Putting Aboriginal faces on screen
The Sapphires won 11 Australian film awards and spawned No. 1 album
TORONTO In the official records of his native Australia, Wayne Blair says, his great-grandmother was not a person. She was a plant.
Blair, 41, is a member of that country’s Aboriginal community, a group that didn’t get the vote until 1962. When the census-takers were counting the population, his great-grandmother, who died in 1966, was listed among the “flora and fauna” section of the form.
The treatment of Australia’s Aborigines is a subtext of The Sapphires, an otherwise rousing film with a score of Motown standards — the soundtrack includes such songs as Land of a Thousand Dances and Heard It Through the Grapevine — and an unusual story to tell.
In 1968, when racial politics was ripping America apart, Australia had a similar divide among whites and Aboriginals. Like the U.S., Australia was fighting in Vietnam and, against this background, four native girls formed a singing group and toured Vietnam, entertaining the troops, finding a freedom they didn’t have at home and, in the story’s throwback plot, discovering romance along the way.
The Sapphires was a popular stage musical in Australia where Blair, an actor, writer and TV director, was in the original cast.
Now it’s a feature film, directed by Blair and starring a group of young Aboriginal actors and one international star, Irish comic Chris O’Dowd (Bridesmaids) as the itinerant bar musician who discovers the Sapphires and helps organize their tour.
Most of The Sapphires is taken up with the loves and career aspirations of the young women in the group, but one of them has been given a dark past.
She is part of the so-called “stolen generation” of children who were taken from their homes, a tragedy that was also explored in another Australian movie, the 2002 drama Rabbit Proof Fence.
The real-life Sapphires were two sisters and two cousins from Melbourne who formed a band and went on tour. They returned and resumed their ordinary lives.
“There wasn’t anything about personal ambition or personal ego,” Blair said at last fall’s Toronto film festival, where the movie had its premiere. “It was just go back to their families. … They had other responsibilities.”
In the film, though, their tour takes on a deeper meaning, mostly because of the stolen generation.
“There’s still a lot of hurt and sadness, I daresay, because how do you recover something like that, being taken away from mom and dad?” Blair says. “I’d just be lost.”
The stage show was co-written by Australian playwright Tony Briggs, who was inspired by the story of his mother and aunt who toured Vietnam in a singing group, and given more political edge in the film version.
Blair has some connection to the subject matter as well: his father served in Vietnam as the first Aboriginal regimental sergeant-major in Australia.
It’s Blair’s first feature-length movie. He grew up in a small country town and was aimed toward a career in marketing when he decided he wanted to become an actor (he calls it “the Sagittarian in me.”). He went to acting school, while his family waited for him to come back to resume his life. “And I’m now in Toronto,” he says. The Sapphires, which won 11 Australian film awards and spawned a No. 1 album, is a hit back home. Blair says it is putting Aboriginal faces onto the screen, and he hopes they will become role models for blacks and whites alike. He says that he saw his father cry for the first time in his life as he watched the movie.
But it has more important benefits even than that.
“Having a film like this, it’s great, it’s getting out into the world, getting to North America and Japan and China and Holland and Germany,” he says.
“But the best thing about it is that people from Australia are seeing it. And it comes in the guise of black soul music, and it comes in the guise of a comedy. But when you have that underlying truth under it, it just rears its head.
“Just to say ‘Hey, here it is.’ It just reminds people. And hopefully in someone’s psyche it stays forever, and it just changes people. And that’s the proudest thing this film has done.”