Hermits and Home Truths in Old Borroloola

In 1962, a battered and dusty Land Rover rolled into Borroloola, an abandoned town on the banks of the McArthur River by the Gulf of Carpentaria. On board was a very young David Attenborough and his BBC film crew. Attenborough was there, in the middle ‘of Northern Territory nowhere’ to interview and film three modern day hermits who had cut themselves off from the civilised world. For the observant viewer, there is much to contemplate in Attenborough’s half-hour film, first broadcast by the BBC in 1963.

Superficially it was about an ‘old Australia’, of the booms and busts, as the pastoral and mining settlements rolled out across the north over the one hundred years from 1860. But there are deeper narratives in the film — stories about the human condition, the colonial encounter, what this land of Australia means to us as a people, as well as the inherent transience of human cultures and civilisations and, indeed, even thoughts on what really constitutes a meaningful life. Attenborough exposed glimpses of these narratives through the lives of the hermits with much the same ease of commentary that would serve his audiences well for the next 60 years.

As I watched this film, so rich in artistic and philosophical metaphor, I came to believe that it should be viewed as a great cinematic work of Australian art from that period, along with Xavier Herbert’s writings, the portraiture of William Dobell and Albert Namatjira’s landscapes.

The final scenes in this short film bring forth in me a flood of emotion — the Florence Syndrome some folks call it —  and continue to do so every time I watch them. A lump forms in my throat and tears appear as I realise that, for me, here is a piece of art that goes a long way to laying bare, in an Australian context, the human condition.

After beguiling the audience with a line of questioning that puts the hermits, and indirectly the viewer, so much at ease that we open our heads and hearts to some deep conversations on the meaning of human loneliness, peace, contentment, wisdom, the presence of God, the pursuit of money or not, and, indeed, what it means to be human and have a good life, Attenborough then overwhelms us when we are at our most vulnerable. He holds open the door to our hearts to the music of Max Bruch as we watch two contented men going about their day’s labours in the presence of God’s stunning wildflowers and one of Namatjira’s lone, desert ghost gums – a solitary, smooth-skinned beauty living and thriving in the harshest but most beautiful landscape on earth.

Sometimes we need an outsider, or an outside event, to awaken in us the recognition of what we actually have in Australia and why it is good, and why it is worth defending. For example, Attenborough’s depiction of the ‘Library of Borroloola’ is a brilliant metaphor, which hints at the transience of civilizations – a library housing the great literary works of a society that no longer values them; its teachers having lost the will to ‘profess’ and hand their culture on; its young wandering off distracted by other things; and thus, the books are left to rot and to be slowly eaten away by white ants. Does that sound like campus life in 2024?

Maybe, just like Aboriginal societies, who were said to have collapsed after their youth failed, or even desired, to learn and carry on their tribe’s cultural traditions after the coming of the ‘white-man’, modern Australia is facing a similar, existential crisis for which the ‘Library at Borroloola’ offers a warning – the great works and the ‘blue-prints’ for our cultural achievements are remembered and revered only by a few old codgers who will take that knowledge and appreciation with them to the grave.

This may sound overly dramatic, but consider this: when, for example, Geoffrey Blainey and his ‘Library of Australia’ finally passes, who will we reach out to and consult when answers to the great questions of our history and culture are required? Give me a list of the respected historians who could take Blainey’s place as our trusted, general history elders? Your very short list just confirms my point.

Viewers of the film might find, like me, many other metaphors pertinent to Australia today. For example, the idea that no matter where we come from, whether we are descendants of 50,000 years of aboriginality, or colonial and more recent Irish, English or Chinese immigrants, or ‘native-born’ sons and daughters – this country melds us together like multicoloured clay. Overtime, the whites became more like the blacks. The Irishman in Attenborough’s film, Jack Mulholland, walks around barefoot, lives on flour, tea, sugar, tobacco and bush-foods, and works hard enough to survive, but is not so financially ambitious that overwork impedes his search for the contentment he derives from having time for contemplation.

The blacks too become more like colonial whites. Biddy and sister Maggie in real life had fallen prey to opium addiction in Pine Creek, 700km north of Borroloola, where Roger Jose found them. He persuaded them to live with him at Borroloola, and we see in the film that Biddy has donned a floral dress and settled in as a homemaker to Roger, while invariably her tribe’s menfolk are off working on cattle stations or adopting that convict heritage of ‘bludgernomics’ – the cadging of a living on government handouts while doing the minimal amount of work necessary, a lifestyle that seems to still have much currency amongst many in Australia today. Assimilation, the great leveller, works both ways.

But there was dark side to Australia as well. Evil, and man’s inhumanity to man, was lurking just below the surface. Roger Jose alludes to this matter-of-factly in his rendition of his poem, which I have to the best of my ability transcribed here:

Here doddering in senile decay, my memory harks brightly away
to pink dawns when I’d creep, on blacks fast asleep
and knock them hell West and all of a heap
a bravo? just hired to slay
That their weapons could scarcely compare
didn’t cause me much care
nor the fact that they slept, while shear? men murder crept
by red embers guided and no sentinel kept them apprised
of the sinister shapes lurking there…

Stories of massacres disturb us today, but recent events in the Middle East only prove that this evil is still with us, just as surely as it was both Australia’s colonial days and, before that, in pre-colonial Aboriginal societies (see Warrowen Massacre in Brighton, Victoria and Massacre of Running Waters in Central Australia).

Speaking for myself, it has always been difficult to articulate, or perhaps even to really understand, “what is great art.” But with this film, and the words of Australian art critic Robert Hughes below, I may have finally gained a clear understanding. Now, when I look at an Albert Namatjira watercolour, I will no longer just think, “that’s very nice”; instead, as my heart rate rises and tears will well up in my eyes, I’ll remember that lone  Borroloola ghost gum and its messages on the meaning of life. Robert Hughes from the BBC’s The Shock of the New (1980):

There is a “kind of direct, sensuous and complex relationship with the world around [us] that … is the Lost Paradise art wants to give back to us…

The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible. To restore it to us in all its glory, and its occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling; and then to close the gap between you and everything that is not you; and in this way to pass from feeling to meaning.

It’s not something that committees can do. It’s not a task achieved by groups or by movements. It’s done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world. This task is literally endless and so although we don’t have an avangarde anymore, we’re always going to have art.