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ABORIGINAL EXPOSE – EXCLUSIVE TO THE MAYFAIR NEWSREEL THEATRETTE – Advert placed in the Daily News (Newspaper) May 23, 1957

The earliest examples of activist documentary in Australia.

The ‘Warburton Range controversy’ and the making of Their Darkest Hour. The ‘Warburton Range controversy’ was a national public debate about the health and welfare of desert Aboriginal people living in and around the Warburton mission, the Rawlinson Range and the Blackstone Range in the Central Aborigines Reserve (‘the Reserve’). The controversy had its provenance in a protracted argument between state and commonwealth governments, anthropologists and activists about how best to manage the fate of those Aboriginal people whose remote existences were set to collide with a series of major national defence projects that began in the late 1940s. Ngaanyatjarra country lay directly under the flight path of the Blue-Streak (non-atomic) missiles being tested by the Woomera Research Establishment (WRE).

Warburton Mission

In 1956, an area of Ngaanyatjarra country in the Rawlinson Range near the present day community of Warakurna had been excised from the Reserve and hosted a weather station that fed meteorological data back to the WRE. Giles weather station, as this little outpost came to be known, was the first permanent colonial occupation in the area of the Rawlinson Range and at the time a number of yarnangu families continued to live in the area relatively independently of the Warburton mission.

Doug Nicholls

In February 1957 William Grayden, a war veteran from the conservative side of politics, and Victorian Aboriginal activist, church pastor and football star Doug Nicholls, made a journey together from Perth into Ngaanyatjarra country. They were on a mission to prove that Aboriginal residents of the Reserve were struggling to survive in an era of increasing defence and mining activity. Determined to provide tangible evidence, Grayden took with him a Bell and Howell 16mm film camera. The images Grayden shot on this trip form the basis of Their Darkest Hour and were also published in his book Adam and Atoms (1957). The film is one of the earliest examples of activist documentary in Australia – Contributed by Greg Lynch –