia as it moved from ‘objective’ recording of customs through to participatory filmmaking and ultimately works made by Indigenous filmmakers. balanced between between conventional filmmaking and ethnography, each with very different rules. As a construction crew met the Traditional Owners, Balloons and Spinifex revealed his life’s work.įrom now on he lived with a quandary. Two years later, he was filming at the Giles Weather Station in the Gibson Desert 750 km from Alice Springs, using 35mm colour film. Some essence of Ian Dunlop remains in his extraordinary thirty-year output of films, many absorbed into gargantuan compendiums, some slipped out in specialist areas, always with excellent crews in conditions that urban Australians would see as the essence of horrible.įrameborder="0" allow="accelerometer autoplay clipboard-write encrypted-media gyroscope picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen> For untold years the Law of the Djang’kawu continued. They also performed many other creative acts when they were here: they named and gave meaning to all the natural phenomena they thrust their digging sticks into the ground from which wells came up and the sacred Djuta trees. Here they created the first people, the children of the Djang’kawu, the children of the Rirratjingu clan. They landed in north-east Arnhem Land at a spot which they named Yalangbara. They were beautifully decorated and around their necks they hung dillybags, and in the dillybags were the symbols of the Djang’kawu Law. In the time before time two great ancestral beings, the Djang’kawu sisters, went in their canoe on a great journey. Talking about his most celebrated series, he started at what he called the beginning.
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The National Museum of Australia (NMA) carries the transcript of an event with Ian Dunlop, with editor and colleague Pip Deveson and Dr Peter Thorley, held in 2011. What kind of ritual should carry us through the death of Ian Dunlop? As one of the key ethnographic filmmakers in Australia, he filmed cultures which created powerful liminal dramas to take a person beyond life, wrapped in a shroud of culture and memory.