Ten Canoes is one of the most astonishing films yet made in Australia, for several reasons. It has an extraordinary beauty, in both black-and-white and colour, that dramatises an Australian landscape few of us have seen, but the film is about human beings in that landscape. This is important because it opens up to non-Aboriginal viewers a sense of the way (some) Indigenous Australians view the land.
Most Australian films – even those by Indigenous filmmakers – have never been able to get beyond ‘problematising’ their subject. Ten Canoes evades it by going into the past, where there were no problems, only people. Both stories take place before white settlement, but the fact that the film shows us hunting practices and cultural beliefs that could be revived with relative ease for the film indicated to audiences that these beliefs and practices were far from dead.
The film came about partly as an act of remembering. David Gulpilil, who worked with director Rolf de Heer on The Tracker invited de Heer to visit his home in Arnhem Land. While there, he suggested they should make a film about this place. Gulpilil told him they would need ten canoes. He then showed de Heer a photograph, taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson during the 1930s, showing ten men in canoes on the Arafura Swamp, collecting magpie-goose eggs.
The Ramingining community were keen to dramatise this traditional food gathering, but it required skills that had almost died out. Only a few of the senior men knew how to construct bark canoes, so the sequence in the film where they do this is partly an exercise in renewal.
