Man about town. boy from the bush. colour bar. Calibre. Coolibah. mid 1950s. prosperity. Naivete. Optimism. the spirit of Marbuk looms large. the dark ogre of white australia's psyche. shadow lands. from here to eternity. spectres of the mind. echoes across desert sands. gone troppo. the savage un-made. unknown beauty. Unutterable. foreign affair. Untouchable.

These images are drawn from the deep well of my father's life, the part of it unfamiliar to me as his eldest child and only daughter. Seven years ago I assumed the task of packing up the material remains of his life, seventy years or so on this earth.

A small room contained boxes, books and papers tracing his life's journey. Among these things was an old cardboard shoebox, and inside this box, lay an old slide box, dating from the 1950s. Like a set of Russian dolls, within the slide box were a group of slides, from the same roll of film; a tiny vignette into my father's life, half a century ago.

I grew up with regular slide nights on Sundays in my childhood, yet as these were unknown to me and without my father to answer questions, I could only guess that they had lain hidden since that time. Not from intent, just that they had been put away and perhaps forgotten. Given their content I also surmised that they were taken before my father and mother had met, which was around 1959, 1960, possibly as early as 1956.

So I carried these images around in my mind for the next seven years, returning to them often, and wondering about the city- and country-scapes, the period in which they were set and the anonymous people in them, apart from my father. He did not know his family and in his single years travelled extensively along the eastern seaboard, I feel that there is no-one from that part of my father's life to ask the questions that I have carried with me, along with the images.

In 1955 film-maker Charles Chauvel directed and released Australia's first ‘colour narrative fiction feature' (got to love that turn of phrase!) Jedda premiered in Darwin on 5 January 1955 to considerable acclaim. The synopsis for Jedda reads like this:

‘…a film that tells the story of an Aboriginal girl who is adopted and raised by a white family on a Northern Territory cattle station. As a young woman Jedda (Ngarla Kunoth), is drawn to Marbuck (Robert Tudawali), an Aboriginal man who arrives at the station seeking work. Marbuck takes her captive but is rejected by his tribe for breaking marriage taboos. Jedda is caught between two worlds, belonging to neither…'

However, I was less concerned with Jedda, the ‘half-caste' girl caught between two worlds, since I was far more interested in Marbuk, the charismatic ‘full-blood', and the actor who played him, Robert Tudawali. Although I have long been familiar with his work, what I came across looking his name up on the web was this:

‘Sickbed drama of Jedda Film Star'

The star in one of Australia's most successful films has been living destitute and wracked with tuberculosis in a native slum near Darwin. He is Robert Tudawali, full-blooded aborigine, whose proud and dignified role as Marbuck in Jedda is still stirring the admiration of theatre audiences throughout the world.

Two years ago this bearded giant was being lionised in Sydney. Today, Tudawali is just a "sick blackfellow". He has been living with six other natives in a mud hut at Bagot Compound, two and a half miles from Darwin. His wife, Peggy, came out of Darwin hospital yesterday with a baby a little more than a week old. Tudawali's plight was revealed on Thursday by the Commonwealth Medical Officer of Native Health Surveys, Dr. T. Tarleton Rayment, in Darwin. Until then, the baby, Christine, did not even have a nightdress. Peggy went into hospital with only one nightdress…

"This is a shameful case" Dr. Rayment told The Sun Herald during the week. "It is something that Australians cannot be very proud of, for Tudawali has done much for Australia. Being a black, Bobby cannot receive the T.B. allowance of about £4 a week. But any half-caste T.B. sufferer, a shade of black, or any down and out alcoholic can receive an income while being treated"…

In Sydney on Thursday Mr. Chauvel, the producer of Jedda, said he was very distressed to hear of Tudawali's illness. Mr. Chauvel said all amounts due to Tudawali had been paid. He referred The Sun-Herald to the secretary of Jedda Productions, Mr. R. C. Brauer. Mr Brauer said a cheque for £110 as payment at £5 a week for 22 weeks from July 1 to December 31, 1954, had been fowarded to the Director of Native Welfare in Darwin within the last few weeks. "If Tudawali has not received it there must be some grave misunderstanding," said Mr. Brauer…

Secretary of Actors' Equity, Mr. Hal Alexander, said Tudawali… ‘..received the award wage here and got some back money, but our award is only a State award," he said. Mr. Alexander added: "Tudawali's distress is a disgrace to Australia. He made the only real Australian picture we have seen. It is a real money spinner."

Tudawali said in Darwin yesterday that he had drawn some of the newly arrived £120 from the Welfare Department to buy blankets and clothes. "I had nothing before the money came," he said. "Mr. Chauvel said he would pay me for six months after the film so I would not act for anyone else. An agent from Hollywood asked me to play the part of a witch doctor but I said 'No, I am acting for Mr. Chauvel.' All I want now is a house and a worthwhile job to carry me over".

(from THE SUN-HERALD Sunday March 18 1956, p.1)

And this:

Robert Tudawali (1930 – 1967), a Tiwi man, was born on Melville Island in the Northern Territory. He worked for both the air force and the army during the Second World War. After the War he became the world's first Aboriginal film star, courtesy of Jedda. He then starred in the movie Dust in the Sun and in many television films in the 1960s. He found it very hard to return to the life of an ordinary person after having been a star. Later he became ill with a disease of the lungs. He died in an accident in Darwin in 1967.

A street is named after him and a film was made about his life in 1987.

I think it was the addendum, which hit me the hardest. That and the knowledge I'd gleaned from some forgotten source that he had died while rolling into a campfire after drinking one night. The comparison with the fate of the ‘first Aboriginal art star' Albert Namatjira is devastatingly compelling.

I prefer to be inspired by another image that I discovered in a publication from the early 1960s, before Tudawali's death, where he is in all his beauty, decked out in a white tuxedo and bow tie, hair brilliantined and sharply parted, smile wide, arms around two ‘half-caste' beauties, similarly aglow in satin and sheen, attending the Melbourne premier of Jedda nearly half a century ago. A proud and beautiful Black Man About Town.

Which leads me to the point where my imagination ran away with me. When I looked at these images of my father in his prime I saw something of the same stance as in Tudawali. I imagined these, as stills from a film never shot, the flipside to Marbuk and Jedda. What if my father was Marbuk's stolen twin? (Well, he had been a twin, no matter that his was a sister whose existence he did not know of at the time these photos where taken).

And wondering about the site where he stood - that, golden-lit street, empty, as if the rest of the population had been struck down. Or thinking of another shadowy street, peopled by blurry pedestrians paying no mind to the photographer, theatre bulbs aglow in competition with red winking neon: Kantrun hosiery . An anonymous beauty, gazing directly, knowingly, easily at the photographer – his girlfriend? What of the two fair maidens in the bush scene, nonchalant about the Black Man they were embracing, being embraced by? A lone motorcycle, a young man's freedom. Journeys undertaken, male bonds, the black and the white of it, in all its faded Technicolour glory. Telling tales, tall and true.