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    ‘The New Boy’ Review: Finding a Light in the Darkness

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    Cate Blanchett stars as a nun who encounters an Indigenous Australian boy with special powers in this film about forced assimilation.In the moody magical-realist drama, “The New Boy,” an Indigenous boy (Aswan Reid) is captured in the outback and forced to live in a Christian orphanage in rural Australia. It’s the early 1940s, and the Australian government is continuing to implement brutal policies geared toward the forced assimilation of Aboriginal people. Missionary groups are taking Aboriginal children from their families to convert them to Christianity. The fate of what came to be known as the Stolen Generations befalls our nameless newcomer in the film’s opening scene, which Thornton visualizes as a stylized, slow-motion face-off on cracked desert grounds.The boy doesn’t speak English, and for most of this uncanny film, he remains silent, baffling the other children in his orphanage with an innocent disregard for the rules. He walks around shirtless, sleeps under his bed, and eats with his hands — behaviors that the abbess, Sister Eileen (Cate Blanchett) treats with patience and understanding.The formidable Blanchett in a rare role in her native Australia, is neither severe nor overly innocent here: Eileen curses and takes sips of wine, bringing unexpected levity to a film that is ultimately about spiritual warfare.Filled with overt, and often poignant, symbolism and touches of fantasy, the director Warwick Thornton (who is also the film’s cinematographer, and an excellent one at that), draws parallels between Eileen’s passionate Christian beliefs and the new boy’s supernatural capacities. In one luminous scene, his touch seems to heal a fellow orphan who has been bitten by a poisonous snake — he’s a miracle worker, though his exterior prevents the other children and orphanage workers from recognizing the obvious.Thornton, who briefly attended a Christian boarding school when he was a child, brings a textured perspective to this story of cultural violence and white guilt. He opts for a dreamy, lugubrious atmosphere and oblique imagery that might alienate some hoping for a more straightforward narrative — and mesmerize others captivated by its slow-burn vision.The New BoyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 56 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Theater

