Kids TV show Thalu works with Pilbara community to create positive role models - ABC News

It's a 40-something-degree day in the Pilbara desert and a motley crew of local kids are facing off against a Shetland pony — who has been holding a man hostage up a small tree for several weeks.

According to a coin-operated Elvis Presley fortune-telling machine, the pony's captive has profound knowledge that is vital to the posse's quest to save their world.

ABC Children's Content executive producer Mary-Ellen Mullane says the script for Thalu is filled with allegories and little life lessons.(Supplied: ABC Me)

Despite their reservations about the man being "yurlga-walyga" — 'absent minded' or crazy, in the local Ngarluma language — the kids huddle together and scheme up some chucklesome ruses to distract the innocuous-looking pony — including pulling its tail, yarning, and even crafting a mechanical friend.

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This delightfully strange and wonderful conundrum is a scene from Thalu, a new series from National Indigenous Television (NITV) and ABC Me.

Thalu is a cheeky, post-apocalyptic sci-fi kids drama conceived, developed, shot and edited in the Pilbara town of Ieramugadu (or Roebourne), and grounded in Ngarluma culture, language and lore.

NITV channel manager Tanya Orman describes it as "The Goonies meets Mad Max, lo-fi sci-fi".

Across 10 episodes, the band of local kids — Em, Hudson, Keile, Lali, Noodles, Samara and Vinka — encounter mystical singing Nannas who play cards, legendary outlaws, and an Aunty desperate for a yarn, as they traverse spinifex-speckled red desert and rocky mountain ranges.

Their goal? To collect eight sacred stones and a key, and reach Thalu — a powerful ancient and sacred site — before the villainous 'Takers' do.

The "bad fellas" or Takers are a faceless faction concealed within an apocalyptic dust cloud, a cancerous blight ailing the Pilbara people and land.

Elaine Crombie describes Thalu as a cross between Tupac's California Love video and ABC3's playground mockumentary Little Lunch.(Supplied: ABC Me)

At a time when there are concerns that Australian-made drama, children's content and Indigenous stories on our televisions are vulnerable, Thalu provides a roadmap for children's TV that works respectfully and inclusively with community from the ground up, offers training opportunities for local talent, and empowers Indigenous kids with their 'own little dreaming'.

A new standard

Ieramugadu (Roebourne) community elders sing Ngarluma Lullaby in episode 10 of Thalu.(Facebook: Thalu)

Thalu is the result of an unprecedented, top-to-bottom model for community consultation: local producers Tyson Mowarin and Robyn Marais (NITV's slow-tv documentary Marni) brought together Ieramugadu community elders and young people to workshop ideas with seasoned creatives like Beck Cole and Sam Paynter, both screenwriters for Little J and Big Cuz.

The mystical Nannas who appear in Thalu are the very same elders who have consulted on and guided the production since participating in the first workshop, in 2018.

Crombie, who plays an eccentric pedlar in Thalu, says it's important to invest in Indigenous children's creativity and content.(Supplied: ABC Me)

For Elaine Crombie (who plays peculiar desert pedlar Bits N Bobs), there's no question that "that's the way it should be".

"It's a unique way of working but it shouldn't really be a unique thing. It should be [standard] practice if you're going to work with Aboriginal communities," she says.

Thalu was filmed on Ngarluma country in and around Ieramugadu (Roebourne), which is 30km from mining boomtown Karratha.(Supplied: ABC Me)

Leading the series as Australia's newest heroes and heroines are not one but seven Indigenous kids cast from the local area.

Not only did these first-time actors have input on their characters, they also spent two weeks rehearsing with director Dena Curtis — who is also a producer on NITV series Grace Beside Me — and their hero, ABC Play School presenter and Cleverman actor Hunter Page-Lochard.

Play School's Acknowledgement of Country episode in 2019 was co-written by presenter, actor and director Hunter Page-Lochard.(ABC)

Like mining, film and TV productions sometimes approach communities with an extract mindset.

"What happens sometimes in Australia is that people just go into communities and take stories, clear out of town and don't leave anything behind," says ABC Children's Content EP Mary-Ellen Mullane.

"[But] this project [Thalu] was very much an organic project that came out of the community, [it's] very much owned by the traditional owners," she says.

