Deborah Mailman sat in rusty red sand on Arrernte country in central Australia, and she felt her character’s deep grief. She was filming a scene in Warwick Thornton’s 1930s frontier western Wolfram, playing Pansy, an Indigenous woman whose children have been stolen from her. As her bundled baby cries, Pansy silently cuts her hair off with a knife – “a grieving ritual”, Mailman says – even though her missing children might still be alive.
Mailman is the mother of two boys herself, Henry, 19, and Oliver, 16. Portraying Pansy’s anguish, she says, “requires no acting”.
“The thought of having your kids wrenched from you in the most horrific circumstances, that plays on any maternal instinct [or] any parent,” the 53-year-old says. “But I related to Pansy’s strength and survival more than anything; she hasn’t given up.”
In Wolfram, Pansy’s kids, Max and Kid, aged nine and six, are taken by a cruel miner named Billy (Matt Nable). Forced to work in dangerous, narrow holes in the ground, the children lay dynamite to excavate the valuable metal wolfram – an old name for tungsten – which was used in the military buildup between world wars to harden steel in bullets and tanks; at one time, it was as valuable as gold. Soon, the children are separated in the desert.
But Mailman is the film’s wounded heart. Using a piece of wire dipped in a campfire, Pansy pierces wild-harvested red, brown and yellow bean-like ininti seeds so she can thread her hair through them; she hangs these braids at campsites like “breadcrumbs” so her children might find her again.
Bespectacled and seated in a Sydney hotel lobby, Mailman had never heard of wolfram or tungsten before reading Stephen McGregor and David Tranter’s script, despite being born in a mining landscape herself. She grew up in Mount Isa in north Queensland amid copper, lead, silver and zinc mines, in which her sister, Gillian, learned her electrical trade and her brothers, Bevan and Lymon, trained as boilermakers.
Wolfram, a sequel to Thornton’s 2017 feature Sweet Country, continues the story of an Aboriginal teenage boy, Philomac (played this time by Pedrea Jackson), who has long been abused by his father, the white station master Mick Kennedy (Thomas M Wright).
While Sweet Country had a “cruel, male-driven energy”, Wolfram is “a nice cure”, Mailman says – being partly a woman’s story that ultimately delivers hope. Pansy is “a combination of the essence” of Thornton and Tranter’s great-grandmothers, she says; Thornton has spoken about how both women worked as child miners in the desert.
Mailman first met Thornton when he was cinematographer on Radiance, the 1998 film directed by Rachel Perkins. “I was terrified because that was my first film,” she recalls – but it launched her career on to popular success in the series The Secret Life of Us and lauded dramatic performances in Redfern Now and Total Control.
Thornton also directed her in the films The Darkside and The New Boy, opposite Cate Blanchett. “He’s a bloody genius,” Mailman says of the man she affectionately calls “Wok”. “Very few people in this country are both directors and cinematographers, so that needs to be celebrated. If I can’t figure out my process, I know it’ll fall into place but also Wok’s gonna look after it in the most beautiful way.”
Mailman grew up on the Mount Isa showgrounds, on Kalkadoon country, although her rodeo rider father, the late Wally Mailman, was a Bidjara man, mustering “up through the guts of Queensland”. He met Mailman’s mother, a Ngāti Porou Māori woman, Jane Pahau, at a bush ball in New Zealand when he was part of a touring demonstration show; they married there in 1965. Before they moved to Mount Isa, Wally brought Jane to Augathella so she could see his country.
Mailman says she inherited from her father his ability to yarn, which he often would do around a campfire. They used to sit and stargaze together. I remember she once told me she watches Nasa broadcasts for relaxation; does she still do it? She throws her head back and laughs with gusto. “I do!” she says, recalling the images from the Artemis II moon voyage astronauts of their planet left behind. “You just go, ‘There it is. There’s our Earth.’ It’s such a thing of beauty.”
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I don’t have Mum or Dad around any more … I’ll see them when I see them
Deborah Mailman
And from her mother Mailman inherited “the cleaning bug”, she jokes: “She had a quiet strength; she just got things done. No complaints, no nothing. She always had the house tidy; she always made sure we were at school. So, that stoicism.”
Five years ago, Mailman, who now lives on the New South Wales south coast with her husband, Matthew Coonan, and their sons, travelled to Augathella to investigate the possibility of making a theatrical show from The Power of Bones, the autobiography of her cousin Keelen Mailman, a cattle station manager at Mount Tabor. That project is yet to bear fruit but on that trip Mailman visited the banks of the Warrego River, where her father was born in 1923.
“Dad used to talk about this country all the time, mustering the brumbies there up in the highlands and working on so many cattle properties,” she says. “And to stand there and see it, and remember the stories Dad used to tell, I could see why Dad loved this place.”
Wally died in 2000; Jane in 2022. “Yeah, so I don’t have Mum or Dad around any more,” she says, her voice catching before she adds quietly: “Yeah, but that’s all right. I’ll see them when I see them.”
Mailman has no new acting projects immediately ahead, and remains satisfied that Total Control, the ABC series in which she played a maverick senator turned independent MP, Alex Irving, ended after three seasons. “We didn’t need to squeeze the life out of that story. It ended strongly,” she says. When it ended, Irving was a political kingmaker, her legacy a more inclusive form of power in Australia’s federal parliament.
How does Mailman feel looking at Australia now through the lens of Total Control’s concerns: inequality, truth-telling and Black deaths in custody? She sighs. “Well, the first hope is Victoria got their first treaty. That’s going to be a really great example of what’s possible, but no, it’s going to take a long time. The gap still widens, in terms of disadvantage for our mob, there are still high rates of incarceration.”
Mailman pauses to think. “There’s got to be a real genuine want and need and acknowledgment and recognition of this country and these stories,” she says. “And I think sometimes people don’t want to care about it, or ‘That’s not part of my back yard.’ The [Indigenous voice to parliament] referendum was an interesting case of people deciding they didn’t care.”
How did Mailman pull up after the referendum failed? “Not very well,” she says. “It’s one of those things where you go, ‘OK, well, just keep taking the knocks and getting up and keep going.’ I mean, we have to.” The misinformation around the proposal “was so awful, and heartbreaking for a lot of people. There’s almost a permission now where people can just be incredibly cruel and bigoted and racist.”
Mailman cries a little, removing her spectacles to wipe her face. Storytelling may be her sanctuary and shield but her big hope is engaging audience hearts and minds will counter such cruelty. “That’s why we do what we do,” she says.
Source:
www.theguardian.com
