Audrey Napanangka Director Penelope McDonald. Photo by Dylan River.

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Filmmaker Penelope McDonald’s intimate documentary, Audrey Napanangka, showcases the heartwarming story of Warlpiri woman, Audrey Napanangka and her Sicilian partner Santo as they navigate through colonial systems to keep the children they care for together.

Audrey Napanangka was born at a time when the world was changing for the people in the Central Australian Desert.

Settler colonisation was permeating the desert and forced changes and the fusion of two worlds shifted Audrey’s life forever.

Today, Audrey raises young people to walk in many worlds, by centering culture, language, and Law in their lives alongside mainstream education.

The intimate footage filmed over 10 years in Mparntwe (Alice Springs), Yuendumu and Audrey’s Warlpiri country Mount Theo, showcases a heartwarming story about the power of kinship and family in what is known as Australia

Penny McDonald is an award-winning producer (Buckskin, SFF 2013, My Mother India, SFF 2002, My Bed Your Bed SFF 1992, Night Cries Cannes 1990) and director (Too Many Captain Cooks SFF 1989). She has worked in the industry for over 35 years. 

A directing and producing graduate of the Australian Film Television and Radio School, Penelope has directed documentaries including Too Many Captain Cooks, Travelling Warlpiris and Kamira: Pina Yanirlipa Ngurrarkurra, and the short dramas Life on Earth as I Know It and for television Safe Home. 

As a creative producer, she has been closely involved with the story of each production she has been involved with. In 2019 she produced First Nations Bedtime Stories, which aired on NITV. She produced Dylan River’s first documentary, Buckskin, which won the Sydney Film Festival Foxtel Award. She produced Safina Uberoi’s My Mother India, which also won the equivalent award, as well as numerous others nationally and internationally. 

Other documentary producing credit’s include Mike Rubbo’s Much Ado About Something and Warwick Thornton’s Photographic Memory. Drama credits include many Indigenous short films, including Warwick Thornton’s first dramatic short Payback, Erica Glynn’s My Bed Your Bed and My Mother My Son, and Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries: A Rural Tragedy.

She stepped out of direct filmmaking from 2004 to 2016, to be the inaugural director of the Northern Territory Government’s agency Screen Territory.

Audrey Napanangka will screen at CinefestOZ on Thursday, 25 August. Details here. A general release date will be announced soon. 

Santo, Penelope and Audrey Napanangka. Photo by Dylan River.

“These services often see these community members as a number almost. They don’t see the whole person. I was just appalled by some of these things I saw happening to Audrey and they made me want to shine a light on it.

Interview by Matthew Eeles

You were born in Newcastle, but you grew up in South Korea. What was that experience like for you?
It was pretty amazing, actually. I look back and think how lucky I was to have the childhood I had because I was living as a minority in another culture. My parents were very active and we used to go on holidays a lot. It was a very unusual childhood for an Australian child. I actually went there when I was six, and came back to Australia when I was a teenager. At a time when your intellect is kicking in, it was a really great experience for me.

Do you still carry some of that South Korean culture with you today?
Oh, absolutely. I love kimchi. I love Korean food and I’ve been happy that, in the intervening years, more Korean restaurants have opened up in Australia. We came back here in 1970 and since then there are many more Korean restaurants. There were virtually none when we came back. We made our Korean food, the family. Also, Korean cinema has really shot ahead in the decades since and has become a leading light in cinema. I know a few words of Korean still. I have lots of great memories really. I think it made me very open to other cultures which is always a good thing because Australia has become more and more multicultural. It taught me to celebrate difference, and not to expect everybody to be the same

Were you actively consuming Korean screen culture while you were there?
No, but I remember the first lot of money I saved up to buy something was to buy a still camera. A llittle brownie camera. I’ve still got some of the photos I took then. So I was beginning to frame the world and I was beginning to think about poetry and expressing one’s response to the world. My parents had a Super 8 camera. They were very early adopters of Super 8. We always had a camera around. We’ve got lots of movies. I was always either in front or behind the camera from a very early age.