      Jack Charles, Grandfather of Aboriginal Theater, Dies at 79

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      One of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, he had a resonant voice, a charismatic personality and a troubled personal life that often landed him in jail.MELBOURNE, Australia — Jack Charles, one of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, who has been called the “grandfather of Aboriginal theater” but whose heroin addiction and penchant for burglary landed him in and out of jail throughout his life, died on Sept. 13 in Melbourne. He was 79.He died in a hospital after having a stroke, according to his publicist, Patrice Capogreco.Mr. Charles had a voice that made people stop and listen.Gravelly and majestic, with rounded vowels honed by elocution lessons in a rough-and-tumble boys’ home, it assured him an audience even over the scrum of the Australian prisons where he spent much of his life.“It’s very unusual for a crim or a screw to listen to a prisoner talk for very long,” he wrote in a memoir, using slang for fellow inmates and prison officers. “But for whatever reason, they’d let me run with whatever I was talking about and actually listen.”That voice catapulted Mr. Charles onto the stage, where he captivated Melbourne theatergoers, and helped make him one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal screen actors.He ascribed his talents to his Indigenous heritage. “We’re great orators,” he wrote in his memoir. “That is merely one element of our culture that white people never saw in our development.”Mr. Charles co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous theater company, Nindethana Theater, with the actor Bob Maza in 1971. He was known in Australia as Uncle Jack, an Aboriginal honorific denoting his status as an elder.His life was chronicled in an unsparing 2008 documentary, “Bastardy”; his memoir, “Born-again Blakfella”; and the 2010 one-man play “Jack Charles vs. the Crown,” which he co-wrote and performed around the world, despite multiple convictions that would ordinarily have limited his ability to travel.“Mr. Trump gave me a waiver to go to New York and perform ‘Jack Charles vs. the Crown,’” he said of the former president in an interview last year with the Australian news outlet The Saturday Paper. “That’s the ultimate for an old thief like me. I’m still thieving, stealing things. I’m stealing hearts and minds nowadays.”His road to stardom was a rocky one. Mr. Charles wrestled with heroin addiction, homelessness and an almost lifelong flirtation with burglary, for which he was incarcerated numerous times. He spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars.It was also a journey of self-discovery: of who he really was, where he had come from, his homosexuality and what it meant to be an Aboriginal Australian and a member of the so-called Stolen Generation, Aboriginal people who for decades as children were removed from their families by the government and forcibly assimilated into white society.Raised in an almost entirely white home for boys, Mr. Charles had no knowledge of Aboriginal culture and did not even know he was Indigenous until other children bullied him for it.He would later use that self-knowledge to educate others about Australia’s history and race relations, whether from the back of a taxi cab or on the set of the 2015 Warner Bros. movie “Pan,” where he draped the Aboriginal flag over the back of his trailer. (He played a tribal chief in the film, alongside his fellow Australian Hugh Jackman.)“It became a talking point to discuss the social and political hopes for Aboriginal Australians,” Mr. Charles wrote, “as well as teaching people about the Dreaming,” an Aboriginal concept for the beginning of time.In his final years, after he had kicked his heroin addiction, he was a familiar and striking figure plying the streets of Melbourne atop a mobility scooter, an Aboriginal flag fluttering on the back.“He was someone that embraced everything, even the bad things,” said Wesley Enoch, an Australian theater director who had worked with Mr. Charles. “He embraced them so that he could understand them and incorporate them in who he was.”He added that to be embraced by Mr. Charles himself, who stood less than five feet tall and whose luxuriant white Afro and beard were perfumed with patchouli oil, was a memorable experience.Mr. Charles starred in the Australian superhero TV series “Cleverman.”Lisa Tomasetti/SundanceTVJack Charles was born in Melbourne on Sept. 5, 1943. He was one of 13 children born to Blanchie Muriel Charles, two of whom died at birth. The 11 survivors were seized from their mother in infancy. Mr. Charles was the only one of his siblings to meet her again.He was placed in his first children’s home at four months old. At his second, the Box Hill Boys’ Home in suburban Melbourne, he endured physical and sexual abuse, he said. The few Indigenous children there were forbidden to speak to one another.“I was whitewashed, if you will, by the system,” Mr. Charles told a state commission.At 14, he moved into a foster home and began a glass-beveling apprenticeship. But after a disagreement with his foster mother over a night out — when he met with other Indigenous Australians and learned his birth mother’s identity — he was removed from the home at 17 and taken into police custody.So began a troubled relationship with the law. Mr. Charles spent 22 years in prison, often on burglary charges. He favored homes in the wealthy Melbourne suburb of Kew, where his forebears had originated.Raised as a Christian, he had been taught that stealing was wrong, he told The Saturday Paper. But committing “burgs,” as he called them, on his ancestral homeland “felt great,” he said. “Very, very satisfying.”Incarceration was, for him, as productive as it was frequent: On behalf of fellow inmates, he wrote love letters to their wives in exchange for chocolate and tobacco. He read extensively, completed his high school education and learned and taught pottery.“You only lose your freedom in the nick,” he said in the documentary “Bastardy,” using a slang term for a jail. “You can’t go anywhere, but your mind can go wandering all over the place when you’re incarcerated. I might be locked up, but I’m free, still. Free inside.”Mr. Charles found his way onto the stage almost by accident. In 1964, representatives of Melbourne’s New Theater came to the Aboriginal youth hostel where he was living to cast an all-Indigenous production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” He was given a role as an understudy.It was a revelation. In the theater, Mr. Charles had found his people. “They threw great parties, and they didn’t seem to care about my sexuality or my Aboriginality,” he wrote in his memoir.For the next seven years he beveled glass in a factory by day and acted with the New Theater by night.But he slid deeper into addiction and ended up on the street. Stints in prison, he wrote, were a relief, as they offered stable housing and regular meals.From 1971 to 1974, he ran the Aboriginal theater group Nindenthana, whose first hit show, “Jack Charles Is Up and Fighting,” explored whether Indigenous Australians should assimilate or stand apart from the country’s white majority.He starred in plays across Australia, including “Cradle of Hercules,” “No Sugar” and, in 2020, “Black Ties,” at Melbourne’s largest theater, the Arts Center. He appeared in several Australian television series, including “Cleverman,” “Women of the Sun” and “Preppers,” and movies, including “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” “Blackfellas” and “Wolf Creek.”He was eventually reunited with four of his siblings: his brother Archie, and his sisters Esme, Eva-Jo and Christine. He did not learn the identity of his father, Hilton Hamilton Walsh, until last year, when he appeared on the reality genealogy television show “Who Do You Think You Are.”He is survived by Christine Zenip Charles, the only one of his 11 siblings he knew to be still alive.In his last years, Mr. Charles was able to look back at his life with magnanimity, moving from a place of deep anger to one of conciliation.“It’s important to keep in mind my story is also about healing,” he wrote in his memoir. “That’s how I’ve been able to keep going.” More

