David Gulpilil, a legendary Yolngu actor, was born around 1953 in Northern Australia. The local missionaries gave him the birthdate of July 1, 1953, and the Christian name David, although he admitted he liked the name from the start. His last name, Gulpilil, was a totem, the kingfisher. He never saw a white person until he was eight years old when he visited the mission school, but he never really allowed them to teach him anything.
In 1969, British film director Nicolas Roeg, scouting locations in the Outback, appeared at a mission in the north and asked if anyone knew a boy who could throw a spear, hunt, and dance. Everyone pointed at David. His easy smile made him a natural, and it quickly became obvious that he was unlike anyone the white man had met in the Outback. He was not reserved or suspicious of strangers, and carried song on his lips and rhythm in his legs. David Gulpilil was fearless.
Looking back over his career, he tells us in the documentary, My Name is Gulpilil (2021),filmed while dying of terminal lung cancer, that he never acted, that acting wasn't something he had to do because it was natural. "I know how to walk across the land in front of a camera, because I belong there," Standing on stage, before a camera, or before the Queen of England, David felt comfortable in his own skin whether it was barely dressed in a loin cloth, or stuffed into the white man's dinner jacket.
Roeg quickly cast the charismatic Gulpilil in Walkabout (1971),a film based upon Donald G Payne's 1959 novel about a boy who cheerfully leads children to safety. Without really knowing it, Roeg broke new ground in Australian cinema, and redefined the way that Indigenous people were represented in Australian cinema. The film was an international success everywhere but in Australia, where First Nation peoples had been previously portrayed only by white people wearing blackface. And to top it off, the film broke cultural barriers, presenting on the wide screen a sexually attractive young Black man.
David Gulpilil was, overnight, hurled in to high society as an instant, international celebrity and presented before Queen Elizabeth, who found him quite charming and humorous. She in turn introduced David to John Lennon and that was just the beginning. Before long he was soon shaking hands with Muhammad Ali, Marlon Brando, Bruce Lee, Jimi Hendrix, and Bob Marley, who would help contribute to David's downfall. David taught Bob Marley to play the didgeridoo. Marley taught David to smoke ganja. But it was while filming Mad Dog Morgan (1976) that he got his crash course in hellraising by Dennis Hopper.
Later in his one-man stage show he'd say, "If you're working with people like Dennis Hopper and [John] Meillon, well, you gotta learn all about drinking and drugs." David enjoyed being in front of the camera, and he well knew the importance of his work because it was history and it would "remember to generation to generation," shining a spotlight on his people who had been murdered, exploited, and corralled into camps. The collective history of his people meant everything to him and these films, he claimed, "Won't rub it out."
He was a dancer, a singer, an artist, and a story teller, and fell lovingly into the role of ambassador of his culture to the white man's world, which ironically would eventually divorce him from his culture, as he took to drink and drugs and wound up in trouble with the law, racking up four drink-driving arrests, and one drunken escapade that landed him in jail again, but this time for assaulting his wife. As he admitted in his biopic, "Left side, my country. Right side, white man's world. This one tiptoe in caviar and champagne, this one in the dirt of my Dreamtime."
When he'd been discovered, he spoke no English, though he knew a few dialects of the First People's language, and he was such a quick learner. He began picking up English while just listening during the making of the film, Walkabout, and afterwards as he travelled about the world.
