Soul music dreaming: The Sapphires,the 1960s and transnational memory

Abstract

In memory studies, concepts of cosmopolitan, transnational and transcultural memory have been identified as a means of studying mnemonic symbols, cultural forms and cultural practices that cross national, ethnic and territorial borders. However, what do these concepts deliver for memory work that originates in an ‘off-centre’ location such as Australia, where outsiders often lack an understanding of the history and cultural codes? A recent Indigenous Australian film, The Sapphires, set in 1968, provides an opportunity to consider some of the claims that are made for the transnational travels of memory. The film tells the story of an Aboriginal girl group that travels to Vietnam to perform for the American troops. I discuss the mnemonic tropes and transcultural carriers of memory, particularly soul music, that enable this popular memory to circulate nationally and internationally. While global tropes and icons of the 1960s can be imported into Australia, and used to construct Australian cultural memory and identity, how effectively does cultural memory travel transnationally from Australia?

Keywords

Cosmopolitan memory soul music the 1960s transnational memory travelling memory

History in a certain canonical form may be delegitimated … but the seduction of the archive and its trove of stories of human achievement and suffering has never been greater. But what good is the memory archive?

Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts, p. 5.

In memory studies, concepts of cosmopolitan, transnational and transcultural memory have been identified as a means of studying mnemonic symbols, cultural forms and cultural practices that cross national, ethnic and territorial borders (Erll, 2011; Levy and Sznaider, 2005). North American, British and European scholars have pioneered productive frameworks for analysing the processes that enable memory to travel in an era of globalization. They have attempted to decouple the concepts of ‘the nation’ and ‘collective memory’, and to think beyond the nation as the assumed frame for remembrance (Levy and Sznaider, 2002: 89). But, what do these concepts deliver for cultural memory work that originates in an ‘off-centre’ location such as Australia, where outsiders often lack an understanding of the history and cultural codes?¹ In this article, I take a recent Australian film set in 1968, The Sapphires, as an opportunity to consider some of the claims that are made for the transnational travels of memory. With its upbeat humour, its musical performances of American soul music, and its Australian and Vietnamese locations, The Sapphires has local, national and transnational connectivity and appeal. As a case study, it raises some compelling questions for memory studies, and for the travels of transnational memory. While global tropes and icons of the 1960s can be imported into Australia, and used to construct Australian cultural memory and identity, how effectively does cultural memory travel transnationally from a location such as Australia? Does Australian ‘internalization’ of ‘cosmopolitan’ iconography and mnemonic symbols (Levy and Sznaider, 2002) help to link an Australian memory of ‘the 1960s’ to a broader transnational context? Or does it mould Australian memory into a common transnational pattern and periodization, flattening history and memory in the process? Does it, perhaps, do both? In The Sapphires, is transnational memory operating ‘multidirectionally’ (Rothberg, 2009) or in one-direction only? How might this film not work as transnational memory?

The Sapphires is an Indigenous Australian film about the driving force of aspirations and hope, and the ties of family and home. It tells the unlikely story of an Aboriginal girl group that achieves professional recognition and personal resolution when they travel to Vietnam in 1968 to entertain the American troops. Their self-appointed Irish manager, Dave, insists that as ‘black’ women they should switch from singing country and western to soul music – for which he has an abiding passion – and moulds them on The Supremes. The film’s visual representation of locations in regional Australia and Vietnam, together with the global sound and look of African-American soul music, is vital to its transnational and layered remembrance of the 1960s. With its Aboriginal female protagonists and African-American soldiers, this is a different kind of Vietnam War story. A secondary plot – recognizable to Australian audiences as a Stolen Generations story – reveals that one of the women, Kay, was stolen as a child from her mother and community under government policy of assimilation in the late 1950s. While the Vietnam War narrative introduces a transnational dimension to the film’s act of cultural remembering, the Stolen Generations narrative contributes to Indigenous and national memory. Based on a musical written by Tony Briggs,² who also co-wrote the screenplay, the film is inspired by the experiences of his mother, Laurel Robinson, who travelled with her sister, Lois Peeler, to perform in Vietnam. The original Sapphires, which included his mother and two aunts, played at venues in Melbourne in the late 1960s. The film is thus a memory project with personal and generational as well as cultural dimensions.³ The connection of these historical women to their fictional counterparts is made at the end, through the screening of photographs of them from the 1960s and the recent past. Contributing to Australian popular memory of the 1960s and of the Aboriginal struggle against racism in Australia, the film conveys the women’s talent, determination and resilience.

