Blood Brothers

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Documentary series

 

Blood Brothers is a series of four Aboriginal stories produced by Ned Lander and Rachel Perkins for SBS. I scored Broken English, added some incidental music to Freedom Ride and created the series title theme (with singing by Djakapurra Munyarryun).

Broken English

Blood Brothers, 1993

Country music elements, performed by The Travelling Country Band, give some breathing space. 

Most of John Whitteron’s camerawork is in moody black and white, with courtroom scenes and arrests lit in the style of the ‘50s. The dramatic underscore, largely created with Kurzweil synthesised samples, references the  heightened intensity of film music from the period.

Freedom Ride

Directed by Rachel Perkins, Freedom Ride is the story of her activist father, Charles Perkins, and the Student Action for Aborigines campaign he led with Jim Spigelman and others into northwest NSW during the mid-1960s to take a stand against racism and discrimination. Freedom Ride blends archival footage, news coverage from the period, re-enactments and contemporary interviews with the protesters and locals. Most of the soundtrack is licensed music from the ‘60s, but since I was waiting for a final cut of Broken English as Freedom Ride was being finished, Rachel asked me to join a few musical dots: some underscore for uni students trying to be cool, a bit of acoustic strum, and a couple of percussion tracks to add tension and apprehension to the bus ride. The percussion tracks fuse Aboriginal instruments with a Western drum kit and were the start of a cross cultural approach I’ve continued to develop, usually with Kirke Godfrey, in other projects.http://www.trackdown.com.au/http://www.shapednoise.com/NoiseSite/Welcome.htmlshapeimage_5_link_0

Directed by Ned Lander, Broken English recreates the false arrest of Aboriginal showground worker (Rupert) Max Stuart for the rape and murder of nine-year-old Mary Hattam on a beach in Ceduna in the late 1950s and follows the subsequent trials and appeals through to the Privy Council in London. The case was a landmark in police verballing and miscarriage of justice, which ultimately caused a change of government in South Australia.


Max Stuart was still alive when the film was made and he appears with his recollections and a surprisingly sanguine view. He was released from jail but never exonerated.

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Max Stuart’s story was the basis of the 2002 feature Black and White and Broken English was a resource for that project.