Impossible Historical Reenactments: Invisible Aborigines on TV

Abstract

In the late 1960s at my Melbourne school, Manningham Primary, films were screened during the holidays, presumably to keep us off the street in those brief respites from formal instruction. The format, as I remember it, was a feature such as Born Free—a film that never failed to bring forth a flood of tears—preceded by a “short.” More than once, that short came from the television series Alcheringa, a prize-winning 1962 ABC program of 12 quarter-hour episodes, initially broadcast weekly, that recreated, romantically and anthropologically, an imagined world of everyday indigenous practices “before the coming of the white man.” The series was written and directed by Frank Few, an American-born director who also made some of the first wildlife or nature documentaries in Australia, and hosted by Bill Onus, a Yorta Yorta man. The cast members were all indigenous.