11153972456
Status: Stock
Contact DVD
‘Contact’ is constructed around one of the most extraordinary pieces of footage in Australian history: The moment when a group of Martu women and children walk in from their nomadic existence of millennia in the desert into the universe of European modernity. Remarkably, participants from both the Aboriginal and European sides are alive to tell their story. The film centres on Yuwali, the beautiful 17-year-old girl we see making that giant leap on the 24th of September 1964. Now 62, vibrant and with gorgeous infectious laugh, Yuwali still remembers life before contact, when her tribe flourished in one of the most hostile environments on the planet. Her group of twenty were the last remnant Aboriginal mob still living traditionally, without any contact or knowledge of modern Australia, in the remote Great Sandy Desert. A huge space rocket test–Blue Streak–was to be fired in May 1964 at their home in the Percival Lakes. The authorities sent in patrol officers to evacuate anyone living there to protect them from rocket debris. The days counting down to blast off drive the narrative of the film. Back at the Lakes, Yuwali gives a riveting account as she and her group are chased hundreds of kilometres around the desert trying to escape the ‘devilmen’ in the ‘rocks that move’ (four wheel drives). The climax is both extraordinary and emotional.
