BEHIND THE CORROBOREE: TOM E LEWIS ON FILM, CULTURE AND RACISM.
An interview with Tom E Lewis resembles the flow of a river in the wet - deep with metaphor and spirit, his thoughts frequently change course. By the end of an hour with him, you realise you’ve been on one hell of a journey. His own journey has taken him from the bush to the big screen, teaching him a love of Shakespeare, the Blues, art and film. He lived in Melbourne for twenty years before returning to Beswick, and today he has some controversial thoughts on the mob ‘down South’.
“The Aborigines down South, they think that they can go and shoot, and do whatever they like. You know, they’re good to take didgeridoo, and our songs, and start dancing, and when the Intervention came, none of them spoke up,” Lewis says.
He’s particularly riled up about Cleverman, the ABC series which merged Dreaming stories with science fiction, on which he is credited as a cultural advisor. When we spoke, Cleverman had finished its first season and received critical acclaim, however, Lewis refuses to watch it. He says that several years prior to the show’s successful debut on ABC in 2016, he was approached by its makers, to whom he passed on the story of the Namorrodor. He is adamant that he only found out it was for a television show when he saw the trailer and he had to fight to be credited.
As an important story in the Beswick area, it’s important that the Namorrodor story be re-told and depicted in a certain way, with permission from the elders.
“You start mucking around with our spirit, you can twist it too, and bring bitterness rather than celebration,” he says.
Born of a Welsh father and Aboriginal mother, Lewis is no stranger to racism, which he says exists strongly within the Aboriginal community as well as outside.
“People think I’ve never been through my culture, people see half-caste people and they think they’ve all been taken away. I wasn’t taken away, my mother told that welfare bloke ‘Fuck off, make your own kid, you know, go away, shoo.’ You wouldn't do that to my mother. So I grew up in the community. I used to love Ugly Duckling - you know that book, odd one out - that was me. So I suffered a lot, but I learned a lot,” he says.
Since his acting debut in The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1978), Lewis has been on some steep learning curves. In 1984, his family down by the Roper River issued a death warrant for him, angry at their perception of a cultural slight he’d committed by swinging the female tongue of a creator in the film, Naked Country. Cultural laws prevented the film from being shot in the Northern Territory, but when Lewis expressed concern that this object was inappropriate to show on film he was told that actors needed to act.
“In Blacksmith, I said to Schepisi, ‘Fred Schepisi, ‘don’t show that object!’ You see that little boy in the beginning and you hear a sound and he’s swinging something and he respected me. I said that to old Tim Burstall (Director of Naked Country). I said, ‘You’re gonna get me into big trouble’ and of course there it is.”
Lewis is glad he never retaliated to the threats and is now able to go to country and participate in ceremony with his family. In discussing conflicts within Indigenous culture, he points to a darker side that exists within every civilisation worldwide.
“I was looking at the history of Rome, and you see the surface of Rome; but underneath there’s all dark sacred blasphemous world. You know, double double world. And my culture’s like that too.” In spite of his own troubled past, Lewis has come through suffering to be successful in multiple fields. As well as preparing for another theatre tour in Europe, he is co-writing a play with violinist Harold Lawson, representing Djilpin Arts nationwide, and even found time to join Yirrmal and other musicians on stage at the Woodford Folk Festival.
“I've been through my right and wrongs, now it’s time for me, Tom, to enjoy whatever comes. I feel like I've survived the art world and I've got a good platform - home, countrymen. Right or wrong, I belong to them.”
Suzanne Rath is a writer and filmmaker, whose work can be seen at www.suzannerath.com. Image credit: Suzanne Rath