Australian reviewers have rightly celebrated The Sapphires’ contribution both to national cinema and to Indigenous Australian cinema. Indigenous leader and academic Marcia Langton values the film for the optimistic message about following your dreams that it conveys to Aboriginal girls and young women (Langton, 2012). The film celebrates female achievement and adventure, as well as acknowledges hardships and loss, and thus stands out in the Australian media context. It is particularly welcome since, in the past decade, the media has overwhelmingly focused on problems in Indigenous communities, with few positive stories. Langton regards the film as an indication that Indigenous filmmaking, which has in recent years been contributing a significant film annually to Australian cinema, is flourishing. The concept of ‘national cinema’ – with its use of ‘the nation’ as an obvious and compelling analytic frame – enables critics to illuminate the links between The Sapphires and earlier Australian films such as Bran Nue Day, Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Rabbit-Proof Fence and Australia (Capp, 2012). The national frame also invites a consideration of how such films make use of national history and myth, and contribute to national identity and collective memory. Here, however, I pursue a different tack – one influenced by my dual histories in America and Australia – which shapes my own viewing and meaning-making.

The images, sounds and landscapes of the American 1960s – which inform The Sapphires – were widely circulated in my American youth and form my mediated memories of the decade. When I saw the film, I was struck by how American it was – the familiar soundtrack, the American archival footage, the Vietnam war scenes, the African-American men, and even the Aboriginal community which reminded me visually of scenes of American sharecroppers. As someone who has lived in Australia since the 1990s, however, I recognize and value the film’s tribute to Cummeragunja, a small community important in Aboriginal activism, and its cultural memory of the Stolen Generations – which may be lost on overseas viewers. Thus, first-time director Wayne Blair’s comments about the multiple audiences for the film – Australia and ‘the world’ – immediately caught my attention. As he explained, when

you tell a story you want the world to see it. And now the world will see it … You just want Australian people to … see it and accept it as one of their own films … and be a catalyst for change. (Tynan, 2012)

Noting that the film received a ‘rapturous’ reception at Cannes, and that American producer Harvey Weinstein had purchased distribution rights for the United States, Blair acknowledges the film’s potential to appeal to multiple audiences. The transnational circulation of the film invites analysis of the mnemonic tropes and symbols it uses to transmit an Australian memory nationally and transnationally.

Periodizing the 1960s: Australian memory in a cosmopolitan frame

Rooted in an Enlightenment philosophical tradition, ‘cosmopolitanism’ traditionally refers to the ideal of belonging to a global community unified by shared values. Linked to concepts such as globalization and transnationalism, cosmopolitanism today has, however, become an ‘exploded’ concept, characterized by a lack of intellectual and political consensus (Braidotti et al., 2013: 1). Sociologists Ulrich Beck and Natan Sznaider (2006) contend that the Kantian conception has to be ‘opened up to the recognition of multiplicity … cosmopolitanism has to lose its fixation on the purely global and be directed to the interconnection between the global and the local’ (p. 3). Building on this approach, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider introduced the concept of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ as a frame for exploring the negotiations between cosmopolitan representations and collective memory in an era of globalization, in which collective memories are no longer limited to the frame of the nation (Levy and Sznaider, 2002: 89). In their conception, cosmopolitan memory ‘is not global in any homogeneous sense’. Rather, it ‘represents a mixture of the local and national with the global, which in turn never was truly global but sprang from very specific historical occurrences’ (Beck and Sznaider, 2006: 12–13). For my argument, two aspects of their analysis are pertinent. First, they identify a ‘process of “internal globalization” through which global concerns become part of local experiences of an increasing number of people’ (Levy and Sznaider, 2005: 2). Second, they contend that in an era of globalization, ‘different national memories are subjected to a common patterning. They begin to develop in accord with common rhythms and periodizations. But in each case, the common elements combine with pre-existing elements to form something new’ (Levy and Sznaider, 2002: 89). While Levy and Sznaider take the Holocaust as a paradigm of ‘cosmopolitan memory’ – a memory that transcends national boundaries – I suggest that the 1960s, a formative decade in many nations, provides another rich example of cosmopolitan memory, in which global tropes and media are localized with differing effects in national and local contexts. The 1960s has spawned a considerable archive of affective images, film, music and scholarly analysis that has both cosmopolitan and national significance, and that produces and activates memories of the era. Although the 1960s was a transformative decade in Australia as elsewhere, Australia does not figure in transnational accounts of 1968 or of the global 1960s.⁴ The Sapphires provides the opportunity to explore how ‘cosmopolitan’ memories of the 1960s are localized in Australia, to tell an Australian Aboriginal story that has transnational reach.

