It was perhaps ten years after I had first met him in the Northern Territory that I encountered the eye doctor Ted Castwell once more. It was at a party in Sydney and he took me seriously enough to be brusque with me.
He addressed me in these terms: ‘You thought I was out there in the desert that time doing charity work. Nice Doctor Castwell. But not so. Two hundred years of us and they’re blind. Two hundred years of mission clinics and they’re blind. I dare you, now you’re a big shot, to go out west with me, out to Bourke and beyond the Darling River. Because, Shelby, I’m actually a revolutionary. I am working to a plan. The plan is to wipe out cataract blindness and fix the causes of glaucoma and trachoma amongst the first Australians. And to give they themselves the means to do it. You see, it makes no sense to me being just another bloody potterer.’
I have to say that as well as being gruff he had an easy, contradictory charm, and thus he argued further, ‘Now, it’s all right getting het up about some fellow who died forty thousand years ago. But these are his descendants, and they’re hostages to blindness. D’you reckon they deserve a bit of your attention?’
This was not so long after I had met Peter Jorgensen and made my first film on Learned Man. Shown on Australian and British television, in part through the voice of Jorgensen, the documentary argued that the modern descendants of Learned Man deserved to be treated with national respect as the true owners of the continent of Australia.
Ted gave a little aggressive praise to the film, but concluded that some jokers were more interested in the remote past than present injustice. My contribution was to say that a well-made documentary was the best way to take public opinion by storm, rather than a drip-feed of news items. Ted said, ‘All right, then let’s make a bloody film!’
He and I set off from Sydney without his saying explicitly that I was to document what he was up to, bringing my authority as an Academy Award winner to the task. God knows he never fully approved of me, and I was hungry for his good opinion. Why, I can’t explain. But everyone seemed to want an accolade from him.
Sometimes on the country roads, just to show that he was more than equal to the task presented by remote Australia’s eyes, he would leave the four-wheel-drives and run in the brilliant ochre clouds of dust behind them. He was tall but chunky, and powerful in the upper body. He did not run to show off. A militant lack of pretence seemed bred in the bone. Yet he combined this with a passion for John Keats, whose poems he could recite in couplets in his aggressive proletarian accent.
‘Bright star,’ he would have breath to declaim at the end of a five-mile jog, ‘would I were steadfast as thou art …’ There would be a beer in his hand as he continued. A nurse had put it there, and her name was Danny Cullerton, a dark-haired beauty who bravely had her eyes on Ted and was up to his level of strength.
Not in lone splendour hung aloft at night,
And watching with eternal lids apart,
like Nature’s patient sleepless eremite,
the moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round Earth’s human shores …
Despite the Keats, at evening campfires beneath the lights of an entire explosive sky in western New South Wales, where you could see the universe hurtling away on its out-gust, what was undeniable was Castwell’s authentic fury at the clumsy earth, too many of whose children were blinded.
For out there in the desert there were Aboriginals so afflicted by eye diseases that they tried to tear their agonised eyelashes out by the roots, and went on suffering a gravelly blindness, their eyes full of abrasion and muck. Their disease was called Sandy Blight. The $5 name for it was trachoma. It was a condition spread by sharing the one standpipe and tap with a hundred other folk.
It made him testy with people, not least me, since he saw me as fussy about technical matters – light, sound, shooting reverses – and tired of me asking him to repeat crucial statements. My strength was that at heart I didn’t give a damn for his judgemental mien. I took it as one takes weather on the shoulders. So in our way we got along.
While we sat drinking whisky one evening after the nurses and others had taken to their swags in the outer velvet dark, he said, ‘You make a bit of a show of being a polite man, don’t you?’
‘I hope it’s not a show,’ I told him.
‘I thought you’d bloody well say that. But you must be pretty ruthless deep down. I’m ruthless too. I’m using you to shame people. But you needn’t pretend to be so bloody polite. You’re not fooling us.’
‘I save my impoliteness for the commentary,’ I warned him. ‘And the editing.’
‘Can you, boy-oh?’
‘Do you talk to other ophthalmologists like you talk to us?’ I asked him.
‘Some,’ he admitted. ‘Only the bastards that are worth bloody saving.’
