In this profile we speak to Professor Tom Murray about his journey into filmmaking and education, passion for investigating and telling stories about cross-cultural trade and exchange relationships, and two significant festivals planned for later this year.
- What is your background and what brought you to Macquarie?
- How did you originally become interested in your area of research, and what keeps you interested in it?
- What is on your agenda for the rest of 2023?
I’m from a family of teachers. My parents both taught in schools and then universities, so professional learning and teaching has always been something that I’ve seen people do. In any case, it seemed sensible to follow school with university and see if that helped make a career path any clearer. I studied units in biology, psychology and marine science among other things, before graduating with majors in politics and geography. With these skills I started tutoring undergraduate geography at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in the 1990s. During the 2000s I thought I’d escaped the family profession by working as a freelance documentary maker doing my own projects as a writer/director and as a factual and reality TV shooter-producer. Making artistically satisfying and socially important work is very rewarding, but it’s also a precarious life financially and personally. As a nation, our arts funding is poor and has been getting worse over the past two decades, so there’s a lot of competition for meagre available funds. This means most filmmakers also produce commercial media (or do other work entirely) in order to pay the rent and put food in the fridge. Commercial work may not always align with your values, so that’s another personal challenge.
Simultaneously, as I continued to work in the screen industry, I was increasingly aware that there was a rich screen history that could inform what I was doing (being largely on-the-job and self-taught, there was a lot I’d missed). From these elements I decided to do a PhD at Macquarie University and use the PhD scholarship to fund my filmmaking. Macquarie was the natural place to do this research because it had inherited and extended on the studios of the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) and had established filmmakers like Kathryn Millard, Maree Delofski, Janet Merewether and Alec Morgan teaching there at the time. In any case, it worked, and I’ve never left. Back to the family profession of learning and teaching!
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in the craft of storytelling, but it took a while to work out how to make it my profession. I worked as a freelancer writing about science for The West Australian, and then I made a short drama film before I began making documentaries. I got paid a small amount for my first documentary, but it made me realise that this was a potential way to be a professional storyteller. I completed my first major documentary, Along the Pituri Trail, in 1998 with UNSW ecologist Professor Mike Letnic and archaeologist Dr Huw Barton. It’s an audio work for ABC Radio National that used the journal of explorer William Oswald Hodgkinson to examine the impact of settler occupation and contemporary cattle farming on First Nations societies and arid land ecologies in the areas colonially now known as the Simpson and Strzelecki deserts.
This project provided an insight into the geographically vast and sophisticated First Nations cultural and trading networks that pre-existed European occupation of Australia, in this instance stimulated by a highly valued desert narcotic called ‘pituri’ but involving a complex web of exchange. This work led to a colonial murder-mystery documentary for ABC TV, made with the Wirrpanda family of Dhuruputjpi, north-east Arnhem Land, and another trade-based documentary project that I completed in 2000. This latter work formed the basis for an ARC Future Fellowship examining the pre-colonial connections between Sulawesi, Indonesia and Yolngu people in north-east Arnhem Land via the lucrative trade in a sea-slug that is known in Indonesia as ‘trepang’ (‘daripa’ in Yolngu Matha languages). This is my current research project.
One thing that fascinates me with this kind of project (investigating cross-cultural and geographically vast exchange relationships and trade) is the universal human desire for the exotic material and cultural productions of others. You can hear it in the Leonard Cohen song Suzanne when he sings about ‘tea and oranges that come all the way from China’, and in the repeated refrain of ‘smoke and steel and the tamarind tree’ in Mandawuy Yunupingu’s celebration of sea-faring traders from Macassar, Sulawesi, in the Yothu Yindi song Macassan Crew.
Of course, as part of these highly lucrative trading enterprises there are other complex forces at work too, and exploitation, misery and death are also part of the story. However, the centuries-old cultural exchange and trading relationship between Indonesia and pre-colonial northern Australia has a lot to teach us about good-faith exchange relationships and contemporary reciprocity.
Within the Faculty of Arts we have recently established the Creative Documentary Research Centre (CDRC). It is our mission to generate and communicate knowledge, insight, perspectives and understandings that can only be secured through creatively practiced documentary forms. At the end of the year, we will host our inaugural CDRC Festival, Conversations and Connections. The festival aims to bring together documentary industry practitioners, scholars, institutional partners and interested members of the public to discuss the research of centre members and insights from industry that have the potential to increase sector engagement and research impact. The festival will be delivered in partnership with the State Library of NSW and will be hosted there from 27 November – 1 December. We plan to have sessions that will include cultural and oral history documentary, nature documentary in relation to climate change awareness, and virtual reality and deep-fake documentary. There will also be a session on documentary drawing that builds on our partnership with the Macquarie University Gallery and its current Vibrations in Australian Drawing exhibition. Threaded events and research support for our HDRs will also be on the program, and we will showcase an exciting collection of documentary-based works from the Black Snapper International Film Festival.
The Black Snapper International Film Festival is another major initiative on the 2023 agenda for us. It will happen on campus from 20–24 November, with select events and an award ceremony at the State Library of NSW the following week. This is the first time we have run this festival, which will bring together student screen and audio works from all over the world. We have received entries from over 50 countries. It is run predominantly by Macquarie students and, while we will unearth some gems to premiere, other student works will already have screened at major film festivals such as Cannes, Toronto, Berlin and Sundance. It is an exciting opportunity for our students to engage with the most innovative and impressive productions being made. The other major aim of this festival is for our students to gain real-world experience that will allow them to practice and improve the skills they are learning in their Macquarie courses (marketing, media production, web design, creative writing and diverse humanities subjects), gain global contacts that will be useful for their careers, and increase their employability prospects through this rich learning experience.
Beyond this, the festival will offer Macquarie staff and students an opportunity to experience the diverse and rich visual and aural worlds that are being conjured by passionate storytellers who have something they want you to know. Look out for it and try join some of the sessions!