Gulpilil’s tracker, though always walking while the others of the party ride, maintains a knowing composure as he listens to racist talk, and there is a moment of genuine rapport when the new leader of the search party releases him from his chains. Thirty years after his debut film, he played the title role in Rolf de Heer’s The Tracker (2002), one of those new-century Australian westerns in which the representation of the Indigenous character reflects a cultural shift. In the 1980s, he appeared in the key role of Benelong in the miniseries version of Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land, and in the wildly popular Crocodile Dundee (1986), in which he dealt out some memorable ripostes. Between Walkabout and the Storm Boy remake, he was a compelling presence in about three dozen films, including some of the most significant Australian-made over several decades, as well as the odd overseas–Australian co-production. In his last film role, in the 2019 remake of Storm Boy, he plays the father of Fingerbone Bill, the Aboriginal boy who befriended the eponym in the original film. It’s natural… like I am.” He often uses the word “natural” in talking about his film roles, as though he found in film a way to be and present himself. My Name Is Gulpilil focuses chiefly on Gulpilil’s life in film. But he also can’t refrain from wondering, “Why did I leave my country?” Filming Storm Boy (1976), in which his character bonded with a young white boy, he recalls feeling “I’m there with the Western world.” Acting, he felt like “two people living in one world” - himself and the part he plays. He is fluent about his achievements and his misgivings. He wants to see his past again “before I go.” He emerges as a many-sided man who, whatever fame he has found, still reflects on what it was like to hunt for food, or when he was sent to jail for a year for assaulting his wife, or how white men have made fortunes from exploiting the land he came from. “I’m not scared, but I’m sorry,” he says of his approaching death. There is something unsentimentally touching about the relationship they have developed: she tends to his physical needs and he relies on her for medical treatment, help with exercising - and sometimes as the audience for his pronouncements about the state of his life and its limited future. He now relies a great deal on his carer Mary Reefed, who is in fact the only other “character” in the documentary. At this late stage of his life, he appears to be trying to come to terms with the jail sentence he served, the failed marriages, and his dealings with “the white man’s disease.” The observations about these episodes by the elderly, suffering Gulpilil are all the more moving for being utterly devoid of self-pity. While the film is undeniably a celebration of his amazing life and career as actor, singer and dancer, it never flinches from its darker aspects, including his alcoholism.

Reynolds’s gripping film is framed by scenes of Gulpilil receiving medical treatment for his longstanding illness. As he says, he “was a non-drinker, non-smoker.

Flashbacks take us to his youth, his voice-overs recalling his time at the Mission School, his English teacher, and the aptitude he revealed for hunting and dancing. He may be famous for his film work, but there was a good deal more to his life and, as the chief voice in the film, he can be admired for his unsparing approach to his own story.ĭirector/co-producer Molly Reynolds, with whom he had a very productive working relationship during the years of the film’s shooting, has interspersed glimpses of Gulpilil’s past with his elderly and cancer-stricken present. “This story is about me… and no one else can do the life story of me,” he announces towards the end of My Name Is Gulpilil. Since then, Gulpilil has invariably brought to his roles a potent charisma and a sense of effortlessly inhabiting his characters. In fact, that film might almost be said to have ushered in the revival. Since his first screen appearance in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971) as the unnamed boy who helps rescue two privileged children stranded in the outback, David Gulpilil has been a significant figure in the New Australian Cinema.

Storm boy achievements