What brought you back to Australia at that time?
My father wanted to bring us back. I think he didn’t want to send us to boarding school. The project he originally went to Korea for had finished and so we came back at a time when we were entering high school. Then we lived in Sydney for a while, then we lived in Central West New South Wales, in Forbes. Then I left there to go to university in Sydney and my parents came back to Sydney shortly after.

You studied at AFTRS, like so many great Australian filmmakers, both emerging and established. How did you go with your studies?
Oh, it was fantastic. I just grabbed it with both hands and I did every course I could. I did both directing and producing there. I was able to direct some drama work and some documentaries. There were some great teachers who were really inspiring teachers who exposed us to different cinema, like Russian cinema. That was really interesting. And just the friends and colleagues that I met because we worked really long hours and worked intensely on each other’s films. You just got to know lots of people and they still remain friends and colleagues today. When I was living in Darwin, there weren’t many filmmakers in Darwin at the time. There were people who’d fly in to make films. And for me being a female, I think it’s harder in this industry for women to be taken seriously if that’s what you wanted to do. Going to film school was a really good thing for me as a young woman. When I was at film school Tony Ayres was there at the same time and Kriv Stenders was there just a little bit before me. Gina Roncoli, Lisa Scott. The majority are still in the film industry. They aren’t all, but the majority are, and a majority are making amazing films on the basis of what they learned there. It was a really positive thing for the majority of people. I was there when it was quite selective with quite a small number of students. So it was quite intimate in a way that you got to know the other students quite well.

Audrey Napanangka. Photos by Dylan River.

You first met Audrey Napanangka in the early 80s. Can you take us back to that time and tell us how and where this encounter came about.
I was actually living in Lajamanu, which is the small community of about 600  Warlpiri nation people living at the top of the Tanami desert. So it’s very, very remote. I’d gone there and I chose to go to a bilingual school, a school where they were still teaching in the Warlpiri language. I thought that was important. So I was living there and I was using the phone a lot because we didn’t have telephones, nobody had mobile phones. I used to go and ring my family and friend in various parts of Australia over what we called VJY. It had to be connected and you had to wait for your turn to talk. Audrey was operating the phone, she was in charge of it. So I got to know Audrey. She was the telephonist and because I was alone there, I didn’t have a partner with me, I guess I made a lot of calls. [Laughs]. I think I had the second highest bill for the year, another friend of mine had the highest bill. [Laughs]. So I got to know Audrey and she was just such a confident, beautiful young woman. She just had a way about her. She had such a sense of fun. We clicked then, and we remained in contact over the years since, even though we haven’t always seen each other, because I went off to film school after that. I was in Sydney, I’ve lived in Darwin, but we’ve always kept in touch. And now I’m in Alice Springs where she is as well.

Audrey Napanangka was ten years in the making. When and why did you decide you wanted to make a film about Audrey?
I was living in Alice Springs and I was making a film and we needed somebody to act. It was like a corporate communications video. We needed someone to act in it and I thought Audrey would be brave enough to do that. There weren’t many indigenous actors at that time, and I certainly didn’t know any in Alice Springs. So we asked her and she said yes. She did that and went from that to her having roles in lots of different films. She was in Green Bush, Samson & Delilah, Nulla Nulla, Rabbit Proof Fence, Kings in Grass Castles. Lots of different productions. So I just thought she’s a really interesting woman. She’s used to being in front of the camera. At first I thought we’d actually have a lot of archive footage from those films in Audrey Napanangka, and that would be a link in that, but we didn’t have time for that. I was living in Alice Springs and we’d sort of reignited our friendship, as in I was seeing her more often, and I was seeing what was happening in her life. She had a couple of children that she was looking after and one day these children were taken away. I was so surprised when that happened. I just had walked beside Audrey a lot, and I thought she’s so interesting because she’s always got a sense of humour. Whenever something happens, she picks herself up and goes on. She’ll take on bureaucracies. Like she’ll say if people do the wrong thing, “I’m gonna go to ABC about that ill treatment.” We do live in a community where there are a lot of institutions involved like schools and hospitals and family and children’s services. These services often see these community members as a number almost. They don’t see the whole person. I was just appalled by some of these things I saw happening to Audrey and they made me want to shine a light on it. I spoke to her about it and she was in, so we just began filming. It took a long time partly because it takes a long time to raise the money for a film like this. You do a lot of the filming first, and then you have to put it all together which costs money. I’m very fortunate that Audrey was willing to share her life. She would never share something she didn’t want to. Also, we respect each other, so she’ll tell me if she doesn’t want to talk about something.

