It was a journey Rachel Perkins was hesitant to take.
It was one that would spotlight violent histories across the country and would ultimately bring her back to a place that left a painful legacy in her own family.
But the Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman couldn’t walk away from the opportunity to tell the history she grew up learning – sharing stories of resistance, shared from generation to generation. Stories she knows to be the nation’s true history.
Perkins directed, produced and presented SBS/NITV series The Australian Wars.
It’s said that history is written by the victors, but the three-part documentary flips the script.
Perkins' personal purpose
From Sydney to Tasmania, and Adelaide to the Kimberley, The Australian Wars recounts the violent realities of the expanding colonial frontier.
In the final instalment, Ms Perkins returns home to Arrernte Country, to a place called ‘Blackfellow’s Bones’.
A place where members of her family were killed by colonists.
Her grandmother survived, passing down the testimony of what happened.
Ms Perkins shares an intimate recording of her grandmother telling her story, accompanied by words written by her father on what happened to her grandmother beyond that day.
Actor depicts Pemulwuy in SBS commissioned documentary, The Australian Wars Source: SBS
“I admit that I actually didn’t really wanna make this documentary series because I know I’d have to spend years going through the horror of it.
“Making this film has led me to this place, I never would have come here probably.”
Telling the whole story
Informed by research, records, testimonies and oral histories, and articulated by reenactments of colonial violence and massacre, The Australian Wars hits and does not miss.
“It’s hard reading through the records, really hard. The brutality was so extreme, and the odds were so stacked against Aboriginal people,” Perkins told NITV.
“In making it, you feel some satisfaction in telling the story, but it can never give justice to those people who were involved. That justice we’re still seeking in many ways today.
“It’s a hard history, you have to face these truths. For a lot of our people, we’ve been carrying these stories on behalf of the nation for far too long. This is a story that the nation needs to really embrace and take responsibility for too.”
The series hears from identities such as Professor Marcia Langton, Rodney Dillon, Uncle Chris Tobin and Dr Fiona Foley, and it tells the stories of powerful resistance warriors like Pemulwuy and Truganini.
Perkins said their stories made her feel “extremely proud about the choices our people made”.
“We have a lot to be proud of in the way that our people defended their lands and how they tried to stand in the face of the most powerful empire in the world,” she said,
“It's a story that Australians more broadly can be proud of, that the first Australians fought for their country over such a long period of time."
The Australian Wars depicts dramatic reconstructions of the battles during early European settlement. Source: SBS
A shove to change
Perkins is the first to admit that the three-part series shares only a small portion of history – that it is “hopelessly inadequate” when telling the true scale of colonial violence.
She said it attempts to “tell broad brushstrokes” of how this warfare was part of the “bigger picture of imperialism”.
“It was part of the British Empire’s global expansion, how they did it in other places, how they were experts at it, how the governments today continue in being responsible for what happened in the past,” she said.
Rachel Perkins at the Australian War Memorial. Still from The Australian Wars documentary series. Source: SBS
“I'm older now, I'm 52. I think the education system has changed hugely since I went to school,” she said.
“But I still think the level of understanding is pretty, pretty low. And I suppose I want people to think deeply about the past, and now how we deal with it, because that history has shaped where we are right now.”
Whilst these stories may be shards of the past, Ms Perkins is adamant there are still things to be done today, to “change the paradigm in this country”.
"I want people to be inspired and stimulated, and become active.
“That’s in our hands to do."
The Australian Wars premieres on Wednesday 21 September at 7.30pm on SBS and NITV.
