Xavier Herbert

Figure 1: Xavier and Sadie Herbert at the launch of Poor Fellow

My Country, 1975.

Wendy K. Rogers

2/22 Daventry St

West End, Q 4101

Film and Television

Creative Industries Faculty

Queensland University of Technology

Masters of Arts (Research)

2010

ii

KEY WORDS

Documentary Script Writing

Biographical Documentary

Creative Practice

Australian Documentary Industry

Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Screen Australia

Xavier Herbert

Percy Trezise

ABSTRACT

As a biographical documentary concept develops, its intention and its form are

impacted and may be transformed by market demands. The documentary idea about

the life of Xavier Herbert has been in development through a number of iterations

within the shifting landscape of the Australian documentary industry from the mid-

1990s to 2009. This study is, on the one hand, an endeavour to find a workable way

to express and practise the multi-layered complexity of creative work, a long-form

documentary script on Herbert, an Australian literary icon. On the other hand, this

thesis represents a cumulative research exercise, whereby my own experiences in the

documentary industry in Queensland, Australia and overseas are analysed in an effort

to enlighten the broader documentary community about such a complex, even

labyrinthine, process.

iii

Table of Contents

Illustrations v.

Abbreviations vi

Statement of Original Authorship vi

Acknowledgements vii

Chapter One

Introduction: the creative challenge 1

Outline of Chapters 3

Methodology, Significance and Limitations of the study 4

Contextual Review 7

The Documentary Field 10

Conclusion 13

Timeline of the development of the documentary idea about Xavier Herbert 14

Chapter Two

Taking on ‘Old Horrible’: the documentary in development 16

Background to the Current Study 17

Vérité and the Documentary Industry under stress 20

ABC Documentary History 22

The Herbert Story in Development 23

The Form of the Documentary 25

Case Studies 25

Case Study 1: Mike Rubbo’s “All About Olive” (Rubbo 2005) 26

The Travelogue 27

The Investigator and Interactional Moments 28

The Tragedy 29

A New Producer 30

Narrative Approach and Form 31

The Style of Reconstruction 32

Case Study 2: “The Legend of Fred Paterson” (Laughren and Dawson 1996) 33

Film Industry Merger: Screen Australia 34

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Approaching the Commissioning Editor 36

Interpretive Interactionism: The Interview and Scriptwriting 38

Case Study 3: Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst

(Armstrong 2006) 40

Chapter Three

Creating the script for a new age of documentary production 44

Wrapping the Creative Practice Script 47

Future Challenges 50

References 53

Filmography/Broadcast Programs 60

Bibliography 61

Films, Television and Radio Programs 69

Creative Component: Script

Xavier Herbert: My Own Road 71

References 127

Filmography/Broadcast Programs 129

Appendix A 131

Appendix B 143

v

Illustrations

1. Xavier and Sadie Herbert at the launch of Poor Fellow

My Country (Herbert, 1975), 1975. i

2. Red Bluff at Jowalbinna, N.Q. – taken from video

by the author, 1997. 1

3. Xavier Herbert at Narrabeen NSW, 1940, Fryer Library. 16

4. Xavier Herbert at 21 and Sadie Norden, Fryer Library. 20

5. Mike Rubbo and Olive Riley during the production of All

About Olive, http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/645.html 26

6. Xavier Herbert 1980 in Darwin for the Kungarakun land claim

hearing in 1980, Northern Territory Library. 27

7. The Legend of Fred Paterson poster

http://www.roninfilms.com.au/feature/682.html 33

8. Mark Twain poster

http://www.pbs.org/marktwain/ 38

9. Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence

Broadhurst (Armstrong 2006) poster

http://www.filmaust.com.au/unfoldingflorence/default.asp 40

10. Xavier Herbert and Percy Trezise visiting cave paintings

Nth Qld, freeze- frame from Xavier Herbert Profile,

4 Corners ABCTV, Dec 3 1978, Director P. Ross. 44

11. Percy Trezise at Jowalbinna, taken from video interview

by Wendy Rogers, 1997. 48

vi

Abbreviations

ABC Australian Broadcasting Corporation

FFC Film Finance Corporation

SBS Special Broadcasting Service

Statement of Original Authorship

The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted to meet

requirements for an award at this or any other higher education institution. To the

best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously

published or written by another person except where due reference is made.

Signature

Date

vii

Acknowledgements

This MA (Research) was created with immense contributions from my supervisor,

Associate Professor Geoffrey Portmann, and my associate supervisor, Helen Yeates.

Associate Professor Geoffrey Portmann supervised the writing of the script, which is

the practical component of this study. I am indebted to him for his professional yet

light-hearted and supportive role during the process. His generosity added a broad,

creative vision to the project. Helen Yeates has supervised the writing of the

exegetical component of this study. Her approach to this task has always been

receptive and warm and her valuable assistance crucial in the creation of a flowing

document of quality and magnitude. From a practitioner’s point of view Helen added

the much needed academic rigour to the exegetical component of the study. I am

grateful for the assistance of my supervisors and for the opportunity to work within

the walls of the Faculty of Creative Industries, QUT. It has truly been a

transformative experience.

This study is the culmination of my work on this particularly long-term documentary

project on the life of Xavier Herbert. Since I commenced researching into Xavier

Herbert in 1995, there have been many people who have offered support and

assistance without which I may not have proceeded. My close friends, Carol Voigt

and Michael Duffy, have long been greatly supportive in my shifting ideas and

queries about Herbert’s life; have listened and given feedback. Kevin Guy, a great

Herbert enthusiast, first came to me with the idea and collected key articles. As the

idea of forming a documentary about Xavier Herbert progressed, many people

working in film and television generously gave assistance and became involved.

Dick Marks lent me his new digital camera for the interviews which I videoed in the

mid-nineties. The former Film Queensland, now Screen Queensland, funded much of

the early research and the interviews which are now so cherished. David Flatman has

also contributed to the development of the Herbert documentary story, and, as

executive producer, worked with me to present it as a documentary project idea to

Film Australia in 1997. Gil Scrine, writer, was also a contributor to the 1997 attempt

at raising broadcaster interest this documentary. I value and respect their

professionalism. I would also like to thank my long-term friend and colleague, Mark

viii

Chapman, who presented this documentary idea to the ABC in 2006. Mark has been

a leading light in the Queensland documentary production industry for many years

and we would not be seeing the stories that we now do without his hard work and

inspiration. Sue Clothier, then Head of TV Factual Production, Screenworld, and her

colleague, executive producer, Mike Bluett, also saw the value of the Herbert story

and became involved. This production team contributed their time and intellect to its

development when presenting it to Film Australia in 2008. Mark Hamlyn of Film

Australia became involved at this point, and took the project forward to the ABC. I

appreciate the opportunity of having witnessed and drawn on the great abilities of

this team.

Robyn Pill, holder of the Herbert Estate, has also been a consistent support. Robyn

has lent me many valuable materials over the years and has kindly permitted the use

of copyright material for this study. Her professional approach has been mirrored by

that of Fran Moore and Tim Curnow, literary agents with Curtis Brown (Aust), who

have also been very helpful. It is a great responsibility to be the ‘keepers’ of such an

important body of work and I appreciate their time and patience.

The research that surrounds the documentary script in this study was possible

through the co-operation of a number of key researchers who generously gave their

time and information. I am particularly indebted to Dr Russell McDougall, for

supplying me with integral information about Herbert. We have had numerous

meetings, and Russell has always been open to sharing ideas especially during the

first phase of research in the mid-1990s. Another eminent Herbert researcher (and

friend of Xavier and Sadie Herbert), Professor Laurie Hergenhan, has been most

forthcoming and has assisted this work through many conversations and a videoed

interview. Professor Hergenhan’s great work in collecting and preserving materials

belonging to Xavier and Sadie Herbert, and the numerous publications he has

produced, represents the backbone of this great Australian writer’s heritage. Frances

de Groen also kindly met with me to talk about her extensive research into the lives

of Sadie and Xavier Herbert. Professor Harry Heseltine, whose work has also helped

lay the foundation of our understanding of Xavier the man and artist, also took the

time to speak with me about his personal memories of Xavier Herbert. I would also

ix

like to thank Eddie Acland for the copy of his unpublished article on Herbert’s

family heritage.

Many of the people who knew and loved Xavier and Sadie also contributed to this

research project. The late Percy Trezise, welcomed me onto his fabled rural property,

Jowalbinna, and kindly gave a long interview over the four days I was there. Percy’s

son, Stephen, has also been interested in the project and has freely given information.

John McHugh, long-term friend of the Herberts, also generously gave an interview,

as did the late Joe McGinness. The opinions and recollections of other members of

the McGinness family, particularly Mim Morley, have been integral in forming the

portrait of Xavier Herbert, adding breath and life that only those present in his life

could offer. Others who have contributed include Margaret McHugh, Robert Reid,

Ken Wilder, David Marshall, Speedy McGinness, Alan Hudson and Bill Horsfall. It

has been an immense honour to have met and spoken with Xavier Herbert’s friends

and colleagues; my life has been greatly enriched through this process.

I want to also thank number of people have contributed to the exegetical component

of this study. ABC broadcaster, Andy Lloyd James, documentary director and

academic Dr Pat Laughren, Documentary maker, Michael Rubbo, film producer with

a significant background in industry governance, Susan MacKinnon, Katherine

Thomson, factual screenwriter, along with Sue Clothier, Mike Bluett and Mark

Hamlyn, have all generously given their time and offered their experience to further

this study.

I want to thank all of those I have mentioned above and my friends and family who

have listened and supported me personally over the years. Most of all, I am indebted

to Xavier and Sadie Herbert who have enriched our understanding of ourselves as

Australians and of what it is to be human.

Wendy Rogers.

x

1

Chapter One

Introduction: the creative challenge

Figure 2: Red Bluff at Jowalbinna, NQ.

This Masters of Arts (Research) comprises a 60% practical component and a 40%

exegetical component (approx. 15000 words). The creative practice aspect of the MA

(Research) is a long-form biographical documentary script on the life of the eminent

Australian writer, Xavier Herbert (1901-1984). The exegetical component is a

mapping of the development of the documentary script in relation to key changes

within the Australian documentary industry.

In this exegesis, I will be exploring my own personal and professional journey as an

industry practitioner in the throes of attempting to raise commercial interest in the

documentary about Herbert, within the shifting industrial landscape of the Australian

documentary from the mid-1990s to 2009. This work from a practitioner perspective

is set against a cultural history of the broader, industrial conditions of documentary

production practice, commencing in the 1960s.

During my Masters candidature (2005-2009) I have created and written the

documentary script, Xavier Herbert: My Own Road. At the same time, I have placed

this creative practice in the context of an investigation into the elements of a shifting

industrial structure that has, historically, waxed and waned in relation to nurturing,

supporting and promoting the production of certain kinds of

art/historical/biographical documentaries. The exegesis is also a critical reflection on

the complex process of verifying and pitching a particular project that is not

necessarily considered suitable for commercial television broadcast. The progress of

this pitching history relates to one broadcaster, that is, the Australian Broadcasting

2

Corporation (ABC), through both the former Film Australia and a large professional

production company.

In this study, I am engaging with three key research questions:

1. What form of documentary would best serve the telling of the story of Xavier

Herbert’s life?

2. How can this documentary be successfully developed for viable production

within the current documentary industry?

3. What are the elements that are impacting on the production of documentary

films in a changing technological and industrial landscape?

In pursuit of the answers to these questions, this study has become, on the one hand,

an endeavour to find a workable way for a practitioner to express the multi-layered

complexity of creative work. On the other hand, it represents a cumulative exercise,

whereby my own experiences in the documentary industry in Queensland, Australia

and overseas are presented here in an effort to enlighten the broader documentary

community about such a complex, even labyrinthine process. The industrial concerns

arise not only from my previous experience as a documentary producer, but also

from my own longstanding activism in the cultural sector of the film industry. For

instance, as a film maker growing up in the repressive, seemingly chaotic years of

Queensland under the leadership of Bjelke-Petersen and the National Party, I

acquired a keen interest in developing creative public spaces that engender pluralistic

approaches to history and society and storytelling. As Pulitzer Prize winner Ron

Powers says, creating documentaries ‘satisfies our hunger for the real and our need to

make sense, make order, out of chaos’ (cited in Gerard, 1996:4). This project is a

result of my own passion and ‘hunger for the real’ through developing a

documentary on the highly significant Australian novelist, Xavier Herbert.

Outline of Chapters

This exegesis has, therefore, a strong autobiographical element shaping its form. In

effect, this study represents a narrative, both of a documentary’s journey and of my

role as a creative practitioner in facilitating that creative journey. As a result, the

literature review is largely interwoven into the discussion of documentary in

3

Australia at appropriate times (see Chapter Two), with a short discussion in this

chapter (Chapter One) on the core literature that has been sourced. Various theories

around documentary practice are also addressed throughout Chapter Two. Chapter

Three encompasses the creation of the script, Xavier Herbert: My Own Road, which

is the practical component of this Master of Arts study. This creative practice journey

concludes with a self-reflective critique of the documentary script, a critique which

also contains, in Chapter Three, a contextual analysis of policy and technological

changes in the documentary industry.

Furthermore, the exegesis includes certain case studies of other documentary-

makers’ works, along with industrial information gleaned from interviews with

documentary executives and other creative practitioners within the documentary

industry. Articles from contemporary film industry magazines are used to track the

major shifts occurring in the broader film industry throughout the development

period of the documentary about Xavier Herbert. These shifts include the

implementation of the Producer Offset and the formation of the new national screen

entity, Screen Australia, both of which are highly significant events in terms of

restructuring the operational and financial modes of the film industry.

The script, Xavier Herbert: My Own Road, is placed directly after this exegetical

work and is followed by Appendices A and B. Ethical clearances with all

interviewees included in this study form Appendix A. Materials that have been

important to the script content, and pitching and marketing to executive producers

and documentary commissioners, form Appendix B.

Methodology, Significance and Limitations of the study

In creating both this exegesis and the creative practice script, I have employed a

range of methodological practices, materials and perspectives. Above all, this study

involves the ‘emerging’ methodological distinction termed practice-led research

(Haseman, 2006:102). As a practice-led inquiry, the methodology utilised in this

study can be encompassed within Carole Gray’s definition:

4

[R]esearch... is initiated in practice, where questions, problems,

challenges are identified and formed by the needs of practice and

practitioners (cited in Haseman, 2006:104).

In this specific study, the research is ‘initiated’ within the ‘practice’ involved in

creating the documentary idea about Xavier Herbert and writing the long-form script,

Xavier Herbert: My Own Road. This creative practice can be further identified as the

‘principal research activity’ within the practitioner context of a study of the

documentary industry (Haseman, 2006:103), as this documentary idea is integrally

connected with the wider documentary market. Haseman adds that the ‘practice’,

which is, in this study, the long-form documentary script, becomes an outcome of the

research, an ‘all-important representation … of research findings in [its] own right’

(Haseman, 2006:103). The script has, therefore, been both the result of, and part of,

the research activity, its current form being linked to a range of contextual

commercial considerations.

The second key point in Carole Gray’s definition of practice-led research is the

following:

...[T]he research strategy is carried out through practice, using

predominantly methodologies and specific methods familiar to us as

practitioners (cited in Haseman, 2006:104).

The methodology used in this current study forms part of a range of qualitative

research methods appropriate for such a creative practice, worked through by myself,

the practitioner. The script has been developed using ‘research cycles’ (Heron,

2008:374), whereby I have collected information about Herbert and incrementally

revealed in this study what I have constructed from that information. After a period

of reflection at each developmental stage, I have returned to the research process,

searching the archives and elaborating on particular areas of Herbert’s life story. In

the case of this documentary script, each major research cycle has culminated in a

presentation of a documentary concept to the broadcaster, such as directly to the

Australian Broadcasting Corporation TV Documentaries or to Film Australia which,

in turn, has at some stage also presented the concept to the ABC. Three pivotal

approaches have been made, including those before and during my candidature, each

one being discussed in the body of this exegesis, as an important part of the mapping

of the industry context. The first approach was in 1996, the second was in 1997 and

5

the third was in 2008. Moreover, this exegesis has documented the process of

reviewing the major emergent themes and form of the documentary script within

each iteration.

Significantly, the exegesis may be read as a form of applied commercial research, in

effect, a discussion of the pivotal relationship of the researcher/writer to the

commercial potential of the project, as well as the influences and pressures on one

documentary in research development. Due to the sparseness of relevant published

information on the nature of this specific aspect of documentary-crafting, an issue

which is often only implicit within the writing process, it has been necessary, as part

of the research, to collect data through qualitative interviews with other industry

practitioners about what actually happens, forensically, to a documentary concept as

it traverses the development phase1.

To further inform my contextual study of the Australian documentary industry, I

have employed ‘autoethnography’ as the overarching research method linked with

creative practice. As discussed by Tedlock, I have ‘reflect[ed] on and critically

engage[d] with my own participation within the ethnographic frame [the

documentary industry]’ (Tedlock, 2005:467). Tedlock further defines

autoethnography as ‘connecting the autobiographical impulse (the gaze inward) with

the ethnographic impulse (the gaze outward)’, elaborating that ‘autoethnography’

itself can be seen as:

...a cultural performance that transcends self-referentiality by engaging

with cultural forms that are directly involved in the creation of culture

(Tedlock, 2005:467).

As a film practitioner developing a documentary idea about Xavier Herbert, I have

been ‘engaging’ with the documentary industry as one particular ‘cultural form’, in

my effort here to avoid and transcend mere anecdotal ‘self-referentiality’. The latter

process of the ‘gaze inward’ could be deemed self-indulgent, and therefore such a

subjective gaze needs, at every stage, the counterbalancing of the ‘gaze outward’

(Tedlock, 2005:467) to the wider cultural context.

1 In most cases, I have organised certain ethical considerations with regard to the treatment of the data

collected, whereby the interviewee supplying the data has been allowed to review the relevant portion

of the exegesis before consent was ultimately granted to use the data for this study (see Appendix A).

