First Contact

The opening few quotes of this documentary suggested to me just how the Inca might have felt when Pizarro arrived on their doorstep in the 16th century and made his presence felt amongst natives who had never seen a white man. Those that these people did see were Australian prospectors who had moved inland from their increasingly impoverished local coastal locations on the island of New Guinea in search of gold. What we are now shown is an impressive collection of archive from these virgin territories in the 1930s where little had changed for the lives of the natives for generations. Needless to say, the new arrivals were better armed and placed to impose themselves on the more primitive culture they encountered, but although there were initial casualties there seems to have emerged a certain degree of cooperative synergy between the two peoples which this film quite poignantly displays. The narration is augmented by some engagingly frank contributions from both the indigenous peoples - many rather incongruously dressed in shirt and tie - and those explorers who come across as more collaborative than you might have expected. Now, of course, much of the thrust of this is predicated on a degree of colonial supremacy that can make this a tough watch nowadays, but those attitudes were prevalent, even benignly so, at the times of filming both the feature and the subsequent interviews and are sometimes just as illuminating as the photography of the gorgeous terrain. In many ways, the tribes are portrayed as if they were children engrossed by their visitor’s colour and their technology - especially their aircraft. The commentary reports rather bluntly that there were labour issues on the island and so fairly swiftly we see an army of people engaged in the more traditionally exploitative activities of panning and mining, with a rather condescendingly delivered comment from one of the miners suggesting that this was in some way a voluntary and fun activity! I wonder? The politics aside, if you can, this is quite an astonishingly well presented look at a curious and welcoming culture that appears to have willingly embraced their visitors - even if their chances of sharing in any of the wealth they discover is slight at best, and it would be quite fascinating if someone were to go and make a follow up forty years on.