As a framing device, The Sapphires evokes a cosmopolitan memory of the 1960s – and especially of anti-racist struggles in the United States and Australia – by interweaving, in quick succession, iconic American and Australian footage of the decade. This fusion gives meaning, for national and transnational audiences, to the less familiar Australian images, and creates a seamless transnational frame for the narrative that unfolds. The sequence of nine black and white frames opens with a helicopter dispensing American soldiers in Vietnam; Jackie and John F Kennedy waving from their car in Dallas; Marilyn Monroe dancing; a march supporting land rights for Aborigines; Aboriginal student leader Charlie Perkins hanging a banner on the ‘Freedom Ride’ bus; an American protest with placards declaring ‘Freedom begins at home’; Aboriginal boxer Lionel Rose, who won a world title; African-American boxer Muhammad Ali, who conscientiously objected to the draft on the grounds that ‘No Viet Cong ever called me “nigger”’; and an Aboriginal family emerging from a tent. The American images, which economically signal the key events, cultural styles and moral concerns of the 1960s today function as global rather than specifically American icons. It is worth remembering that like all iconic images, these images ‘sprang from very specific historical occurrences’ (Beck and Sznaider, 2006: 13) in the United States. Moreover, these American icons have transnational roots; for instance, Martin Luther King was influenced by Gandhi’s non-violent protests, and African-American militants drew on the rhetoric of decolonization movements in Africa and the Caribbean.

The cosmopolitan frame of ‘the 1960s’ is further developed through the film’s periodization. The Sapphires locates its story in 1968 – a year that began, in Vietnam, with the Tet offensive and the attack on the American embassy in Saigon. That year witnessed widespread student riots and anti-war protests in the United States, Europe and Japan, and saw dashed hopes for civil rights in America with the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert F Kennedy. In Australia, however, 1968 was not a particularly significant year in terms either of Aboriginal rights or anti-war protests. Rather, 1967 – the year of a National Referendum that agreed to count Aboriginal people as citizens, for which more than 90% of the population voted ‘yes’ – figures large in Australian public memory. Although there were anti-war protests in the 1960s, the largest and most significant protests – the Moratorium marches – took place in 1970 and 1971.⁵ The Black Power movement only emerged in Australia in 1969 and was most visible with the Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest for land rights in 1972 (Clark, 2008: 203). Indeed, Australian historians have observed that many of the events associated in popular memory with ‘the 1960s’ took place, in Australia, in the 1970s (Clark, 2008; Pierce, 2002: 65–66). As a framing device, however, ‘1968’ has a global significance that ‘1967’ or ‘1972’ lacks; it operates as a transnational mnemonic symbol of the era, conveying meanings of social unrest and betrayed dreams (Caute, 1988; Kurlansky, 2004).⁶ It could be argued that in using a deterritorialized, cosmopolitan trope of ‘1968’ to give transnational significance to an Australian memory of ‘the 1960s’, The Sapphires moulds Australian memory on a ‘common patterning’ and ‘periodization’ (Levy and Sznaider, 2002: 89), at the expense of local historical specificity. As Huyssen (2003) argues, in global media products, ‘national traditions and historical pasts are increasingly deprived of their geographic and political groundings, which are reorganized in the processes of cultural globalization’ (p. 4). Yet, the film’s remembering of a specific Aboriginal community as a key location affirms the significance of the local – of ‘country’ and community. For Aboriginal people, ‘country’, which refers to the land to which they belong, and the associated dreaming stories, has immense cultural and collective significance.

On location: place and national memory

The Sapphires contributes to an Australian cultural memory through its transmission of meanings, memories and affects associated with particular locations. Four locations, three of them Australian, are significant to the film’s collective memory work: Cummeragunja, a rural Aboriginal settlement in what is today the Goulburn River Valley; a pub in a country town; Melbourne and Vietnam. The narrative begins in 1958 in Cummeragunja, which was established as an Aboriginal mission in 1888–1889.⁷ An opening scene in which two girls run through a field of shoulder-high yellow blossoms is accompanied by Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1970s hit, ‘Run Through the Jungle’. The song signals the significance of the Vietnam War – a transnational symbol of the 1960s – for the narrative, while also hinting at the danger the girls face due to the state’s assimilation policy of removing mixed descent children from Aboriginal communities. The girls, Gail and Kay, join up with two younger girls, Cindy and Julie, and the community gathers round to listen as they sing on a makeshift stage. The camera hones in on the proud faces of the girls’ mothers. The scene is suffused with a warm glow, and rustic family cottages are grouped in a semi-circle around an open communal space. A later scene shows the girls, now grown up, picking oranges. Blair comments that he wanted to convey a particular feel to the location, and drew inspiration from Spielberg’s The Colour Purple, a triumphal African-American story set in the rural American south (Tynan, 2012). These scenes are important for transmitting a popular memory of Aboriginal family and community life during the 1950s and 1960s, when Aboriginal people were denied land and other rights and, despite an official policy of assimilation, suffered racist exclusion from jobs and civic life.

