Please watch the short film by clicking on the image for this request. We seek funding for no ordinary documentary. It is a fight to build awareness about the importance of the incredible pristine environment of the King Sound and a culture in danger of being lost. By investing in this project you are investing in the preservation of this incredible natural environment and the spirit of the Mayala people.

Noomool

Tide Waits for No-One: The Aubrey Tigan Story

A Half Hour Television Documentary produced by Aboriginal Television and Radio Production Company, Broome, Western Australia

Synopsis

Between the crumbling red crags of the empty islands peppering King Sound off the northwest Australian coast run some of the most treacherous rips in the world. Powered by the Earth’s greatest tidal extremes, the name given to these currents by the ancient Mayala people who once populated the Buccaneer Archipelago, is noomool. Great skill was required to navigate a Mayala raft between the islands, and the penalty for misjudgment could be death.These waters, at the price of many a diver’s life, became the hunting grounds of white pearlers who, in the 20th century’s great boom, reaped the precious pearl-shell to depletion. Long since moved off the islands, the remaining Mayala now live strewn over the mainland, bereft of the spiritual connection to country vital to the Aboriginal soul. Mayala leader AubreyTigan is the last exponent of ceremonial pearl-shell carving, or Riji, and his work is prized throughout the world.

The Storyline: The Riji Carver

In 2011, an 85-foot pearling vessel captained by Steve Arrow, a modern-day pearler and Aubrey’s friend, took the Tigan family on a return to Country. In a time when the traditional ways are dying with each elder who passes, Aubrey has reached an age when he must pass his knowledge on to his descendants.

This voyage was his chance to confide the secrets of the spectacular islands, the skills of spear-making and the art of reading the noomool, to prepare his grandchildren for one day accepting the mantle of the Riji carver, to teach them how to smoothe, carve and stain the shells, and share the spiritual message of the ancestors who command his inspiration in his dreams, and whose requests, if unheeded, can cost a man his health.

Once the delta of a huge prehistoric river, this is the oldest unchanged landscape on earth. The islands of the Mayala are eerily and staggeringly beautiful, and they’re bursting with mineral wealth. Now, under threat of their compulsory acquisition from the State, Aubrey has, on behalf of his people, leased some of them to Pluton Mines. In so navigating the greatest spiritual threat his people have ever faced, Aubrey’s mastery of opposing currents has once again become, in many senses, a matter of cultural life and death.

Proposal

Goolarri Media sent a director and crew on a two week shoot in June 2011 to cover the Tigan family’s return to country, from which a seven minute film was produced. Everyone involved with the short film we compiled believes Aubrey’s story has enoughinterest to warrant expansion to a TV half-hour for a broader audience.

Our budget allowed only for the short film that comes with this proposal, but in anticipation we shot much more great stuff from which a longer film could be substantially built. To expand Aubrey’s story beyond just its current teaser format, we would like to film more.

Much of what he has told us would gain further fascination with visual illustration. This would entail some modest historical re-enactments, in particular of tribal dancing and the use of rafts. Some of what we have included (taken from other productions of ours) is not quite culturally appropriate and prevents us from displaying the current film to a wider audience.

Further interviews with Aubrey and others would elucidate his role as his people’s cultural representative in the non-Indigenous world, including the story of how he negotiated themining leases now active in Mayala country (and we would seek interviews with the Pluton executives who worked with him for a short but integral sequence). We feel the film could benefit from aerial coverage of King Sound and the islands. We’d like to create animated AfterFX maps of the islands in the Riji style. And we need a properly written and moreculturally-appropriate musical score.

We do feel a compelling need to reach an audience with Aubrey Tigan’s story. No one with any voice seems to care that Australian Indigenous elders and their precious societies are dying, their secrets of living together in harmony with each other and with nature to be lost forever. The humble spiritual beauty of traditional culture, as imparted through our subject’s modest dignity, drifts closer to extinction with each encroachment of an outside world hungry for both resources and the riches they bring, and set against such polar-opposite priorities, the opportunities for audiences to learn of -- and from -- this culture are rapidly dwindling. Add to this the stark and mystical beauty of the Mayala land and seascapes and you have a uniquesubject with which to intrigue an audience,probably worldwide.

This is not just because Aubrey is of international standing as an artist, but also because his is a story that recurs among all post-colonial indigenous cultures which remains morally unresolved, his quiet cause unheard beneath the thunder of the population explosion.

As the wider world grapples with notions like global financial meltdown, depleting mineral and food resources, killer drones, the ethics of torture, planetary warming, and our own extinction -- all of which simply comprise our film’s contemporary context -- it might be beneficial to meet an elder from a way of life with an integrity out of fashion since colonialism began. It’s by expressing this beauty, through showing-not-telling, without preaching, and by employing every available skill we have, that we mean to captivate and inspire reflection in our viewers. Indeed, Aubrey’s uniquely patient and non-judgmental view of his world can inspire only beauty in any film about him

For every $1 that is donated for this project Goolarri Media Enterprises will provide $3 in order to make this half hour documentary happen. Goolarri have done a great deal of work to develop this project to the point where it is ready to fly.  $30,000 is directly needed from crowd funding sources. Please make a commitment.

Full documentation of the documentary production process by Goolarri Television is available to those who make a pledge on request. Goolarri is a legendary Aboriginal company which operates a television and radio station in Broome 24/7 for more go to www.goolarri.com Goolarri is also well known for its productions many of which air on NITV, SBS, the ABC and internationally. Each year Goolarri trains many Aboriginal young people in media, film and radio skills. It is a grass roots Broome company that really makes a difference.