6

Denzin adds that the ‘critical ethnographer’ enters ‘situations that connect critical

biographical experiences (epiphanies) with culture, history, and social structure’

(Denzin, 2008:121). His notion of epiphany is defined as ‘a biographically

meaningful event or moment in a subject's life’ (Denzin, 2008:117). In this study, my

autobiographical experiences during the development of different iterations of one

particular ‘cultural form’, the documentary script about Herbert’s life, are discussed

in relation to other important and relevant ‘cultural forms’ of the film industries of

western cultures, that is, other inspirational documentaries. Also this study focuses

on the documentary film industry, charting how this industry both enables and

discourages creative endeavours.

By writing about my ‘lived experience’ in this engagement with the industry, I have

attempted to act as an insider, a ‘complete-member-researcher’ [itals in original],

interpreting the culture of the documentary industry for ‘outsiders’ (Bryant,

2005:423). In order to give more texture and significance to the study, I have

collected and analysed data from other documentary scriptwriters in the field. At the

same time, as mentioned, I have also reported on the trends within the documentary

and broader film industry through my own experience in that ‘world’.

To further inform and transform my practice, I have used material gathered through a

critical review of existing literature, of audio visual material, as well as a collection

of data. Data for the writing of the film script were collected through a series of

‘structured’ interviews , where I requested clearly defined information ( Fontana and

Frey, 2003:68), and ‘unstructured’ interviews, where the interviewees defined the

content of given information (Fontana and Frey, 2003:74). The ‘crystallisation’ of

the information in the script views the subject, Xavier Herbert, ‘from a number of

different points of view’ (Denzin, 2000:5). This is done largely through the

interviews without, however, ‘limit[ing] historical understanding to the personal’

whereby the portrayal of Herbert might collapse into what Nichols calls the

‘rhetorical’ mode, using the so-called ‘Great Man theory of history’ (Nichols,

2005:25). Therefore, researching an authentic context to Herbert’s life and works has

been a significant impetus in creating an appropriately multi-layered view of the

protagonist.

7

As the writer and researcher, I have been the ‘facilitator’, relating to the people

represented in the script who perform the live interviews, respecting their ‘rights,

needs and aspirations’ (Williamson, 2004:62). All of these strategies create a

documentary with which the audience can become actively involved, through

glimpsing the levels of complexity of the life of this famous Australian author and

icon, Xavier Herbert. As the creative practice project has evolved, the subject area

has shifted and expanded, resulting in a script which contains a montage of

information and content presentation styles. The script attached to this exegesis for

examination is, in effect, a ‘bricolage’ of ‘competing and overlapping perspectives

and paradigms’, combining the ideas and inspirations of all of the stake-holders

represented in the development of this documentary program (Denzin, 2000:6).

Within the scope and scale of this Masters thesis, however, the study is limited to the

above methods and practices, and cannot, therefore, give a detailed study of the

nature of biographical documentary genre itself, nor can it engage with a

comprehensive, in-depth history of the Australian documentary industry.

Contextual Review

Looking back on the critical and academic works on Herbert, the number surged

around the publication of Poor Fellow My Country in 1975 and his gaining the Miles

Franklin Award in 1976. The most prominent researchers of Herbert’s works are

Emeritus Professor Laurie Hergenhan and Professor Harry Heseltine. Dr Hergenhan,

as the then editor of the journal, Australian Literary Studies, published in 1970, a

transcript of Herbert’s original presentation to the Australian Writers Guild

Conference, ‘The Writing of Capricornia’. Following on from this, in 1973, Dr

Heseltine published his critical analysis of Herbert’s books, linking these works with

elements of Herbert’s life story, in a small book, entitled Xavier Herbert. The

writings of these two researchers continued the ground-breaking research in 1960 of

Vincent Buckley, one of the first academics to review Herbert’s book, Capricornia

(1938), over twenty years after its publication, in an article of the same name in the

journal, Meanjin.

8

The works of Buckley, Hergenhan and Heseltine represent the core research around

which others, including myself, have worked. The next wave of researchers produced

different, more comprehensive work about Herbert: for example, Dr Frances de

Groen wrote the biography, Xavier Herbert, in 1998, and co-edited a collection of

Xavier Herbert’s letters with Dr Laurie Hergenhan in 2000. In the early stages of my

own research into Herbert (pre-Masters), Hergenhan, who was a personal friend of

Xavier and Sadie Herbert, agreed to a videoed interview in 1997 from which I

sourced important insights into their characters for the current script.

Dr Russell McDougall, who has yet to publish his long-awaited biography on Xavier

Herbert, has also contributed strongly to early versions of my work on Herbert. In

1996-97, Russell made himself available for many meetings and supplied an

invaluable, succinct life chronology for use in my early research. This chronology

now appears in Appendix B. The work of the current script presented here for

examination, leans toward that of McDougall in theoretical approach, and I have

long intended to involve him in the eventual production of the documentary as the

biographical consultant.

Dr Frances de Groen also generously met with me and discussed her work on

Herbert. Her book, Xavier Herbert (1998), is fascinating and very useful in its detail;

however, I found her oppositional approach to Herbert problematic, in that the value

and nature of his achievements are often unclear and ambiguous2.

All of these contributors have given their time and information, not only with the

view of being recognised in a produced documentary on Herbert, but through a deep

appreciation of Herbert’s profoundly significant contribution to our understanding of

ourselves as Australians within a post-colonial society.

The existing collections of written material on Herbert are awe-inspiring for an

intending documentary-maker. Each writer over the years has brought a new element

to the Herbert story, until it seems now that every facet of his existence has been

dealt with, probed and discussed. As a documentary researcher, I have felt overcome,

2 Sean Monahan, a well respected biographer, found that de Groen’s work, while extensive in its

scope, failed to acknowledge Herbert’s positive attributes (Monahan, 2003).

9

at times, by the sheer weight of academic scrutiny that Herbert and his work have

sustained. I have attempted to identify elements that this documentary would be able

to offer to the existing, weighty body of knowledge, hopefully giving, in this study, a

fresh, enlightened perspective in the New Millennium.

In discussing the historical documentary genre and its relationship to the academic

world, Eitzen says:

Academic historians naturally tend to evaluate historical

documentaries according to how well they do what academic

historians are supposed to do. Their verdict, when analysing extant

historical documentaries, is almost always that they do not do that

very well. This is not just a matter of factual inaccuracies; in fact, it

has to do more with the kinds of questions that historical

documentaries pose and answer. It has to do with how they function

as discourses about the past (Eitzen, 2005:410).

As in many other documentaries viewed as inspiration for my project, my own work

on Herbert has aimed to offer something apart from the academic, another form of

creating such ‘discourses about the past’. I have worked on making a distinct script,

creating within the documentary form what it must have been like to be Xavier

Herbert the man, as well as what he experienced in the places he had been, rather

than simply presenting flatly, on the one hand, the so-called ‘facts’ about his life, or,

on the other hand, what might amount to an academic critique of his works.

The most voluminous amount of existing material on Herbert was bestowed by

Herbert himself after the death of his life partner, Sadie Herbert, in 1979. The Fryer

Library at the University of Queensland holds the largest manuscript collection of

any Australian writer in the Papers of Sadie and Xavier Herbert. The massive

holding consists of seventy-eight boxes of notebooks (referred to by Herbert as

‘literary logs’), drafts, proofs and other papers relating to Poor Fellow My Country

(1975), Disturbing Element (1963), Soldiers' Women (1963), short stories, poems,

articles, publications, newspaper cuttings, correspondence, photographs, financial

records and artwork by Xavier Herbert (Herbert, 1941-1980). The existence of this

extraordinary collection has become one of the marketing features of this

documentary, offering, as it does, important self-reflexive material from Herbert

10

himself, a primary source that is utilised extensively in the current script. A large

proportion of the material in the Herbert collection is subject to copyright laws and I

have sought the permission of Robyn Pill, the owner of the Herbert estate, through

her literary agents, Curtis Brown (Aust) to include such material in this study.

The Documentary Field

Fortunately for this project, Herbert was also the subject of many television

interviews. He appeared on ABC television throughout the 1960s until the 1980s,

and in televised material reutilised posthumously in 1988, the fiftieth anniversary of

the publication of Capricornia. This audio-visual archive of Herbert’s testimony to

the public has been sourced extensively in the documentary script.

It is the contention of this current Masters study, that this creative practice script is

significant and ground-breaking in that no other long-form, television documentary

about Xavier Herbert currently exists. The following useful work does, however,

exist. For instance, Nicole Steinke produced In Capricornia Country: The Legend of

Xavier Herbert (Steinke 2003), a fascinating radio documentary for Hind Sight on

Radio National in 2003. In the following year, George Negus conducted a concise

enquiry into Herbert’s life and work during his television program, George Negus

Tonight (Negus 2004) for the ABC. As this study into the documentary industry will

discover, however, the fact that a story has not already been told on television in long

form, is not necessarily an argument for the production of a documentary; it is only

one consideration of many.

Theorists such as Rosenthal and Corner (2005) do offer a useful, comprehensive

discussion on documentary form and global industry trends. Their work does not

include conditions peculiar to the Australian documentary industry which are the

focus of this study (Rosenthal and Corner, 2005). Nichols is another eminent writer

on documentary; however, I agree with Duncan’s critique that Nichols is ‘more

concerned with the analysis of existing texts than the approach to researching new

projects’ (Duncan, 2004:82). The works of such documentary film theorists are often

too general to be of specific relevance for this creative practice study, although they

11

are useful in forming a background understanding of the global documentary

industry. More pertinent to this study is the work of Stella Bruzzi, who defines and

illuminates certain contemporary forms of documentary including the ‘travel film’;

her interesting perception has been utilised in this documentary script (Bruzzi, 2000),

and her work and its application will be elaborated on further in Chapters Two and

Three. I have also found existing sources with excellent, general information about

documentary scriptwriting, such as in the material from United States documentary

producer/director, Ken Burns, and his writing teams on their documentary work,

which I have investigated through a number of case studies in Chapter Two. Such

material throws invaluable light on approaches to documentary research, the writer’s

role and the process of scriptwriting a documentary.

Within this study, another related aspect of developing an understanding of

documentary creation has been to view and critique a number of relevant

documentaries. For instance, the documentary, Mark Twain (Burns 2002), is a two-

part biographical documentary series using photographs, interviews and voiceover as

the main storytelling devices, amounting to what Nichols would term, an ‘interview

documentary’ (Nichols, 2005:23-4). The Australian production, Unfolding Florence:

The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst (Armstrong 2005), a well-received

biographical film about the flamboyant wallpaper entrepreneur, uses interviews

extensively, as well as dramatising sections of Broadhurst’s life with animation3.

Errol Morris’ Academy Award winner, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the

Life of Robert S. McNamara (Morris 2003), also an interview documentary, employs

Robert McNamara’s recounting of his years as Secretary of State in the United

States, as a riveting main story thread. The eminent Australian documentary

director/producer, Mike Rubbo, interviewed for this thesis, speaks about his film, All

About Olive (Rubbo 2005), which utilises vérité and dramatic reconstruction.

Furthermore, I have interviewed Queensland historical documentary writer and

director, Pat Laughren about his works, Red Ted and the Great Depression

(Laughren 1994) and The Legend of Fred Paterson (Laughren and Dawson 1996).

Analysing these various documentaries, along with the associated interview with one

of the filmmakers, has helped me to ground the Xavier Herbert documentary

3 I have interviewed producer, Sue Clothier, and writer, Katherine Thomson. This will be expanded in

Chapter Two.

12

contextually within the Australian and global documentary landscape, as well as

informing the development and research process, central to my forensic study as well

as my practice. This analysis will be expanded on in Chapter Two.

Denzin’s work on the ‘epiphany’, mentioned above, has also illuminated my

approach to the biographical documentary script about Xavier Herbert. I would

contend that the final version of the script fits into Denzin’s definition of an

‘interpretive biography’, where I invent ‘a new version of the past, a new history’ of

Herbert’s life and work (Denzin, 2008:117-8). In this way I have set out to identify

the ‘meaningful event’ or ‘epiphany’ in Herbert’s own life, and to show how such a

key experience has influenced his life view and shaped his journey. This key

experience is discussed in Chapter Two and elaborated on in terms of the script

content in Chapter Three.

13

Conclusion

This exegesis sets out to offer an insider’s view of the Australian documentary

industry, how projects can be developed and by whom. It examines, as a core

narrative arc in itself, the processes involved in the development of a particular

documentary form and content, at the same time as this documentary script idea

about Xavier Herbert interfaces with the documentary industry, in competition with

other documentaries. The exegesis will consider, by example, the position of several

documentary creators in that process and examine the effectiveness of the industry

processes.

14

Timeline of the development of the documentary idea about Xavier

Herbert

As stated above, a large part of this study forms a narrative of the documentary’s

journey through the various stages of raising commercial interest in the project. This

timeline outlines the major moves through the industrial process.

1996

The first submission was sent to ABC Documentaries for a documentary about the

life and times of Xavier Herbert, entitled The Stirrer.

ABC Documentaries provides letter of interest. The resulting script fails to attract a

commission.

1997

A second proposal for a documentary on the life of Xavier Herbert, entitled

Disturbing Element, was submitted to Film Australia with David Flatman as

Executive Producer. Film Australia was not interested in the project at this point.

2003

The National Interest Program is initiated through Film Australia.

2004

November: With the commencement of this Masters of Arts (Research) in mind, I

submitted a short proposal for a documentary on the life of Xavier Herbert to Film

Australia. Executive Producer, Mark Hamlyn indicated that Film Australia would be

pleased to consider the documentary.

2005

February: I commenced this Masters of Arts (Research) at Faculty of Creative

Industries, Film and Television at QUT.

June: Meeting with Mark Hamlyn who advises that I involve a producer in the

project.

15

2006

Mark Chapman comes on board the Herbert documentary project as producer.

December: Film Australia and the ABC decline the project.

2007

May: Mark Chapman becomes ill.

November/December: Sue Clothier, Head of TV Factual Production for Becker

Entertainment, takes on the documentary project.

2008

January: A proposal document is worked up between Sue Clothier, producer and

Head of Factual at Becker Entertainment, Mike Bluett, executive producer at Becker

Entertainment and myself as writer.

March: the team approach Film Australia with the documentary proposal entitled,

Xavier Herbert: My Own Road.

April – June: Film Australia submits documentary proposal to the ABC. ABC

declines.

16

Chapter Two

Taking on ‘Old Horrible’4: the documentary in development

Figure 3: Xavier Herbert 1941

Xavier Herbert

(1901 - 1984)

From humble beginnings on an outpost of North-western Australia

to international literary figure, haunted by his disapproving yet

possessive family, controversial writer, Xavier Herbert, grapples

with his inner demons to write the Great Australian Novel.

Xavier Herbert is the most controversial figure of Australian

literature. Over twenty years after his death, experts are still arguing

the merits of his work. Strong terms are used from botcher to genius.

People who knew him are also still at odds: is he a man of great vision

or an outright bully? This documentary looks inside the writer of

Australia's Magnum Opus, Poor Fellow My Country, to discover what

drove him, as Herbert (1970) himself said, to ‘write the hair off his

arm’.

The above represents the opening paragraphs of my short proposal to Film Australia

in late 2004, not long before this Masters study began. Film Australia was then one

of the main organisations that worked hand-in-hand with the Australian

Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to produce Australian content documentaries.

4 From the title of the article, Wrestling with Old Horrible [Review of De Groen, Frances. Xavier

Herbert, 1998] (Darby, 1999).

17

Since 1 July 2008, Film Australia has become part of Screen Australia, a national

screen organisation recombining the traditional roles of Film Australia, the

Australian Film Commission and the Film Finance Corporation of Australia. The

central aim of Screen Australia’s National Documentary Program is ‘to provide a

distinctive slate of projects with a sense of cultural ambition’ (Screen Australia,

2009b).

In 2004, within the earlier industrial context for pitching documentary films, I sent

the above proposal for a biographical documentary about Xavier Herbert, in order to

test the market for interest in the documentary idea, prior to embarking on this

Master of Arts (Research) in 2005. A reply came very quickly (within a week)

saying, in effect, that Film Australia would be pleased to consider the documentary.

This informal interest from Film Australia triggered a new development phase for the

documentary on Herbert which has culminated in the creative practice element for

the Masters, entitled Xavier Herbert: My Own Road.

Background to the Current Study

Although this study is written from my point of view as the writer/creator of the

documentary about Xavier Herbert and not as the project’s producer, I looked to

Webb’s work with regard to including certain details in relation to the documentary

industry and documentary development. Webb says of writers, that

unless they know the structure of the field and the shape of the

industry, they risk missing out on approaches to creative expression

that might drive, or at least inform, both their personal practice and

their capacity to derive a professional income or career from their

practice (Webb, 2007:118).

This study, therefore, follows the history of the development of this documentary

about Xavier Herbert with a view to elucidating my own context, as well as

demonstrating an industry experience that may benefit other writers when creating

similar projects.

18

It is therefore in the wider interest of describing the ‘structure of the field’ (Webb,

2007:118), to mention here that I had commenced developing this documentary

project as an independent producer in 1996. An independent producer, as Trish

Fitzsimons states, is one who is ‘freelance, not on the roll of any institution’

(Fitzsimons, 2000:173). I would add to that definition, that an independent producer

also raises funds for a production and is responsible for all aspects of production,

such as the administering of funds, liaising with the creative principals of the

documentary, the film crew and the broadcaster representative, the delivery of the

program, along with the marketing and distribution. An independent producer will

often hold a share in the copyright of the production.

My 1996 pitched version of the documentary on Herbert, entitled The Stirrer, was

well suited to Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) programming. The

protagonist, Xavier Herbert, was definitively Australian, his professional life was

well documented by the ABC from the 1960s to the 1980s, and there was still some

interest in Herbert within the culture of the ABC. The form of the documentary, The

Stirrer, as proposed in 1996, was an interview-based, historical biography utilising

archival footage and stills, along with some visual reconstruction. With a ‘post

mortem’, historical documentary, that is, one made after a person has died, there was

little choice in the area of form, considering the level of documentary budgets and

the accepted style in the mid-nineties in Australia.