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      in Music

      Archie Roach, Who Lived and Sang the Aboriginal Blues, Dies at 66

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      His song “Took the Children Away,” inspired by his childhood, shook Australians into confronting a grim era when their government tore apart Aboriginal families.One day in 1970, Archie Cox’s high school English class in Melbourne, Australia, was interrupted by a voice from the intercom: “Could Archibald William Roach come to the office?”An uncanny feeling took hold of 14-year-old Archie: This name, which he had no recollection of, he somehow knew to be his own.A letter to Archibald William Roach awaited him. It announced that Nellie Austin, a name he had never heard, was his mother, and that she had just died. His father and namesake was dead, too, the letter said. It was signed by Myrtle Evans, who identified herself as his sister.Within a year, Archie had dropped out of school, abandoned Dulcie and Alex Cox — who, he realized, were only his foster parents — and embarked on a quest to discover who he really was.He spent years without a home. He was imprisoned on burglary charges twice. He tried to kill himself. All the while, he kept bumping into revelations about his family and why he had been taken away from them.When he left home, there was not a name for what Archie was. But today people like him are considered part of the Stolen Generations — Indigenous Australians seized from their families as children to be assimilated into white society.This history is known thanks in no small part to Mr. Roach, who turned his wayward life into the material for a career as one of Australia’s best-loved folk singers, and who in doing so dramatized the plight of his people.He died on July 30 at a hospital in Warrnambool, a city in southeastern Australia, his sons Amos and Eban announced on his website. He was 66.The announcement did not cite the cause, but Mr. Roach had struggled with lung cancer and emphysema, requiring him to perform while breathing through a nasal cannula.His rise to prominence began in the late 1980s and early ’90s, on the strength in particular to one autobiographical song: “Took the Children Away.” He performed it at Melbourne Concert Hall when he opened for the popular Australian rock singer Paul Kelly.“There was this stunned silence; he thought he’d bombed,” Mr. Kelly recalled to The Guardian for a 2020 article about the song’s impact. “Then this wave of applause grew and grew. I’d never heard anything like it.”Mr. Kelly was a producer of Mr. Roach’s first album, “Charcoal Lane,” released in 1990. When the two toured together, Aboriginal audience members approached Mr. Roach, saying they, too, had been taken from their families.“He started to realize it was a much broader story,” Mr. Kelly said.The song became a national hit. “When he sings ‘Took the Children Away,’ or any of the tracks on ‘Charcoal Lane,’ it cuts through like great blues should,” Rolling Stone Australia wrote in 1990. “The experience becomes universal.”In a 2020 article commemorating the 30th anniversary of “Charcoal Lane,” Rolling Stone Australia credited “Took the Children Away” with helping to inspire a landmark 1997 government report estimating that as many as one in three Indigenous children were seized from their families between 1910 and 1970.Fourteen more albums followed “Charcoal Lane,” ranging in style from blues to gospel, while Mr. Roach’s wife, Ruby Hunter, gained renown of her own as a musical partner of Mr. Roach’s, and as a songwriter in her own right.The Aboriginal singer and songwriter Emma Donovan told The Guardian that when she was growing up, “we’d see Archie and Ruby on TV.”