JEDDA (1955). The last feature film to be made by producer/director Charles Chauvel, Jedda is his most compelling and interesting, a great classic of the prerevival period. In terms of its melodramatic intensity and its unflinching ability to marshal irresolvable differences around gender and ethnicity, the film can bear the closest of comparison with King Vidor’s great Hollywood classic, Duel in the Sun (1946). The narrative of the Australian film is deceptively simple. On a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory, a newly born Aboriginal baby is adopted by a white woman, Sarah McMann, in place of her own child who has died. Sarah names the baby Jedda, after a wild bird, and raises her as a white child, forbidding contact with the Aborigines on the station. Years pass, and Jedda, a beautiful teenage girl, is drawn by the mysteries of the Aboriginal people, but is restrained by her upbringing. Like the half-caste Pearl Chauvez in Duel, this ethnic “doubleness” lays the base of the tragedy that is to follow.
One day a powerfully built-full blood Aborigine, Marbuck, arrives at the station seeking work. As though to emphasize his sexuality, Marbuck is marked as physically darker than the other Aborigines. Jedda is fascinated by him and one moonlit night is drawn by his song to his campfire. He takes her away as his captive. Dragging the half-willing but frightened girl across the desert, Marbuck returns to his tribal lands, only to find himself rejected by his tribe for breaking its marriage taboos. Pursued by the men from Jedda’s station and haunted by the death wish of his own tribe, Marbuck is driven insane. He and Jedda fall to their death over a cliff. On the face of it, the film was interesting in its time in placing Aborigines in the central roles and is, depending on one’s point of view, either reactionary or progressive in its first half in tracing the white-black encounter. However, these considerations fall away in the second half that is concerned with the drive of the chase and the relationship between Marbuck and Jedda. Like Pearl and Lewt in Duel, their love is impossible and the film reaches a magnificent pitch of romanticism in tracing out the logical and emotional outcome of this union.
JONES, GILLIAN (1947– ). Since 1982, Gillian Jones has appeared in strong and diverse supporting roles over almost 20 years, yet rarely has she played lead roles. Her characters are often in a state of change and growth, and are narratively significant. In the Phillip Noyce directed Heatwave (1982), she was a prostitute in a web of corruption and crime in the seedier Sydney inner-city areas. Subsequently, in the critically lauded but unpopular Shame (1987), she played the working-class, country-town girl who gains strength through her involvement with an out-of-town avenging angel. In 1987, she played three characters in Twelfth Night, and in Echoes of Paradise (1987). She played a lead in Lover Boy (1988) and What I Have Written (1995), and appeared in Oscar and Lucinda (1997) and Terra Nova (1999).
Other films include Fighting Back (1982), I Own the Racecourse (1986), Echoes of Paradise (1987), Alterations (1988), and Cody: A Family Affair (1994).