Was Santos, her partner, as open to filming as Audrey was?
Oh yes. He loved it. [Laughs]. He loved being part of the film. Santo is very friendly. He’s well known in Alice Springs. He’s very friendly, and he was very open to it. Audrey and Santos have a loving relationship and he’s very proud of her. He’s proud of the film. Audrey is a prolific painter, so he’s very proud of that as well.

I love that this film follows such broad aspects of Audrey’s life, and it doesn’t just focus on the negative like so many documentaries are guilty of. It’s a romance, a comedy, a drama and a tragedy all in one. How important was it for you to show all of these aspects of Audrey’s life and not just focus on one?
It was very important because Audrey’s a complex person who lives a complex life. I certainly wanted it to be a film that, at the end of it, an audience could walk away from feeling positive. I want audiences to feel that they could perhaps see the world slightly differently as a result of seeing the film. We could have focused on one aspect or another, and that was a challenge as well, because you can only fit so much into an 84 minute film. There’s a lot of things, obviously that haven’t ended up in the film, but finding the right shape took quite a while during the editing and mining through all the material. We had lots of really good material. I think there was about 130 minutes of footage.

Audrey and her family. Photo by Dylan River.

If you could pinpoint one thing about Audrey’s psychology that made her so willing to foster so many children, what would it be?
Audrey sees herself as opening up her heart and home where children need a safe place. From the first time I met her, she was in her early twenties, she was looking after a young girl, Charmaine. So she’s always had children in her life. She just loves looking after them. She’s a great role model as well because she’s strong and she lives an honest and good life. She’s a great role model for children. All the children that she’s looked after are relatives of Audrey from her extended family. She looks after children for a few months or a few years, not necessary from zero to 18, but there’ve been several that she’s looked after in that way for the whole duration. Lots of people call Audrey, mum. What’s so beautiful is that she’s not generally officially fostering them, which is a government process. She’s just looking after them. The only one who was actually fostered was a disabled boy that she brought up so that he was with family. She looked after him until he became an adult and she could no longer look after him. She still sees him, but he’s in institutional care now.

What were the results, if any, of Audrey’s protest in Canberra?
We’re still watching. There are more First Nations kids being taken into foster care than ever before. So the Grandmothers Against Removals was a tight group for a while, but they’re all older. So they come together at times when they need to. There’s a lot more to be done in that space. Audrey succeeded in getting her children back, but only with a fight in the courts and finding out that the grounds on which they were taken was spurious. I think more could be done in terms of support for families. That would make a lot of difference rather than taking children away. I think for me, it would be so sad if those children hadn’t come home because they’re loved, they’ve learned a lot of language, they’re in their family. Who doesn’t want to be in their family if you’ve got a good family? The attitude was that if Audrey and Santo can’t do it on their own, then we’ll take them away. And yet they pay foster carers money to look after them. So it just doesn’t make sense when removing a child is the outcome. There are many studies of the outcomes for children that are taken from their homes. And they’re generally not that positive.

Is Audrey recognised within the community for this good deed? Do people know her walking down the street
Oh, yes. Very much so. Audrey is very well known in Alice Springs. That was an interesting thing about making the film. I’d say, “I’m making a film about Audrey.” And people would say, “Oh, Audrey Audrey?” [Laughs]. She’s very, very warm and friendly and a lot of people know her.

Audrey Napanangka soundie Will Sheridan, Penelope McDonald and Dylan River. Photo by Dylan River.