I would continue to seek out men like Ted Castwell all my life. Sages of the tribe. Castwell and Jorgensen. Their certitude was a balm, though I found them bracing too. It was a tonic to be measured and, if necessary, judged by them. Cath did not understand this in the least. It seemed crazy to her to queue up for chastisement. And reasonably enough, since she knew I did not relish her own chastisements. But also, any respect they retained for me had been through the furnace of our collaborations, and so was tempered metal, unadulterated.
‘Well,’ murmured Ted, ‘At least you’re good at your job.’
I was honoured, nonetheless, to shoot footage for him. He spoke to the sufferers with a jovial, tradesman-like patter as if he’d come to fix the toilet – not that there were any plumbed toilets on the cattle stations or reservations beyond the Darling River. That was part of the trouble. That all helped the trachomas along.
‘You see, they believe there’s a curse on their eyes. And you know who the bloody curse is? It’s us. We forced them off their land and made ’em live in shitholes in the bush without sanitation, and reduced them to a crappy diet.’
‘Why do you think none of us have trachoma?’ he continued. ‘Go back to Europe four hundred years ago and you would have seen it. But go back four hundred years in Australia and if you’d been a whitefella here you wouldn’t have seen it at all amongst the Indigenous. Because then they weren’t disinherited, and being nomads they left their shit behind them and their religion was all to do with keeping campsites and water pure. We took away their freedom of movement and used their water to leach mines and gave them the freedom to contract trachoma. This is a disease of disadvantage,’ growled Castwell. ‘The more disadvantage, the more bloody trachoma.’
I directed the filming of his work at camp after camp in the country around Bourke and the strangely lovely but harsh hinterland of Wilcannia. Since I had not paid attention to what Castwell had been doing at Wattie Creek those years before, I was shocked to see Aboriginal kids sit up in a chair and be shown the full, excruciating, swollen-eyed condition named trachoma.
‘We need clinics all over Australia to defeat this,’ Ted growled. ‘And run by the people in the area, not by city cunts.’
The trachoma, the cataract sufferers, neglected out in bush camps, all needed surgery. ‘Where am I to get the resources? The authority? Well, your film will help. It better be bloody good.’
The handsome dark-eyed Danny, who was the other fearless member of the party, was an ophthalmic nurse from an un-reconstituted Irish-Australian bush family – they were the sort of people who travelled from the boat into the bush, bought and stole livestock and exhibited unchanged attitudes and virtues from the 1840s to the 1970s. Cancer had killed Ted’s first wife three years before. And what a woman was this Danny! What a tigress, as Cath was! And Danny shone with his certainties and her own.
We laughed, we cheered, we cherished him. Was he a bully? Was he an abrasive prophet? He delivered. I became more renowned just for filming him.
‘We can’t fix this one operation at a time. That’s what fucking missionaries do. We’re not bloody missionaries. We’ve got to fix the system.’
After we left the arid but weirdly beautiful country around Bourke, we returned to Sydney – me to the editing suite with Cath, and Ted to his crusade. He appeared one night on the ABC and brought the news of an unjust blindness to a nation’s people in a way they hadn’t heard it before. A conservative minister for Aboriginal Affairs on the show with him was mocked and harried and exposed as ignorant and institutionally callous. Ted shamed the nation with his proposition that not only had we disinherited Aboriginals, we had blinded them. And just as I took insults and chastisement from him, so did the public, who loved him. Because Ted had this capacity to love us enough to expect better things from us.
After my documentary came out, with its withering footage, the respect for Ted and what he was doing was enhanced, and the whole country was ready to be harassed by him into decency or, to put it more in Ted’s terms, justice and efficacy. And all this somehow suffused with an air of kindness, hard to convey simply in what he said. The arguments continued, with politicians shifting blame but not able to deny the disgrace. For Ted Castwell had emerged as the man whose terse revelations could not be denied.
Ted’s obsession with not being seen as ‘bloody missionaries’ was a topic he returned to frequently. In Ted’s worldview, to be a missionary was to dip down into the pool of misery, succouring a case here or there but not giving the oppressed the tools to eliminate misery. And thus he demanded Aboriginal eye clinics be run by Aboriginals in the remoter, blinder bush.
‘If we keep doing it the old way, with us calling the shots, we’ll never be anything except a bloody visitation. A bolt from the bloody blue. They’ve had enough of that.’
As for politicians, ‘Look up what E. E. Cummings said of them!’ Ted urged us.