“They were our royalty, our king and queen,” she said.Archibald William Roach was born in the Framlingham Aboriginal Reserve, in southwestern Australia, on Jan. 8, 1956. When he was older, he recovered a memory of a tall man with long limbs and curly hair reaching toward him while police officers were grabbing him. That man, he realized, was Archibald, his father.He was raised largely by the Coxes. The implications of the fact that he was Black and that the Coxes were white dawned on Archie only gradually.His foster father, who was Scottish, longed for his homeland, and at night tears came to his eyes as he sang ballads around the family’s organ. “For years I thought I missed Scotland,” Mr. Roach wrote in “Tell Me Why,” his 2019 memoir. “I took great joy in sharing those songs with Dad Alex, because I wanted to be close to him, and I also wanted to understand the power that the songs had over him.”Mr. Cox gave Archie his first guitar. After Archie left home at 15, he never saw his foster parents again.He took a circuitous path to the return address on the letter he had received, in Sydney; by the time he arrived, his sister had left, without informing her neighbors of her next destination.A homeless one-armed Aboriginal man named Albert took care of Archie, showing him where in Sydney to sleep free of charge and teaching him how to panhandle. Archie began drinking with his new Aboriginal friends from morning till night.“I look back now and see the darkness that would have touched every moment unless we numbed it with beer and port and sherry,” he wrote in his memoir. “We were part of an obliterated culture.”He built a life from openness to chance and the coincidences that ensued. Archie found his family by running into one of his sisters at a bar in Sydney. On a coin flip, he decided to visit the South Australia city of Adelaide, where he met Ms. Hunter, who would become the love of his life. She, too, was an Aborigine who had been taken from her parents.Chance also granted Mr. Roach knowledge about his past. In 2013, he stumbled across the first photographs he had ever seen of his father as a boy, and of his grandmother.He learned that there were dangers in trying to recover tradition. He and his peers sought approval from elders before going on dates with other Aboriginal people, to ensure that they were not related. Taking up the old profession of his father and brother, Mr. Roach became an itinerant boxer. He realized in the middle of one bout that he was fighting his own first cousin.At other times he earned a living by picking grapes, pushing sheep up kill runs at an abattoir and doing metalwork at a foundry. He often lost jobs in a blur of drunkenness. The binges induced seizures. During one bender, overcome with despair at his prospects as a father and husband, he tried hanging himself with a belt. After more than a decade of patience, Ms. Hunter left him.Mr. Roach was jolted into sobriety. He found work as a health counselor at a rehab center in Melbourne. He rejoined Ms. Hunter and their two sons, and he threw himself into writing songs.“Like my daddy before me/I set ’em up and knock ’em down/Like my brother before me/I’m weaving in your town,” he wrote in “Rally Round the Drum,” a song from the early 1990s about his boxing days.“Have you got two bob?/Can you gimme a job?,” he wrote in the 1997 song “Beggar Man.”“At 15 I left my foster home/Looking for the people I call my own/But all I found was pain and strife/And nothing else but an empty life,” he wrote in “Open Up Your Eyes,” which was not released until 2019.Mr. Roach at Carrara Stadium on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, in 2018. His songs helped uncover the history of the Indigenous Australians known as the Stolen Generations.Dita Alangkara/Associated PressComplete information about his survivors was not available, but in addition to his sons, Mr. Roach and Ms. Hunter unofficially adopted 15 to 20 children. The impetus in some cases was simply encountering a young person on the street looking “a little worse for wear,” he told the Australian newspaper The Age in 2002.Ms. Hunter died suddenly in 2010 at the family home in Gunditjmara country, in southeast Australia, the ancestral land of Mr. Roach’s mother.As “Took the Children Away” grew in fame, even to the point of overshadowing Mr. Roach’s other work, he was often asked whether he got sick of singing it.“I say, ‘Never,’” he told ABC News Australia in 2019. “It’s a healing for me. Each time I sing it, you let some of it go.” More

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      in Movies

      Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, Champion of Indigenous Peoples, Dies at 85

