Rachel didn’t want to tell her great-grandmother’s story. Now strangers thank her for it

The moment Rachel Perkins sits down at the Redfern eatery Bush, Burl, the restaurant dog makes a beeline for her, running excitedly and jumping onto her lap to lick her face as if she’s a long-lost friend.

The award-winning Indigenous filmmaker and writer has never eaten at this native produce-themed diner before despite the fact Blackfella Films, the production company she founded in 1992 was based nearby, and she spent a lot of time in this suburb while directing several episodes of the ABC TV series Redfern Now.

The rat terrier who had never met her until today only has eyes for her. The Perkins charisma, for which her father, Indigenous leader and 1965 Freedom Ride organiser Charlie was famed, is undeniable. Even dogs, it seems, can sense it.

She splits her time between nearby Newtown, where she lives with her 15-year-old son Arnhem, and a home in Alice Springs, her father’s birthplace and where she began her film-editing career at Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA).

“I’d love a dog,” she says, enthusiastically patting the canine. “But that’s not possible living in two places.”

For a while, it looks like it might be lunch with Rachel and Burl, at this pet-friendly establishment, until chef-owner Grant Lawn, whisks his pooch out back, and waiter Charlie Band comes to take our order.

The 55-year-old filmmaker has directed and produced some of our most successful First Nations films including Radiance, Bran Nue Dae, and Jasper Jones, as well as television dramas such as Total Control and Mystery Road. We are not here to talk about her film work, but a new book The Australian Wars, based on her 2022 three-part documentary of the same name.

After SBS aired the series, which examined the bloody battles fought on Australian soil after colonisation, five publishers approached her to edit a book on the subject. “That had never happened to me before,” she says as our drinks arrive, homemade sodas so good we both order seconds (though I realise later Bush didn’t charge us for them). My oysters with finger lime arrive at the same time as her filo pastry, called a saltbush spliff.

Perkins’ publishing debut, First Australians, in 2008, co-edited with Indigenous Professor Marcia Langton, is also based on a Blackfella Films production and remains the highest-selling educational title in Australia.

Her second book uses experts whose research underpinned the narrative in her TV series, like historians Henry Reynolds and Stephen Gapps, Professor Langton and Wiradjuri scholar Mina Murray, and writers like Torres Strait Islander Thomas Mayo, and David Marr, whose ancestors served with the Queensland Native Police. It is the first book to tell the story of the continental sweep of massacres, guerilla warfare, resistance and the contests of firearms and traditional Aboriginal weaponry as Indigenous nations resisted colonial occupation of their lands, territory by territory. It’s ordered geographically and chronologically since colonisation; each chapter begins with a local Indigenous voice.

It is estimated up to 100,000 people died in the frontier wars that raged across Australia for more than 150 years. This is equivalent to the combined total of all Australians killed in foreign battles to date. The Tasmanian chapter by historian Nicholas Clements details the “Black Line” of 1830 where more than 2000 heavily armed European settlers, convicts and soldiers formed a human chain to capture Indigenous Tasmanians or kill them. Clements calls it “the largest military offensive ever undertaken on Australia soil”.

Despite the difficult subject, it was so easy to read that I tell her I devoured the book in a day and learnt more about Indigenous history than in my entire Australian primary, secondary and tertiary education.

“Same here,” she says. “We all grew up knowing about the American civil rights movement, the US Civil War, but this has been overlooked. It’s the great whitewashing of Australian history.”

Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon woman, was born and raised in Canberra, to where her professional soccer-playing father, the first Indigenous person to graduate from university, had moved for work with wife Eileen and young family. She learnt nothing of Indigenous history in classes at Canberra’s Melrose High and, although she virtually grew up at the tent embassy, she only pieced together her own history from shards of family stories her father told.

Her Arrernte great-grandmother Nellie Araka was a survivor of a massacre in Central Australia, at a place that is still marked on maps as “Blackfellows Bones”. Hundreds of these sites of violence are laced across the continent, writes Perkins. Araka was chained to a tree and raped by policemen. She took shelter with an Irishman with whom she had children, and one of those children, Perkins’ grandmother, Arrernte elder Hetty Perkins recounts the awful details in a poignant recording that is played to close the TV version of The Australian Wars. She was hesitant about including herself and her family’s story in the documentary, until she asked writer Don Watson to help her craft a script for telling it.

“I was really reluctant and uncomfortable about appearing in the TV series. But I just thought in this instance it was relevant because it’s my story, and I could see the way it would work for television. I just have never wanted to have that role. I don’t like public life very much at all.”

People now stop her in the street and thank her for telling that story, so it seemed a good place to begin the book. She says like many children of public figures, she doesn’t like the spotlight because she remembers the intense pressure this placed on her dad.

