By Steve Dow
Hunter Page-Lochard runs to the cliff's edge at Magic Point, a coastal headland in Maroubra, and drops to his knees. He removes his shirt to reveal lean limbs, having fasted to appear 16 years old. He wipes white ochre across his forehead, face, upper body and arms as seagulls glide past and a swell smashes the waves against the rocks below.
A pod of whales breaks the surface of the ocean and comes closer as he performs a dance he has choreographed, disappearing when film director and writer Sarah Spillane calls "cut".
"You watch," says Stephen Page, artistic director of Bangarra Dance Theatre and also the father of the 20-year-old actor and dancer. "He'll take my legacy and he'll pump some good energy into that."
Page-Lochard is playing Liam Wood, who in Spillane's film Around the Block is torn between playing Shakespeare's Hamlet at his school, the fictitious Redfern High, and aiding his brother, who wants murderous revenge on behalf of their jailed father. The cliffhanger question is whether Liam will reconnect with his Aboriginal identity and the unfulfilled promise of his late uncle Charlie, who was a "deadly" actor.
Hunter Page-Lochard and Madeleine Madden from the film Around The Block.Credit: Sahlan Hayes
In 2002, Page-Lochard's own uncle, the acclaimed dancer and choreographer Russell Page, committed suicide at age 34.
"Hunter was drawing on some very personal experiences to get to the level of performance required," says Spillane of her charismatic young star.
"When we first rehearsed it I was a little embarrassed and nervous," admits Page-Lochard. "But then I just touched back to my inner culture and spirit." Page-Lochard is among a new generation of indigenous actors in Sydney being discovered by a wider film and TV-viewing audience than the stage audience of their predecessors.
Many of the young guns are descended from high-profile indigenous cultural leaders, including Madeleine Madden, the 16-year-old granddaughter of the late Aboriginal activist Charlie Perkins, who plays Liam's love interest in Around the Block.
Hunter Page-Lochard, pictured at Magic Point, Maroubra, stars in the film Around The Block.
"I get a lot of qualities from my grandfather in that I'm very direct in how I think," she says.
Madden's mother is Charlie's eldest daughter, Hetti Perkins, former Art Gallery of NSW indigenous art curator and now artistic director of Corroboree, a new indigenous festival that makes its debut in Sydney for 11 days and nights this month [see breakout]. "My mum's been lifelong friends with Hunter's dad and uncles," says Madden. "It was great working with Hunter because he's like an older brother. We keep an eye out for each other."
The Sapphires was the biggest Australian film of 2012.
At 13, Madden filmed a TV commercial for the national movement Generation One, urging employers to hire Aboriginal Australians. Last year, Madden had a part in the Paddington-based Blackfella Films company TV series Redfern Now, a role reprised for the second series to premiere on October 31 on ABC1. Written and directed by indigenous people, Redfern Now has been critically applauded, with some episodes watched by more than a million viewers.
Madden's aunt, Rachel Perkins, director of the indigenous musical movie Bran Nue Dae, whose $7.6 million box-office take made it the second-highest grossing Australian film of 2010, also directed both Redfern Now episodes starring her niece.
Redfern Now series two stars Ursula Yovich and Leah Purcell.Credit: Mark Rogers
"I like to influence younger people to get involved with the arts," says Madden. "Because it's great for expressing your views on the world and who you are as a person."
At 17, Darwin-born Miranda Tapsell, whose heritage is Larrakia-Tiwi and Caucasian Australian, saw a stage play called The Sapphires, written by Tony Briggs. Tapsell marvelled at Deborah Mailman as a Sapphire in the play. Seven years later, she got to play Mailman's little sister, Cynthia, in the Wayne Blair-directed cinema version. The biggest Australian film of 2012, the musical gem grossed $14.47 million domestically.
Tapsell, who then appeared in Redfern Now and is now filming a role as a single Aboriginal mother in the forthcoming Nine Network series Love Child, set in Kings Cross in 1969, says The Sapphires and Redfern Now's success is due to their accessibility: "What's so great about these stories is we were no longer this mystical creature that we were often featured as in the past."
Her Sapphires co-star Shari Sebbens says the film succeeded because "everyone can identify with the family dynamics".