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      As a teenager, she was the star of a film about an Aboriginal girl raised by a white family. As an adult, she fought discrimination in Australia against her people.Rosalie Kunoth-Monks, who as a teenager was believed to be the first female Indigenous person to star in a feature film in Australia and later became an Aboriginal rights activist, died on Jan. 26 in Alice Springs, in Australia’s Northern Territory. She was 85 and had been living in Utopia, an Aboriginal homeland.Her daughter, Ngarla Kunoth-Monks, said the cause was a stroke. Her family gave permission to use her name and image.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was cast in the title role of “Jedda,” a film directed by Charles Chauvel, which he wrote with his wife, Elsa. The story is about a teenager who is raised apart from her Aboriginal culture by a white woman after her mother dies in childbirth. Eventually, she is abducted by an Aboriginal man (played by Robert Tudawali).The Chauvels had come to her school in 1953, chosen her for the lead and taken her to locations around the Northern Territory and in Sydney. Away from her family and school, she recalled being lonely and scared. She said Mrs. Chauvel bullied her and, on several occasions, she tried to escape but did not succeed. She did not know how to be an actor, so she did as she was told, speaking the words she was fed.“I was in a state of confusion, a state of trauma,” Mrs. Kunoth-Monks said in an interview with Australia’s National Film and Sound Archive in 1995. “I really didn’t want to ask questions about what I was doing there, or what they were going to do with me. I was quite literally petrified that I wasn’t going to see my family, or my country, again.”She attended the premiere in the summer of 1955 at a segregated theater in Darwin, the capital of the Northern Territory, but was allowed, she said, to sit in the whites-only section.In a review of “Jedda” in The Age, a newspaper in Melbourne, the critic Brian McArdle wrote that despite some rough edges to Mr. Chauvel’s direction, “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades.”Mrs. Kunoth-Monks recalled being horrified when she saw the sexual context of scenes with Mr. Tudawali in which he touched her. But looking back as an adult, she recognized in her character’s assimilation into her white foster mother’s world a subject that was not only true to life for people like her in Australia but one that would animate her future activism.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks in 1955, the year her movie, “Jedda,” was released. “It is easily the most significant film to have emerged from an Australian studio in the past two decades,” one critic wrote at the time.History and Art Collection / Alamy Stock PhotoRosalie Lynette Kunoth was born on Jan, 4, 1937, in Utopia. Her father, Alan, sheared sheep. Her mother, Ruby Ngale, was a homemaker, and was an Aboriginal of the Anmatjere group. Her father’s parentage was mixed: his father was German and his mother was part-Aboriginal.Five years after the release of “Jedda” — the only movie she acted in — she joined an Anglican order in a suburb of Melbourne, where she took her final vows as a nun in 1964. But she recalled feeling sheltered from the travails of Aboriginal peoples, which she followed on television, and left the order in 1969. The next year, she married Bill Monks, whose sister had known Mrs. Kunoth-Monks while she was still a nun.She soon joined the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, where she persuaded college students to help young Indigenous students with their school work, and set up what she said was the first group home for Aboriginal families in Victoria whose goal was to keep children from being separated from their parents.She left in 1977 to run a hostel in Alice Springs; started the social work section at a hospital there; was the chairman of the Central Australian Aboriginal Legal Aid Service; a commissioner of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, an adviser on Indigenous affairs to the chief minister of the Northern Territory and chairman of Batchelor Institute, a school for Aboriginal students, also in the Northern Territory.Malarndirri McCarthy, a senator in the Australian parliament from the Northern Territory, in a statement after Mrs. Kunoth-Monks’s death, praised her “quietly spoken yet determined focus on challenging institutional racism.”In 2008, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was elected to a four-year term as president of the Barkly Shire, a local governmental entity in the Northern Territory. It was a year after the Australian government’s imposition of a series of laws on the Northern Territory that were, in part, designed to crack down on child sexual abuse and alcoholism in Indigenous communities.The government’s raft of measures — referred to as the Intervention — included the compulsory acquisition of dozens of Aboriginal communities under five-year federal leases; restricting the sale, consumption and purchase of alcohol in certain areas, and linking income support payments to school attendance for people on Aboriginal land.Mrs. Kunoth-Monks opposed the Intervention as discriminatory because it so clearly targeted Australia’s Aboriginal peoples. As part of her protest, she and the Rev. Dr. Djiniyini Gondarra, a clan leader and ceremonial lawman in the Northern Territory, met in 2010 in Geneva with the United Nations’s International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination.The two later issued a report which said: “Ordinary Australians can see this injustice in a democratic country and know that it shouldn’t be happening. When you share with a body such as the U.N.,” they wrote, “straight away they see that Australia is racist and that the Government does not govern with the spirit of peace and order.”In addition to her daughter, she is survived by many grandchildren; her sisters Teresa Tilmouth and Irene Kunoth; her brothers, Don Kunoth and Colin Kunoth; her foster daughters, Elaine Power, Natasha Adams and Patrice Power, and her foster son, Mathew Adams. Her husband died in 2011.In 2014, Mrs. Kunoth-Monks was a featured voice in “Utopia,” a documentary by John Pilger about the mistreatment of First Nations peoples, as Indigenous and Torres Strait Islanders are called.In a panel discussion on Australian television after the film’s release, she articulated her opposition to the federal government’s policies toward her people and any attempt to forcibly assimilate them.“This is the country I came out from,” she said. “I didn’t come from overseas. I came from here. My language, in spite of whiteness trying to penetrate into my brain by assimilationists — I am alive, I am here and now — and I speak my language.”She added, “I practice my cultural essence of me.” More