As someone more comfortable behind the camera than in front of it, she scans the room for visual cues as if she were filming: a Hermannsburg pot, a table hewn from a tree trunk, a pink waratah. Over mains, my bush burger and her Warrigal greens pasta, she tells me how much she still misses her father.

Charlie Perkins was sent to a boys’ home for schooling in South Australia, was selected to play state soccer there, then English first division and eventually captained Adelaide Croatia, before moving to Sydney to play for the team that would become Sydney Olympic FC.

“Ted Noffs took him under his wing, advised him to go to uni and sort of mentored him, helping organise the Freedom Rides. Ted was the father figure that dad never really had, and he baptised all of us children at the Wayside Chapel.”

In 1969, her father began his Commonwealth public service career, heading what became the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1972, the same year he underwent a kidney transplant. At the time of his death in 2000 aged 64, he was the longest post-transplant survivor in Australia.

“It’s so tragic that he died so young,” she says. Even a quarter of a century on, she feels a moral obligation to continue his work. “He said to me once ‘you should go to Hollywood and make movies, do whatever you want’. Because he didn’t want his children to be limited in any way. He used to say the world is your oyster. My son recently said to me, I would like to get into Indigenous affairs. And, I was like, you know, you don’t have to do that. You can just live your life and be free.”

Their father’s legacy continues in her work, and that of her sister Hetti’s, a former Art Gallery of NSW Indigenous curator, who now runs Alice Springs-based art festival Desert Mob, and brother Adam, a former stockbroker now chair of the Charlie Perkins Scholarship Trust. She’s close to her nieces and nephews, artist Thea Anamara Perkins and Hollywood actor Maddie Madden among them.

“We all had this yearning for Alice we sort of inherited from dad. We’d go back at Christmas time on these epic 3000-kilometre, red-dirt road car rides to see family, and whenever dad would get kicked out of the department for being an ‘uppity black’ for calling out racism. Even though we spent a lot of time in Canberra, it never really felt like our home.”

What she does remember about Canberra is visiting the Australian War Memorial on primary school excursions and being deeply affected by it. She returned there for the first time to film The Australian Wars, when she got to ask the top brass why there was no mention of the Australian wars and all the fallen on our soil.

She has asked this question many times before of cultural gatekeepers and the answer is usually a variation on a theme. As she says in the foreword to her book, she is told the National Museum is “the place that we should take the commemoration of the dead and our stories, apparently to sit along the stuffed crocodiles, dinosaur skeletons and 1960s cars on display”.

Since then, there’s been some change at the memorial. A year or so after the series went to air, it announced a shift in policy, and there are now plans afoot to more fully represent the warfare that is described, in both Perkins’ book and documentary. Indigenous woman Lorraine Hatton is on the memorial council, and Kim Beazley is now its chair. Reynolds, the historian, hopes the memorial will one day be home to a tomb for Indigenous warriors who died in the frontier wars. Perkins just hopes in her lifetime there will be some acknowledgement at the memorial, for those who with no graves, but who died in wars that determined Australia’s sovereignty.

The book will be launched nationally this month including, significantly, at Canberra’s War Memorial on November 14. “Some things change and some stay the same,” she muses. “Incredibly some still deny these wars. In Queensland, they just shut down a truth-telling process.”

Other than editing this book, Perkins has, unusually for her, no major projects on the boil. She left Blackfella Films in 2022 and is now chair of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School. She says she needed time to “lie fallow” after the failed 2023 referendum on the Indigenous Voice and the exhausting six years it took to film The Australian Wars.

“It [the referendum] was sort of like a death, and I suppose it was the death of an ideal, a movement ... I did think a lot about dad during and after the referendum because he helped write a whole report on constitutional recognition and it never saw the light of day … He made a lot of attempts for Indigenous recognition that got killed off. I wondered how he was able to pick up the pieces and just keep going.”

She jokes the answer may lie with “that terrible racist” Rudyard Kipling whose poem, If, was an inspiration. She then recites the words:

“‘If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken, Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools – which was so much the referendum – watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools ’… he used to love that poem because he’d done so much of that in his life … stooping down … beginning again. I never wanted to understand what it meant, but now I do.

“You have to stoop down, pick up broken tools and begin again. I’ve learnt that lesson, and I’m doing the same thing now.”

As I reach for the bill, I realise I’ve just dined with one of Australia’s most significant storytellers whose next book deserves to be on home bookshelves and school curricula across the nation. Burl follows her to the door, keeps her in his gaze and gives a little mournful yelp as she disappears.

The Australian Wars, edited by Rachel Perkins, is out today.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.