Other People’s Stories
Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), an adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s 1972 novel of the same name, is an incendiary film from the Australian New Wave that attempts to give voice to aspects of the nation’s violent history. With its then-sizeable A$1.2 million budget, the film was a commercial failure despite playing at the Cannes Film Festival to critical acclaim, and has continued to court controversy.1
The film has its origins in a dark episode from Australia’s past: a series of attacks carried out by an Aboriginal man, Jimmy Governor, against white settlers. The newspaper articles printed in the immediate aftermath of the murders, in July 1900, were at a loss to discern a clear motive.2 In the space of a week, Governor, his brother Joe and their friend Jacky Underwood, all Aboriginal men from central-western New South Wales, killed nine people. While popular historian Frank Clune first penned a detailed account of this historical figure’s life in 1959,3 it was Keneally’s critically acclaimed novelisation The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith – which retold the events from the perspective of Jimmy Governor, whose name was changed as per the title – that won wider public recognition for the case, and would become the basis for Schepisi’s film six years later. Both Keneally’s and Schepisi’s representations attempt to explore Jimmie’s (Tom E Lewis) experiences and psychology, and how they were shaped by colonial forces, in order to understand his actions.
The artistic and narrative decisions made by Schepisi can be analysed in light of the film’s sociopolitical backdrop: the struggle for civil and land rights for Indigenous Australians. Similarly, the controversies raised by the film, including its blunt depictions of
