2023 High Ground – Response to Boobook Exam Q1

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Boobook Exam – 2023

TOPIC i: High Ground by Stephen Johnson (director)
‘As well as villains on both sides, there are heroes on both sides in High Ground.’
Discuss.

Stephen Johnson’s 2020 revisionist historical drama High Ground uses the conventions of the Western form to position characters as heroes and villains. The massacre of a mob of Yolngu tribespeople establishes the deep divisions between white interlopers and traditional land owners. Rupturing the continuity of Yolngu life, the 1919 massacre is perpetrated by colonialist villains such as McGuiness and Eddy. Silencing the truth, Moran, the presiding police officer, also self-nominates as one of the ‘bad men’. Equally capable of violence, Baywarra’s retaliatory antics twelve years after the initial massacre confirm his profile as an antagonist. Unable to trust the colonial usurpers who silence the past as a form of self-protection, Baywarra is motivated by vengeance. His response counters Grandfather Dharrpa’s trust in traditional tribal lore. The heroic nobility of the elder statesman establishes him as the presiding moral voice in the text. The system of Makarrata and its enshrined practices of consistency and balance become the means by which individuals and culturally incompatible groups can hope to reconcile past wrongdoing. Refusing initially to advocate for the victims, Travis traverses the East Arnhem land country, taking up the occupation of crocodile hunter. Negating binaries that reinforce the hero/villain trope, Travis instead, is presented as a flawed character capable of both good and evil. Choosing to save Gutjuk first as a young victim of the massacre and then in the concluding gun battle, Johnson eschews the idea that people can change. In turn, Travis’s actions catalyse Gutjuk’s development, choosing his grandfather’s heroic path rather than his uncle’s villainous route. The observational lens of his namesake, ‘the hawk’ affords him the power of insight. Finally, the remoteness of the Australian interior contributes to the binaries that solidify the status of individuals as either heroic or villainous. Needing a hero to reinstate balance and continuity, Gutjuk’s application of Makarrata offers a way forward where healing perhaps, suggests Stephen Johnson, can lead to the creation of a new paradigm not defined by heroes and villains but by justice and fairness.