Blackfella Films/SBS’s Black Panther Woman (directed by Rachel Perkins) provides a fine portrait of its protagonist, Marlene Cummins, as well as an at times fascinating, frustrating, sad and inspiring tale of the interconnections of global ideas, local activism and ingrained misogyny, making a significant contribution to a field with relatively little scholarly engagement.
Black Panther Woman is actually two films, each enwrapped in a productive tension and dialogue. One ‘half’ of Black Panther Woman is a history of the Australian Black Panther Party, a relatively tiny yet incredibly significant organisation formed in Brisbane in December of 1971. The other is a tale of sexual violence and misogyny within activist movements, of how Cummins and others like her ‘paid a price’ for the causes that matter to them, and how this can be easily swept under the carpet by history.
The first ‘half’ contains all the passion and inspiration – via pertinent and well-integrated interview and archival footage – of the Black Power era in Australia. After the 1967 referendum delivered such high hopes yet frustratingly little outcomes, young Aboriginal activists around Australia looked to the global repertoire of Black Power – the idea that black people should run their own affairs. Some chose to transform existing organisations, like the Aborigines Advancement League, while others set up new formations in tune with this imported ideology.
One of these was the Australian Black Panther Party, which as Cummins describes with some verve, was inspired by and heavily drew on their American namesakes. They held ‘pig patrols’ (where members of the party followed police at night to offer assistance to Indigenous people), hosted plays and fed local children. ‘We even used their language’, she comments, with terms like ‘pig’, ‘honky’ and other elements of the Black Panther vocabulary gaining much media attention – and the organisation and its key members earned long ASIO files. The urgency, the bravery and the power of these times is captured splendidly in Perkins’ film, which does not resort to the nauseating nostalgia that often accompanies programs on 1960s activism.
Global inspiration is central to the film. One of the key events chronicled is a trip Cummins takes to meet with fellow Black Panther activists – from Israel, Britain, India and New Zealand – in New York. This is a truly amazing part of the documentary, as activists from around the world and a diversity of contexts meet, many for the first time, 40 years after the events they participated in. That Panther ideology was so mobile and usable in so many contexts speaks to its rhetorical power, and illustrates the necessity of further research into this fascinating transnational relationship.
However, this conference also displayed something of the film’s second ‘half’, the underbelly of sexual violence and misogyny that was so prevalent in social movements of that era. Scholars have well documented how the women’s liberation movement emerged from the sexism of the civil rights and anti-war movements. While the women’s liberation movement was exploding in Australia in the early 1970s, this had little flow-on effect to the Indigenous movement. For Indigenous women, as for female Black Power radicals in the USA, racism was the overriding concern. Ideas of patriarchy were seen as irrelevant to their daily lives, or were presented as splitting the movement.
As Cummins put it to US Black Panther and conference organiser, Katherine Cleaver, ‘we had to put up with a lot of shit’, and as she tells her story, this seems quite the understatement. The allegations she makes are heart-wrenching, and the documentary clearly captures how difficult it is for a woman to come forward regarding this sort of violence, let alone a woman subject to the ‘unofficial code of silence’ Cummins describes. These scenes are an indictment of the sexist practices permeating every layer of our society, so prevalent that even those trying to liberate one oppressed group could oppress and dehumanise another. Yet, Cummins’ objective in participating in this film was not to castigate or vilify those male activists who participated in the struggle for Indigenous rights – indeed, she hopes that viewers will be sensitive enough not to generalise from her experience to besmirch all Indigenous men. Brisbane activist Sam Watson’s interview for this program demonstrates a genuine sense of remorse, as he did not stand up when he knew that some were perpetrating this sort of violence.
Cummins wants to use her story to make broader points about domestic violence in society. As she put it in a press interview: ‘My whole thing with Black Panther Woman was to use my story to address misogyny and violence that women experienced from these so-called heroes that were immortalised in history.’Footnote1 As such, Perkins and Cummins’ blending of transnational history with a strong focus on gender and sexual violence provides not only a strong documentary, but also many pertinent lessons for historians.
Notes
1 David Dale, ‘Australia's Black Panther Woman, Marlene Cummins, Breaks Her Silence,’, Sydney Morning Herald, 1 November 2015. http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/tv-and-radio/australias-black-panther-woman-marlene-cummins-breaks-her-silence-20151026-gkj0d7.html#ixzz3sNDcq4t3.