Adelaide Film Festival review: Journey Home, David Gulpilil
In a highly emotional farewell to one of Australia’s greatest actors, David Gulpilil’s dying wish is fulfilled: his body returned to Yolŋu country and a film crew documenting each ceremony along the way.
In November 2021, Yolŋu man and lauded actor David Gulpilil died of a lung cancer that had plagued him for four long years. Unable to travel to his birthplace Gupulul in Arnhem Land while still alive, he stayed in Murray Bridge, South Australia, to have the medical support he needed, but his dying wish was to have his deceased body delivered there for his Bäpurru (funeral ceremony), and to have it documented for the world to see. His intention was that the learning of Aboriginal culture continue. Journey Home, David Gulpilil is that documentary.
Before Gulpilil hit the screens in 1971, he was a teenaged boy who excelled at hunting, painting and dancing – and blackface was still a characteristic of Australian cinema. Being the best of the dancers in his community, he was chosen by British director Nicolas Roeg to star in Walkabout, a film about two lost English children in the Australian bush, and the Indigenous boy who helps them survive. At sixteen years of age – or so, he didn’t know exactly how old he was – Gulpilil became an international star.
Gulpilil walked in two worlds. One saw him star in films like Crocodile Dundee, Rabbit Proof Fence, Storm Boy and The Tracker, and hang out with the likes of John Lennon, Jimmi Hendrix and Bob Marley, while the other had him with his mob in Gupulul, where he lived in a ramshackle home without a toilet and shared his great wealth with family and community. He never felt fully comfortable in either world, the two being so drastically different and him coming and going over the years, yet in the end, he brought them together in the way that only he could.
Trisha Morton-Thomas (The Song Keepers) and Maggie Miles (Paper Planes) teamed up to direct the film, with an impressively long list of producers, including his son Jida Gulpilil. It took a village to turn Gulpilil’s wish of documenting his Bäpurru into reality, but what’s more is the passion and effort it took to see his return to country.
Logistically, there was COVID to contend with, as well as the wet season that turns his country into many islands separated by swampy water. There was a croc-infested river to cross in an engineless tinny, and dirt roads in remote land to drive and walk on. It took months to deliver Gulpilil’s body, but along the way, at every new transition point from Adelaide to Darwin to the many stops in Arnhem Land, there was ceremony, which included family mourning and celebrating through song and dance. It’s an amazing procession to witness, something every Australian should know about if there is any attempt at understanding Indigenous ties to land and family. This was his final gift to us, and what a revelation it is.
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Journey Home, David Gulpilil is narrated by Danzal James (Baker Boy) and Hugh Jackman, but it’s the stories told by his many sons and nieces and cousins and grandchildren that bring the heavy emotion to surface. That, and the knowledge that as mostly uninitiated white folk sitting in the climate-controlled cinema with our popcorn and drink, the lights dimmed and the sound surround, what we are seeing is like nothing we’ve ever seen before or could even imagine seeing anywhere else. Gulpilil used his positioning in the two opposing worlds of film and country to ensure the teaching of culture continues.
It was a privilege to be among the packed audience at the Adelaide Film Festival, where we collectively had an insider’s view of Yolŋu’s Bäpurru, and where we could say goodbye to the legendary David Gulpilil in the way best suited to us, which is the same way we were introduced to him: through cinema.
Journey Home, David Gulpilil screened as part of Adelaide Film Festival 2025
Journey Home, David Gulpilil screened as part of Adelaide Film Festival