The Herbert documentary idea did gain formal interest from the ABC in 1996.

Inspired by this, I subsequently raised funds through Film Queensland (now Screen

Queensland) for research and script development. The resulting script, written by

Jonathan Dawson, was not taken up by the ABC, and the dream of a broadcasting

contract for a Xavier Herbert documentary had to be put on hold. I also realised that

I would certainly have to gain more experience in order to produce such a complex

story.

At that time, a substantial documentary budget was $A 350,000/hour in Australia. A

small to medium budget in the United States was over $US 500,000/hour. This is a

sizeable difference considering that the exchange rate in the mid-nineties averaged

about $US 0.75 to the Australian dollar. This difference reflects the size of the

19

primary audiences of each country and the resultant funds available for documentary

production. Australian documentaries had much lower budgets to tell stories of

national importance and were dependent on television presales to raise that budget.

In 1996, the Keating government lost power to John Howard’s conservative

coalition. On 16 July, 1996, Senator Richard Alston, the new Liberal Minister for

Communications, announced a cut in the ABC budget of 2% for the 1996-1997

financial year, with a further cut of $55 million, 10 % of the ABC budget in the

following financial year, 1997-1998 (Inglis, 2006: 382-4). According to one

commentator, the effect on the ABC was no less than ‘cataclysmic’ (Lloyd James,

2008:8). Even so, as I considered that Xavier Herbert’s work was still very

important, I attempted to raise interest in the project in 1997, in my role as

independent producer. This time it was entitled Disturbing Element and pitched to

Film Australia, with David Flatman as Executive Producer and Gil Scrine as writer.

Unfortunately, Film Australia could not see a place for the documentary in the

existing market. Again the project Disturbing Element failed to gain interest and seed

funding, and I subsequently shelved the idea. In particular, I realised that this version

of a documentary on Xavier Herbert profiling, as it did, the life of an ‘anarchic’

Australian republican (Buckley, 1960:29) with a commitment to Indigenous Land

Rights, was difficult to market in the prevailing industrial/political environment

under John Howard’s very conservative Prime Ministership.

Given the rejections of my early configuration of the documentary project on Xavier

Herbert, I realised that my approach to the subject would have to be rethought.

Ironically, my negative experiences in pitching the documentary brought to mind

similar experiences Xavier Herbert had endured when attempting to gain acceptance

for an early unpublished novel, Black Velvet. After unsuccessfully presenting the

novel to publishers in England, he then heeded the advice of Sadie Norden (whom he

would later marry). He wrote about this period:

20

I began to talk to Sadie about the loveliness of the land I'd left, not

simply about the violences, that harshness, the cruelty of it. I'd tell her

how the Wet Season would come in ... how the land that had been

sterile dust, would be emerald with growth and its deathly silence

forgotten in the melody of running water ... and she kept on saying:

'Why don't you write about it?'

'I can't write about things like that,' I said.

But I did start writing about them, just a little bits [sic], not to sell, not

to stagger the world, but just to paint pictures for myself and Sadie

(Herbert, 1970:212).

As a result, in 1932, Herbert had commenced writing what would become one of

Australia's classics, Capricornia (1938).

Figure 4: Xavier Herbert aged 21 and Sadie

Norden.

Wishing that my own Xavier Herbert project might bring about a classic

documentary, nevertheless, at that stage, I shelved it and took on a new project

commissioned by the ABC, producing The Diviners (Thatcher, 1999), a half-hour

vérité style documentary about a family of water diviners. However, the idea and

vision I had for a documentary about Xavier Herbert would not dissipate. His

tenacious inventiveness against all odds was an inspiring example for me and, I

hoped, would be also for my imagined prospective audience.

Vérité and the Documentary Industry under stress

The impacts on the documentary market in the mid-nineties included the beginnings

of a new impetus in documentary form creation. Across the globe, vérité, or

observational documentary, was emerging (Maslin, 2004). This low-cost genre was

creating an audience expectation of immediacy and frankness, offering new, inside

21

information about the subject. More significantly for the potential success of

Disturbing Element, the arrival of low-cost digital cameras made vérité

documentaries more cost-effective than the biographical documentary, the budget for

which would be encumbered with expensive archival licence fees of up to $85 per

second (world rights for ABC archival footage in 1996). The new vérité

documentaries were being made for $200,000/hour and sometimes for as little as

$120,000/hour (Screen Australia, 2009a).

If the script of The Stirrer had been acceptable to the ABC in 1996, I would have

then applied for funds through the ABC/Film Finance Corporation (FFC) ‘accord’5.

The accord, an agreement between broadcasters and the FFC, was designed to

ameliorate the outsourcing of independently produced films, a mode of operating that

broadcasters had commenced to employ in the late 1980s (see more details about

ABC outsourcing below). Furthermore, the accord grew out of a ‘prototype system’

of program commissioning, which was set up with funds from the FFC in 1988

(Fitzsimons, 2000:175-6)6.

During the era of the investor-driven 10BA system, introduced in 1981, documentary

production was not tied to distribution (MacKee, 2000). However, the documentary

accord regulated the industry and required a presale agreement to ensure free-to-air

broadcast, ensuring some consistency in budgetary expectations and streamlined

business practices between broadcasters and independent producers (Hamlyn, 2008).

This arrangement was used by Special Broadcasting Service (SBS), the ABC, and,

more rarely, the commercial free-to-air networks (FFC, 2000/01; MacKinnon, 2008).

This process topped up the budget of Australian content domestic documentaries that

had gained a commission and licence fee (approximately the first 30% of budget)

from a broadcaster (Lloyd James, 2008).

5 The accord was later replaced with the Domestic Door and the International Door in 2006-7 (Screen

Australia, 2009a:11), a scheme which required 50% of the budget to be provided by a broadcaster

with an investment cap of $200,000 for a one-off program. This arrangement is still in place under the

industry support programs of the newly formed national entity, Screen Australia (Screen Australia,

2009b).

6 This new funding system largely replaced the investor-driven, 10BA tax rebate incentive which was

reduced from 120% to 100% in 1988-9 (Screen Australia, 2009a:10). The accord was initiated in

1991-2 (Fitzsimons, 2000:176).

22

ABC Documentary History

Prior to the outsourcing of documentaries, a method which was formalised through

the accord, ABC productions were mostly made in-house, travelling on a particular

evolutionary path. For instance, in the Sixties, before the advent of This Day Tonight

in 1967, the ABC provided programs ‘in which ABC interviewers tugged their

forelocks to the powerful and famous’ (Inglis, 2006:254). Although This Day

Tonight was squarely in News and Current Affairs, the program established a new

vision which triggered shock waves throughout the ABC. Long-time ABC producer,

executive producer and network head, Andy Lloyd James, describes the resounding

effects of This Day Tonight and the ABC’s subsequent approach to factual television:

Slowly the idea that you could actually comment on things got into

the ABC’s books. And then Whitlam came in, money came in and at

the same time people like Alan Bateman were coming through just

filled with bright ideas. And that’s what started the change (Lloyd

James, 2008:3).

By the early eighties, the ABC was purchasing externally produced documentary

programs, firstly as finished programs, and later, pre-purchasing the rights for

between ‘10-20% of the production cost’ (Lloyd James, 2008:3). Independent

documentary producers had been attempting to interest the ABC in airing their

programs for some time, until Alan Bateman as Head of Programming and Andy

Lloyd James, Head of Features made way to source these documentaries.

There wasn’t a vast amount of money for it but … it made an

enormous difference and, like when you open any door, you get a

great blast of fresh air through it (Lloyd James, 2008:3).

The ABC had internal divisions concerning this controversial issue of outsourcing.

Strong elements within the ABC lobbied against independent documentaries being

sourced, because of the following issues: firstly, the flow of funds that would

obviously be going outside the ABC; and, secondly, a suspicion of the potential bias

of independent producers (Lloyd James, 2008).

23

Nonetheless, the ABC continued to outsource documentaries which, according to

Lloyd James, brought great benefits; independent filmmakers had exposure to a

broader range of aesthetic and technical competencies and brought new creative

approaches: the ‘blast of fresh air’ (Lloyd James, 2008:3). The ABC also saw

outsourcing as a chance to save funds. From this perspective, licensing

documentaries for a certain number of screenings of documentary programs cost a

fraction of the expense of employing permanent, full-time staff for in-house

production (Hamlyn, 2008).

The ABC screened approximately forty hours of independently produced

documentaries under the Accord in 1994-95 and 1995-96 (ABC 1994-95, 1995-96).

Documentary content declined in 1996-97, much more than the 2% drop in ABC

funds instigated by the federal government that financial year ( ABC 1996-97; Inglis,

2006). A further ‘reduction of seven documentaries’ was quoted in 1997-98 (ABC,

1997-98).

In the following years, the ABC annual reports ceased mentioning independent

documentary all together (ABC, 1998-99). Andy Lloyd James explains the

fluctuations in documentary funding within the ABC as being a function of shifting

managerial interest in the broad genre of documentary, linked with the extent of

finance made available to documentaries and the prioritisation of documentaries in

ABC programming (Lloyd James, 2008). The market for high-end, quality,

independent Australian documentaries had shrunk, and it appeared that ‘the ABC

were moving away from history films in favour of vérité style docos’ (Maslin,

2004:80).

The Herbert Story in Development

Historical documentaries were bolstered in 2003 when the federal government

allocated funds to Film Australia’s National Interest Program initiative (Film

Australia, 2008). In late 2004, I made the above-mentioned approach to Film

Australia. This reframed documentary idea on Xavier Herbert elicited Executive

Producer Mark Hamlyn’s informal, renewed interest in the documentary for

24

inclusion in the National Interest Program slate. At this stage, I chose to be the writer

rather than the producer of the documentary, and, in order to advance my skills in

this area, I commenced the Master of Arts (Research). I probed the Film Australia

potential a little more.

Mark Hamlyn came to a meeting in June, 2005, the year I commenced my Masters

study. He advised me to find a producer who would take on the project and develop

it before approaching Film Australia formally. I had not produced anything

significant since The Diviners in 1999 due to child-rearing duties, and also, in light

of the magnitude of the project, I could see that an experienced producer would

greatly enhance it. I looked for a collaboration that would form, as Webb states, a

‘point … of connection’. She elaborates on the importance and the benefits of

collaboration:

[C]reative practice is and has always been about the beehive of

society. Creative work and workers are, like everyone else, defined,

determined and delimited by the structures, logic and trajectories of

the field and of social institutions and practices. To work effectively

in the field, therefore, we must find ways of forming points of

connection in the network that is society, that is industry, that is the

creative community (Webb, 2007:119).

As part of forming a strategy toward making an effective, collaborative pitch for the

project, I approached Brisbane documentary producer, Mark Chapman, of Big Island

Films, a long-term colleague, and he agreed to take on the Herbert story. I composed

a writer’s statement outlining the possibilities of the documentary for Mark to refer

to, when discussing the project with Film Australia (see Appendix B). This document

outlined the considerable research materials available to the story, the main

biographical points and some stylistic ideas. Mark Chapman, however, came back

with a negative response from Film Australia; by then they had moved to other

priorities in their slate of documentary productions. At that stage, he also

unsuccessfully approached ABC Arts.

25

The Form of the Documentary

The story of this project as a ‘cultural performance’ took a turn when, within the

framework of the Masters candidature, I took steps to change the emphasis of the

project (Tedlock, 2005:467). Inspired by what I had read about Mike Rubbo’s ideas

on documentary, I went to talk to this eminent documentary director/producer in

2005, to ask his opinion. I was particularly interested in what Mike would have to

say, considering that, coincidentally, he was the Commissioning Editor at ABC

Documentaries when I first submitted the earliest phase of the Herbert project in

1996. Mike patiently listened to my ideas on the Herbert documentary. ‘How are you

going to visually treat the subject matter?’ was his main question. At the time I met

with Mike, I was planning a documentary that utilised archival footage and

impressionistic, visual collage to complement a threaded monologue of the deceased

subject, Xavier Herbert. Mike pointed out that the budget levels available for

Australian domestic documentaries would not sustain the high production costs that

this type of archival treatment would incur; in short, it would be a very expensive

way of telling the story. I therefore concluded that the documentary would need

some kind of ‘real-time’ activity through which to tell Herbert’s story.

Case Studies

To better understand the evolution that my documentary project on Xavier Herbert

had gone through since 1996, in the context of the changing budgetary and policy

pressures within the documentary industry, and to compare my creative experiences

with those of other documentary practitioners, I then decided to investigate further

the research and development processes of a number of other documentary projects.

Methodologically, I had, as Stake advises, an ‘intrinsic interest’ in each individual

case and was also investigating ‘a phenomenon, population, or general condition’.

Therefore, in conducting the ‘collective case study’ via an interview method, in

order to seek out the general conditions of the documentary industry, I was also

conducting a series of ‘intrinsic case studies’ that involved my researching relevant

projects and gaining insights into how they had been developed (Stake, 2000:437).

26

Case Study 1: Mike Rubbo’s ‘All About Olive’ (Rubbo 2005)

My first case study related to documentary filmmaker Mike Rubbo, mentioned

above. I wanted to investigate in more depth his latest documentary at that time, All

About Olive. All About Olive is a predominantly vérité-style documentary about

Olive Riley, a 105 year-old woman who travels from her nursing home in Sydney to

visit Broken Hill, the town where she grew up. The documentary also employs

dramatic reconstructions, depicting major events and memories in Olive’s life story

as she visits the places she knew almost a century ago. The visually riveting

reconstructions are directed by Olive Riley herself, making her the oldest person in

the world to have a directing credit on a film. The reconstructions weave in and out

of her dialogue about her childhood and enhance the viewers’ experience of the

documentary (Rubbo, 2005).

Figure 5: Mike Rubbo and Olive Riley during production.

While the ABC commissioners had expressed early interest in this film, they wanted

Film Australia to partner the production. However, Mike could not procure the

commitment he needed from Film Australia, which was more narrowly focused on a

straightforward, essay-style film about people over a hundred years old. As Mike

was much more interested in Olive’s extraordinary, personal story, and although

Film Australia offered $25,000 to develop the film, he declined the potential

partnership and went back to talk to the ABC (Rubbo, 2006).

When he approached the ABC again, a fortuitous co-incidence took place; Executive

Producer, Stephan Moore, who was about to leave the ABC after many years of

dedicated work, was offered by management the film All About Olive ‘as a sort of

going away present…And it just went ahead from there’ (Rubbo, 2006:2). The script

document that Mike submitted to the ABC was ten pages long. Mike added: ‘It went

through various versions, becoming less and less essay-like. The final document was

27

actually a string of Olive’s stories and it was basically the stories that you see’

(Rubbo, 2006:3). Inspired by this example, I considered ways of employing a vérité

treatment in the story about Xavier Herbert, without compromising its integrity.

The Travelogue

Figure 6: Xavier Herbert 1980

I considered everything I knew about Herbert. Herbert was a great traveller. He was

also a supreme landscape writer (Heseltine, 1975). While preparing for the pitch of

this documentary, which was presented to the ABC in 2008, I decided that this

documentary might be told effectively as a travel documentary, in effect, a

biographical, cultural travelogue. I considered the approach of telling the story by

observing someone who was following Herbert’s footsteps, investigating what

influenced Herbert and what Herbert influenced: historico-cultural relic hunting. This

would take the story into semi-vérité style, sidestepping (as advised by Mike Rubbo

in the interview) the issues of archival film cost, which can be up to $A85 per

second. I thought that designing the film as a travelogue was fortuitously appropriate,

considering that, according to Mike Rubbo, the word ‘documentary’ comes from the

French word meaning travel film (Rubbo, 1986). Thus the Herbert documentary

would become one of ‘the new journey documentaries’ that Stella Bruzzi has

identified, which ‘signal[s] the influence of direct cinema upon more intellectual and

relatively elitist documentary filmmaking’ (Bruzzi, 2000:99). I saw an opportunity,

through the use of direct cinema, to provide access to Herbert’s life story for a

broader audience.

28

The greatest consideration at this stage was the identity of the investigator. The story

about Xavier Herbert would require someone experienced in the media with a

literary background or an interest in Herbert. Producer Mark Chapman and I were

stumped. Associate Professor Geoffrey Portmann suggested that a high profile

person with some personal similarities to Herbert might work in the position of

investigator. We realised then that both Herbert and the Scottish comedian, Billy

Connolly, had experienced difficult relationships with their fathers. We agreed that it

was worth developing that core idea further. Mark Chapman reported back that both

ABC Arts and Film Australia rather gleefully agreed to take on the film, if Billy

Connolly expressed a strong interest.

In 2007 I wrote a new document outlining the approach (see Appendix B). The

investigator, viz. Billy Connolly, would visit Herbert’s place of birth, meet the

experts to discover his hidden origins, follow Herbert’s trail to Melbourne and then

north to Sydney, Brisbane, Cairns and overland to Darwin. The audience would see

and feel the textures of the places Herbert lived in, and meet the people he knew. In

this way, the documentary would directly depict a layered view of Herbert’s

complexities as both man and writer.

The Investigator and Interactional Moments

This new approach envisaged that the investigator would also take Herbert’s

experience of life and, in particular, discourses regarding his issues with his father

and compare them to his/her own. As the camera catches the moments of the

investigator’s identification with Herbert’s life, more depth and richness would be

added. Such moments are ‘interactional moments ... that leave marks on people's

lives [and] have the potential for creating transformational experiences for the

person’ (Fontana, 2003:81 ). As mentioned earlier, Denzin describes these moments

variously as 'epiphanies', ‘dramatic events’, or ‘ruptures in the structure of daily life’

(Denzin, 2008:121). The investigator would gain insights into his/her own

experiences that might lead him/her to form a new set of values and meanings.