What positions the film as memory rather than history, however, is its mythopoeic representation of Cummeragunja. In contrast to history, which attempts to reconstruct ‘what the event was’ for the society in which it occurred, memory remembers the past for the present (Wieviorka, 2006: 149). The film remembers the spirit, resilience and achievements of residents of Cummeragunja, while representing none of the vicissitudes of its history. Home of the Yorta Yorta people, Cummeragunja had a tradition of education and mentoring Aboriginal leadership (Atkinson, 2008). Some of the most influential Aboriginal leaders, including William Cooper, and Tony Briggs’ grandmother, Geraldine Briggs, and his aunt, Margaret Tucker, came from Cummeragunja. They helped to establish the Aborigines Advancement League (AAL) in Melbourne in 1934, and were active leaders in the south-east in the mid-twentieth century. In 1939, protesting against poor living conditions and hostile managers, the residents walked off the Cummeragunja Mission, and in later years, camped and established rough homes on the banks of the Murray River. Although they repeatedly petitioned to have their land allocated to them for farming, the state government refused, and instead leased it to a European farmer (Barwick, 1972: 64). Residents were forced to work as labourers, picking fruit, and had to move seasonally. Despite this history of obstruction, the Cummeragunja community had an active cultural life, including choirs, theatrical performances and fashion shows (Peeler, 2008). In 1994, the Yorta Yorta were one of the first Indigenous groups to pursue a land claims case for native title. After years of struggle, their claim was rejected in the Federal Court in 1998, and the High Court in 2002 upheld that decision. The history of Cummeragunja and its people featured in an episode in the ground-breaking Australian television documentary, First Australians (2008), and The Sapphires extends this collective memory. The film helps to recover and publicize a positive memory for this shattered community after the humiliating loss of the native title claim. It celebrates cultural vibrancy and strength on a national stage for a community whose identity and history had been questioned publicly by the courts. The history of the Yorta Yorta will not, of course, be familiar to transnational audiences, nor to all Australians. Instead, The Sapphires is self-reflexively ironic about the obscurity of a tiny place like Cummeragunja on a world stage, humorously depicted by the difficulty outsiders such as Dave have pronouncing the name.

While the Cummeragunja scenes convey an Indigenous memory of belonging, two other Australian sites of memory – a pub in a country town and Melbourne – remember Aboriginal experiences in the 1960s. The country pub scene, in which the girls perform in a talent contest to a po-faced white audience, recalls the racism that pervaded everyday life in country Australia in the 1960s.⁸ Laurel Robinson, one of the original Sapphires, remembers how difficult it was for Aboriginal people to be hired: ‘I couldn’t get work in Shepparton. I’d tried everywhere. I put it down to racism. They took one look at you and said “no”’. (Nunn, 2012). She moved to Melbourne in the late 1960s, and with two of her cousins, sung harmonies for a Maori band at a club, Tiki Village, which is how The Sapphires got their start (Nunn, 2012). Her cousin, Naomi Mayers recalls, ‘It was after the 1967 referendum that black people started to come back in [to the cities]. In Melbourne before then, there were hardly any black people except us’ (Nunn, 2012). Reflecting something of this personal history, racial relations in Melbourne are represented as more complex than in the country town. The pressure to conform to white middle-class values is figured through an amusing scene of passing. Two of the Cummeragunja sisters, Gail and Cindy, arrive at their long-lost cousin Kay’s door in Melbourne to find her hosting a Tupperware party for her white friends, all immaculately dressed in 1960s shifts and matching headbands. Their inconvenient arrival embarrasses Kay, who sends her cousins away. Attracted by their invitation to sing in Vietnam, Kay later joins them at a party at their Uncle Ed’s, where they first meet African-American men. Uncle Ed is Irish, which contributes to the transnational link the film establishes between the Irish, Aboriginals and African-Americans. This scene remembers a past that has been forgotten in Australia – the intimate cross-racial relationships between Aboriginal and white Australians, and between (African) American military and (Aboriginal) Australian women.⁹ The Irish characters, Dave and Uncle Ed, remind audiences of the transnationalism within Australia. By representing Australian locations as sites of formative memory, the film positions Australians as a significant audience for its collective memory work.

