Short Film Review: Tayamangajirri
Tayamangajirri is a half hour documentary made-to-air on NITV. The film is set in the town of Wurrumiyanga on the Tiwi Islands and follows the adults who dedicate their lives to educating and keeping the local kids safe. The film is shot on lands belonging to the Tiwi people and post produced on lands belonging to the Larrakia nation.
The doco begins by following two female Tiwi Islanders, Janey Puautjimi and Camilla Timaepatua, in their role as part of the town’s night patrol. The focus of their work is to make sure kids are getting off the streets and going home by 9pm so they can go to bed before school the next day. With no public transport or taxis in the town, the night patrol team take up the responsibility, filling their van with kids who need a ride home.
It is great to see two women featured in the story, and also somewhat surprising as a young female viewer from Melbourne to see two women working together in a night time, security-type role. I couldn’t imagine women feeling safe enough to work a similar job in a mainland-Australia capital city, so it is wonderful to see both these women being represented on screen and that women are respected enough within Tiwi Island culture to authoritatively hold such a position.
During the day, the night patrol are taken over by workers from the Remote School Attendance Strategy who ferry carload after carload of kids to school in the morning. The main message of the documentary seems to be showing the value of education to Tiwi Islanders. The roles of both the groups shown in the film centre around ensuring Tiwi Island kids are attending school so that they can grow up to fill the limited full-time job positions in the town, rather than needing people from outside the islands to come in.
Tayamangajirri also highlights the similarities between Tiwi Island culture and that of mainland Australia. A key theme that runs through the film is the idea that mobile phones and social media are the enemy. Parent’s struggling to limit and understand their children’s mobile phone usage is an issue mirrored in general Australian society, so the inclusion of this in the documentary does well to close the gap between Indigenous communities and the remainder of the Australian population.
By representing the challenges of Tiwi Island life as not all that different to anywhere else in the world, it allowed director Charmaine Ingram – a Yidinji woman from Cairns – to focus on the positive differences of their culture. The caring, one-big-family culture of the community in Wurrumiyanga is obvious as the night patrollers explain how they know who every kid is and where they live, making dropping them off an easy task.
The imagery in the documentary is beautiful and crisp, and the cultural music that backs it is enjoyable and uplifting. Everything in the documentary aims to show off the Tiwi Islands and Ingram and the production team – producer Sally Ingleton with 360 Degree Films in association with Native Bird Media for NITV – have done a fantastic job.
‘Tayamangajirri’ means ‘we look after each other’ and sums up the attitude of the Tiwi Island night patrollers and their community as a whole perfectly.
Tayamangajirri premieres on NITV at 8:30pm on October 28th
4 stars