29

The universal theme of Xavier Herbert’s search for the father, or the father’s

approval, could ‘breathe’ within this sort of treatment. However, there was a danger

that the use of an investigator (especially a celebrity) would take the focus off the

key character, Herbert. On the other hand, a live investigator would also add

significant, contemporary contexts and relevance to the human story.

Sadly, if predictably, Billy Connolly declined the offer of traversing Australia in

Xavier’s wake. Who else, then, would take the journey on camera? All of the people

I approached turned out to be already fully engaged in their own creative pursuits. I

then wrote to actor Brian Brown, comedian Barry Humphries, Indigenous writer

Melissa Lukoshenko and was looking into contacting writer David Malouf, when a

tragedy struck close to home.

The Tragedy

In May 2007, soon after our meeting to discuss the next step, the producer I had been

working with, Mark Chapman, became seriously ill as a result of a stroke. The whole

Queensland film industry was devastated; Mark was an integral part of the industry

and had a slate of projects in development and a series in production. I had known

Mark since the early eighties. Our association floated around in my memory. The

eighties was a time when the Brisbane art scene was relatively unharnessed and all-

inclusive, with filmmakers, musicians, performance artists mixing and connecting

subversively underneath the repressive politics of the Petersen era (Harley, 1986).

Mark was not only important to the documentary industry and our current project,

but he was also a significant part of the broader artistic and social history in our

town.

As I patiently waited for a few months to see how Mark’s illness would progress, it

became evident that, sadly, his recovery would take some time7. By August 2007, I

7 Mark Chapman appeared not to have any income or health insurance. Budgets for Australian

documentaries do not allow for such costs, and Mark would have ploughed whatever finances he

could into the company’s projects. It seemed that the financial stress of his business was already

showing within his family relationships. If he had been working in-house at the ABC under the old

system, he would have been at least partly covered for such eventualities and his family would not

have suffered the economic difficulties that exacerbated those caused by his illness. I wondered if he

would have had the stroke under different, less stressful circumstances.

30

realised that I had to continue alone or seek out another producer. It dawned on me

that film producers act in a similar way to a publisher of literary works; they can

have significant creative input as well as managing the production and marketing of

the work. The publisher of Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938) was Inky (Percy

Reginald) Stephensen. Together they had worked on the manuscript in 1934 with a

view to Stephensen publishing it. However, when it became evident that

Stephensen’s publishing company was going bankrupt at that time, Herbert turned on

him in anger, and then fled to Darwin (Munro, 1984). Two years later they had

healed their rift:

You are my publisher, you know. I'm convinced that we were born to

work with one another. Some day we shall. Till then I shall do no

writing, & shall keep 'Capricornia' in my swag. You were the midwife

at the birth of 'Capricornia'; & you have to be its wet nurse. Poor

'Capricornia'! The other day Sadie was rooting round the box where it

is stored, & found that the white ants were getting to it (Hergenhan,

2002:79).

Herbert’s professed allegiance to Stephensen in 1936, although characteristically

dramatic and stormy, reflects the depth of these kinds of creative relationships –

publisher/writer; producer/writer. Herbert had developed emotional ‘points of

connection’ with Stephensen (Webb, 2007:119). Later, in the second half of 2007, I

set out again to create a collaborative working partnership, albeit a less emotional

‘point of connection’, with other members of the documentary industry.

A New Producer

The search for a new producer led me to one particular film, Unfolding Florence:

The Many Lives of Florence Broadhurst (Armstrong, 2005) which screened on SBS

in November, 2007. It had been released theatrically and I had seen the documentary

at the cinema the year before. This film utilised a rich and engaging approach to

biographical documentary, with animation and dramatisation as its core visual

languages while exploring the life of the famous Sydney wallpaper designer and her

murder in 1977. The similarities between Florence’s self-constructed life and

31

Herbert’s persistent fabricated accounts about his place and circumstances of birth

resonated and intrigued me when I first saw Unfolding Florence.

Inspired by seeing the film again, in November 2007, I contacted one of the

producers of the documentary, Sue Clothier, Head of TV Factual Production for

Becker Entertainment, to offer her the documentary about Herbert. After a brief

discussion, I sent a written proposal to her (see Appendix B). A week and one day

later, the Rudd government gained power. Co-incidentally, at the same time, Sue

Clothier agreed to take on the Herbert documentary.

She claimed that she liked the travelogue approach to the documentary and asked me

to write a number of documents so that she could consider the possibilities. I wrote

an outline for a four-part half-hour travelogue series, a list of possible informants to

the documentary, an outline for an historical, interview-based approach and a story

arc (See Appendix B). An executive producer, Mike Bluett, also took an interest in

the idea. During the Christmas break while visiting Cairns, he went to Xavier’s old

home in Redlynch, met some of Herbert’s neighbours and became committed to the

idea of the documentary.

Narrative Approach and Form

When business resumed in mid-January, 2008, we all spoke over the telephone. The

executive producer was looking for a structure through which the story could unfold,

using dramatic reconstructions. He was not sure that the format of a travelogue with

an investigator was going to serve the story well, and he felt that the presence of the

investigator would take too much attention away from Herbert, the subject.

We agreed that Herbert’s last journey could be a good narrative backbone. The last

journey was one Herbert took alone, overland from Cairns to Alice Springs in early

1984. He signed over his estate to a close friend of Sadie, Robin Pill, said his good-

byes and drove his ancient Land Rover to the centre of Australia to die: an

appropriately dramatic point to enter into his life story. We tested the approach

32

through more discussions of how it might work. I wrote another series of points

around his last journey to explore how this could tie in to other parts of Herbert’s life

and the discourses surrounding it. It became clear that if we continued the journey to

his death and funeral in Alice Springs, this approach would certainly offer sufficient

narrative opportunities for the story to be able to explore the various significant

elements in Herbert’s life. This approach would also incorporate a substantial

amount of dramatic reconstruction, with an actor playing the part of Herbert in his

last year of life. I looked further, therefore, into the use of the convention of dramatic

reconstruction in documentary for my creative practice.

The Style of Reconstruction

Derek Paget has defined drama-documentary as the use of

the sequence of events from real historical occurrence or situation and

the identities of the protagonists to underpin a film script intended to

provoke debate about the significance of the events/occurrence. The

resultant film usually follows a cinematic narrative structure and

employs the standard naturalist/realist performance techniques of

screen drama. If the documentary material is directly presented as all,

it is used in a way calculated to minimise disruption to the realist

narrative (Paget, 1998:82).

The next draft of my creative practice film (2009) utilised drama-documentary only

in parts8. I attempted to blur the boundaries that Paget outlines; his definition is

more relevant to a type of Australian television drama-documentary program popular

in the last decades of the twentieth century, such as Joh’s Jury (Cameron 1993). In

the case of the newly-reconstituted, hybridised Herbert documentary, I decided that

the ‘documentary material’ would not necessarily be minimised, nor would it be a

disruptive element within the realist narrative I was attempting to create. I realised

that further, in-depth research into documentary practice was needed at this point.

8 This is the version prior to the script in this MA.

33

Case Study 2: ‘The Legend of Fred Paterson’ (Laughren and Dawson

1996)

Figure 7: The Legend of Fred Paterson Poster showing a scene using

dramatic reconstruction.

With a new creative purpose in mind, I discovered in my case study research of

biographical films that The Legend of Fred Paterson was the first documentary made

in Queensland to use dramatic reconstruction. The film is about the life and times of

the only communist Member of Parliament in Queensland, Fred Paterson. A number

of reconstructed scenes were filmed including the depiction of Paterson’s bashing by

the police during a street march in Brisbane in the Fifties. I consider that the dramatic

reconstructions in The Legend of Fred Paterson work well in eliciting a feel for the

time and underlining the dramatic power of Paterson’s life. This bashing scene in

particular is used as a climax to the documentary, as the horrific violence disables

him forever. Pat Laughren explains (in an interview conducted for this thesis), that

the reason he used dramatic reconstruction was not simply as a preference for a

story-telling device. There were also issues regarding the budget, as well as access to

and availability of appropriate archival footage:

[O]ur budget for Red Ted [and the Great Depression (Laughren,

1994)] was $320,000. It had a huge archival budget. ... By the time

we got to [The Legend of Fred Paterson] we knew we wouldn’t get

$320,000. We were going to get, at the most, about $280,000 or

$270,000 but there was far less archive [archival footage] relevant to

the story (Laughren, 2008:11).

Reconstructions can fail, however, if not treated skilfully. The critic, Rosenthal,

warns of this, but, at the same time, he cites Culloden (Watkins, 1964) as a

particularly successful example. He says that reconstruction is best used to represent

34

the pre-photographic era or, presumably, when the event has not been recorded, as in

the bashing of Fred Paterson (Rosenthal, 1996:256). In my view, the dramatic

reconstructions in The Legend of Fred Paterson do enhance the biographical drama

and aesthetic appeal of the documentary. Hence this locally produced documentary

became another source of influence and inspiration for the next iteration of the

Herbert documentary.

Film Industry Merger: Screen Australia

In early March, 2008, the production team which had been assembled through Sue

Clothier as producer, took the proposal for the newly-titled documentary, Xavier

Herbert: My Own Road to Film Australia. At the time, there were huge fluctuations

emerging in the industry that deeply concerned both our team and the staff at Film

Australia. A key issue was the scheduled finalisation of the National Interest

Program at the end of June, 2008. Some fears were allayed in February 2008, with an

announcement that Film Australia and the ABC had reached a new agreement,

whereby the ABC would commission ten new historical documentaries by

December, 2008, continuing ‘their “History Initiative” partnership’ (ABC TV

Publicity, 2008). This indicated that the National Interest Program may also

continue.

A more pressing concern, however, would impinge on the whole film industry in

Australia. A federally-initiated move for the complete reconstruction of the

landscape of film investment, funding and culture in Australia was taking place; this

involved the proposed merging of Film Australia with the Film Finance Corporation

of Australia and the Australian Film Commission to form a new body, Screen

Australia. The idea was that Screen Australia ‘will focus on development, marketing,

and strategic planning for the industry in Australia’ initiating a new distribution-led

approach to film production in Australia (Newby, 2007).

As Schembri argues, our understanding of the audience and the marketing strategies

in Australia are often sadly lacking (Schembri, 2008). Therefore, it was considered

that an attempt at a co-ordinated, national policy and implementation strategy for

35

marketing and distribution could open doors for documentary programs. Previous

efforts of the FFC in this area involved informing producers of standard deals,

providing a list of potential distributors and following up on sales agents and

distributors for outstanding returns. Often, in the case of the smaller budgets and

returns of documentaries, the amount of the return was not worth the legal costs of

implementing an audit of a sales agent’s books so that the outstanding returns often

remained outstanding (MacKinnon, 2008).

A major difficulty in dealing with distribution itself is the ever-fragmenting

contemporary audience – fragmenting, that is, through the expanding choices

between online, cable, free-to-air and theatrical viewing options. Susan MacKinnon,

former Investment Manager (Documentary) at the former FFC says of the

‘transitional’ market:

[T]he broadcasters are commissioning for free-to-air but really what

interests them is anything that can be done on the internet. And

they’re still showing [programs] free-to-air but all their dealings in

their legal contracts are all about the internet really; all that long tail

stuff. And it doesn’t work financially because there are no financial

models for the internet except advertising. ... Free-to-air will mean

online; that’s what it will be and they’ll just have to keep paying

filmmakers (MacKinnon, 2008:5).

The ways in which documentaries are marketed and even financed were in the midst

of a huge shift. Many of the smaller, traditional documentary distributors from the

last century had closed, while internet-based distribution was growing (MacKinnon,

2008). This is often true for documentaries that are framed as issue-based, such as

the US production, Iraq for Sale: the War Profiteers (Greenwald, 2007) where 3002

people contributed $US367,892 in nine days to finance the film (Greenwald, 2008).

36

During the six-month transition period in 2008, when Screen Australia was in the

process of becoming the peak organization within the Australian screen industry,

Mark Hamlyn, then an executive producer at Film Australia, said on this crucial

matter:

The main financing comes to you via television. That’s not going to

change in the next ten years. The internet may get more powerful but it’s

not going to do what TV does in terms of being the financial engine to

drive production or become the trigger to financing projects (Hamlyn,

2008:16).

Within this fluid and relatively uncertain industrial milieu, my documentary on

Xavier Herbert, could only feasibly be financed through the commissioning process

with ABC Documentaries or ABC Arts; the finished production would then,

hopefully, be broadcast on the ABC with a limited, but free, online access period,

and would ultimately have a DVD release. With this in mind, I therefore attempted a

further pitch to the appropriately targeted ‘powers-that-be’.

Approaching the Commissioning Editor

Despite the understandable nervousness of the commissioning staff at Film Australia

regarding the imminent amalgamation into Screen Australia in mid-to-late 2008, they

added the Herbert documentary idea to the shortlist of projects they were discussing

with the ABC. During those discussions, the Xavier Herbert film was probably

considered by the Commissioning Editor at the ABC, Stuart Menzies. Interestingly,

at that time, Menzies said to an Age reporter, in relation to his vision concerning

documentary:

Everything we do talks about identity; about us. I'm unashamedly

nationalistic in the focus of the documentaries ... The ambition of our

department has always been to explain to our audience where we

come from and where we might be headed (Kalina, 2008).

While such sentiments might seem to be in support of a documentary about an

Australian icon such as Xavier Herbert, I suspected that there might be many less

complex Australian cultural narratives in competition with this particular pitch, and

the odds may still be against this project. Still awaiting a final decision from the

37

ABC, I returned to refining the script for the Masters and ultimately also for the

hoped-for industry outcome.

To forward the documentary Xavier Herbert: My Own Road to a new stage, I

revisited the existing plan sketched earlier in collaboration with Sue Clothier,

producer, and Mike Bluett, executive producer at our initial meeting early in 2008.

The documentary proposal presented to the ABC through Film Australia had outlined

the use of dramatic reconstructions, with an actor playing the part of Herbert, and, at

the same time, incorporating live interviews with those who knew and worked with

Herbert. With the new focus of the documentary, at that stage, fully on Herbert, his

inner thoughts and human mechanisms could be directly explored.

Nichols asserts that offering the audience a larger map of knowledge and analysis

provides a broader choice of experiences and allows space, which Nichols terms the

‘gap’, in which members of the audience can flex their own understandings of reality

(Nichols, 2005:24). He says that, to do this, the documentary, seen as an 'autonomous

whole', includes the following: visual and sound elements; the 'textual “voice”

spoken by the style of the film as a whole', and ‘the surrounding historical context,

including the viewing event itself, which the textual voice cannot successfully rise

above or fully control' (Nichols, 2005:28). Therefore, if such a tiered approach was

to be taken onboard in this project, all elements of the documentary must be treated

critically in order to find the authentic ‘voice’. This would involve a deeper

examination of the broader intent of the film, placing the organic textual elements

upon a rich canvas of relevant Australian socio-political history.

As mentioned earlier, Herbert had grappled with himself and his view of the world in

his letters, journals and in his major works. Autobiographical/self-reflexive material

written by Herbert was therefore embedded within the developing documentary

script. A critical understanding of his life and work can also be informed through live

interviews with others who have knowledge of and insights into Xavier’s life story.

The information gained through the live interviews would provide ‘the surrounding

historical context’ (Nichols, 2005:28) of the story. However, discovering a viable

mode with which to approach the interviews within the script presented a creative

38

challenge: how do I obtain the further information necessary for the script, while not

pre-empting the actual production interview process?

Interpretive Interactionism: The Interview and Scriptwriting

When conducting interviews for previous films I have made, the approach I followed

could be summed up by the adage: ‘Don’t let the interviewee start talking until the

camera is rolling’. Collecting sufficient material on what the interviewee knows in

order to produce a script before shooting is problematic; there is a possibility that the

interviewee will remember what he or she has said to the researcher/writer prior to

the filming, and often will not be able to reproduce the statement in its entirety, or

with the same conviction or quality of delivery.

Figure 8: Poster for the documentary, Mark

Twain.

As discussed above, Denzin has identified the phenomenon of the ‘epiphany’ (cited

in Fontana, 2003:81). Fontana adds: ‘Thus the topic of inquiry becomes dramatized

by the focus on existential moments in people’s lives, hopefully producing richer and

more meaningful data’ (Fontana, 2003:81). Similarly, US filmmakers, Ken Burns,

director/producer, and Dayton Duncan, writer/co-producer, have also identified the

intense dramatic qualities of the interviewee experiencing a transformative

recollection on the screen. Burns claims that he uses a technique to prevent his

subjects from losing the quality, in effect, Denzin’s ‘epiphany’, in their delivery to

camera; he and his team conduct the interviews for the film as part of their primary

research. During his writing of their pertinent biographical film on the iconic

39

American writer, Mark Twain (Burns 2002a), writer, Dayton Duncan describes this

process:

The last thing that we want to have happen is for an interview to

sound like we're just asking somebody to fill a hole in a script. … We

ask very open-ended questions and just see where it takes us. ... [The

interviews] help us in our discovery process; they're not just the tail

end, they're the very start (Burns, 2002).

Interestingly, Brisbane documentary-maker Pat Laughren’s approach to the

documentary interview is very close to that of Ken Burns. When talking about the

process of writing Red Ted and the Great Depression (Laughren 1994) Pat describes

writing the script using ‘imagined interview or interview transposed from other

sources’ (Laughren, 2008:1). He then conducts long oral history interviews with the

film’s informants without pre-interviews:

Because consciously or unconsciously they’ll think, ‘I told you that.’

and you’ll get the Readers Digest version rather than the full version

(Laughren, 2008:4).

These interviews form the backbone of Laughren’s films with the narration written

later to weave the interviews into a story structure.

Another US documentary director, Errol Morris, also describes the outcome of an

effective interview process when talking about the extended interview he conducted

with Robert McNamara for Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S.

McNamara (Morris, 2003).

