ABSTRACT
Aboriginal Westerns from the Asian viewpoint This chapter will focus on the Australian Western, or more specifically, a substrand that some scholars have identified as ‘Aboriginal Westerns’. The films I have selected for analysis in this chapter are Jedda (1955), directed by Charles Chauvel, and Mystery Road (2013), directed by Ivan Sen, an Aboriginal director. I place both films in the category of the Aboriginal Western because they feature Aboriginal characters as chief protagonists and the narratives are entirely driven by these characters. Andrew Hurley has traced the Aboriginal Western to the early 1970s, in the documentary work of the Australian New Wave filmmaker Michael Edols, particularly Floating (1975), about the Aboriginal Mowanjum community in a small West Australian town. The film actually presents only a brief imaginary episode within the film as a Western but to Hurley, this short fragment is powerful enough to give birth to a whole genre, the Aboriginal Western, which, according to Hurley, ‘no other protagonists of the Australian New Wave were inclined to expand on’ (see Hurley 2015, 138). According to Hurley, the Aboriginal Western ‘seems to have lain fallow only to be picked up by Ivan Sen in the last decade’ (Hurley 2015, 139). Sen’s work, such as Beneath Clouds (2002) and Toomelah (2011), more solidly covers the ground of the Aboriginal Western as Hurley discusses it in his assessment of Edols’ Floating, and a film such as Mystery Road is a full-fledged Aboriginal Western.
