‘Absolutely mind-blowing’: David Gulpilil’s difficult journey to his final resting place

Warning: This story contains the name and image of an Indigenous person who has died.

When the great Indigenous actor David Gulpilil died four years ago, the many warm tributes reflected what a remarkable career he’d had since being cast as a teenager from a largely tribal Arnhem Land upbringing in the 1971 film Walkabout.

A Yolngu man of the Mandjalpingu clan, Gulpilil went on to be a charismatic presence – loose-limbed and riveting – in Storm Boy, Mad Dog Morgan, The Last Wave, Crocodile Dundee, Rabbit-Proof Fence, The Tracker, Australia and Charlie’s Country.

When the end neared after four years of treatment for lung cancer with “white fellas’ medicine” near Adelaide, he told his family and friends that he wanted his body to be taken to Gupulul, where he was born, in Arnhem Land.

“He was very clear to us that he wanted to be returned back home, which is important,” his eldest son, Jida, says. “We don’t have cemeteries. Wherever our families live and tribes live, we bury our people.”

But Gulpilil’s final journey was far from simple.

As shown in the documentary Journey Home, David Gulpilil, the challenge was taking his coffin more than 4000 kilometres to what has been called “the biggest wetland system in the southern hemisphere” during wet season.

It was a journey that started in a hearse driven from South Australia’s Murray Bridge to Darwin, then a flight to a mortuary in Nhulunbuy, north-east Arnhem Land, to wait for floodwaters to recede. At each stage of the trip, there were moving mourning ceremonies.

“I live in my land and my land lives in me,” Gulpilil says in the film. “We live together. There is nowhere else I can go. This is my home.”

The plan was to take the coffin to Gulpilil’s final resting place by car at the start of the dry season but, as complications arose, it was 10 months after his death when he was eventually laid to rest.

The documentary, directed by Maggie Miles and Trisha Morton-Thomas, is a fascinating insight into sacred Indigenous rituals – dances, music, and ceremonies – and a complex kinship system as communities expressed their grief for a much-loved elder.

Morton-Thomas says she was initially intrigued by how the family was going to carry off a challenging plan.

“They’re incredibly low income, they live right out in the Arafura Swamp,” she says. “They have to cross a crocodile-infested river to get there. And then when they do get there, there are no amenities.

“There’s a house, but there’s no kitchen, there’s no running water. But just the tenacity of these people, the energy and the ability to pull together such a large-scale event, was absolutely mind-blowing.”

Morton-Thomas felt it was important for viewers to get to know the man – “who he was to his family, who he was to his community, who he was to his ceremony and his land” – rather than just the screen star.

Miles wanted to honour Gulpilil as an Australian acting legend in the documentary.

“I felt that this was an incredible window into a part of Australia that many, many Australians will perhaps not be able to experience for themselves,” she says.

But doing that took much longer than expected.

“It was incredible the distance, the different cultural elements, the logistics and the seasonal elements [involved],” she says. “But it was a great invitation from the family for us to document this, because of David’s wish to be reunited with his homeland, that unbreakable connection between Yolngu and Country.”

Despite being exhausted, hot and hungry, Miles found it extremely moving when Gulpilil was finally buried as he had wanted.

“All the threads came together of all the stories that had been performed,” she says. “We were completely spent. It was amazing.”

Jida, who is studying to be a paramedic and is operations manager of tour company Gulpilil’s Australia, is now hoping to raise funds to build a new house next to his father’s bumbula (resting place), where his awards and memorabilia can be stored and his filmmaker and actor friends can visit to pay their respects.

By building a new airstrip and improving road and river access, Jida thinks there would be potential to bring in tourists as well.

“I felt proud of my family and our culture and our way of life and our ceremonies,” he says of fulfilling his father’s final wish. “It filled me with courage and strength to carry on his legacy and his name.”

Journey Home, David Gulpilil opens in cinemas on October 30.

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