Morris says:

[T]he remarkable thing about McNamara is that he is involved in this

inquiry about himself. ... What I find fascinating is his struggle. Here

is a man who is clearly struggling with himself and trying to

understand who he was, who he is today the nature of what he did and

why he did it. And that is a noble inquiry – certainly a fascinating and

powerful inquiry (Morris, 2005).

Therefore, these three documentary directors analysed here recognize the powerful

impact for their respective audiences in this form of ‘meaningful data’ (Fontana,

2003:81).

40

Case Study 3: Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence

Broadhurst (Armstrong 2006)

Figure 9: Unfolding Florence: The Many Lives of Florence

Broadhurst poster

Unlike the films of Burns, Laughren and Morris which are mostly reliant on

interviews as a story-telling device, Unfolding Florence utilised other visual

mechanisms including some rich animation. Significantly, the interview was not the

central focus. The scriptwriter of Unfolding Florence, Katherine Thomson, whom I

also interviewed for this project, spoke to all of the informants to the story, before the

director, Gillian Armstrong, conducted her interviews.

The quality of delivery in the final filmic version is very moving for the viewer. The

production relied on the passing of time between the research work of writer,

Katherine Thomson, and the on-camera interviews conducted by Gillian Armstrong

who also acts as a fresh interface for the interviewees. Katherine says:

Obviously Gillian did her own expert interviews. She’s the one that

conducted them. I deliberately wasn’t there. ...

So it was a sense of: if you want to tell your story you’re going to

have to do it with clarity and energy to this new person (Thomson,

2008:1).

The producer, Sue Clothier (then Head of TV Factual Production, Becker

Entertainment) added, again in interview, that the budgetary constraints led to tight

schedules and precluded a long research process (Clothier, 2008). It would seem that

this pressure is often experienced by Australian documentary filmmakers.

41

According to her interview text, Sue Clothier had initiated Unfolding Florence after

noticing an article about Florence Broadhurst in an inflight magazine. After a nine-

month exploration period and some initial discussions with broadcasters, the

development team at Becker Entertainment produced several drafts outlining an

approach for the documentary, only to have the idea knocked back initially. Eighteen

months into the process of pitching the idea, the producer offered the document to a

colleague at SBS, and asked what was missing in the pitch document. Margaret

Murphy, a commissioning editor at SBSTV, returned with a positive response and

the documentary was finally commissioned.

Florence Broadhurst’s designs were visually lush. This led the producers to consider

that Unfolding Florence had great potential for a ‘bigger canvas’. They approached

the well known director, Gillian Armstrong, to direct the film. Impressed by

Signature Prints, Broadhurst’s wallpaper company, which was still operating,

Armstrong came on board. With Gillian Armstrong as the director, a presale from

SBS, as well as investment from the New South Wales Film and Television Office,

the production had several noteworthy ‘hooks’, and easily attracted the commitment

of Film Australia to include Unfolding Florence in its National Interest Program.

The producers pitched Unfolding Florence as a theatrical film, gaining a theatrical

release commitment through the Dendy cinema chain. The problem they faced then

was that the documentary was already in preproduction and had a production path

planned for television broadcast. Sue Clothier recounts the difficulty they

encountered in transforming a television documentary into a cinema release film: ‘It

was highly stressful at that particular time but Film Australia were extraordinary

partners to work with. ... It was a rollicking couple of months’ (Clothier, 2008:6).

Screenwriter Katherine Thomson, also interviewed for my Masters project, was

introduced to the production through Gillian Armstrong’s recommendation. After

some in-depth, detective-style work, Katherine uncovered a trunk full of invaluable

papers and photographs that once belonged to Florence Broadhurst (Thomson, 2008).

With this research material in hand, Katherine worked on the form and visual

approach of the documentary. The idea of using animation had been part of the

original document with which Sue Clothier had marketed the film, and, along with

42

the new bank of archival images from Florence’s trunk, Katherine’s script took

shape.

Some writers have criticised the use of the animation technique in the film as

‘alarming’, claiming that ‘it trivialises and distracts’ (New Zealand Herald, 2006).

Furthermore, Variety film reviewer, Russell Edwards thought that

[The] Terry Gilliam-like animation with old family photos does

jangle the nerves. Intention may have been to replicate Broadhurst's

zeal, but the effect is trivializing and detracts from Armstrong's other,

smarter directorial choices (Edwards, 2006:40).

By contrast, I did not have the same reaction to the animations when I watched the

film, experiencing the treatment as Edwards thought it may have been intended: ‘to

replicate Broadhurst’s zeal’. Hence, this aspect of the film could be a matter of taste

depending on the viewer’s predilection.

I reflected on the choices other than animation that confronted Armstrong and her

production team in depicting Broadhurst’s life, in view of the fact that this was a

post-mortem biography of a flamboyant design artist. Other than a full-blown

dramatic reconstruction (which was impossible for the budget) the animation

sequences seemed a perfect choice, as articulated by the scriptwriter in the

promotional production package for the film:

Once we knew the details of her extraordinary life, how much she

loved life, what fun she was to have around, the challenge became

how we told the story with as much energy as Florence had. We also

had to tell the other side of her character. Neither Gillian [Armstrong]

nor I wanted to do a conventional biography. We knew that a week in,

just from looking at the press clippings, and Film Australia said ‘go

for it’ (Thomson, 2006:9).

Other critics question the validity of making a film about Broadhurst in the first

place, citing ‘Broadhurst's dubious morality’ as reason enough not to document her

life (Metro NZ, 2006:132). This statement, dubious in itself, made me wonder which

biographical documentaries would be valid if a morality-based process drives such

production choices. This also begs the questions: who would have the right to make

such a loaded judgement? Why should such judgements even be considered?

43

Herbert’s story would certainly be rejected from such a biased, moralistic standpoint.

In my view, a morality-based, decision-making criterion would be completely

invalid, as is sanctimonious, morality-driven film criticism.

Indeed, the production team working on Unfolding Florence also took a positive

approach to this complex, flawed yet fascinating person, impressed as they were that

one remarkable woman could achieve so much in her life. Their creative impulse was

that they wanted to show this to the world:

There is a feeling that options become limited as we get older. Not in

Florence's life they didn't (Thomson, 2006:10).

This type of universal theme elevates the particular ‘voice’ of the text within its own

historical, cultural context, into a production that would resonate with an

international audience.

One of the most pertinent points that Katherine made in her interview for this study,

was that ‘the writer always puts more than the director needs to shoot’ (Thomson,

2008:6). This particular comment resonated strongly with me, with regard to the

Herbert script I was working and reworking at the time of interviewing her. The main

narrative arc decided on by the creative team was chronological, using a recreation of

Florence’s final walk to her studio – the place of her murder – as a vivid linking

device between the various chapters of her life. Katherine Thomson, the writer, was

involved with the production throughout the editing phases, writing the voiceover of

Florence and keeping personal links with the interviewees to ensure their satisfaction

with the process (Thomson, 2008).

Clearly the amount of time-consuming work involved in researching and writing a

documentary is often under-estimated and possibly underpaid as a result. Such

weighty considerations raised by the Unfolding Florence example made me reflect

more deeply on my own work.

44

Chapter Three

Creating the script for a new age of documentary production

Figure 10: Xavier Herbert and Percy Trezise

visit cave paintings Nth Qld during the filming of 4

Corners, ABC, 1978.

After the flurry of activity between the production team and Film Australia in March

2008, unfortunately all communication ceased. By June 2008, the documentary’s

future was still uncertain and Film Australia was about to be subsumed into Screen

Australia. Even though there was no definitive indication, it was becoming evident

within this production landscape-in-flux that the documentary, Xavier Herbert: My

Own Road, was not going to be commissioned at this point in time. Linked with my

contextual research for this study, I was closely following the events leading up to

the formation of Screen Australia and the policies that may impact on the

documentary industry. Screen Australia, the national film entity, was finally formed

officially on July 1 2008. Since then, new initiatives and incentives, such as the

Producer Offset9, have been implemented, and, arguably, are currently transforming

the Australian film industry. The Producer Offset is ‘the biggest change to the

industry since introduction of 10BA in 1980’ (Rosen, cited in Williams, 2007b). This

Offset is an indirect subsidy, which ‘provides a rebate of 40 percent of eligible

9 When the Howard government originally flagged the Producer Offset in 2007, the contentious issue

for documentary production was that the documentary budget threshold was $500,000. Documentary

producers strongly criticised the Producer Offset stating that it would only benefit a small number of

producers, less than 15% as in the case of 2006/7 (Williams 2007a; Screen Australia 2009a). In

Australia’s documentary industry, with documentaries holding only a 2% share of television

broadcasting content, compared with 11% in New Zealand and 21% in Canada, and with the bulk of

Australian documentaries under the prescribed $500,000 qualifying expenditure, the actual income

generated through the Producer Offset would be insignificant (Screen Australia, 2009a). The level of

qualifying Australian production expenditure (QAPE) (which excludes certain development and

marketing expenses) for documentaries has subsequently been reduced to $250,000-an-hour for

television documentaries (Barnard, 2008; Screen Australia, 2009).

45

Australian expenditure to producers of qualifying feature films, with a 20 percent

rate for qualifying TV productions’ (Montgomery, 2007).

Under the captaincy of the new CEO, Ruth Harley, Screen Australia has reviewed

key policy areas and has subsequently maintained some investment conditions

pertaining to documentary, including the National Documentary Program, similar to

the former National Interest Program where funds from Screen Australia can make

up to 75% of the budget (Screen Australia, 2009b). One of the most important shifts

has involved the devolution of the executive producer role from Screen Australia to

the independent production sector (PFTC, 2008). This is in contrast with the earlier

Film Australia model, whereby Film Australia would present documentaries to

broadcasters to attract presales, package series and co-produce with international

entities (Hamlyn, 2008).

With the devolution of executive roles, there has been an expectation that film

companies will increase in size. In July, 2008, in his speech for the Opening of the

Melbourne Film Festival, the Minister for the Arts, the Hon. Peter Garrett, indicated

the government would bring about

...a level of consolidation in the industry – not necessarily more

businesses, but larger ones – but this should be embraced, not

resisted, because the global media and entertainment world is not one

in which a cottage scale industry can expect to survive (Garrett,

2008:8).

Within Screen Australia’s programs, one of the key initiatives to support this growth

of company size is the newly formed Enterprise Program

… designed to engender larger companies and new partnerships. This

program will offer $500,000 over a three-year period to screen

production companies with experienced principals who have

identified opportunities to develop and expand their business (PFTC,

2008).

These first Enterprise Program funding approvals were announced in September,

2009. The internationally acclaimed, Queensland-based, digital entertainment

company, Hoodlum, received $A1m to extend their overseas partnerships (Screen

46

Australia, 2009d). However, at present there were no Queensland documentary-

specific production companies funded under the scheme10

.

A predicted outcome from Screen Australia’s new initiatives for television

documentary programming was articulated by Mark Hamlyn in late 2008, in his role

as executive producer for the National Interest Program:

[W]e are seeing the evolution of the medium of tv documentary into

something quite diverse. On one hand it’s Who do You Think You

Are?. On the other hand it might be a fairly standard doco with

narration on it. But there will be less space … The broadcasters are

buying less of them – of the auteur film which isn’t particularly

popular with audiences (Hamlyn, 2008:16).

During this time, the ongoing, developing version of my creative practice

documentary, Xavier Herbert: My Own Road, seemed to be situated in a position

that, arguably, was in keeping with this shift. The documentary’s intended producer,

Sue Clothier, is Head of TV Factual Production for Screenworld (formerly Becker

Entertainment), one of the longest standing independent production houses in

Australia (Off the Fence, 2009; Wikipedia, 2008). Most importantly, as researcher

and writer, I still considered that Sue Clothier would be the right person to be

involved with the Herbert documentary. The future of the Herbert documentary

therefore looked even brighter, with a three-fold increase in independent

documentary production investment at the ABC in 2009 (Knox, 2009).

On the other hand, there was a significant decrease in support for Screen Australia in

the 2009 Federal budget. The Screen Australia budget has been cut by $9.5million,

from $31.4 million to $21.9 million (Bodey, 2009). This is explained as ‘direct

appropriations to Screen Australia’ being ‘reduced over time proportional to the

uptake of the Producer Offset’ (Brown, 2009). The Screen Producers Association of

Australia’s official line is that there is

10

I wondered if Queensland documentary would have benefitted from this scheme if Mark Chapman

was able to maintain his position as the long-term, major documentary producer. He had extensive

networks and had trained many people still working in the industry. If any individual in Queensland

could engender new partnerships it would have been Mark. The Enterprise Program is a scheme with

great benefits which came too late for Mark Chapman.

47

no pick-up on the Offset from local investors, markets are fickle,

there are no presales, gap funding is virtually dead for film, and we're

experiencing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression

(Brown, 2009).

The drop in Screen Australia’s funds has been balanced in the light of the $A90

million increase for ABC Drama programs granted in the 2009/2010 Federal budget

(Hudson, 2009). Hence the future for documentary productions is hanging in the

balance.

Wrapping the Creative Practice Script

By early 2009, in the absence of a firm commercial industry agreement, I chose to

write the next version of the script, Xavier Herbert: My Own Road, using a fictitious

character to travel through Herbert’s life utilising extensive dramatisation. While still

moving toward the final iteration of this documentary project, I had already

abandoned the idea of including Billy Connolly, or any other luminary in the

documentary, as explained earlier.

I first wrote a script with a chronological structure and a varying style using vérité

(the investigator’s real-time journey), interviews, traditional documentary material

(stills, archival material and newspaper articles) and re-enactments. From that

material I identified the main elements of the story I wanted to highlight. Xavier’s

relationship from 1956 with his long-term friend, Percy Trezise, was a pivotal

subplot. One of the main ideas in the final version of the script I have submitted for

this Masters study involves the ways this relationship is a catalyst to Xavier

overcoming writer’s block to commence writing Poor Fellow My Country, more than

thirty years after writing Capricornia.

Despite some fresh ideas, the problem of the identity of the investigator remained

unresolved. I had already written Xavier as a reconstructed character, to be played by

an actor, in most of the script. Why not also reconstruct his best mate, Percy

48

Trezise11

, to drive the story? The more I considered this approach, a clearer pathway

emerged. The great bushman and larrikin, Percy Trezise, could serve all of the

purposes I wanted the investigating character to perform, and, as he already played a

major part in this story, the constructed ‘presence’ of Percy Trezise would not be a

distraction. Instead, Percy would add significant perspectives on Xavier himself and

the great author’s personal relationships, particularly with his partner/manager,

Sadie.

Figure 11: Percy Trezise at Jowalbinna with

part of Red Bluff in the background, 1997.

I had conducted a long interview over a period of four days with Percy Trezise in

1997, years before embarking on this study. I had found then that his relationship

with Herbert had a particularly turbulent period between 1971 and 1975. On the one

hand, Trezise seemed objective in his opinions about Herbert. His negative

experiences of Herbert were, however, tempered with his continuing respect for him

and would ameliorate the documentary’s attempt to explore Herbert’s life

experiences. On the other hand, in the interview, Percy Trezise displayed a

reluctance to enter into a full discussion of the difficult period in their relationship,

until I demonstrated prior knowledge of some of the underlying reasons of the

disruption. Then he clarified the problem. The complex personal events leading up to

what could be called Herbert’s ‘poison pen letter’ to Trezise became, therefore, in

this latest version of the script, the pivotal driving tension in the narrative, and

consequently, the key reason behind both Trezise’s riveting personal journey of

understanding and illumination, and, it is to be hoped, the audience’s interest in and

engagement with Herbert and his friend.

11

Percy Trezise was an aviator and Aboriginal rock art expert. He and Xavier rediscovered much of

the Cape York Aboriginal rock art. Trezise involved many of the traditional owners in his endeavour

to uncover and interpret the paintings and left a wealth of information with research groups such as

the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Percy died in 2005.

49

Thus, the biographical documentary script presented in this study has evolved into a

form of travel documentary with an actor playing the part of the investigator/narrator,

Percy Trezise. He takes the audience on a journey to tell a story about his

relationship with his long-term friend, Xavier Herbert. More specifically, Trezise

relives the events around their five-year estrangement and undertakes a personal

search into Xavier’s life story to discover reasons driving Herbert’s volatile

personality, as well as the source of his extreme anger toward Trezise during that

period.

I have used Trezise’s words from my own extensive 1997 interview archive as part

of the documentary script. However, I found that the interview did not provide

sufficient information of Percy Trezise’s experience of Herbert. Hence, I have added

further clarification about this relationship in the script, gleaned from comparing the

testimonies of one about the other – thoughts that Trezise and Herbert may or may

not have revealed to each other (Herbert in Hergenhan, 2002; Trezise Interview,

1997).

In short, I have, at times, embellished Percy’s experience of Herbert with projections

extending from fact, but not grounded in fact. The reconstructions of Trezise (and

Herbert), and the elaboration of his feelings about Herbert and their sometimes

tumultuous relationship represent an ‘overt form … of performativity’ that

documentary theorist Bruzzi claims is an important element in the agenda of new

documentaries, part of the ‘change’ in the way documentary has chosen to represent

reality (Bruzzi, 2006:252).

The characters of Percy Trezise and Xavier Herbert co-exist in this biographical

story along with the onscreen, live ‘experts’ on Herbert’s life. These extant experts

provide ‘disciplines of knowledge’ for the story (Ulmer cited in Denzin, 2008:123)

as does factual documentation represented through newspaper headlines and

archival material. Following Denzin, I have tried to make the current biographical

script represent a story that ‘is simultaneously a personal mythology, a public story, a

personal narrative, and a performance that critiques’, re-performing Herbert’s

50

experiences to create ‘a meaningful biographical experience’ for the potential

audience (Denzin, 2008:117, 122-3).

After touring Herbert’s life across a range of key sites, the documentary ends with

Herbert’s funeral. Herbert’s contribution to Australian society is summarised and

highlighted during a dream-like reconstruction of segments of the funeral service.

