Ablaze director Tiriki Onus on filmmaking legacy and stories of strength
Tiriki Onus in the Pilbara
Imagine getting a phone call with the news that 70-year-old footage has been discovered proving your grandfather might be the first Aboriginal filmmaker. That’s what happened to Tiriki Onus, a visual artist, curator, university lecturer, performance artist, opera singer and now feature film writer-director.
His documentary, Ablaze, co-written and directed with Alec Morgan (Hunt Angels), tells the story of filmmaker and activist William ‘Bill’ Onus, whose work was mostly lost in a caravan fire in the 1960s. The Yorta Yorta man from Victoria was a showman, successful entrepreneur and fierce campaigner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights during the 1940s. He was a Jack of all trades, master of all.
“Now to be afforded this type of platform to be able to carry on those stories, to keep telling Bill’s stories, I feel not only incredibly fortunate to have that privilege, but incredibly lucky that I’ve been able to grow closer to him in this process,” Onus tells Popcorn Podcast.
“If it weren’t for the stories that have been told to me, I wouldn’t be here, doing what I do now”
This isn’t Onus’s first time sharing his grandfather’s truth. He wrote and acted in the 2014 musical drama William and Mary, about the love affair between his grandparents, and created and played the character of ‘Uncle Bill’, also based on his grandfather, in Deborah Cheetham’s Indigenous opera Pecan Summer. But how did it feel continuing Bill’s filmmaking legacy? “It has been quite emotional thinking about the responsibility, but also the tremendous opportunities he’s left for me,” Onus says.
Piecing together the story after uncovering the mystery reel was “a labour of love”. The chance finding of the nine-and-a-half minutes of silent film in the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA) taught Onus much about his own heritage and identity. The footage jumps from uniformed WWII soldiers on the streets of Fitzroy to body-painted Bill throwing a boomerang out in the open. Much like Bill’s film, Onus explains his documentary is not a linear narrative, analogising it to ripples in a pond for the directions in which it moves. “If we put in everything we wanted to put in, all the stuff that didn’t make the cut, Ablaze would have been longer than Lord of the Rings,” he says.
“The education system tried to teach me that I didn't exist”
Onus emphasises the importance of an allyship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists, as he and Morgan model a practice of intercultural collaboration recognising the responsibility that comes with power and privilege. He believes all filmmakers must ask themselves: “Who holds the authority of voice in a conversation?” In the case of Ablaze, he attributes the story’s sovereignty to the elders from his community who, like Bill, were erased from the history books. But that’s the thing about stories – they never truly go away.
He hopes that Indigenous peoples from all over the world “who find themselves in states of maintenance and cultural revival” will see that even a story like Bill’s, “which was actively suppressed” for more than 70 years, eventually comes to light. “We play a long game here,” Onus says. “It’s an intergenerational game.”
Thankfully, his partnership with acclaimed filmmaker Morgan was nothing short of magic. “I felt very safe throughout this process,” Onus says, struggling to recall an argument or disagreement across the whole seven-year production period (aside from Onus’s hesitation to sing a cover of the traditional Yorta Yorta song Bura Fera – a debate Morgan, fortunately for us, won). “Hopefully I haven’t driven him too far away,” Onus jokes, open to future collaboration with the AACTA Award-winning director.
When asked what’s next, the debut filmmaker admits to being approached to make movies about his other extraordinary family members, but he brushes off the idea, saying, “I can’t be that person who just makes films about their family.”
Well, he could…
The opera singer changes his tune: “Someone has to.”
“We need more stories of strength, all of us,” he adds. “Black, white, brindle, wherever we come from – stories of strength that we can admire, that we can hold up, and which we can celebrate with our families and those around us.
“I think there is a pantheon of artists out there!” he continues, opening his arms wide. “And that more of those stories are just waiting, sleeping, having a rest for now, waiting to come back and be told again. That is quite exciting when we think about the possibilities for what is to come.”
