Mythmakers of the modern era
Weta Workshop has helped create Australia’s new indigenous superhero, writes Tim Richards.
Creator Ryan Griffen says he came up with idea for Cleverman so his son would have his own superhero. ‘‘A hero that was based on Aboriginal culture. When I was growing up, I would always tell people I was an Aboriginal, and would get into fights because of it.
‘‘My son’s nine now. He’s very proud and calls himself a blackfella, and talks about his Aboriginal culture, but there’ll be a point where people question that. So that was seeded into the growth of the character as well.’’
The character in question is Koen (played by Hunter PageLochard), a young Indigenous man in a strange near-future Australia grappling with the challenge of the Hairies, a mythological species struggling to co-exist with humans. Alongside his estranged brother Waruu (Rob Collins), he’s forced to don the mantle of the Cleverman and assume his powers in a fight against human and inhuman foes.
Though the plot is set in the years ahead, Griffen drew on the deepest myths and traditions of Aboriginal Australia in creating his fictional universe.
Chief among these was the concept of the ‘‘cleverman’’, a respected member of a clan who is gifted special abilities. Griffen saw it as a role which could be adapted for his futuristic storyline.
‘‘Our cleverman is different from the actual cleverman that existed in many Aboriginal communities,’’ he says. ‘‘The Dreamtime is about the past, present and future, and so he has powers that relate to all three of those.
‘‘He has the ability to heal, which relates to the present. He can heal himself on the spot. He has visions of both past and future. But he also has the ability to be a conduit between the real world and the Dreaming, so he can kill a beast that is from the Dreaming and send it back there.
‘‘In our show, these powers are passed down, very much as in Aboriginal culture. A cleverman is chosen by another cleverman when they’re of the right bloodline or are the right type of person. For our cleverman, those powers are passed down to him by his uncle.’’
To adapt this role to the small screen, the writing team sought permission from Indigenous communities. Though Griffen grew up in the Blue Mountains, his family is Kamilaroi from north-east NSW.
‘‘It’s a very sensitive topic, men’s business, stuff that not everyone likes to talk about. So I dealt first with two countries that are very close to the show, which is my country and writer Jon Bell’s country. We felt we needed to get permission from our own people first, before we continued.
‘‘Not only that, we had to get permission for language. We dealt with four different communities, three from the east coast and one from Katherine in the middle of the Northern Territory.’’
Another linguistic stumbling block related to the otherworldly Hairies. Should they speak an invented tongue?
‘‘For me, it was no,’’ says Griffen. ‘‘I said let’s actually use an Aboriginal language that we already have. To me it was about giving a reason to a language again.
‘‘We have people out there who love Lord of the Rings and can speak Elvish fluently, while we have languages in Australia that are dying off. So if we put a number of real languages down in the script, and the show becomes popular, people will want to learn about it.’’
As with Australia’s multiple Aboriginal tongues, the concept of the cleverman had also become obscured.
‘‘The cleverman was one of the first things to be removed from our culture because of colonisation,’’ says Griffen.
‘‘When there’s a new religion being introduced to the country, that’s the first sort of thing to be shut down.
‘‘The cleverman was cast aside, not respected any more.
‘‘There’s a subtle sort of reference to that in our show. The two brothers have an uncle who’s been cast aside because some people do believe in the cleverman, some people don’t.’’
Wellington’s world-renowned Weta Workshop, first made famous by its work on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Hobbit trilogy, King Kong and Avatar helped design the show’s ‘‘otherworldly’’ creatures, while Sir Peter Jackson’s Park Road Post Production provided picture, visual effects and sound postproduction services.