Undoubtedly, Herbert’s role in bringing the plight of the Indigenous stolen

generations to public scrutiny with the publication of Capricornia in 1938 is a

landmark achievement in our short white history. On a more personal level, Percy

Trezise finds that Herbert’s strong vision, coupled with his difficult family

background, separated him from non-Aboriginal Australian society with which he

worked so hard to communicate.

In a way, while working on Herbert’s story over the past fourteen years my research

for this documentary has become an archive. I have accessed multiple archives

during the process of script development and, in effect, this thesis has formed another

archive. For instance, I have put into my Appendix B an unpublished chronology of

Xavier Herbert’s life and work which was compiled by Dr Russell McDougall when

I commenced research in the mid 1990s. I have also conducted interviews with some

of the key players in Herbert’s life, from which I have drawn for the script. I also

have filed a substantial collection of original articles now out of publication. This is

all part of the original contribution that this study has made to the documentary

industry and to the study of this indefinable writer, Xavier Herbert.

As this documentary has not yet found a commercial placement, the script that is part

of this Masters study is not a ‘shooting script’, that is, a blueprint designed to guide

the production of the documentary. This draft script is ready for the next stage of

production, with room for a producer and a director to bring their individual changes

to it. Subsequently, this version would be rewritten into a form that would facilitate

production and budgetary considerations.

51

Future Challenges

In this thesis, I have set out to draft a contextual map of the documentary industry

and the shifting processes and pressures through which one documentary ‘idea’ has

passed in order to gain the ultimate prize, a firm commission with the ABC. To date,

this biographical documentary script about Xavier Herbert has not secured such a

commission – which is not to say that this hoped-for outcome will not come to pass

in the future.

Australia is currently on the threshold of a new era in internet services, including

film distribution, with the creation of the National Broadband Network, which is

predicted to connect ninety percent of homes and businesses to high speed ‘Fibre-to-

the-Premises’, with the remaining ten percent connected to ‘next-generation wireless

and satellite … broadband’ (Conroy, 2009). Mike Quigley is the new Chief

Executive Officer of NBN (National Broadcasting Network) Co, the company set up

to roll out the broadband initiative. He talks of the ‘likely inclusion of [radio

frequency] in down stream’, which would allow internet protocol television (IPTV)

to be more economical in terms of download time (cited in Bajkowski, 2009:49).

Paul Budde, international telecommunications research specialist states:

Once you have 10 or 20 percent penetration of 100 Mbps services, you

start seeing that a whole new range of media are going to be developed.

And that advertising-driven, sequential broadcast model [as in free-to-air

television] is unlikely to survive; instead, it’s going to be much more like

YouTube, but on steroids [a greater scale] (cited in Braue, 2009:10).

The internet landscape of distribution already holds additional potential for the long-

tail12

distribution of documentaries, although this is hindered by the fragmented

nature of programming pricing that can sometimes have a devaluing effect. Liesl

Copland, an executive of William Morris Endeavor, which operates the online

distribution facility, Netflix, addressed the Toronto International Film Festival in

September, 2009. In that address, she asked the global independent documentary

community to consider an agreed release model for feature documentaries, rather

than allowing the continuation of the problem of varying prices of release platforms

12

Program sales after broadcast.

52

where programs can be hired or purchased, for between one dollar and fifteen dollars

‘at the same time’ (Copland, 2009:10). A globalised, co-operative approach to

independent documentary distribution online would, arguably, enhance the future of

documentary production through adding value to program sales.

More recently, in December, 2009, producer, academic and author, John Howkins,

speaking at the opening of the new Creative Industries Innovation Centre at the

University of Technology, Sydney, indicated that thinking around the issue had been

further developed. He concluded that:

[T]he consumer, is increasingly impatient – and explicitly so – in making

sure that they … can make their own decisions about what they want to

see and when they want to see it and on the device that they choose. …

[I]f you want to pay 100 dollars to see [a film] when it is released, sitting

at home, we've got to work out so that you are … enabled to do that.

[W]e are now beginning to think about how we can use price and to

develop … a waterfall of different [viewing] licenses (Encore Magazine,

2009: 3,4).

With the transforming digital developments, the documentary industry, as with all

media, is currently in a state of flux that will continue to create new platforms and

access to audiences for some time to come, although the implications of such

multiple platforms for individual filmmakers are, as yet, uncertain. As Mark

Hamlyn, the former Executive Producer at Screen Australia has stated, however,

documentary sales and the raising of budgetary funds through the internet does not

replace the ‘financial engine’ that drives production, nor does it ‘become the trigger

to financing projects’ offered through the commissioning practices of the free-to-air

broadcasters (Hamlyn, 2008:16). For now, it is the Australian Broadcasting

Corporation where this story of Xavier Herbert belongs.

53

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61

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This Bibliography also applies to the script, Xavier Herbert: My Own Road.

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Addie, B. and Nelson, A. (2004) National Identity in Australian Documentaries.

Metro, 143, 76-80.

Avenell, J. (2006) Design for life: Unfolding Florence [The Many Lives of Florence

Broadhurst (2005) Gillian Armstrong's new documentary]. Metro, 150, (68)-

72.

Barnes, G. (2004) Xavier Herbert Remembered. On Line Opinion. Accessed 13.5.08.

www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=2746

Biederman, L. (2006) What Are Proper Responses? Hip Hop, Aesthetics, Race and

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Bodey, M. (2008) In with Lyn, just not for long. The Australian Online. Accessed

19.3.08.

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Actors and Directors Tell How They Conquered Hollywood, Crows Nest,

Allen & Unwin, 97-112.

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Shelter from the Storm, St Leonards, Allen & Unwin, 29-38.

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Cattoni, J. (2006) Interview with Wendy Rogers about After Maeve. IN Rogers, W.

(Ed.), Brisbane, unpublished.

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Justice Studies. IN Denzin, N. K. and Lincoln, S. Y. (Eds), The Sage

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62

Cusack, D. (1941) Love Poems to Herbert. Sadie Herbert Collection, Brisbane, Fryer

Library, Mss 83 Box 30.

De Bruyn, S. (2008a) AFI puts major focus on docos in 2008. Inside Film Magazine.

Accessed 26.8.08.

www.if.com.au/2008/08/26/article/AFI-puts-major-focus-on-docos-in-

2008/MQXIIQLMMO.html

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Magazine. Accessed 14.5.08.

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Budget-2008/YCSELKBIGV.html

de Groen, F. (1987) Three Background Studies of Poor Fellow My Country. Notes

and Furphies, 18, 29-33.

de Groen, F. (1988) Xavier Herbert's Birth - The Documentary Record. IN

Department of English (Ed.), Occasional Paper no. 11, Australian Defence

Force Academy, University of New South Wales.

de Groen, F. (1993) Xavier Herbert, journalist? Australian Literary Studies, 16:1,

University of Queensland Press, 116-118.

de Groen, F. (1995) Larger Than Life: A Biographical Study of Xavier Herbert.

Australian Defence Force Academy, Sydney, University of New South

Wales.

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letters, Brisbane, University of Queensland Press,.

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Ed., London, Panther Books Ltd.

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Furphies, 43, Oct 2000, 24.

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2000, 25-27.

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WA), 12:3, 5-18.

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aspx?direct=true&db=afh&AN=1244431&site=ehost-live

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James, Miles Franklin, St Lucia, University of Queensland Press.

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Richards, D. (1985) Me and My Shadow. The National Times, Fairfax, Melbourne,

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ents/pm_seizes_vision_of_social_renaissance/

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aspx?direct=true&db=anh&AN=20817073&site=ehost-live

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War". All Things Considered, 1. Accessed 19.3.07.

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9394111&Fmt=7&clientId=14394&RQT=309&VName=PQD

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Paintings in Cape York, Sydney, Melbourne, Wellington, Auckland, A. H. &

A. W. Reed.

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to Australian Literature, New York, Boydell & Brewer Inc., 335-345.

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(Ed.), Brisbane, unpublished.

69

Films and Television and Radio Programs

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Report (ABC), Australia, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 11.6.09.

Accessed 12.6.09.

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uid&an=P6S225538570508&db=anh&scope=site&site=ehost

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PBS Home Video.

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Collins Audio Books.

Cutler, R.J. (2009) September Issue, US, Madman.

Dahan, O. (2007) La Vie en Rose, France, Icon Film Distribution.

Fontaine, A. (2009) Coco Avant Chanel, France, Roadshow.

Gabrielsson, J. and Thornton, W. (2007) Dark Science, Australia, FFC, SBS.

Gallacher, L. (2009) Australian Classics: Xavier Herbert's Capricornia. IN Koval, R.

(Ed.), The Book Show, Sydney, Australian Broadcasting Corporation - Radio

National. Accessed 7.9.2009.

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Shock.

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Kotow, J. W. (2002) Xavier Herbert Letters - a Review. The Book Show, ABC Radio

National. Accessed 2.4.06.

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Series, USA, Shock.

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Rubbo, M. (2001b) Much Ado About Something, Australia, ABCTV.

Tyrnauer, M. (2009) Valentino, The Last Emperor, Italy, Acolyte Films.

Van Splunteren, Bram (2008) Iggy Pop: Lust for Life, Holland, Other Cinema.

70

Creative Component: Script

Xavier Herbert

My Own Road

© Wendy Rogers 2010

71

131

Appendix A

Permissions and Ethical Clearances

Bluett, Mike

Chapman, Mark

Clothier, Sue

Hamlyn, Mark

Laughren, Pat

Lloyd James, Andy

MacKinnon, Susan

Rubbo, Michael

Thomson, Katherine

Curtis Brown RE: Herbert Estate

132

"Xavier Herbert"

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or ethicscontact@gut.edu.au if you have concerns about the ethical conduct of the project

agree to participate in the project with the right to view and have input into your comments

Name_g~~£g-_Tt ............................. . Sign•:: .tt~~;:;.-

133

"Xavier Herbert"

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or ethicscontact@qut.edu .au if you have concerns about the ethical conduct of the project

agree to participate in the project

Name _ Tri\./f1 _

Signature --~- ~ -h-"-----­Date _ _j-4:

134

-L......=-C~O=N=S~EN=T=F=O~R~M=f=o=r =Q-U~T=R=E=S=E=A=R=C=H=P_R=O=J=E=C=T====:I "Xavier Herbert"

c:a~tem nt -of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or ethicscontact@gut.edu.au if you hffiLe concem5_ about the ethical conduct of the proj~ct

agree to participate in the project with the right to view and have input into your comments

Sign::: ===~~:~-:_r:-~-::;~:-:-··--·-----=-(]_o,....:::..-=:...:_rn_.!. _ _:__. _ _:__rq=+·-·--=-------_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ -.. -.----·-----------···~~~-------~~~-·-Date I __ _f.___________ I -·_q_f_ ___ ·-··-···--

135

QUT CONSENT FORM for QUT RESEARCH PROJECT

"Xavier Herbert"

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you :

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or eth icscontact@qut.edu.au if you have concerns about the ethical conduct of the project

agree to participate in the project

136

. _ ....... """-'-=c~o_N_S_E_N_T~F..;....;O_R.....:.IVI_, ·_f.o_r;.:..Q~lJ...;.T_. R_E..;....;S..;....;E_A_;.R~C..;....;H_.;P..;....;, R..;....;O_;..;J'"'-E'-C...;.T_.•·,•· = ,__.;;j<: I "Xavier Herbert"

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have· any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or ethicscontact@qut.edu.au if you have concerns about the ethical conduct of the project

"::~:~_:x~;· :r.. :.~F?,_,..-... __ _ Signature _J__--'1-·-tH- -"\Y------"-'----- ----- --·------------­

Date __ _.::1____ I ---~--- I -~?_LQ __

137

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

·~·.

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any quest1ons answered to your satisfaction /

understand that if you have any additional questions you .,an contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or,@thicscontact@qut.e~.al!jf . you have concerns about the ethical condi.Jct of the project ·

agree to pficipate in the project

Name

Signature

Date

.J'

······-········ ········-·--· .. ···-------t--

138

CONSENT FORM for QUT RESEARCH PROJECT

"Xavier Herbert"

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or ethicscontact@gut.edu.au if you have concerns about the ethical conduct of the project

agree to participate in the project

Name _S~slr~t ...... ~~~-~~~~-···· ··-- ·-····--· -·-Signature ___ <i_vv.J_~r\j_ 0\.~~ -~: ___ ~-----------

/ M~ I Date ----'--

139

_ii CONSENT FORM for QUT RESEARCH PROJECT -. _____ _ "Xavier Herbert"

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or ethicscontact@qut.edu.au if you have concerns about the ethical conduct of the project

Name

Signature

Date

140

"Xavier Herbert"

Statement of consent

By signing below, you are indicating that you:

•

have read and understood the information document regarding this project

have had any questions answered to your satisfaction

understand that if you have any additional questions you can contact the research team

understand that you can contact the Research Ethics Officer on 3138 2340 or ethicscontact@gut.edu.au if you have concerns about the ethical conduct of the project

agree to participate in the project 1

_ . • .. , - ~ ~ -+o ~ .. ~•,..r-A:.. ~ ~.,..,___~

Name ...... . ~~l- -~---~-~~---Signature ......... ~ ~- ~<2. -~ ... C.. ... ~---·········· ··········

Date --····-- -'- -~ ____ _Q_~ .. _Q_·-~----

141

Agreement

between

FranMoore

Acting for Curds Brown (Australia) Pty Ltd of

Paddington,

Sydney,

New South Wales,

Literary Agents for Robyn Pill

and

Wendy Rogers of

2n.2 Daventry St

West End

Brisbane,

Queensland, 4101.

142

Agreement

This agreement recognises that the Herbert Estate contains materials written under the names of Xavier Herbert, Alfred Herbert and Herbert Astor it also contains sound recordings of Xavier Herbert and Sadie Herbert and letters written by Sadie Herbert. These materials are owned by Robyn Pill and managed by Curtis Brown (Australia) Pty Ltd.

This written agreement is to grant permission for the use of materials in the Herbert Estate to Wendy Rogers for educational purposes pursuant to her study at Queensland University of Technology.

The study involves a written documentary film script on the life ofXavier Herbert and an academic piece which contextualises the script.

The materials from the Herbert Estate that will be used for this study include excerpts from:

• Letters written by Xavier Herbert and Sadie Herbert Creative works, published and unpublished

• Articles published in journals, magazines and newspapers • Unpublished Articles.

Wendy Rogers undertakes to use these materials exclusively for the study and to not publish the results of the study containing materials in the Herbert Estate without further agreement.

Wendy Rogers will deliver a copy of the documentary film script and the academic piece which contextualises the script on completion of the work to Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd, P 0 Box 19, Paddington NSW 2021.

The parties hereto have executed this Agreement on the day first hereinbefore written.

~A#J~ Fran Moore, Date Acting for Curtis Brown (Australia) Pty Ltd

'/.:?.·<?

w~2

143

Appendix B

Pitch Document (By the author for Mark Hamlyn, then Executive Producer

for Film Australia, November, 2004.) 144

Writer’s Statement (By the author for documentary

Producer, Mark Chapman, March, 2006.) 148

Proposal for Billy Connolly (By the author, March, 2007.) 151

Proposal (By the author for Sue Clothier, Head of TV Factual,

Screenworld, August, 2007.) 161

Four-part Series Idea (By the author for

Sue Clothier, December, 2007.) 165

Story Arc (By the author for Sue Clothier, December, 2007.) 175

Final Journey Structure: Points of intersection between this journey and

earlier parts of Herbert’s life.

(By the author for Mike Bluett, February, 2008.) 178

144

Xavier Herbert

An Inner Biography

Documentary, 52 mins.

From humble beginnings on an outpost of North-western Australia to

international literary figure, haunted by his disapproving yet

possessive family, controversial writer, Xavier Herbert, grapples with

his inner demons to write the Great Australian Novel.

Xavier Herbert is the most controversial figure of Australian literature. Twenty years

after his death in 1984, experts are still arguing the merits of his work. Strong terms

are used from botcher to genius. People who knew him are also still at odds. He is a

compassionate man or an outright bully. This documentary looks inside the writer of

Australia's Magnum Opus, Poor Fellow My Country, to discover what drove him to

write the hairs off his arms.

Born Alfred Jackson in 1901 in Geraldton on the Northwestern outskirts of Australia,

Herbert is the illegitimate son of a steam engine driver, his mother, the daughter of a

goldminer. Alfred grows up in the shadow of two beautiful older half-siblings, the

runt with uncertain paternity. He is straining to be noticed within his family, a

recurring theme throughout his life as a writer. His mother, Amy Herbert (she marries

Ben Herbert 17 years after Alfred's birth) is also the granddaughter of a convict, a fact

well hidden by her own snobbish pretensions to being 'descended from a gentleman'.

He paints her on the one hand as rarely being loving toward him yet on the other as

inspiring him with her highly dramatic, self-aggrandised and humorous personal style.

And the diminutive Alfred is so different to his father, the excellent horseman, the

man's man, the heroic engine driver, that his own suspicions of another, absent father,

fed by rumours of his illegitimacy, are ground deep within his psyche.

145

Until he is ten years old Alfred spends his childhood in a very remote part of Western

Australia, Geraldton, and near the railway siding of Middle Junction, just east of

Perth. In the pale, sandy scrub surrounding their dirt-floor house, Herbert grows up

half wild with few social boundaries. With his deep-seated low self-image, a growing

hatred of a family that gives mainly negative attention (for his 'making up stories') and

seriously missing a father figure, he creates a world of his own. He explores wide-

eyed the bush and spies on the camps of dislocated Indigenous people.

He finally attains recognition from his family by successfully qualifying as a chemist.

However, it is not long before he leaves that path to become a professional writer. His

family follows him to the East but by 1927, Herbert escapes to the Far North to claim

his fate, which, he decides, is to become the Great Australian Writer.

