The films of renowned filmmaker Ian Dunlop were seen by the Indigenous people he documented as a way of getting their own cultural message out to the wider community, says Pip Deveson, who has spent the past year exploring Dunlop’s Yirrkala Film Project.

Ms Deveson, from the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University, worked on 13 of the 22 Dunlop documentaries over 15 years. She has used the Frederick Watson Fellowship from the National Archives of Australia to investigate film footage and other records it holds relating to the films which documented the Yolngu people of Yirrkala during life-changing times.

In 1969 the Commonwealth Film Unit (now Film Australia) asked Ian Dunlop to film the impact of a bauxite mine on a remote Aboriginal community near the Yirrkala mission in Northern Australia. Filming began in 1970 and his relationship with the Yolngu people continued for more than 25 years while he documented their culture, lifestyle, art and connection to the land.

It was in the 1970s that many Yolngu began to move away from the mission settlement of Yirrkala to live on their own clan lands. This homeland, or outstation movement, as it became known, made it possible for Yolngu both to escape the pressures of life at Yirrkala and the nearby mining town and to reaffirm their relationship with their land. Ian Dunlop’s films document this and what was the first (unsuccessful) land rights case in Australian history when the Yolngu tried to stop the bauxite mine. Ms Deveson has been reading through location diaries, correspondence and government documents from the filming period, with fascinating results.

‘My research has reinforced the importance of looking at the collection as a whole,’ she said. ‘From reading diaries and other items I gained the very strong idea that the Yirrkala people were using the films to get across their own message.

‘At the time the Yolngu had mounted the first land rights case in Australia which they lost. They were very concerned to get across the message of how incredibly important their land was to them as a people.

‘They also saw the project as a way of making records for their own children. Recording their own culture had become very important to them at a time when it seemed under threat and this has continued with other film makers.’

Her research is enabling Ms Deveson to produce a research guide to the Yirrkala collection including culturally important out cuts which didn’t make it to the final screenings.

Pip Deveson gave a public lecture on her findings at the National Archives of Australia at 12.30 pm on Thursday 31 May.