river.bend 2.0 (The Valley Was Mine)
A film in development
by Robert Nugent
January 2020
Introduction
Framed by a journey to an unnamed river town (Albury becomes a proxy for all hometowns on the Murray river), which was once touted as a “growth centre” in 1970s, the film portrays a vexed relationship with the Murray River.
The film explores the social geography of the river, in a journey up and down its waters. The river is haunted by an old film called The Valley Is Ours, and the gulf between the promise made by “that film” and the contemporary situation the river find’s itself confronted with.
Other ghosts are encountered in the form of voices. There is the voice, spoken in Polish, of Wilhelm Von Blandowski, the first scientist appointed by Governor La Trobe to the new Victorian Museum on 1 April 1854. He lead the first scientific expedition to the Murray River - he was driven mad by it, and also a “Marxist geographer”, whose character is based on the work of Thomas Taylor Griffith (see the following section for more information on these characters)
A series of geographically focused case studies will be filmed. At each location, the relationship between the biophysical and the social would be documented by following activities connected to water flows, livelihoods and recreation.
Indigenous filmmakers will be invited to add their own vignettes from “The Barmah Choke” and Lake Victoria.
Proposed case study areas:
The Upper Murray / Khancoban to Lake Hume : a day in the life of hydro and weir operations, following the intricate, seasonal decisions governing flow regulation.
The Mitta Mitta to Lake Hume to Howlong: a case study on bank erosion mitigation / the distribution and influence of historic gold mining sediments / a cod fisherman / a farmer.
Lake Mulwala : a case study on recreation and the expanding holiday resorts around the lake.
The Barmah Choke / Junction of the Murray and the Goulburn Rivers : a case study of the contemporary geography of the location of Sidney Nolan’s magisterial and haunting portrait of the riverlands, “Riverbend”, painted in London, that drew on the artist’s childhood memories of his holidays with his father on the river. If it is possible this segment will be made in collaboration with local Indigenous filmmakers using the Karrabing collective model from the NT.
Torrumbarry Weir: a day in the life of a weir keeper / and the giant cod who has learnt to harvest carp from the weir’s fish trap.
Mildura / Lake Victoria / automated irrigation infrastructure/ a case study in forward looking cross-cultural engagement. If it is possible this segment will be made in collaboration with local Indigenous filmmakers in the same way as the Barmah Choke section (see above).
The Coorong / a day in the life of a dredge operator on the Murray’s mouth. Locations in this area also include the site of the 1911 Pelican slaughter.
In order to capture the pulse of life on the river seasonal activities would be observed over several days, over two different time periods (winter/summer). Filming would be carried out in observational mode (no interviews).
Director’s statement
I grew up on the banks of the Murray River in Albury. I now find myself at a time in my life when I am compelled to return to this border town. Over the last two years I have spent considerable time in Albury to be near my dying Mother. It has been a heartbreaking time. If I was to be studied by an Anthropologist they would write of me “ he has entered a “deterritorialized” zone, a place where he became separated from the cultural practices of the locations he visits”.
In 2018 I was also able to undertake a journey down the entire length of the river, revisiting many sections of the river I canoed as a scout. I have already spent several weeks filming at my own expense on parts of the river near Albury and in Goolwa in South Australia.
All this has made me made acutely aware of the distances I have travelled from the Murray River. I have spent my life far from those waters, yet they never escaped my mind. Like Sidney Nolan, mining his childhood to paint a stretch of the river from memory, I wish to delve into this place that formed my own imagination. I invoke Nolan’s Riverbend and Heyer’s The Valley Is Ours as starting points for where this storied river has travelled in our minds.
My approach is concerned with portraying the physical/sensory experience of being in particular socio-cultural environments. In this sense, my Murray River film will have a phenomenological agenda in trying to convey the subjective and aesthetic experiences of the Murray River through sound and image. In much the same way that Heyer does with the technology and cinema grammar of his time.
river.bend 2.0 (The Valley Was Mine) uses various narrative tropes and the appropriation of tightly held and contested stories.The use of the first-person singular (past tense) and the possessive contained in title The Valley Was Mine hints at a revisiting of previous representations and narratives. I am deliberately casting the film in juxtaposition to Heyer’s 1948 The Valley Is Ours; which implores a collective, almost socialist, optimism. I love his title’s present-tense certainty, laying emphatically a collective claim on the geography of the river. The first thing an audience sees is a flag and then the words in capitals “AUSTRALIA PRESENTS” filling the screen. The ownership of stories is an implicit part of my film’s dramaturgy. An audience will be provoked to question who is really telling the story.
The Valley Was Mine will be an anthology of place. Places featured in that old film include the lower Murray locks, Goolwa, the upper Murray (where I was born) and The Snowy Hydro. The Valley Was Mine will revisit these places to gaze at contemporary social geography in an analogous way to Heyer’s camera, as it roamed, tightly scripted, down the valley. e.g the location of the great pelican slaughter of 1911 will be revisited at the Coorong and the Sisyphean task of dredging the river to keep its mouth open at Goolwa will be explored through a day-in-the-life of the dredge operators.
The locations of the Aboriginal massacres around Lake Victoria will be visited in collaboration with Traditional Owners. Contemporary situations include the last of the remaining Red Gum forest on the river. Its very name suggests a geographic impediment to progress - “The Barmah Choke”. It is where Sidney Nolan painted his epic masterpiece, Riverbend.
To further contextualise these places I will be examining the work of geographers to interrogate the “problem” of a particular form of Australian Capitalism that has arisen from the waters of the river.
The ghosts of previous endeavours to corral stories of the river haunt the passage of the film maker. Specifically these ghosts are those of the troubled soul of Wilhelm Von Blandowski, the first scientist sent to the river, and the spectre of Thomas Taylor Griffith, the father of Australian Geography.
The flux of labour and the movement of capital up and down the river (a theme of Heyer’s 1948 film) will be seen through the heretical approach taken by Thomas Taylor Griffith, who dared to question the White Australia policy and the concept of “Australia Unlimited”.
My film is influenced by the digressive wanderings of WG Sebald's Rings of Saturn and the writings of Gerald Murnane, in particular his story of a lost film maker in Western Victoria in his novel The Plains. There are cinematic precedents to what I am proposing. The work of the UK film maker Patrick Keiller is an influence. So too the UK film maker Ben Rivers.
I hope by taking such an approach the film will provoke and invigorate individuals, and the settler state itself, to engage with this heartland in new ways.
Framed by the hubris of historical narratives river.bend 2.0 (The Valley Was Mine) is a sacramental journey which inverts the dominant geographic interpretations of the river through fantastical reverie. It is Guy Maden’s “My Winnipeg” going on a date with Agnus Varda. They bond while discussing how to remake Harry Watt’s “The Night Mail”.
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see the following link for examples of some of the media and situations…
(with thanks to the wonderful music of Chiara Constanza - the music in this clip is temporary only. Chiara would be asked to produce original music for the film)