This is his first test of physical endurance. He walks across arid West Queensland

through to the Northern Territory, sleeping under bushes in the heat of the day, jumps

trains and some say he jumps a plane, to reach his destination: the virgin story lands

of Australia's Deep North, the lawless edge of society. Here he gathers experience that

feeds his work for decades.

Throughout his life as a writer, he demonstrates again and again how permanently

patterns were imprinted on him in childhood. He is self-deprecating, insulting and

hilarious. His dramatic sense of humour, rough and from the bush, is often

misunderstood. His books are dotted with the boy searching for a missing father and

women who are controlling and harsh. In his life he has been described as mistrustful,

socially shy, charming, witty and very needy. And as he takes up this fateful role he

throws himself deeply into friendships with people who help him along the way like

Inky (P. R.) Stephenson, Nugget Coombs, Percy Trezise, Arthur Dibley, Ian Mudie to

name a few and often falls out with them just as deeply - everything heart-felt and

relating to his great task (of writing the Great Australian Novel).

Undoubtedly, the most constant and important person for Herbert is his life-partner of

forty-seven years, Sadie Norden. Although Sadie is not highly educated she is integral

to Xavier achieving his goal. His books are her children. In 1930, Sadie, a Jewish

cockney returning to London after leaving a failed marriage is sailing on the

Esperance Bay. Alfred is also leaving Australia with a swag of short stories he has

146

written and a manuscript of a never-to-be-published novel, Black Velvet. They have a

wild shipboard romance and Sadie decides that this writer, this Colonial Lair will be

hers to love and nourish (and manage) for the rest of her life. Alfred (now writing

short stories as A. X. Herbert) is less convinced of the importance of their

relationship, yet he returns to her again and again while in England where he lives

poorly, trying to attract a publisher for his work. She assists him in rewriting his

original, providing him with a garret and food and guarding his door from intruders.

In London, as his first novel develops, along with his relationship with Sadie, she

convinces him to change the style of his writing. "If you could only write the way you

talk, the way you tell me stories," she says to Herbert who is in the habit of telling his

tall stories as a meal ticket.

By the time he returns to Australia in 1932, Xavier Herbert has recreated himself. In

London he has refused an offer to publish Black Velvet. The publisher wants to edit

out 'what was considered to be offensively Australian'. This is not what Xavier has in

mind for his work. He is surprisingly adamant about that. The book isn't published,

but is rewritten to become Capricornia, which is finally published six years later.

Throughout his rocky career, Xavier Herbert has many obstacles to overcome.

Capricornia (1938) is his first great success, winning the Australian Sesquicentennial

Prize for writing and the Australia Literature Society's Gold Medal (1940). But it has

a mixed reception. H. G. Wells sees it as a masterpiece, propelling it on to the world's

bookshelves, while Brian Penton calls it a botch-up. Two extreme points of view

reflecting Herbert's own extremes in his work and in his life. Success goes to his head

and he starts on another life-long career of seducing women. At the same time he is

writhing in torment, trying to write his next great book.

He produces a number of lesser works, which also take many years to complete and

publish. He is developing new writing techniques during this period and also

developing his resistance to the editing of his work. It becomes a publicised passion

during his infamous brawl with P. R. Stephenson, the publisher of Capricornia, in the

pages of the Bulletin in 1961. Stephenson has claimed editorship of Capricornia, a

claim that Herbert energetically denies: "He didn't put a pencil to my manuscript. …

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an author who does not strive to become independent of editorship is a hack." And

Herbert is a " … professional imaginator," Stephenson replies.

It is his early training in successfully overcoming failure and ridicule and the

nurturing role of Sadie that assists him through the years of struggle until the

publication of Poor Fellow My Country in 1975, the largest book ever written in the

English language. He wins the Miles Franklin Award, receives two Honorary

Doctorates and attains great personal influence.

Herbert is a dramatist and an enigma to the end. After a lifetime of public

performance to the cameras (he appears many times on television) he constructs his

own funeral service to take place in Alice Springs. At his behest, only close friends

attend and cameras are banned. Xavier is buried with the tribal ceremony of friends

from Darwin so long ago, with the ashes of his precious Sadie and in the heart of his

country quietly and for the first time without drama.

Wendy Rogers, 2004.

148

Writer's Statement

Xavier Herbert (1901 – 1984)

Documentary, 52 Min

It has been over twenty years since Xavier Herbert's death in 1984 yet he is still on the

cultural map. Australian writer, self-confessed “wild colonial lair”, genius and

botcher, Herbert's well-documented and controversial life spanned the 20th

Century.

Since 1998 three books have been published on Herbert:

• Xavier Herbert by Francis Degroen (1998), a biography,

• Xavier Herbert: letters edited by Francis Degroen and Laurie Hergenhen

(2002), an expansive collection of his letters dating from 1929 to 1979,

• a long and winding road by Sean Monahan (2003), a critique of Herbert's

work reviewing its place in Australian literature.

These books represent a resurgence of interest in Herbert and the significance of his

work, as the 1970s Australian cultural renaissance is reviewed.

This increase in the perceived importance of his work makes this documentary on

Xavier Herbert timely and pertinent to Australian audiences. Furthermore, Herbert’s

estate, the largest collection of manuscripts of any Australian writer, holds significant

research opportunities. But most the most important aspect to this story is the

investigation into Xavier Herbert himself - the extreme anomalies of his personality.

Herbert is hilarious, indignant, bullying, sexist, loving, revered and hated. He lives

mostly as a hermit in the latter part of his life and has little contact with the

mainstream, yet he comes out of seclusion to promote his works with a fully-

constructed public persona. He has an uncompromising personal style which puts him

outside the norms and niceties of society, revealing a side of human nature that is

fascinating, absorbing and unusually well-documented in his own journals and letters.

In this documentary we investigate Herbert’s life, visiting his stormy relationships

with his family and almost everybody he encounters, and the deep dependency he has

on his life partner, Sadie. He ‘writes out’ the fascination he has with his uncertain

origins, something he has been vaguely aware of since childhood. Xavier was not

officially recognized by his father, Ben Herbert. On his birth certificate he is Alfred

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Jackson, and his father is the mysterious John Jackson, presumably, a previous partner

of his mother, Amy Scammell. The search for belonging drives the narrative of the

bookends of his works, Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country (PFMC) and

engulfs his life with a crippling effect.

As a result he is fascinated with the human condition, especially his own, and goes to

great lengths to examine his own species through endless self-reflection and analysis.

His journal, which he starts in 1940, and a profusion of letters provide insight into his

motivations and in particular, for this documentary, the motivation to write his later

work, Poor Fellow My Country, the ‘Great Australian Novel’ and the longest book

ever written in a European language.

The examination of Xavier Herbert’s internal struggles with life parallels that of other

successful documentary subjects, most notably, Robert McNamara, in Fog of War.

Director, Errol Morris elaborates:

“What I find fascinating is his struggle. Here is a man who is clearly

struggling with himself and trying to understand who he was, who he is

today, the nature of what he did and why he did it. And that is a noble

inquiry – certainly a fascinating and powerful inquiry.”

Morris’ emphasis is not on the truth of what McNamara said, but in the human

endeavour to search for some truth. This is what Herbert looks for in his public and

his private writing: what makes the world go round and what is my part in this?

The huge amount of material written by Herbert about Herbert makes the use of his

testimonials an obvious device. Nobody writes as well about Herbert as Herbert

himself. This is what Dayton Duncan, co-writer and co-producer, also found when

researching the life of Mark Twain for the documentary, Mark Twain:

“Twain crowded everybody else out. He crowded out the wonderful

narrations, sometimes, that I had written …. just because his voice, once

it kicks in, sucks the oxygen out of the room.”

Herbert’s words are equally powerful.

150

He has many first-hand experiences of life, similar to Twain in America, and takes on

the themes of life on the Australian frontier as his own, spending many years as a

young adult mixing with the hoy-poloy on the fringes. It is a safe place for him to be.

Herbert is a rough character, a stranger to the literary debates and social conventions.

He is often nasty, embarrassingly overweening and treacherous. It is a wonder that he

produces these classic books at all. He goes to great lengths to reach a place from

where he can do that. He runs and writes for days on end. He abstains from society

and sex. All that is left is his passion for his country and his need to belong. It is this

passion, his most successful theme, that propels Xavier to rise above his own

existence to create some of the most vivid and compelling reflections ever written.

For Herbert, writing is not a profession it is “the means of outlet for the full blood of

his peculiar imagination.”

© Wendy Rogers, 2006

151

152

153

Quotes from Xavier Herbert

Writers are all bums. Writing, after all, is just a neurotic form of expression.

I don't believe in any political party but I do believe in my species. I think we're the

wonder of the universe as far as we know and if there's anything more wonderful we'll

get hold of it and take it off them. We are very clever people. I do love being a human

being. I'm glad I wasn't born a donkey. And I shall die in the joy of being a human

being even if humanity is in chaos.{Herbert, 1975 #82}

Until we give back to the black man just a bit of the land that was his, and give it

without provisos, without strings to snatch it back, without anything but complete

generosity of spirit in concession for the evil we have done him - until we do that, we

shall remain what we have always been so far, a people without integrity, not a

nation, but a community of thieves.

I'm suspicious of everybody and especially myself. {Herbert, 1975 #82}

Xavier Herbert, Darwin, 1980

154

Xavier Herbert (1 90 1-1984) Documentary

From humble beginnings on an outpost

of North-western Australia to

international literary figure: haunted by

his past, controversial writer, Xavier

Herbert, grapples with his inner demons

to write the Great Australian Novel.

Xavier and life partner, Sadie at the launch of

Poor Fellow My Country, 1975.

Xavier Herbert is the most controversial writer in Australian history. He is hilarious,

indignant, bullying, sexist, loving, revered and hated. He has an uncompromising

personal style which puts him outside the social norms and splits the opinions of

critics. Yet he contributed to Australian culture for most of the Twentieth Century.

This documentary looks inside·the writer of two prize-winning classics, Poor Fellow

My Country (1975) and Capricornia (1937), to discover what drove him to 'write the

hairs off his arms' 1•

The documentary follows Herbert's footsteps from where he is born in Geraldton in

Western Australia to the Eastern states, to Darwin, England, Far North Queensland

and A lice Springs. Throughout his life Herbert has intriguing modes of travel: he

jumps the rattler (where your eo-travellers might be a mob of sheep), hitches rides,

travels by sea and eventually sets up a solar-powered camping vehicle. This is a

cultural travelogue offering the audience the opportunity to examine the places he

loved, the landscapes he wrote and his relationships with the people in his life, in

particular his troubled relationship with his father.

Sadie Herbert, Xavier's life partner, is ever present in this story. She meets Herbert on

his way to England ('you had to go to England if you had any talent') when she is

returning home from a failed marriage. After a great shipboard romance with Xavier,

1 While writing his unpublished manuscript, Black Velvet, in London in 1931, Herbert says he wrote so furiously he wore the hairs off his arms.

155

the self confessed wild colonial lair, Sadie puts him in a London garret and makes

sure he is fed while he writes the first draft of Capricornia. Without her, he would

never have produced this prize-winning work or any others.

Another key person in Herbert' s life is Percy Trezise, adventurer and pilot. Percy has

everything Herbert could want in a friendship: a love of the bush, of flying and a

dramatic sense of humour. By the late 1950s, Herbert has not matched the success of

Capricornia, producing only a slow trickle of less successful novels. Their

relationship is the catalyst that inspires Herbert to write The Great Australian Novel.

Through scrutinising this rockY. friendship (all Herbert' s relationships are rocky) the

story dips back to a similar, earlier relationship Herbert has in the 1930s with P. R.

Stephensen, fellow ratbag and publisher of Capricornia. A pattern emerges. Herbert

is volatile and demanding, and when his idealised vision of these men is threatened,

Herbert turns on them with stinging spite. To find the source of this flaw, the story

dips back further into Xavier' s past.

Xavier is a critic of Australian society. This is his

main and most successful theme. But when he is in

his fifties he acknowledges that a lot of his writing

comes out of his uncertain feelings toward his own

father and toward fatherhood in general. In his

autobiographical novel, Disturbing Element,

Xavier portrays himself as an unwanted child whose

birth forces the involuntary union of his parents. He

is born under a cloud of confusion and innuendo.

His parents do not marry until little Alfred, as he is

named, is 16 years old, but that is not the only

reason he is labelled a bastard and not the only

Xavier Herbert pearl diving, 1927.

source of confusion. Xavier has two fathers - Ben Herbert, with whom Xavier could

never relate, and another, very mysterious, shadowy man, John Jackson, named on his

birth certificate.

At the end of his career Herbert writes Australia's Magnum Opus, the longest book

ever written in a European language, Poor Fellow My Country (half as long again as

156

the Old and New Testament and much longer than War and Peace). PFMC and his

other classic, Capricornia are highly innovative. They depart from traditional notions

of form and style and come from what Herbert calls his “deep purpose”. Xavier’s

work comes out of and is part of his life. It is a way of making sense of life for

himself and for his audience.

In writing about Australia, a country that clings to England while misusing its

Indigenous custodians, Herbert’s interpretation of his world is heightened by his early

personal experience. The story teases out the interplay between childhood experience

and creative sensitivity – what it is to be human. This documentary is not only an

investigation of Xavier Herbert; it is a journey of discovery, often hilarious and

sometimes confronting, into what connects us to Herbert’s passion.

Wendy Rogers, 2007.

157

Quotes from Xavier Herbert

I don't believe in any political party but I do believe in my species. I think we're the

wonder of the universe as far as we know and if there's anything more wonderful we'll

get hold of it and take it off them. We are very clever people. I do love being a human

being. I'm glad I wasn't born a donkey. And I shall die in the joy of being a human

being even if humanity is in chaos.

While it is the ‘Land of your Destiny’, as a place to live in & to write in, its mass is

the very substance of my being.

Letter: Xavier Herbert to Patrick White, 11.2.79.

Until we give back to the black man just a bit of the land that was his, and give it

without provisos, without strings to snatch it back, without anything but complete

generosity of spirit in concession for the evil we have done him - until we do that, we

shall remain what we have always been so far, a people without integrity, not a

nation, but a community of thieves.

I'm suspicious of everybody and especially myself.

Xavier Herbert, Darwin, 1980

158

Xavier Herbert

Documentary Series 4 x 26 min

This documentary series is a trip around Australia following the footsteps of the most

controversial public figure of the 20th

Century: the irascible writer, Xavier Herbert. It

investigates what drove Herbert to write his two Australian Classics: Capricornia

(1937/8) and Poor Fellow My Country (1975), the largest book ever written in a

European language. Well known republican, Greg Barnes, sets out on a trek that spans

the country from Geraldton, WA, to Darwin, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Redlynch

and London and finally to Alice Springs. The documentary uses reflections from the

presenter, readings from Herbert’s work and letters, images and textures of the places

Herbert loved and interviews with the people who knew him and his work to recreate

Herbert’s life. Throughout the series Herbert’s reconstructed voice pushes its way

through to the foreground to give his opinions and thoughts. The passion and force of

his words is unparalleled with his well-honed literary talent drawing us in to his story.

The backbone of the story is a journey lead by a presenter, someone like Greg Barnes,

republican and journalist, as he inquires into Herbert’s life: how and why did Herbert

write such a huge book, his Magnum Opus, Poor Fellow My Country? The presenter

brings the historical content of the story into the present. Barnes has a long

association with the republican movement and a particular interest in Herbert’s work.

He could bring a contemporary understanding to Herbert and how his writing and

passion relates to us. The quest spans most of the 20th Century, both World Wars, the

Great Depression, the literary world, Indigenous Land Rights, the republican

movement and the ‘Spirit of the Land’.

Each of the four parts is preceded with a collage: Dancing feet raise red dust,

statements of Herbert’s achievements according to Herbert and his many

commentators including Professor Laurie Hergenhan, friend and academic, Frances

Degroen, biographer, Sean Monahan, biographer, Professor Harry Heseltine,

academic and biographer, Dr Russell McDougall, biographer, Speedy McGinness and

Mim Morely, members of Herbert’s adoptive Aboriginal family and our presenter,

159

republican and writer, Greg Barnes. Xavier Herbert won the Sesqui-Centenary Prize

for Literature in 1938, the Gold Medal for Literature in 1940, the Miles Franklin

Award in 1976 and two doctorates.

‘There has never been a book like Poor Fellow My Country that conveys such a

complex and illuminating picture of a whole culture.’

‘It places Herbert as the greatest writer of landscape Australia has produced, his

narrative passages of imaginative force and vividness rarely equalled in Australian

literature.’

The opening sequence ends with the dancing feet and a woman’s voice saying, “We

came to say ‘mummuk’ to our uncle’s brother.”

160

Part 1: The Writer

Part one starts during Xavier Herbert’s unfruitful years between the two big books. It

is 1950. At this time he was suffering from writers block and a frustrating form of

cultural alienation. Herbert had a writing camp on Black Mountain, near his home in

Redlynch, North Queensland. At a similar, recreated camp the presenter reads from

Herbert’s journals and letters, sitting on a folding chair at a table with a loaded

typewriter, under an awning stretching out from the 4wheel drive vehicle in a scrubby

paddock. A horse looks on. Photographs of Sadie and Herbert. The camp tells a lot

about Herbert: his need for solitude and love of the bush, and it was just a half-hour

run to Sadie, his life partner, manager and confidant. Feet running through the bush:

Herbert runs for inspiration – to clear his head. He also abstains from sex (while he is

writing) believing this energy to be a vital ingredient for his creativity.

Herbert loved the horse which listened without complaint to everything he had to say.

Herbert was known for his ability to talk unceasingly for long periods. His voice starts

one such monologue that will resurface throughout the documentary as if he hasn’t

taken a breath. The horse listens to his theory of life’s destiny, particularly that his

mother treated him badly because he needed that experience to reach his full potential.