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      in Movies

      David Gulpilil, Famed Aboriginal Actor, Dies at 68

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      In a career that began with the film “Walkabout” 50 years ago, he was acclaimed for changing the way Australia’s Indigenous people were portrayed and viewed.David Gulpilil, an Indigenous Australian who found film stardom as a teenager in 1971 when he was featured in “Walkabout” and went on to become Australia’s most famous Aboriginal actor, appearing in dramas like “Charlie’s Country,” for which he won a best-actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014, and comedies like the 1986 hit “Crocodile Dundee,” has died. He was 68.Steven Marshall, South Australia’s top official, announced his death on Monday, though he did not say when or where he died. In 2017 Mr. Gulpilil learned that he had terminal lung cancer, something he addressed in a documentary released this year called “My Name Is Gulpilil.”Mr. Marshall, in a statement, called Mr. Gulpilil “an iconic, once-in-a-generation artist who shaped the history of Australian film and Aboriginal representation onscreen.” Others had heaped similar praise on Mr. Gulpilil over the years. In 2019, presenting him with a lifetime achievement award, the National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee, which celebrates Indigenous Australian communities, said he “revolutionized the way the world saw Aboriginal people.”Mr. Gulpilil often played characters who explore or are affected by the intersection of Indigenous and modern cultures in Australia, something he knew from personal experience and did not always handle well. In between his acting roles, he had trouble with alcohol and spent time in prison, including for domestic abuse. Though Mr. Gulpilil sometimes seemed to mix easily in the broader world, Rolf de Heer, the director with whom he worked most often, said demons found him there.“David can’t handle alcohol,” Mr. de Heer said in his director’s notes for “Charlie’s Country.” “He can’t handle cigarettes, or sugary drinks, or almost anything addictive. All of these substances, foreign to his culture, both soothe him and enrage him.”One part of the moviemaking world that Mr. Gulpilil didn’t have trouble with, however, was the camera — he always seemed to be a natural, especially when, as was often the case, the setting of the film was the Australian wilds. As he put it in an autobiographical one-man stage show he performed in 2004, “I know how to walk across the land in front of a camera, because I belong there.”David Gulpilil Ridjimiraril Dalaithngu is believed to have been born in 1953 in Arnhem Land, in Australia’s Northern Territory. Missionaries are said to have assigned him a birth date of July 1.He was also assigned the name David at a government-run English school that he attended for a time.“They asked me what was my name,” he said in a 1978 audio interview posted by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, “and I said, ‘My name is Gulpilil,’ and suddenly they said, ‘Ah, yeah, we’ll give you David.’”He didn’t care for the school and its paternalism — “You got your culture, I got my culture,” he said — and instead cultivated a reputation as an excellent ceremonial dancer. His fluidity and love of performing caught the attention of the British director Nicolas Roeg when Mr. Roeg came to Australia looking for an Aboriginal youth for “Walkabout,” a story about two white children lost in the wilderness who are befriended by an Indigenous teenager. (Few Aboriginal actors had appeared in feature films at the time, though documentarians had visited Indigenous communities.)The film led to international travel. Mr. Gulpilil, who was also a musician, used to tell the story of having his room at Cannes invaded by firefighters, who couldn’t place the sounds he was making on his didgeridoo — a traditional wooden instrument — and thought they might be the rumblings of a fire.Several television roles followed “Walkabout,” and then in 1976 Mr. Gulpilil was back on the big screen in “Mad Dog Morgan,” a drama about an Irish outlaw (played by Dennis Hopper) who is a wanted man in Australia. Soon after came “Storm Boy,” in which he played an Aboriginal man who befriends a lonely boy and joins with him in raising some pelicans.From left, Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski and Mr. Gulpilil in “Crocodile Dundee,” in which Mr. Gulpilil played a friend to the title character.Paramount, via Everett CollectionMr. Gulpilil reached a much wider audience when he appeared in “Crocodile Dundee.” As a friend of Paul Hogan’s swashbuckling title character, he delivers one particularly good joke after his character meets a New York journalist played by Linda Kozlowski. She immediately tries to take his picture.“You can’t take my photograph,” he says.“I’m sorry,” she answers. “You believe it’ll take your spirit away.”“No,” he says. “You’ve got the lens cap on.”Mr. Gulpilil was especially proud of his work in “The Tracker” (2002), one of several films he made with Mr. de Heer. He played the title character, who leads several white men on a brutal journey in search of a fugitive.“As he has in other Australian films, including ‘Walkabout,’ ‘The Last Wave’ and ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence,’ Mr. Gulpilil has the mystical aura of a man so profoundly in touch with the earth that he is omniscient and safe from harm,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review in The New York Times.Mr. Gulpilil in a scene from “Charlie’s Country,” for which he won a best-actor award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2014.Monument ReleasingHis most acclaimed role came in “Charlie’s Country,” another project directed by Mr. de Heer; the two men share the screenwriting credit. The movie is about an Aboriginal man struggling to maintain traditional ways. Parts of it were drawn from Mr. Gulpilil’s own life. He and Mr. de Heer began developing the story while Mr. Gulpilil, struggling with alcohol at the time, was in jail for breaking his wife’s arm.His performance won the best-actor award in the Un Certain Regard section of the Cannes festival.Mr. Gulpilil was married several times. Australian newspapers said his survivors include seven children.Mr. de Heer, in an interview with The Herald Sun of Australia shortly after Mr. Gulpilil won the acting award at Cannes, talked about the pressures his friend felt living in the traditional Indigenous world and in the world that included places like Cannes.“He struggles in both,” he said. “He’ll say he can live in both cultures, but I don’t think he does well in either.” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Burning’ Review: Pulling the Fire Alarm in Australia

