‘Going Back’: Journeys with David MacDougall’s Link-Up Diary

Abstract

Imagine there'd been a battle on a battlefield. It's over, and people are moving away. But the wounded are still lying out there. Well, someone must go back for those wounded. What we're doing is going back for the wounded and bringing them with us because they can't be left back there.1 This paper analyses several journeys of memory and 'return' that are derived from ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall's2 1987 feature-length documentary film, Link-?? Diary. The first section of the paper addresses the history and social issues that lie in the film's content. The second section analyses the film further via the text of a conversation held about the film in 2007 and the third continues with my analysis of how the film and this conversation interact. The primary journey described in this paper is the one represented in the film: the week-long car trip from Canberra to Sydney in the 'Link-Up Falcon'3 undertaken by the Link-Up New South Wales team as it was constituted in 1983 - Coral Edwards, historian Peter Read and trainee Robyn Vincent together with David MacDougall. When the film was made, the Link-Up organisation had been formally in operation for two years.4 Link-Up Diary is a testimony to Australia's Aboriginal 'Stolen Generations' and therefore is embedded in those memories of loss and grief experienced by Aboriginal children and their families who were separated from each other according to Austrahan Government pohcy and interventions, predominantly during the first half of the twentieth century.5 Through this film, we also witness the story of the early days of the Link-Up organisation and the personal cost of working for Link-Up at that time; it is an organisation now run solely by Aboriginal people, to assist in reuniting Aboriginal families.6 Link-Up Diary was one of the first pubhc acts of communication that addressed this conflictembedded issue. As well as describing the context and historical significance of the film, my account of the various journeys of the film Link-Up Diary includes other journeys of memory, recollection and interpretation. The journey of interpretation is my own; I viewed the film many times, interviewed MacDougall and Read in 1999 and included my analysis of the film as part of my doctoral thesis. My personal, intellectual and emotional journey of interpretation permeates the third journey: a journey of recollection that occurred when MacDougall, Read, ANU scholar Ursula Frederick and I met in 2007 and recorded our discussion of Link-Up Diary and some of the times and places it represents. This paper emerged from another journey of recollection and exposure: a screening of excerpts from the film at the 'Cruising Country' symposium in Canberra in 2005, which included all the memories that the film evoked in the people present. MacDougall and Read attended this event. The screening was introduced by Read speaking the words of Stolen Generations member Sharon Condren, which included reflections on her own journeys in a Link-Up vehicle. The Stolen Generations7 The historical dislocations of Austrahan Indigenous people, and especially the taking away of their children as the enactment of pohcy, occurred most significantly from early in the twentieth century and continued into the 1960s. These separations and dislocations were endorsed by pohcies of both Commonwealth and State Governments. The histories and stories of this cataclysmic separation of Indigenous families entered the wider pubhc arena of debate and political action only during the 1990s. Link-Up Diary was made during a period when the Stolen Generations were still coming to conceptualise themselves through this identity term. Read powerfully describes how LinkUp contributed to a turning point for Aboriginal people, when they realised that they had been accepting various governments' bureaucratic lies about themselves and their families. In Read's words: Think back to the early Eighties: no one knew bugger-all about this. …