‘I’ll Take You There’: soul music and travelling memory

Travel, as both a narrative device and a cinematic experience, is fundamental to the appeal of The Sapphires. Alison Landsberg (2004) contends that cinema, with its technological ability to ‘mov[e] people across time and space’, is an ‘archetype’ (p. 14) of the new memory technologies of the twentieth century. Part of the project of early cinema was ‘transportation, the capacity to carry viewers to faraway places and alternative temporalities’, which is still ‘very much alive today’ (Landsberg, 2004: 12). In The Sapphires, viewers move virtually through time and space, as they travel with the girl group from Cummeragunja to Melbourne, to then Vietnam, and eventually back home. When the group first arrives in Vietnam, viewers see – through archival footage of Saigon – what the young women might have seen in 1968: a teeming, rushing, multiracial city. It takes them (and us) a few minutes before they (we) notice corpses on the roadside, and register that they (we) are in a war zone. Through the ubiquitous presence of American soldiers and popular culture, Vietnam is figured as a site of American rather than Australian (or Vietnamese) memory. In Australia, there was significant opposition both to the war and the draft. Two of the original Sapphires, Naomi Mayers and Beverley Briggs, refused to go to Vietnam in protest against the war (Nunn, 2012). The film, however, shows no scenes either of anti-war protest in Australia, or of Australian soldiers in Vietnam. In omitting this history, both collective and personal, the film misses an opportunity to convey a more complex memory of the 1960s in Australia – one in which Australia does not only borrow from American culture but also resists it. One of the most memorable photographs of anti-war protest in Australia, not in the film, shows young demonstrators lying on the road blocking Lyndon B Johnson’s presidential motorcade on his visit to Sydney in 1966 (Curthoys, 1994: 115).

Like cinema, soul music can be regarded as a symbolic form of transportation – it promises to take its listeners, emotionally and imaginatively, to other places, beyond everyday life. A musical genre that emerged from the southern United States, it adapted patterns of gospel song to lyrics expressing the feelings of African-Americans about their lives and the racist conditions they confronted. As one critic explains, ‘soul was the raw cry of a broken heart full of the passion and suffering of a wrong relationship, because nothing else in the crumbling world of riots, assassinations, and arrests could possibly offer any happiness’ (De Vita, 2008: 849). Soul was an affective genre, ‘profoundly satisfying’, which was played constantly on radio in the 1960s (De Vita, 2008: 850). The lyrics of what I regard as The Sapphires theme song – ‘I’ll Take You There’ – are about the fantasy of escape to a better place, where: ‘Ain’t nobody cryin’, Ain’t nobody worried, Ain’t no smilin’ faces … Lyin’ to the races’.¹⁰ The ‘universal’ language of soul music functions as a transit lane that promises to ‘take you there’ – wherever ‘there’ happens to be. Performing for the American troops in Vietnam offered the young women not only the possibility of travel, but of escape from Australian racism and the opportunity to break into the entertainment industry. The ‘Vietnam circuit’ attracted musicians from all over the world, and most musical acts ‘featured female dancers who, depending on the venue, might go topless’ (Lair, 2011: 129). Dave repeatedly encourages the girls to make their dance routines and their dress ‘sexy’. They comply, but their policing of each other’s public behaviour – as when Gail admonishes Cynthia for being too familiar with the audience during a performance – brings into cultural memory the pressure Aboriginal women were under to conform to expectations of respectability, and how easily reputation could be lost.¹¹

While Landsberg explores cinema as an experiential technology of memory that promises virtual travel to other times and places, Astrid Erll contends that travel, which she conceives of both literally and metaphorically, is central to the formation of memory. The first and second stages of memory studies, characterized by Hawlbachs and Nora, respectively, tied collective memory and identity to the framework of the nation (Erll, 2011: 4). She proposes a third, transcultural stage, of memory studies. As a ‘research perspective’, transcultural memory studies should bring into visibility the significance of cultural formations that exceed the nation-state, such as world religions, global sport, music culture and consumer culture (Erll, 2011: 8). Soul music, a ‘carrier’ of transcultural memory and identity, provides a basis for transnational connections (Erll, 2011: 11). Tony Briggs recalls the importance of American soul music to his own sense of identity growing up in Sydney and Melbourne in the 1970s:

I watched the Jackson 5 in the ‘70s … and just saw these little kids conquering the world, and this one little kid looked like me. It was like: god, they were black people … empowering themselves. And it was very empowering for me. (Dow, 2005)

Erll’s concept of transcultural carriers of memory is productive for analysing how soul music, with its identification with a global ‘black’ identity, enables connections across cultures and races.