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      A new documentary looks at the visceral impact of wildfires and climate change on the country, from its beleaguered people to sickly koalas.If you think what climate change portends for America is scary, wait until you hear about Australia. That’s the gist of “Burning,” which focuses on that country’s sadly familiar experiences with warming temperatures: terrifying wildfires, drill-baby-drill politicians, and activists desperately trying to save us all by pointing out the facts about the future.The big difference is that Australia’s fires are the biggest: Over 50 million acres burned during its so-called “Black Summer” (2019-20), dwarfing losses in California or the Amazon. The director, Eva Orner (“Chasing Asylum”), makes her contribution to documentaries on climate change by sticking to Australia and underlining the visceral impact on Australians. It’s hellish: red skies and dark days, fear and helplessness, pregnancy complications and death.Orner’s flood of talking heads and footage from the field (including beleaguered locals and sickly koalas) settles into a drumbeat of worry — justified, obviously, but numbing. The film also suffers by comparison with a more complex and stimulating look at climate change, Lucy Walker’s alarming “Bring Your Own Brigade.” But the young activist Daisy Jeffrey does provide this film with a smart rebel leader, versus Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, and his coal-friendly politicking.Like many environmental docs, Orner holds up a possible savior (a tech billionaire pitching a pivot to renewables) and a prelapsarian vision (the Aboriginal stewardship of the land before European arrival). Her film is ultimately another in a series of distress signals for the world, with the hope that Australia doesn’t become a continent-sized Cassandra.BurningNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More