Putuparri and the Rainmakers is a remarkable film, but director Nicole Ma readily admits she can't take credit for its most powerful sequence.
It dates from 1994, was shot by Tom "Putuparri" Lawford – the 43-year old Wangkatjungka man at the heart of the story – on "a shitty old VHS camera" (his words), and it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of picture quality. But what it shows is rare and precious, an ancient ceremony in which a group of indigenous elders venture into the desert, locate a tiny puddle and reveal, through days of ritual and hard labour, the sacred waterhole that lies beneath.
Ma wasn't on that trip to Kurtal (both the name of the waterhole, or djila, and of the spirit that supposedly lives there), but she and her camera did go along on the next three trips, made over a decade.
She sat on that tape almost as long before finally looking at it a few years ago. "We were getting beautiful pictures, and I thought 'VHS – who needs it?'," she says.
As it turns out, she did. "It's the heart of the film, really," Ma says. "I don't think we'd have the film without it. It's a precious Australian archive now, but in 50 years that footage is going to be gold because it's so meaningful."
For Lawford, that first trip marked the beginning of a journey both individual and emblematic. Like many indigenous men in remote communities (he lives in Fitzroy Crossing), he didn't quite fit in the modern world; he was an alcoholic, and was violent towards his wife, aspects of his story the film does not shirk. But nor did he have much of a connection to traditional culture.
He belonged, in effect, nowhere.
That first trip, he had no idea what to expect. Though he'd grown up watching his grandfather Spider perform the ritual dance associated with Kurtal, he didn't know what it meant. "I just thought it was a dance," he says. "Then when I went there I realised this place was so important."
Now he can glimpse a better future connected to a richer past. His job is all about preserving the cultures of the 36 language groups in the Kimberley, he is remarried, and he says he barely drinks any more.
"My life now is different to what it was before," says Lawford. "I'm more cultural. Our people, we got that culture. It's up to us to follow it or not."
Kurtal is a couple of hundred kilometres as the eagle flies from Fitzroy Crossing, but it takes about six days to drive there because the terrain is so rugged (and flat tyres, even in heavy-duty 4WDs, are so frequent). As one elder puts it in the film, it's "too hot, too hard, too far".
But it is home, insists Lawford. It's where his grandparents were born. It's where the stories live, where the relationship between his people and the land is forged.
Could you imagine living there, I ask him.
"Not full time, not this day and age," he says. Then, putting hand to heart, he says: "It's a home from here."
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