Transcultural connectivity: soul music and global black identity

Soul music, ‘“multicultural” before the word existed’ (Brackett, 2009: 177), was from its early days a cross-over genre that appealed to mainstream white audiences as well as African-Americans. In the years since the 1960s, through the global success of Motown, Stax Records and other labels, soul music has become ‘cosmopolitan’ in Levy and Sznaider’s sense – people from all over the world have used it to articulate their own struggles. For instance, The Commitments, an Irish film, uses soul music to establish a connection between the Irish and ‘blackness’ as a global identity of the marginalized. The Irish band manager, Jimmy Rabbitte, explains to the dishevelled members of his working-class Dublin band why he insists that they play soul music: ‘The Irish are the blacks of Europe, Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland, and the North Siders are the blacks of Dublin … so say it loud – I’m black and I’m proud!’ Through the figure of Dave, The Sapphires intertextually references The Commitments, and remembers the transnational connections between Aboriginal Australia and Ireland.¹² In historical fact, the band manager who took the young women to Vietnam was English, but in The Sapphires, Dave is cast as Irish, a subtle but symbolically powerful change. He represents himself as a ‘soul man’ who deeply identifies with the values and aspirations of soul music.

In The Sapphires, Dave, who has experienced his own disappointments, connects the young women to the world of soul music and the global ‘black’ identity it affirms. In a comic scene, he explains to ‘the girls’ that they should perform ‘soul’ rather than country and Western because they are ‘black’, and soul is the music of black suffering but also of aspiration:

Country & Western music is about loss, soul music is also about loss. But the difference is in Country & Western music they’ve lost, they’ve given up and they’re just at home whining about it. In soul music, they’re struggling to get it back, and they haven’t given up. So every note that passes through you lips should have the tone of a woman who’s grasping, and fighting and desperate to retrieve what’s been taken from her. Understand? What it is you’re searching for is up to you. I’m just here to get you there.

During this monologue, he beings to play ‘I’ll take you there’, which reinforces the meaning of soul music as a form of imaginative transportation. In an impassioned performance, he belts out a fantasy of their success:

There’s a place called the Apollo Theatre, where dreams are born, I can see you girls singing in places like that, the Rainbow, the Olympia, because you’ve got in you. Let it out of you like a geyser springing from the earth, like a volcano, and finally it’s easy enough, like breathing in, and breathing out, breathing in and breathing out, oohhhh, mercy, can I have some mercy now?

In telling the girls that they should sing ‘soul’ because they are ‘black’, Dave captures the memory and mood of 1968, which was ‘the year that “Negroes” became “blacks”’ (Kurlansky, 2004: 6). In The Sapphires, ‘black’ is represented not as an imposed racial identity, but rather, as a mobile signifier – a chosen social and political identity, which expresses a will to fight oppression, and a commitment to a black aesthetic marked by creativity and innovation.

While Dave interpellates the girls as ‘black’, it is in Vietnam that they experience ‘black’ as a lived identity rather than an abstraction. Kay reclaims her Aboriginal identity via a detour through an African-American Vietnam, telling her African-American suitor: ‘I’m black. I’m just pale black’. Historian Jennifer Clark (2008) contends that ‘Black Power … encouraged Australian Aborigines to assert their Indigenous identity’ and provided ‘Aborigines with an entry card to the international revolution’ (pp. 214–215). In claiming a black identity, Kay positions herself as part of an international cultural and political movement. The ease with which she claims a black identity, however, obscures the intense controversy in Australia about ‘black power’, which ‘hit Australia with a thud’ in late 1969 (quoted in Clark, 2008: 209). In August 1969, Aboriginal Quarterly published an article that asked, ‘Is Black Power amongst Aboriginal groups a possibility … and if it is, what form will it take and will it lead to violent protest for Aboriginals?’ (Clark, 2008: 209–210). Black feminist activist Roberta Sykes debated Aboriginal MP Neville Bonner on the question: was ‘black power’ a ‘spurious American import or a genuine movement expressing the frustration and anger of black Australians’ (Turner, 1975: 1)? By contrast, through the character of Kay, The Sapphires shows alternatives to this binary approach – either Aboriginal or black, local or cosmopolitan. For Kay, the encounter with African-Americans in Vietnam enables her to identify both as black and as Aboriginal. Her character exemplifies a multidirectionality of memory and identity, in which ‘groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others; both the subjects and spaces of the public sphere are open to continual reconstruction’ (Rothberg, 2009: 5). Thus, it is only through witnessing the suffering of American soldiers in Vietnam, and interacting with them, that she is able to work through her own memories of the trauma of her childhood removal and the loss of her mother and family.