Tapsell noticed people in general seemed ready to hear indigenous stories from 2007, when prime minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the stolen generations: "I remember being in Martin Place with my mother [during the apology] and this non-indigenous man came up and shook our hands and said, 'I'm really sorry'. I thought, 'Wow'. There was an unsaid social camaraderie."
On Redfern Now, says series co-producer Darren Dale, "we talked about what makes an indigenous story. Could that have happened to anyone? And then sometimes relieving ourselves of that idea and going: does it have to be particular?" Dale says more than 60 indigenous actors were cast in Redfern Now, and following the success of Bran Nue Dae, The Sapphires and Warwick Thornton's 2008 critically lauded film Samson and Delilah, Australian indigenous films are gaining an international audience.
But Bangarra deputy chair and Corroboree working group chair Michael McDaniel is sceptical about how widely interest in indigenous stories has spread beyond cosmopolitan Sydney and Melbourne. "Travel around NSW, travel inland around Australia: it's not as thirsting to connect to a whole range of people." Some public curiosity about Redfern Now, he says, begins with a sense of "voyeurism" about the Aboriginal community.
After The Sapphires, Shari Sebbens went on to play Julie in episode two of Redfern Now's first series. Sebbens says she's grateful for the roles but admits the Logie, which she won for most outstanding new talent, hasn't yet changed anything: this year she has been offered fewer film and TV roles compared with the previous two years.
In September, she played a non-Aboriginal character on stage at Griffin Theatre in Lally Katz's play Return to Earth. Her first non-culturally-specific screen role meanwhile has been sipping coffee in a Nescafé commercial. "I look at Australian television and it still really is white, there's no denying that," she says.
Indigenous actors remain keen to extend their screen repertoire with colour-blind casting, which is still rare on Australian screens. Redfern Now actor and star of 2011 feature film Mad Bastards, Dean Daley-Jones, would love to play James Bond. Hunter Page-Lochard hankers to play Spider-Man, "but I know it could never happen, because Peter Parker was never black". But Page-Lochard seems to stand a better chance than most of the new crop of indigenous performers at transcending culturally specific characters. He has dual Australian-US citizenship, his mother being Haitian-American former New York City Ballet dancer Cynthia Lochard, and harbours "greedy" ambitions for a career across dancing, acting and writing his own movie screenplays.
He wants to apply his cultural traditions with a fresh flavour. "Technically the Aboriginal culture is an art form that's been alive for 40,000 years or more," he says. "And yet you've still got people halfway across the world who don't know about it at all. It's a good story; I want to tell you this good story. Most of it has still got that [traditional] energy and spirit in it, but it's completely modern." (s)
CORROBOREE FESTIVAL
The inaugural Corroboree festival begins with a Macquarie Street parade for children on November 14, followed, on the evening of November 15, by a ceremonial flame being carried on a bark canoe towards Pier 2/3 at Walsh Bay, and welcomed by Gadigal elder Charles "Chika" Madden, a council of elders and the NSW governor, Marie Bashir.
The festival "celebrates the cultural energy of Sydney, past and present", says Perkins. "The city is a real hub for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts practice in all forums: we've got our dancers and singers and musos and visual artists and writers. But we felt there wasn't an opportunity to celebrate this in a cross-arts-form way, at one time of year." There will be film, music and dance at Cockatoo Island, arts and crafts at Walsh Bay, a First Nations conference, an indigenous fashion and design showcase, a youth career day and educational culture camps. Destination NSW is providing funding, with Bangarra Dance Theatre contracted to auspice the annual festival for its first three years before it needs to become self-supporting.
Top 5 Corroboree events
1. Gurung parade
November 14, from 11am, a parade of NSW schoolchildren. Commencing at Hyde Park and heading down Macquarie Street. Line the streets and celebrate.
2. The Darkside
Sydney premiere of Samson and Delilah director Warwick Thornton's gripping new film about ghost stories. November 16, 17 and 19, 8pm, Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, $15-$25.
3. Dance Clan 3
Bangarra's new dance work, November 21 to December 1. Pier 4 Walsh Bay $35-$49.
4. Illuminate
Paper, light and sound exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, the Domain, from November 16, free.
5. Black arts market
Meet indigenous artists, see and buy their works. Pier 2/3 Walsh Bay, November 16 and 17, 10am to 6pm, free.