Amidst the deceptive darkness of the wide open outback, the moon hangs high in the sky like a beacon, luring a young girl from her bedroom and into a world she knows little about. Startled out of her slumber, her mother wakes in fright, rushing to her daughters room to find her gone. Come morning, the police have arrived with a search party who intend to scour the land for any sign of the missing girl, but their Indigenous police officer is denied the chance to help track the girls’ path. The girls father has claimed this land as his own, and through a profound act of racism, he rejects any help from the black tracker. The all white search party forge a path through the wide plains, all the while the Indigenous tracker laments that they’re heading in the wrong direction. Days turn into nights, and nights turn into weeks. The girl is nowhere to be found. Exhausted and desperate, and yet all too late, the mother turns to the tracker for his assistance. The two find the girl, her life consumed by time and disorientation. Upon hearing this news, her father walks off into the night, distraught, blaming himself for not finding his daughter, and through the power of a shotgun, claims his life. The tracker and his family mourn the mothers’ loss, her left alone and desolate on this unforgiving land, with only the memory of her dead family to keep her company.
This is Rachel Perkins outback opera, One Night the Moon.
Inspired by the life of Alexander Riley, as told in the documentary Black Tracker (directed by his grandson, Michael Riley), this is the story of a tracker who worked with the Dubbo police in the early 1900s, helping them find criminals and missing people. Unlike the documentary, Perkins opts to focus predominantly on a family of white farmers, as portrayed by real life family, Paul Kelly, Kaarin Fairfax, and their daughter, Memphis Kelly. The ever reliable Kelton Pell delivers one of his first film performances as the tracker.
Coming in at a brisk 57 minutes, One Night the Moon is deceptively slight. This is a narrative we’ve seen told countless times over and over, especially in the Western format: A family loses a child and due to their racist roots, they distrust the Indigenous peoples guidance and help, and in turn, the family suffers a great deal when their child is found dead. But, what sets One Night the Moon apart from similar narratives is the use of music to help weave this narrative. With songs written by Paul Kelly and a score by Kev Carmody and Mairead Hannan, the music by itself is quite beautiful to listen to. When paired with the immersive cinematography of Kim Batterham, the two work in harmony. Batterham’s camera captures the darkness of the narrative with the grand deep blue night skies, managing to perfectly portray the enchanting quality of the moon itself.
The ‘lost child’ narrative has been one that has long been fostered within Australian cinema – Picnic at Hanging Rock and Walkabout are notable entries in this subgenre. The constant that links these films together is how alluring the openness of the outback can be, operating like a silent siren, beckoning these (often white) children into their grips and delivering a cruel injustice unto them. Death, trauma, or a grand enduring mystery, envelops these characters, with their misunderstanding of this harsh landscape being the key to their downfall. While Picnic at Hanging Rock and Walkabout mainly focus on the children themselves, One Night the Moon opts to engage in the fallibility of the father.
As a director and co-writer, Rachel Perkins appears to recognise how slight the narrative may appear, and leans on the most pertinent theme of the film: the distinction between a connection to country versus the ownership of land. This is most powerful presented in the song ‘This Land is Mine’, which comes early in the film, setting the tone of ‘us and them’. Paul Kelly’s farmer Jim Ryan makes haste onto his land in search of his daughter with his troupe of white men by his side. He powerfully declares as a statement against Kelton Pell’s tracker that ‘this land is mine’. He paid a deed, he has established his home, he is the owner of this soil and what exists on it. He’s exhausted, toiling on a land that openly rejects any kind of cultivation, outwardly dispelling any chance of crops or farm life to foster and prosper.
He will be damned if anyone, especially an Indigenous bloke, is going to take what is his away from him.
As a reminder to himself and as a declaration to his country, Kelton Pell’s Albert Yang sings as he walks off the property alone. This is the most powerful moment of One Night the Moon, and if there is an enduring element from this film, it is this song and the image of Pell walking proudly across his country, singing about his spiritual connection with the land. He sings, ‘This land is me’, and proudly sings about how he is one with the rocks, the water, the animals, the trees. The land is his home, and he is the land. No clearer is the connection to country made than in the lines, ‘this land owns me, from generations past to infinity, we’re all but woman and man’ and later, in a rebuttal to Jim Ryan, Albert sings, ‘this land is me… they won’t take it away from me’.
One other line of great importance in ‘This Land is Mine’ that Albert sings is, ‘you only fear what you don’t understand’. This song alone feels like the reason that One Night the Moon was made – to show the clear difference between white folks and our inability to comprehend the importance of having a connection to country for the first nations people. While the white man conquers the land that he lives on, spoiling the world at his doorstep for misguided purposes, he never has an interest in learning from or engaging with this land. In their mind, once their flag is planted in the soil, what more do they have to gain from it? It is theirs now, and that is all that matters.
