Heritage
Clip 2: Settlers attacked
3 min 5 sec
Taken from the feature Heritage (1935)
Original title classification G – this clip chosen to be PG
Availability of the complete title
Please be aware that this clip may contain the names, images and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may now be deceased.
This clip contains low-level violence.
Curator’s clip description
Morrison (Franklyn Bennett) has married Jane Judd (Margot Rhys) because of a promise he made before he met Biddy O’Shea. Biddy has also married, and both women have had a baby. When Aborigines attack and kill her family, the fatally wounded Biddy (Peggy Maguire) asks Morrison to rescue and care for her child.
Curator’s notes
The scene could have come straight from an American western, except for the black skin of the Aborigines, and the bark-slab hut construction of the farm house. Chauvel had grown up around Aboriginal people and he used Aboriginal actors in many of his films, often to provide action in scenes of warfare (see Uncivilised [1936]). It is true that their concerns became more central to his films as he developed as a film-maker. He would eventually make Jedda (1955), the first Australian feature film in which two Aboriginal actors would play the main roles. Their presence in Heritage is to provide a sense of action and opposition. The film never considers the question of why these blacks might want to attack settlers on their land; that was a given. The point of view of Indigenous Australians is almost never discussed in Australian films before the Second World War.
Paul Byrnes, curator
have teachers’ notes.