Using a transnational frame to analyse The Sapphires has enabled me to identify transcultural carriers of memory such as soul music, and cosmopolitan mnemonic symbols such as ‘1968’. Soul music, an affective medium, can ‘allow marginalized memories to gain prominence in the public arena’ (Erll and Rigney, 2009: 2). Writing about an Australian film from the location of Australia, however, one cannot help but be aware of the uneven flows of cultural memory across national borders. From the Australian side of the Pacific, American cultural exports such as soul music can give meaning to Australian experience – as Briggs indicates in his comments on growing up listening to soul music. But, as the debates about ‘black power’ in Australia indicate, the importation of American rhetoric and models can sometimes feel like imitation rather than joining an international movement. From the American side, it is sometimes difficult to see the transnational connection to Australia at all; Australia is typically figured as a loyal follower, as with the Vietnam War, or worse, as irrelevant. Yet, a poignant scene in The Sapphires demonstrates the multidirectionality of transnational memory – how a global memory can enable other stories and memories to be brought into public visibility (Rothberg, 2009). In the scene, the young women are in a hotel lobby in Saigon after narrowly surviving a bombing in which Dave has been wounded and is presumed dead. As they speak to their mother on the phone, they watch TV footage announcing the murder of Martin Luther King. With this footage playing, mother and daughters sing together, down the phone line, a Yorta Yorta song, Ngarra Burra Ferra, thereby commemorating King in their own language. As they sing, their Cummeragunja community at home sits around a TV outside, watching Martin Luther King give his impassioned last speech, ‘I Have Seen the Promised Land’. In this scene, the women are connected to their community and to a global public through the then new medium of television. The Yorta Yorta song is now, through the media of film and CD, circulating in the public sphere and producing new affective public memories.

Gendering transnational memory: the maternal trope

Although The Sapphires embodies the entertainment values of Hollywood, it also embeds a cultural memory of the Stolen Generations, using a familiar scene of maternal suffering at the loss of a child to invoke this past.¹³ Literary critic Claire Kahane reflects upon the frequency with which scenes of anguished separation of mother and child recur in Holocaust literature and film. She argues that ‘… the profound intimacy between mother and child and its callous violation is a powerful and moving signifier, effectively capturing the perversion of human bonds that was a primary consequence of the Holocaust’ (Kahane, 2001: 164). Apart from signifying trauma and moments of social breakdown, she suggests that writers use the figure of ‘the female in pain’ because it compels the viewer’s identification (Kahane, 2001: 165). Even when scenes of mother and child separation have a historical referent such as the Holocaust or the Stolen Generations, their translation into text ‘… asks us not merely to experience their painful affect but to question their function within the context of cultural representation and the social effects of their transmission’ (Kahane, 2001: 165). Like soul music, the maternal trope is transcultural in its reach, elastic in its applicability and discursively mobile. It is regularly used by filmmakers to mediate unfamiliar or distant events for global audiences, who may lack historical and local knowledge, but can identify with the figure of the suffering woman and child.

In the Australian context, the maternal trope has been ubiquitous in shaping the cultural memory of the Stolen Generations. In the wake of the Bringing Them Home report, which used a mother/child image to frame its findings regarding Indigenous child removal, the maternal trope has figured in memorials; songs; artwork; films, such as Rabbit-Proof Fence; and media discourse. In The Sapphires, the iconography and narrative used to represent this story – the image of the stricken mother arriving at the hospital to visit her child, only to discover the child has been stolen by authorities – position the film as contributing to a cultural memory of Stolen Generations that is informed by the 1996 National Inquiry and its report (Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), 1997). Thus, the film collapses time, by representing events from the 1950s in terms that have become meaningful, for Australian audiences, since the 1990s – culminating in the 2008 federal apology to the Stolen Generations. As a cultural memory of the Stolen Generations, The Sapphires requires us to ‘to think both traumatic memory and entertainment memory together as occupying the same public space’ (Huyssen, 2003: 19). As Huyssen (2003) points out, ‘key questions of contemporary culture are located precisely at the threshold between traumatic memory and the commercial media … trauma is marketed as much as the fun is, and not even for different memory consumers’ (p. 19). The Sapphires is not only a story of trauma and suffering, it is also a story of resilience and triumph. The film thereby moves away from trauma as ‘the new language of the event’ and its victim subjectivity (Fassin and Rechtman, 2009: 7) to focus instead on resilience, and provides a memory for the future as well as the past.

