Profile: Rachel Perkins, right place, right time
Encore spoke with the prolific Rachel Perkins about a career that started by chance and evolved into an everlasting passion.
Rachel Perkins is part of the Arrernte people from central Australia, east of Alice Springs. The daughter of Indigenous activist Charlie Perkins, she grew up in Canberra but didn’t necessarily dream of becoming a filmmaker. She just happened to be in the right place at the right time, when there was a lot enthusiasm for Indigenous people to be made a part of the screen industry.
After finishing high school in 1988 she knew she didn’t want to go to university. “It was the arrogance of youth,” she says. Perkins wanted to do something related to Aboriginal studies, and go to Alice Springs to learn more about the strong traditional culture of the area.
The method she chose to get there would change her life; Perkins found out about job interviews for a TV presenter position at the then-new Imparja Television network, and they were offering to fly the interviewees up to Alice Springs. “It was just a way to get up there. I was terrible at it, as I knew I would be, but they gave me a different job,” she admits.
The job was a traineeship in the TV unit of the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA), run by the legendary Freda Glynn. Perkins found herself working with Glynn’s son, Warwick Thornton; their first project was the long-running series Nganampa Anwernekenhe, which showcases Indigenous languages and cultures. The experience left a lasting impression on Perkins, who took it as a valuable learning experience both professionally and, above all, personally.
“I’d been there a couple of times before, but not really as an adult. I felt very ignorant, like I had this sort of missing knowledge or understanding. I wanted to find out more, so working in the TV unit was a great way to do it. From the day we started we were shooting testimonies all around central Australia, and I managed to get a massive hit of culture very quickly, that I wouldn’t necessarily have been able to access had there not been that work association.
“It certainly gave me a sense of the importance of giving Indigenous people a voice, because they had none. At that stage, there were no Indigenous programs on SBS and ABC made by Indigenous people; I grew up seeing very bad anthropological representations of Aboriginal people, so CAAMA was a very dynamic place to be. We were trained and given the understanding by Freda that we were there to be an instrument for our people to speak through. It was pretty much drilled into us, what we were there for,” says Perkins.
Her first production was a 30-second antigrog community message, and many other projects followed. It was on the field that Perkins realised the power of film, and soon she wanted to be better at it and
speak to a bigger audience. After three years, Perkins left CAAMA and joined SBS in Sydney, as the executive producer of the Aboriginal television unit.
Coming from a very hands-on, intimate environment at CAAMA, the broadcaster represented a big culture shock for Perkins, who had never worked in a bureaucratic system.
“I went in as an executive producer and I had never executive-produced anything, let alone manage a massive budget, so they really took a leap of faith with me. For me, the change meant going into an established system, with bigger budgets and bigger audiences. It was a much more complex environment, but there were a lot of people who helped me work things out. There were so many different cultural backgrounds and an appreciation of why I was there; people understood the importance of having Indigenous people make films,” says Perkins.
It was during that time that she established her production company Blackfella Films, to assists in financing projects. “I also wanted to strongly identify the kind of content that I wanted to make, which is why we chose a name that speaks of what we do. You can’t get any clearer than that!” she says.
According to Perkins, the main obstacles for the public broadcasters’ Indigenous units were not having budgets that would make the content good enough to get into the primetime slots and, most importantly, changing the paradigm- that a 30-minute weekly program could address all Indigenous needs and, at the same time, tick the requirements of their charter.
“Management didn’t challenge those filmmakers to do something better. That has absolutely changed, because the public broadcasters are now putting substantial amounts of money into TV drama and documentary series.”
The first time Perkins felt Blackfella was living up to her professional ambitions was during production of the documentary series Blood Brothers – about the 1965 Freedom Ride, which saw her telling the story of her own father. In the mid 90s, she was awarded the first Indigenous scholarship to study production at the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. Later, she was appointed as the
executive producer of the Indigenous programs unit at the ABC, and assisted the defunct Australian Film Commission in its strategies to transition Indigenous creatives from documentary into drama.
That initiative was a successful first step into drama for a number of filmmakers, including Thornton and Perkins herself with the short Payback, which she produced. Perkins would soon direct her first feature, the intense family drama Radiance (1998), followed by One Night the Moon (2001) and the musical Bran Nue Dae (2010). But even this commercially successful project had a social conscience, beneath its glossy exterior: “During the promotional work I was pushing it as a piece of entertainment, but there’s a lot of history that underpins that film. People want to go to the cinema to escape and to be entertained, but at the same time I have an agenda and I want to make things that I care about, so hopefully I can do something that is both entertaining and meaningful.”
Perkins also found a business partner in Darren Dale, whom she’d met at a workshop. Dale joined in 2001, starting a new era for Blackfella Films.
“The company started with an aspiration, that one day we’d make the films that we wanted to make, in our own terms, but we didn’t manage to do that for quite a while. Darren’s arrival accelerated the growth and the professionalism of the company. First Australians was the first major project for us, and now we have a lot of drama in development (including the SBS series Redfern Now and the historical feature The Comet) and we’re finishing a couple of docos.
“We’d been very shambolic to be honest, and now we’re more organised and coherent. We’re finally generating the sort of output now that allows us to do an annual budget and work it out,” explains Perkins.
Perkins became a mother last year, and she’s looking forward to the challenge of balancing work with family life. It might be exhausting, but she’s not about to give up. She is a woman on a mission.
“I haven’t got a lot of work done recently, but considering I’d done plenty of work before, it was good to take some time off. I’m not sure how it’s going to work out when I I go into production, but people do it. Lots of mothers do it, so I’m sure I’ll be able to do it too. It’s a learning curve and I never realised what people were going through, that’s for sure!
“I was just lucky, but other people may not have those opportunities, so that’s why I’m trying to ensure those benefits become ongoing for Indigenous filmmakers.”
