The Fringe Dwellers

Clip 1: ‘As much right as anybody’

Taken from the feature The Fringe Dwellers (1986)

Original title classification PG – this clip chosen to be PG

Please be aware that this clip may contain the names, images and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may now be deceased.

Curator’s clip description

The girls walk into a cafe for milkshakes. They are told to drink them at the counter. Trilby (Kristina Nehm) urges her family to sit down in a booth. The white patrons taunt them with racist remarks.

Curator’s notes

This scene establishes how Trilby and her family are positioned within society, and the racism that informs this experience.

Romaine Moreton, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows the interactions between a young Indigenous girl, Trilby (Kristina Nehm), members of her family and non-Indigenous residents in a small Australian country town in the 1980s. It opens with Trilby encouraging her companions to enter a cafe where Indigenous people do not normally go. Their presence is greeted with hostility although one customer defends their right to be there. This scene is intercut with a scene in the local hospital where Trilby’s sister Noonah, a nurse, is embarrassed when her mother arrives to see her.

Educational value points

The clip exposes racism in small-town Australia in the 1980s at the same time as challenging the potential racist assumptions of the audience. Racism is expressed openly through language as well as covertly through looks and glances in both the hospital and the cafe scenes. However, the racism of the cafe patrons, and perhaps the audience, is challenged when the male customer defends the right of Trilby and her friends to be in the cafe.

The experience of racism is depicted clearly in the clip. The town appears to have areas that are ‘no go’ for Indigenous people and Trilby resents this. As she says, ‘there’s no law against it’ (going into the cafe) but the clip shows that unwritten laws can be even harder to fight. She refuses to drink the milkshake at the counter but by sitting down she and her companions are subjected to racist remarks designed to show them they are unwelcome and to indicate their inferior status.

Trilby and her elder sister Noonah are depicted in the film as people attempting to negotiate two cultures. Intelligent and articulate, they aspire to succeed in a white world that despises them, and their traditional cultural practices now appear to offer no support. As the one member of the family with a job, Noonah feels obligated to support her relatives as sharing is a fundamental value in Indigenous cultures.

The ‘whites only’ rule was applied strictly in some Australian towns in the 1960s, the setting for the novel on which the film The Fringe Dwellers (1986) was based. Charles Perkins led the Freedom Rides in 1965 to challenge this colour bar. With a group of local children he entered the Moree Baths, where Indigenous people were not allowed to go. The resulting publicity contributed to the overwhelming vote in favour of Indigenous equality in the 1967 referendum.

The film The Fringe Dwellers was based on the novel by Nene Gare (1919–94) about white attitudes to Indigenous people that she observed while living in Geraldton, Western Australia, in the 1960s. The novel was a landmark in that it confronted readers with the situation of Indigenous people living on the outskirts of Australian towns. The film changed the story’s setting to the town of ‘Curgon’ in Queensland in the 1980s.

The Fringe Dwellers was based on a white woman’s story and was made by white filmmakers, but it was significant in 1986 for having a cast who were almost entirely Indigenous and having Indigenous activist and poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal as an actor in, and script adviser for, the film.

The film’s director, Bruce Beresford (1940–), returned to Australia from the USA to make The Fringe Dwellers after achieving success with such films as The Adventures of Barry McKenzie (1972) and Breaker Morant (1980), which had established his international reputation. The Fringe Dwellers received critical and international success when it was released in 1986 but gained only a lukewarm reception in Australia.