Mullane says that the children's shows that have an inter-generational impact speak with an authentic voice about something that matters.(Supplied: ABC Me)

Mullane (who started developing Thalu in her previous role as senior commissioning editor at NITV) says developing local talent behind the camera was just as important to the creative team as developing the local talent in front.

On the eight-week-long shoot, attachments to almost every department on set were offered to anyone in the community, with a view to inspiring the next generation of storytellers.

'Its own little Dreaming'

Neomad was the result of a collaboration between 40 Ieramugadu children and artist Stu Campbell.(Supplied: Stu Campbell)

When Page-Lochard received a call to direct an episode of Thalu, the working title at the time was Neomad, as it was initially based on the interactive Aboriginal comic book of the same name — a three-part cyberpunk space opera set in the Murujuga (the Burrup Peninsula).

Although Thalu quickly morphed into its own standalone concept, Page-Lochard says he was immediately drawn to the project because of the Neomad connection — "because I knew exactly what the world was and what they were trying to do".

"It's its own little Dreaming, its own little spirit world where Indigenous people inhabit, and there's folklore characters and characters with different stories that reflect the land and the world that they come from."

Page-Lochard says he modelled his character The Trapper on Nigel from 90s Nickelodeon series The Wild Thornberrys.(Supplied: ABC Me)

"It's an alternative reality that mimics a little bit of our [real world] issues but kind of has a softer tone to it," says Page-Lochard.

Thalu arrives on ABC iview in the wake of mining giant Rio Tinto detonating explosive charges that destroyed a 46,000-year-old culturally significant Aboriginal site in the Pilbara.

'Thalu' mean totem in Ngarluma language.(Supplied: ABC Me)

Page-Lochard grew up watching animated satires like Kiwi cult-comedy series bro'Town and US series The Boondocks (set for a HBO reboot later this year), both of which offer social commentary and stories from a Pacific Island diaspora and African-American perspective, respectively.

Page-Lochard says Neomad feels as if you grabbed all the characters from bro'Town and The Boondocks and put them in a comic.(Supplied: Firehorse Films)

He says that Neomad and Thalu, like bro'Town and The Boondocks, come from an authentic place because they are created by voices from the same community they seek to represent, normalise and satirise.

"This is genius, this is great, this is something that we've always needed," the director told ABC Arts. 

"It [Thalu] shows [kids] that they're capable and they can have dreams and aspirations that they might feel are a little bit far-fetched, but they're actually not."

'All kids in Australia deserve it'

Page-Lochard says directing was always a dream of his.(ABC Arts: Teresa Tan)

For Page-Lochard, Thalu, like NITV's ground-breaking animated series Little J and Big Cuz, normalises seeing Indigenous people and hearing the diversity of their languages on screen, without creating a sense of othering.

"The context doesn't always need to revolve around who this person is [culturally] and why they're a person of colour," he says.

Referring to the reckoning happening in arts and media in tandem with the Black Lives Matter movement, Page-Lochard says: "With what's happening around the world, I think now more than ever is the best time to start producing more inclusive children's shows."

NITV channel manager Tanya Orman says there wasn't a "little Black character" that originated out of Australia when she was growing up.(Supplied: ABC Me)

Tanya Orman, who helped launch NITV in 2007, recalls: "[Growing up] in this country, there was a medium in your house that was telling you that you're either not a part of the community or that you're in dysfunction."

"We believe that bad public perception can lead to bad public policy," she says, citing the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, which recognised that the negative portrayal of Indigenous people in the media affected Indigenous people's self-perception and shaped public opinion — and subsequently, policy.

Orman says Little J and Big Cuz is ground-breaking because it is the first Australian show centred around a group of Indigenous kids in their family dynamic.(ABC)

Thalu, along with Little J and Big Cuz and NITV's first scripted live-action drama, Grace Beside Me, is just the beginning of the broadcaster's long-term strategy to invest in children's content.

"The majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are under the age of 25," says Orman.

She says a core priority for NITV is "to show young ones, potentially what they could be, so they can see the diversity of opportunities for them."

"We're growing new Deborah Mailmans," she says.

Mullane hopes Thalu will resonate with the next two generations of Australian children.(Supplied: Margaret Ellen Burns/ACTF)

"That's why we have to connect with them at a young age and then also provide them a place where they can see themselves belonging in their own country."

"Our kids, all kids in Australia deserve it."

Thalu is streaming now on ABC iview.

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2020-08-01 18:54:00Z
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