Spoiler Alert: Just as the movie now contains a warning at the beginning for Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders that there is depiction of images and the names of persons now deceased, this article contains a warning that what follow contains spoilers. Do not read the article if you do not want key moments, scenes and the ending revealed.
In the early 1960’s my mother and father took my brothers and I out each Sunday for “The Outing”, which usually consisted of driving somewhere and having fish and chips. Sometimes the trips were further afield and more varied: a day at the beach, fishing in the Hawkesbury River, or sometimes a trip to La Perouse to watch the “Snake Man”, the chap who handled the snakes and lizards. La Perouse was populated almost entirely by aboriginals in those days. I can remember watching the black kids dive for coins thrown from the wharf into the water by the white tourists.
It was in about the mid 1960’s when I first saw Jedda, on TV. My mother did not let my brothers and I go to movie theatres because of her conviction that they were used by teenagers as “passion pits”. She was right but only for the back of the theatre. Still, my mother and the mother in Portnoy’s Complaint have a lot in common.
Even then Jedda struck me as a strange, powerful and mystical movie, unlike any others that were on the TV at the time. Remember that this was the days of Bonanza, Father Knows Best and Skippy. The referendum to change the Constitution to count aboriginals as part of the population was still a few years away, that happening 1967.