Your son, Dylan River, is one of this country’s best cinematographers. He’s credited as a writer on the film, but did he pick up a camera at all to help during the shoot?
Oh yeah. [Laughs]. Dylan was a great support in making this film. He shot the early footage, which we began filming in 2012. He did that, and he’s come in and out doing filming depending on his availability and what we were doing. Sometimes I’ve done the filming alongside various other people, but Dylan was also involved with different ideas for the film, and talking structure and looking at edits of the film with me. He’s been a great support. It’s lovely to work with Dylan.

You must be thrilled to watch his career thrive.
I’m very proud of both my children. They learn from me and I learn from them. It’s a nice phase of our lives right now.

You produced Dylan’s first documentary, Buckskin. How much has he grown as a filmmaker from your point of view, both as a mother and a producer?
He’s gone forward in leaps and strides. He works very hard. He’s always open to learning and collaborating and it’s great to see him developing into the storyteller that he is now. I watch everything he does, and I’ve been involved with various projects as well. When he was making his short film, Nulla Nulla, which was his first funded short drama, he was looking for actors. He gave me the script and asked me if I would talk to Audrey and her friends about being in it. Audrey is great in the film. She’s also in Dylan’s Robbie Hood, the series he made for SBS and NITV. The three of us sort of come together on some projects every now and then, and we probably will again.

You filmed some of the documentary yourself, and you called upon others to help during the shoot. Who were some of those other cinematographers you worked with?
Justine Kerrigan was a cinematographer, and she’s wonderful to work with. And Shane Mulcahy, who’s based here. Anna Cadden, who was living here, she’s now in Tasmania. Bonnie Scott and Miriam Williams who’s also in the film. She turned the camera on herself which was great. We got permission for her to take a camera in to Alice Springs Correctional Centre which was great to keep a bit of video diary. I feel very blessed in regards to who worked on this project. I had three fabulous editors, like top Australian editors, and we only had three just because it took so long. I had different sound recorders as well, and David Bridie was the composer, and Liam Egan did the sound design. Liam and I went to film school.  Half the fun of making this film was hanging out with these people. [Laughs].

You can certainly tell this film was such a large collaboration of talent because the quality of it is so good. All of that talent really shines on screen.
That’s right. I feel lucky really. When I was doing the final post, I almost skipped to the edit room because I was working with people who I loved working with. There’s some really good industry people involved who are really at the top of their game. I feel lucky to have worked with them.

Earlier you mentioned your passion for Super 8. There’s a bit of Super 8 work in this film with the flashback scenes to Audrey’s earlier life. Can you tell us about shooting those scenes? They look so great in the film.
That was so much fun. I had so much fun doing that. I was the cinematographer of those Super 8 scenes. It was so much fun. The woman playing Audrey as a young woman, that’s her granddaughter. I’d seen her and I thought, “Gosh, she looks a lot like Audrey.” I took a photo of them sitting next to each other and thought they looked so alike. That’s Alana, her granddaughter. And the really young girl in those shots, the baby who’s being smoked in the film, that’s Audrey’s other granddaughter who was born during the making of the film. She’s now about six years old. So that was a nice thing as well that they were all family. We’d done some tests a couple of years ago and I came back to Alice Springs partway through the edit once we knew exactly what I wanted and where it would go. It was lots of fun. We found an old car for those scenes. A friend has an old Holden and that was perfect to use. I found that the costumes, and everything else was done in a very short space of time.

How’s the family now? Do you have any updates since you concluded filming?
They’re thriving. Audrey’s at home actually. Both of the children are away at boarding school. That’s because Audrey’s older now. That was decided that that’s the best way forward for the children at the moment, but they come back and they look forward to going out to community when they come back on holidays and being with their cousins and family. They’re thriving and enjoying going around with the film which we’re doing. I’m bringing the family where I can to show the film.

Audrey Napanangka will screen at CinefestOZ on Thursday, 25 August. Details here. A general release date will be announced soon.