When the British film director Nicolas Roeg asked Aboriginal elders in the outback in 1969 who was the best dancer among their people, they pointed at a skinny 16-year-old called David Gulpilil. The youth smiled, totally uninhibited as he rhythmically moved his body. The director who was about to garner praise and notoriety for the crime drama Performance (1970), starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, knew that Gulpilil was exactly what he needed for his next film, Walkabout (1971).
Gulpilil, already an accomplished tracker and hunter, was preternaturally powerful given his tender years in the role of a teenager sent on “walkabout”, to live off the land for six months as part of his initiation into manhood. At a dried-up watering hole he encountered two lost white children (played by Jenny Agutter and Luc Roeg) whose father had taken them into the outback for a picnic, only to try and kill them; when they got away, the father set the car on fire and shot himself.
Perhaps inspired by gunslinging images of John Wayne from the westerns he loved to watch as an orphan growing up in a missionary school, Gulpilil commands the wide-screen frame to the backdrop of lizards scuttling on the desert sand and deep-orange sunrises. Unlike many indigenous people who were understandably suspicious and reserved among white people, he had a simple, friendly magnetism, exemplified by his huge smile.
Agutter, who was 16 at the time of filming, recalled Gulpilil’s natural gift for friendship and storytelling in the intense family atmosphere that Roeg liked to create. “He was clearly quite a different person to most of the [indigenous people] I came across who were very reserved,” she recalled in 2018. “He was a very open, very outgoing personality who had an innate understanding of how the film would look. I remember one scene when he asked me to move because I was standing in his light.”
In the film, based on Donald G Payne’s 1959 novel and scripted by Edward Bond, the boy cheerfully leads the children to safety. Gulpilil’s power and grace as he hunts and cooks bush meat for his new friends and humours the six-year-old-boy, who wants to play soldiers with him, is an eloquent statement of the dignity of the Aboriginal people.
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Walkabout also explores darker themes of adolescents on the cusp of lost innocence and the ultimate incompatibility of the two cultures, allegorised by the dreamlike sequence of Gulpilil’s final mating dance and death.
The film was critically acclaimed in Europe and America but poorly received in Australia, where screen portrayals of indigenous people up to that point almost always involved white actors using blackface. The Australian actor Jack Thompson said it was the first time he had seen Aboriginal culture presented on-screen as “dynamically attractive”. “No Australian director would have done that,” he said. “It would not have until then been culturally possible for us to think of an Aboriginal young man as being sexually attractive.”
Gulpilil was soon catapulted out of the land, which is all he had ever known, to the Promenade de la Croisette in Cannes wearing a dinner jacket to promote the film. Over several months he was introduced to the Queen, John Lennon, Muhammad Ali, Bruce Lee, Marlon Brando and Bob Marley, who introduced him to “ganja”. Only looking back in old age did he realise how traumatising these heady experiences had been.
Even as a young man he understood the importance of representing Aboriginal culture to the rest of the world to bring attention to the plight of his people, who had been exploited and corralled into settlements. The great irony, and fault line, of his life was that in performing this ambassadorial role he became increasingly divorced from his own culture. He described the predicament as: “Left side, my country. Right side, white man’s world. This one tiptoe in caviar and champagne, this one in the dirt of my Dreamtime.”
Gulpilil would win acclaim for many more film roles and as a dancer but would also become an alcoholic. He was jailed in 1987 after his fourth drink-driving offence and as a result could not fly to London to receive the Order of Australia from the Queen for services to the arts through the interpretation of Aboriginal culture.
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The money earned from his film appearances was never substantial (he reportedly received $10,000 for the Hollywood production Crocodile Dundee, which made some $328 million worldwide). What he did earn was soon spent and even as a more distinguished performer he was still subject to racism from film crews and agents. He was often itinerant, sleeping in parks in the northern city of Darwin.
Eventually, he settled with his then partner Robyn Djunginy in a corrugated iron hut in the indigenous community of Ramingining without power or running water, hunting kangaroos and cooking bush meat over an open fire. “I was brought up in a tin shed. I wandered all over the world — Paris, New York — now I’m back in a tin shed,” Gulpilil said.
After another spell in prison in 2011 for assaulting his then partner Miriam Ashley, he finally got sober.
Gulpilil Ridjimiraril Dalaithngu was born “under a tree” near Maningrida in Arnhem Land in Australia’s Northern Territory into the Mandjalpingu (Djilba) clan of the Yolngu people. His name, or totem, Gulpilil represents the kingfisher.
He later said that he did not know when he was born. His earliest years were spent in the outback and he did not see a white Australian until he was eight. After the death of his parents he attended a missionary school at Maningrida. Here, he was given the name David. He was also assigned a birthdate of July 1, 1953, based on “guesswork”.
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After Walkabout, there were few films featuring Aboriginal people that he did not appear in. His work included Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) and Baz Luhrmann’s epic Australia (2008).
While filming Mad Dog Morgan (1976), Gulpilil was given a crash course in hellraising by his co-star Dennis Hopper. Gulpilil’s character forms a friendship with the 19th-century Irish-Australian outlaw played by Hopper. Life imitated art.
“If you’re working with people like Dennis Hopper and [John] Meillon, well, you gotta learn all about drinking and drugs,” said Gulipilil in his one-man stage show in 2004. “It was the 1970s. I thought well, I got to join in this whitefella corroboree. But I tell you, I’d never seen anything like this before.”
Storm Boy (1976) was Gulpilil’s breakthrough role in Australian cinema and was also his personal favourite film. In it he plays Fingerbone Bill, who helps a white boy raise an orphaned pelican.
Gulpilil cited his performance in The Tracker (2002) as the best of his career, playing a man who is forced by a racist policeman to use his tracking skills to find the murderer of a white woman. For this role he won the award for best actor at the Australian Film Institute Awards, the Inside Film Awards and the Film Critics’ Circle Awards.
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He teamed up with The Tracker director Rolf de Herr several more times, including for Ten Canoes (2006), the first feature film scripted entirely in the Yolngu language. Gulpilil narrates the dramatisation of a 1,000-year-old story of misplaced love and revenge that featured his son, Jamie. The film won a Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Gulpilil gave another powerful, not to say true to life, performance in Charlie’s Country (2013), which he co-wrote with de Herr, about an ageing man who yearns for a return to his cultural roots. His final dramatic role was the 2019 remake of Storm Boy.
Gulpilil had no popular peer in promoting Australian indigenous culture until Cathy Freeman (who is of Birri Gubba Aboriginal heritage) won gold for Australia in the 400m at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Multi-talented, he danced for the Queen at the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973 and won the Darwin Australia Day Eisteddfod dance competition four times. He was an accomplished yidaki (didgeridoo) player (once teaching Marley how to play the instrument between spliffs) and painter of outback scenes. He also wrote children’s stories based on Yolngu beliefs.
Gulpilil’s private life was complicated. He was married to Miriam Ashley, an artist, and Robyn Djunginy, also an artist. Other partners included Airlie Thomas. He is survived by his children Jida, a musician and actor, Jamie, an actor, Milan, Makia, Andrew, Phoebe and Malakai.
After his lung cancer diagnosis in 2017, Gulpilil was looked after by his friend Mary Hood, whom he had met at the premiere of Ten Canoes. She helped him to appear in the 2021 documentary, My Name is Gulpilil, in which the dying actor spoke of his pride in what he had achieved for his people, despite having paid a heavy price: “I showed the world how Aboriginal people lived before the white man came to this country.”
David Gulpilil, AM, CM, actor and dancer, was born around 1953. He died of lung cancer on November 29, 2021, aged about 68