The story dips back into the past to Herbert’s childhood. The presenter is in Western

Australia: a long beach with a jetty jutting into the sea. Xavier was named Alfred, he

was from a working class family, his father a train driver, his mother a goldminer’s

daughter. The presenter takes us on to Melbourne, where Herbert first decides to write

about the frontiers of Australian life, and re-enacts parts of Herbert’s first great

overland trek to Darwin. On his way the presenter meets with people who knew

Xavier. There is a wide range of opinions about Herbert from sceptical to loving,

focussed, intelligent, inspiring, funny and scathing.

Using interviews and newspaper reports, the presenter creates a picture of Darwin,

1927, where Herbert gathers material from the pulsating, multicultural community

that will feed his first Great Australian Novel. A ship is ploughing through deep seas.

He leaves Australia for England with his growing manuscript under his arm and meets

Sadie Norden on the ship. They have a great shipboard romance.

161

The plot of our story returns to the fifties. The presenter introduces Ansett pilot, Percy

Trezise. An interview with Trezise: it is 1955 when the young Trezise wakes Herbert

from his cultural doldrums. They head off to the bush to uncover a rich collection of

Aboriginal rock art dotted throughout Cape York. The presenter is thrashing through

scrub. He is with Percy’s sons and local Aboriginal elders who guide him to the

places the two men found. It’s hot and hard going – they must have been fit. These

ancient paintings are entrancing. They had been there so long that the pigment is 7mm

deep in the rock.

162

Part 2: Capricornia and Aboriginal Rights

At the writer’s camp: There was a renaissance in Herbert’s writing in the late fifties-

early sixties, but he doesn’t repeat his success with Capricornia. Pages of a

manuscript feed a fire as Harry Heseltine talks: the books he wrote at that time, Seven

Emus (1959) and Soldiers Women (1963), were exercises - practise for the next Great

Australian Novel that Xavier had been dreaming of since Capricornia. Herbert’s

voice: That bastard book, Capricornia.

The presenter is in a small garret in London. It is a place like this where Sadie put him

up to write the first draft of Capricornia. It’s freezing. Herbert recounts ‘How I wrote

Capricornia’. Photographs of the Sadie and Herbert, a typewriter and the original

manuscript of Capricornia: It is 1932 and Sadie has coaxed Herbert to write in the

same way he tells his stories, and he does. It is unanimous amongst the experts:

Herbert would never have published his books if Sadie (or someone like Sadie)

wasn’t behind him.

The presenter introduces another character to the story: former-Communist-turned-

nationalist Inky (P. R.) Stephensen, publisher. Photographs of Stephensen: the

presenter visits the offices in Bond Street, Sydney, where P. R. Stephensen

established his publishing company. He interviews Craig Monro about this period

when Capricornia is prepared for publication the first time. Herbert and Stephensen

have a notoriously stormy relationship resulting in the melting down of tons of galleys

being prepared for the printing of Capricornia. Herbert flees the skulduggery he has

instigated against Stephenson and his ailing company, again to the north. He jumps

the rattler (and so does the presenter), hitches lifts, walks overland and catches a plane

toward the end of this second epic journey north.

In Darwin Aboriginal people talk about Herbert’s stint as Acting Supervisor of the

Khalin Compound, an institution integral to the dismantling of Aboriginal

communities, housing the stolen generations. Visiting the site reveals that it is now an

exclusive housing development, contrasting with the photographs of Sadie and Xavier

and Val McGinness standing before the poorly-built wooden buildings of the

compound. Herbert’s letters of the time testify to the terrible conditions of the place.

163

The land surrounding Darwin is on screen. It is 1936. Herbert is outspoken, criticising

government policies that have lead to such suffering. He is out of favour with

authorities and spends two years eking out a living, working on the docks and mining

the Lucy claim, a patch of land belonging to the McGinness family. Photographs of

Xavier, Sadie and Val McGinness dissolve to the presenter visiting the area with Mim

Morely, Val’s niece. Mim talks about the relationship her uncle and her family had

with Xavier that would last all of his life.

Photographs and newspaper articles: the publication of Capricornia has finally gone

ahead with Stephensen, now backed by the nationalist businessman, W. J. Miles. The

book wins the Sesqui-Centenary Prize for Literature. Friends of Herbert’s recount the

party he threw. The book is published in desperation, and at a great cost to Herbert

who loses his rights to Capricornia forever.

Photographs: Dymphna Cusack, Xavier and Sadie. Fame goes to his head. When they

move to Sydney, Herbert tries to leave Sadie for Cusack. Sadie knows Dymphna

doesn’t have what it takes to ‘keep him’ and eventually takes him back. It is not the

last time Herbert has a ‘fling’ but it’s the last time he tries to leave Sadie.

The presenter is at the camp at Black Mountain. He talks about the role P. R.

Stephensen played in Herbert’s emotional life. Herbert needed more than Sadie to

succeed, he needed a close male in his life as well; a total rebuilding of parental

relationships. Photographs of Trezise and Herbert, Herbert in a plane with Sadie:

Percy Trezise also had this role. Not only do he and Xavier have a common interest in

the bush and the Indigenous heritage of the country, Trezise gives Herbert access to a

passion for aviation. He lowers his age and learns to fly.

164

Part 3: The Family, Masculinity, Identity and the Republic

The presenter reads a story about flying that Herbert wrote in the early 60s. He heads

off in a Tiger Moth as the story unfolds: it is not only about flying, it is about

Herbert’s father, Ben Herbert. A man whose talents Xavier could never live up to.

Ben Herbert was a master horseman. Xavier was not. “Then and there, a man's

manhood was largely measured by his horsemanship.” His identity as a man is

restored by learning to fly at the age of sixty: “I resolved it with mastery of that mount

of all mounts for a modern man - the horse with wings, the aeroplane.”

Interviews with Degroen, Hergenhan, McDougall and Heseltine: Herbert had a lot of

unstable personality traits. He was a chameleon, socially and politically. His

childhood illness and family background pulled the rug from under the young

Herbert’s feet and his identity was compromised.

In W. A. Degroen talks about finding Herbert’s birth certificate. Interview with West

Australian researcher: Eddy Acklan has identified Jackson who was implicated in a

huge goldmining scandal in 1892-3. Photographs of the Londonderry Gold Mine,

newspaper articles, government records: an interview with Degroen and Acklan about

Herbert’s illegitimacy and the amnesty for paternal recognition when Herbert would

have found out something about his faked origins. How could Ben Herbert adopt the

younger David Herbert without doing the same for Xavier?

Images of the gold rush era, newspaper headlines, photograph of Amy: This piece of

legislation reflected a widespread tendency in the 19th

Century gold fields for couples

not to marry.

The presenter reads from Capricornia where Norman finds out about his Aboriginal

mother and his father-uncle. It is a hugely emotional and violent piece and could well

be a reference to Xavier’s own confusion. But why would he keep the secret all of his

life?

Archival footage of the Inauguration of the Federal Government plays over Herbert’s

voice: he is born in the same year as the birth of the Commonwealth of Australia. The

presenter asks a psychologist about Herbert. His strong feeling of destiny and

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identification with the country was a replacement for the family in which he didn’t

feel welcome.

Percy Trezise: “I lived seven years with that book.” Herbert is writing Poor Fellow

My Country. Feet running: This time Herbert is more careful. He courts the nurturing

support of Laurie Hergenhan to develop the attention of the mainstream academic

world.

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Part 4: The Spirit of the Land

Interview: In 1971 Percy receives the poison pen letter from Herbert. Xavier has cut

him off for accepting a Churchill Scholarship. “He hated Churchill and anything

British.” The presenter reads the letter. It is full of anger and heart-break. An

interview with Laurie Hergenhan reveals that Herbert dealt with many of his

disappointments with people in the same way. Like Stephensen when his publishing

company started to fail and later, Sir Zelman Cowan when he took the knighthood,

Trezise had let Xavier down.

Photographs of Xavier and Sadie at the launch of PFMC, Ken Wilder, Herbert with

Billy Collins. Ken Wilder: After Collins published PFMC they wanted to enter it into

the Miles Franklin Award. Sadie gives the go-ahead but ‘don’t tell him. He’ll be

thrilled if it wins.’ And it does. Wilder is astounded when Herbert, at the award

ceremony, abuses the ‘bunyip knights’ granting the award and the literary

establishment gathered for the event, as snobs, prigs and exploiters, all in front of the

whirring cameras and tape recorders. On leaving the ceremony he declared it to have

been the best night he’d ever had.

Monahan: Xavier was at his best when he wrote about what he loved most: Australia

and what he called the ‘Spirit of the Land’. The presenter reads from PFMC. It is a

passage where Delacy, travelling overland on foot by night, sleeping under bushes by

day, is returning home. He dreams of his Yalmaru. At his property near Laura, FNQ,

Percy tells the story of how Xavier dreamt that a huge Aboriginal man was his

Yalmaru, his spirit guide, it was so important to him that his unconscious had sent an

image of an Aboriginal man to be his guide. He felt a part of the country on the one

hand but knew he would never have the sense of belonging that his Aboriginal friends

had.

A small baby is lying in a cot: Xavier talks about his childhood illness. He would like

to think that the Aboriginal man who looked after him had ‘sung’ the ‘Spirit of the

Land’ into him.

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Percy Trezise: When Sadie died Herbert paid a huge price. They had kept themselves

secluded for years. Herbert was isolated. He couldn’t believe Sadie had died before

him.

Mim Morley talks about Herbert’s support for their land claim in Darwin, 1980.

Feet dance in the red dust. Herbert left all of his belongings except for his 4WD which

he drove to Alice Springs ‘to die in the centre of my beloved country.’ Speedy

McGinness talks about visiting Xavier at his writer’s camp outside of Alice Springs.

His hands are arthritic and Speedy massages them and does some typing for Xavier.

Herbert dies at the home of Dr Charles Butcher. Geraldton is the place of birth on the

death certificate.

Dr Charles Butcher, Mim Morely, Speedy McGinness, John McHugh, Pat Dodson

and a handful of others attend the funeral. No cameras and no press are present. Ti-

tree leaves and paperbark are used for ceremony. The house of Dr Butcher is smoked

to let Herbert’s spirit free.

Wendy Rogers, 2007.

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Story Arc

Great Australian writer, Xavier Herbert, overcomes life’s obstacles to

write the Great Australian Novel, twice.

Throughout his working life Herbert has a preoccupation with his own inner workings

as a creative genius. His thoughts are documented through his letters, his creative

writing and a journal which he commenced writing at the age of thirty-nine.

His early short stories and first novel, Capricornia, often follow the search of the

male character for his father and his identity. This is in direct parallel to Herbert’s life:

an obsession. Herbert has basic and tragic insecurities resulting from his early

childhood illness, the absence of proof of paternity of a birth certificate, rumours of

his illegitimacy and his father’s later inability to legally claim Xavier as his own

child.

Herbert develops a ‘need’ theory to explain life, particularly his own. In this theory he

states that everybody unconsciously recognises the needs of others and treats them

accordingly. He sees that his family treated him as they did (in not appreciating his

genius). For example he writes: “my brother would be compelled to drive me away

because my love for him isn't good for me.” He ponders life as a matter of destiny.

Likewise he writes to Sadie that his ‘horsing about’ (with women) ‘meant nothing

except experience for my wisdom to be.’ A little like the biographical subject of My

Architect (2006), Herbert is incapable of living within the strictures of society.

However, his theory of destiny is later tempered with a more responsible approach to

life.

Herbert is the irascible, unfaithful, chameleon unable to negotiate society without the

assistance of his wife and manager, Sadie Norden. Yet, by the time he writes his

second great classic, Poor Fellow My Country, the main character, Prindy, is self-

assured and following his own road. The book is deemed to be ‘a complex and

illuminating picture of a whole culture’: an Australian Classic. It is also criticised as

being a didactic vehicle for Herbert’s own pet themes.

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His major leap in self development seemed to be between 1959 and 1964. In that time

Herbert had become close to Percy Trezise, fellow ratbag and artist, in North

Queensland. It was through this relationship that Herbert learnt to fly and learning to

fly released Herbert from his own self image as a failure. is written up in the short

story, The Black Beast. In this incident Xavier comes up against his bete noir, the

flying instructor, who, in a way, represents his father. The flying experience is

parallelled with handling a horse of which he was a failure and his father an expert.

Xavier directly points to his attainment of flying skills as his way to conquer a

lifetime of self-doubt and shame to finally become his father’s equal.

Another epiphany he experienced was through his writing his autobiographical novel,

Disturbing Element (1963), not only by way of writing out the demons of the past, but

by visiting his childhood home in Western Australia while promoting the book. It was

on this journey that he wrote to Sadie (8 April 1964) saying he was shocked,

exhausted, depressed and excited to see the place again. ‘I have deep feelings about

this place - sheer hatred mixed up with love.’ In the same letter he tells her of his

‘victories in the female line ..... the victories being not getting into bed with them, but

not getting taken in by any.’ After years of philandering, this was a major

breakthrough for Herbert no matter how temporary (he sees one of his romantic

attachments, Nancy Wills, on the way back to Redlynch).

Also while in WA, Herbert is invited by Dame Mary Durack to a dinner party. Also at

the dinner party is Paul Hasluck, then a Federal Minister, and other writers. This is

enough to set off his old demons and the larrikin arrives very late and drunk at his

host’s event. Not only drunk, but riding his motorbike up the ramp and nosing it into

the dining room. Herbert proceeds to berate a number of the guests and climbs a tree

in the back yard. He only comes down at the behest of Durack’s daughter. This is a

typical reaction of Herbert’s to what he perceives to be high society. Not only does he

feel insecure in this landscape, he spurns everything it represents: the social-climbing

mother figure and the authority represented, in this case, by Hasluck.

This documentary examines the strengths Herbert develops to overcome his fatalistic

approach to life and weighs up his personal limitations against the immense

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contribution that his two main works provided to our society. It seems to be no

coincidence that he commences the drafting of Poor Fellow My Country in 1964,

soon after these events. The Australian Arts and society awareness are also

developing toward the seventies renaissance of which Herbert would be very aware.

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Xavier Herbert the Documentary

Final-Journey Structure

Points of intersection between this journey and earlier parts of Herbert’s life.

In January, 1984, Xavier Herbert decides to travel overland from Cairns to Alice

Springs in his 4WD. He declares he is making a final journey to the heart of his

country to die. This story follows Herbert on that trip through his last months in the

Centre and his funeral in Alice Springs.

• During his preparations for leaving Cairns, he says good-bye to his friends,

Percy Trezise (deceased but he has two sons who might have witnessed the

event), Robin Pill-Sinclair, John and Margaret McHugh, Robert Reid, etc.

These witnesses could give us some inside information about the man by

describing his farewell. They can be called on throughout the story to give

frank accounts of Herbert as we dip back into his life.

• On a previous journey (1935) overland to Darwin, after P. R. Stephensen’s

failure to publish Capricornia, “Herbert walked both to find himself and to

outstrip failure.” His final journey joins the same road he travelled in 1935 at

Cloncurry. He follows his own steps along the Flinders, then Barkly, Highway

from Cloncurry to Mary Kathleen, Mt Isa, Kalkadoon, Camooweal, Avon

Downs until, on his previous journey, he turned north onto the Tablelands

Hwy to Darwin. On this 1984 journey, Herbert turns south onto the Stuart

Hwy to travel to Ross River Station, 80 kms east of Alice Springs.

Via these geographical coincidences our story has the potential to go

anywhere in the Capricornia saga and his growing commitment to Indigenous

and nationalist issues.

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Map:

http://maps.google.com.au/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=Charters+Towers&sll=-

19.963023,144.486694&sspn=2.070338,3.702393&ie=UTF8&ll=-

20.13847,134.593506&spn=4.135538,11.008301&z=7&pw=2

(NB. Another previous journey to Darwin was from Cairns overland and by sea in

1927. On this occasion he went a route further to the north from Mareeba, jumping

the rattler and nearly losing his life crossing the flooded continent to Burktown alone.

This was the initial journey to Darwin to research what would become Capricornia

and the beginning of his involvement both with the McGinness family and Indigenous

issues. On crossing the border to the NT, he creates the name, Xavier Herbert, “finally

ready for his career of self-discovery, the true voice and discoverer of the Nation.”

The journey is written up after the writing of Capricornia. It may not suit our

purposes to depict anything of this journey but he could refer to it.)

At Ross River Station: Herbert’s last days as a writer

• Speedy McGinness, Val McGinness’ nephew (see list of main informants), is

working in the area and visits Herbert often while he is at his writing camp at

Ross River. Herbert’s arthritic hands are very painful and Speedy often

massages them and types for him. Herbert is still writing 6 hours a day

working on his never to be published autobiography, Me and My Shadow.

Their relationship is indicative of that which Herbert had with Val McGinness

who adopted him into the family as his brother. (Following carpal tunnel

surgery on his hands that Herbert’s health deteriorates and he moves in to

Alice Springs and stays with his doctor.)

• Also visiting Herbert at his camp at Ross River is Dave Richards, journalist.

Dave has a three hour interview with Herbert at Ross River after contacting

Herbert through the Alice Springs library. Dave Richards is still in Alice

Springs and would probably agree to an interview and a reconstruction of the

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Herbert interview. The resulting articles Dave wrote cover various opinions of

Herbert’s and biographical details.

• Closer to the funeral our story might jump to members of the McGinness

family (and other Kungarakan tribal members) in Darwin, preparing to take a

bus to Alice for Herbert’s funeral. Mim Morely, Val McGinness’ niece, and

others would probably consent to be interviewed about the ensuing funeral

ceremony and their ongoing relationship with Herbert over the decades.

(NB. In 1980, Herbert had given witness to the land claim the family were

involved in, establishing their presence on that land in the 1920s and 30s. “and

in illustrating the way officialdom had inhibited Aborigines from maintaining

their traditional cultural links with "country" by breaking up families and

forcibly removing them into government institutions.” Parts of his testimony

were included in Bringing them home: The 'Stolen Children' report (1997).

(There is currently another documentary being made about the McGinness

family’s enforced removal to South Australia during WWII.)