There is a deep relevance to the message within One Night the Moon that will carry across time and history. It doesn’t take much to see how painfully unaware white Australians are about the importance of the connection to country for first nations people – just look at the caravan of disrespectful people making their way up Uluru before the climbing ban is in place, or even at the generally progressively perceived Victorian government moves forward with the obliteration of the Djap Wurrung trees just for a high way extension. It’s clear how deep the currents of racism run, and it’s clear how far white Australia has to go to understanding and appreciating the importance of the history of first nations people. We – and I write this as the royal ‘we’, as a white person on stolen land, I am complicit in the actions of my white brethren – have to get over our eagerness to misunderstand and undervalue first nations people, and hoisting our own importance above that of others.
The wilful ignorance about what the lands of Australia can do to a person is one of the great ironies of One Night the Moon– the misguided notion that this farmer sees that every land is the same as every other land, the soil of England is no different to the soil of Australia. But, instead of listening and learning from those who know the country the best, Ryan dooms his family, and inevitably, himself, by rejecting the black tracker. There’s a profound arrogance to the white man that’s somewhat ineffectively portrayed by Paul Kelly. As one of Australia’s great songwriters, Kelly has crafted some of the most empathetic songs that we have been fortunate enough to hear, and by gosh can he sing them like no tomorrow, but, Kelly is no actor. It’s clear that the distaste and disgust that Jim Ryan should direct towards Albert Yang simply fails to come across. This works against the songs, which are better realised in isolation away from the film where the visuals of a stilted Paul Kelly in the wilderness are removed. This is unfortunate given how well Kelly manages to bring stories of tragedy to life, imbuing them with a tone that suggest that he has lived through this pain. Take a listen to the heartbroken ‘Everything’s Turning to White’, where Kelly retells the story of a woman who is found dead by a group of men who went out fishing, and you can’t help but wish the same level of anguish and pain was applied to his performance as Jim Ryan.
While the theme of the loneliness of the remote woman is explored less than the subject of racism, it is still relevant, with Kaarin Fairfax delivering a beautifully understated performance as Jim’s wife Rose that reinforces how difficult life was for white women. In comparison, moments where Albert is at home with his family show a community united – the women are an important bond that helps keep the family together, supporting the men, and supporting the community as a whole. For Rose, she is a housewife whose pleas for Jim to allow the assistance of Albert to help find their missing daughter go unheard. It’s only when she herself takes off in the middle of the night and requests his assistance that their daughter is finally found – albeit, much too late for any joy in the discovery. Upon the discovery of her body, Jim kills himself – less as an act of humility over having not asked for help from Albert, but instead, more as a stubborn act of insolence, with him singing that ‘I don’t have anything anymore’. Meanwhile, Rose is left alone with the one thing he did have, herself and his land. Her future is damned, with nary a sign of hope or positivity in sight. He has ruined them all, and it is merely because of wilful racism and prejudice.
And what a grand lesson that is. If only us white people could embrace diversity, reject racism and prejudice, one could only imagine what kind of world we would live in. There would, no doubt, still be antagonism due to differences, but at least there might be a path where fear and hate caused by the colour of ones skin doesn’t exist. That’s pure fantasy, and it’s one that a quote from Charles Perkins informs at the end of the film:
‘We know we cannot live in the past but the past lives within us’
Can we not learn and change from what we have become? Can we not be better people, to become a better nation, and to honour the first nations people? No, it’s clear that we cannot. Because the arrogance of white man is paramount above all else.
As a filmmaker, Rachel Perkins has long told Indigenous stories on a grand scale, and with One Night the Moon, she does so with a unique perspective that doesn’t always work. As an outback opera, it’s an interesting affair that works better if you listen to the soundtrack in isolation. And while that sounds like a damnation of the film itself, I assure you, it is not. The film is beautiful to behold, and has a fine performance from Kelton Pell, and sumptuous cinematography, but given how slim the narrative is, its brief run time can’t help but start to feel like a drag. This is even more evident once ‘This Land is Mine’ has been sung – the themes are laid out bare about fifteen minutes in, and unfortunately there’s little more that can be added to further inform those themes.
The themes she explores here have been explored in greater detail, and with greater confidence in latter films – Bran Nue Daeand Jasper Jones in particular are simply wonderful films about Indigenous Australia. This makes One Night the Moon a fairly minor work amongst greatness in Perkins career, but no less of a film to seek out.
Director: Rachel Perkins
Cast: Paul Kelly, Kelton Pell, Kaarin Fairfax
Writers: John Remeril, Rachel Perkins, with music by Paul Kelly, Kev Carmody, Mairead Hannan