Conclusion: the vectors of transnational exchange

The Sapphires, which incorporates cosmopolitan tropes, symbols and media, and combines them with local and national locations, styles, images and memories, to produce a distinctively Aboriginal Australian memory of the 1960s, exemplifies the practice of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ (Beck, 2002). It also draws attention to the multi-sitedness of the transnational space. If ‘we inhabit a trans-national community as our historical location’ (Braidotti et al., 2013: 3), the challenge for critics is to be attentive to the multiple sites, and the relations between them, in which the transnational operates in the production and consumption of cultural memory. In The Sapphires, we see at least two vectors of transnational exchange, which could be described as vertical (cosmopolitan) and horizontal (multidirectional) transnationalism. In the film, soul music operates along both vectors – as a global cultural product with cosmopolitan meanings that is adapted to articulate local struggles and aspirations, and as a black cultural aesthetic that connects diverse peoples. A cosmopolitan approach to transnational memory, articulated by Levy and Sznaider, is useful for analysing how global tropes and icons – such as ‘the 1960s’ – are combined with local and national histories and memories to tell a new story. Cosmopolitan tropes do sometimes lead to a flattening or obscuring of local histories, as in the case of ‘1968’ masking over the significance of 1967 and 1972 as significant years in the struggle for Aboriginal rights in Australia. Rothberg’s (2009: 5) concept of ‘multidirectional memory’, however, directs our attention to the productive relationship between the memory of global events, such as the civil rights and black power movements of the 1960s, and the way these memories enable others, such as Aboriginal filmmakers and writers, to bring into the public arena less familiar stories and memories. A comparative approach to multidirectional memory, which Rothberg advocates, has enabled me to discuss not only the obvious transnational dynamic between African-Americans and Aboriginal people in the 1960s but also the less obvious connections between the Irish and Aboriginal people. Analysis of The Sapphires has also enabled me to show how popular music can function as a transcultural carrier of memory and create transnational connections.

In addition to the ways in which the transnational operates within the text – through transcultural carries of meaning, such as soul music or the trope of ‘1968’ – there is also the issue of transnationalism and nationalism at the level of reception. To return to the question with which I began: in what ways might this film not work as transnational memory? A corollary question: how effectively does the film work as national memory? The box office returns, critical reviews and audience feedback indicate that the film has been well received in Australia, accepted by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians as ‘one of our own stories’, as Blair had hoped. The film will only function as memory, however, to the extent that ‘people continue to re-invest’ in it, which signals the importance of an affective relationship to memory (Erll and Rigney, 2009: 2). As Meaghan Morris (2006) observes, a ‘popular culture genre’ is ‘one in which people take up aesthetic materials from the media and elaborate them in other aspects of their lives [such as] … in dreams and fantasies’. The Sapphires shapes cultural and public memory when, for instance, audiences copy the fashions and download the apps that enable them to learn the songs and performances from the film. Some girls and boys who see The Sapphires may fantasize about becoming the next Jessica Mabouy – an Australian idol – and the film will become a vehicle for their feelings, dreams and fantasies. For Australians who grew up in the 1960s, and lived through or participated in Aboriginal activism and anti-Vietnam War protests, the film may activate entirely different feelings and memories.

Whether the film will travel as transnational memory, whether it will be incorporated into other national and transnational memories of the 1960s or whether it will give rise to other similar memories, for instance, of child removal in other contexts, remains to be seen. The film has done well at international film festivals, including Cannes, Toronto and Denver. To date, however, it has only opened in limited overseas markets. In Britain, The Sapphires did not perform well at the box office, and consequently, had a limited run. With so many American referents, it may fare better in the United States. In an American year of significant anniversaries for civil rights, including the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, the film may remind American audiences of the promise and struggle of the 1960s. However, early reviews suggest that it is just as likely to be seen narrowly, as an Australian imitation of the 2006 American film, Dreamgirls, rather than as a rooted cosmopolitan memory of the of the 1960s.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Maria Nugent, Kate Mitchell, Susannah Radstone, Gillian Russell and the anonymous reviewer from Memory Studies for discussion and comments on this essay.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

Notes

Author biography

Rosanne Kennedy is Associate Professor of Literature and Gender, Sexuality and Culture at Australian National University. She is a team leader on an Australian/German grant, Memory and Media (2012–2013), and has recently (2011) been a Visiting Fellow at University of Konstanz, where she was a member of the Forschungsgruppe Gedächtnis und Geschichte. She has published widely on trauma, testimony and memory and its re-mediations in cultural, literary and legal texts and contexts. She has recently edited (with Gillian Whitlock) an issue of Australian Feminist Studies (2011), and has edited (with Jill Bennett) World Memory: Global Trajectories in Personal Time (Palgrave, 2003).

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