EVERYBODY in Australia, of whatever ethnicity, can learn from Nicole Ma’s feature documentary filmed over a decade in WA’s Great Sandy Desert, the town of Fitzroy Crossing and during a two-year roadshow of the giant canvas painted by the Aboriginal group to which Tom Lawford, a leading force in a claim for ownership of lands of major significance, belongs.

Tom’s Aboriginal name is Putuparri. His grandparents “Spider” and Dolly Snell in their final years provide Ma’s film with the link to the past that drives the film’s narrative. His grandson Buster, a delightful little boy who adds a wistful note to the film’s sociology, may well follow Tom in energising the community’s spiritual future.

The film provides a handsome look at the desert landscape that eyes raised with white-fella perceptions might consider sere, barren, of little value, and home to declining populations of native fauna and feral camels. It takes us through a catalogue of Aboriginal culture explained in language that so-minded whites can understand.

The film doesn’t linger on explanations of elements that make autonomous sense to Aboriginal people but which urban people need to ponder. Spirituality focuses on Kurtal, the desert waterhole where Putuparri and his people perform rain-making ceremonies. There’s a poignant logic about our last look at Kurtal’s dry bed.

Watching the dancers, bedecked with stuff gathered from the surrounding bush, against a background of parked Land Cruisers, I couldn’t help pondering the incongruity between the two cultures and the folly of us white fellas’ expectations that we can resolve the issues facing our Aboriginals by throwing money at them. It’s simply not that simple!

At Capitol 6