Caution: this chapter contains images of Indigenous people who have died.

There was a new political awareness in Australia in the late '60s. After years of the conservative Menzies regime it led many Australians, including Martin Sharp, Richard Neville and Juno Gemes as well as those mentioned in previous chapters (John Kirk, David Perry, etc.) among other artists, to seek out something more than the conservative Australian culture of the time. For them this involved moving to England to live and work.

The film-maker Mick Glasheen had been living with Juno Gemes, who set up 10 Cunningham St an alternative experimental theatre venue/workshop in Sydney in the late 60s. They were living in Simms St. (in what I believe was a converted stable) behind Taylor Square in Darlinghurst in 1966, before she went to England to seek out other experimental theatre groups.[1] On her return to Australia in 1971, Juno was offered a room at the Yellow House.

[She] got a call from Peter Wright and Albie [Thoms], saying, Marty's [Martin Sharp] got hold of this building. And they want to do an art collective there. And you've got a room there. And I was just on my way there and I bumped into Mick [Glasheen] walking down Macleay Street, and I was telling him about this dream thing [see below]. Then he says to me, I just got $3,000 to make this film. I want to make a film on the ancient stories of Uluru. And I said, That's where I've gotta go, Central Australia. That was my... I said, Shall we do this together? Work on it together? He said, Yeah. Absolutely. So that was it. [2]

Sharp's building [the old Clune Galleries] was on Macleay St, Potts Point, and soon became the Yellow House. Glasheen had finished Teleologic Telecast the year before, so he took up Juno's offer to share a room and establish a workspace there.

In the winter of 1971 Juno went out to Uluru, then known as Ayer's Rock (now returned to the Anangu Pitjantjajara people of central Australia) in pursuit of the resolution of a dream she had had while in the UK. Mick wanted to start working on a film on the ancient stories of Uluru and followed Juno about two weeks later with his modified Bolex 16mm camera to film the lands around Uluru and if possible gather some of its stories, but he didn't take a sound recorder so he had to go out there again in 1972.

Juno Gemes on travelling to Uluru

There was magic afoot at this time. The hippie cultural offshoot that had developed in the mid-60s brought with it new ideas of spirituality, of the histories of various peoples and of their sacred relationship with their lands. It was also, for the young generation at the time, the moment when LSD and the knowledge and new awareness that psychedelic drugs (also known as entheogens [3]) were brought to the modern consciousness. [It's not that psychedelics were a new thing though. There is a long history of early peoples using various kinds of botanical drugs, from Cannabis in India to Peyote in Central America, to the Amanita Muscaria mushroom in the old cultures of Europe (which the Roman invaders and their Church so successfully destroyed with their prohibitions on “witches” or women of knowledge in the then pagan cultures of Europe) or the Psilocybe mushrooms that abound in various cultures, to the use of Ayahuasca as a spiritual healing substance by the indigenous people in the Amazon basin of South America.]

This new awareness also engendered a new interest in other aspects of the older, pre-christian, shamanic and “pagan” cultures. In the UK this centred on the megalithic monuments such as Stonehenge and Avebury and the spiritual pathways (known as ley-lines) of pre-Roman (Druidic [4]) Britain, while in Australia there were a few people taking an interest in the ancient histories and knowledge of the land held by the indigenous people [the first Australians] of the country.

Juno's dream involved meeting some of the elders living near Uluru

“And in this dream, we're in central Australia, and there's red dust and shimmering horizons like a miasma. And out of this miasma comes a lawman and he's wearing little shorts and a short sleeved shirt and there's red dust all over him, he's got a beard and a red bandanna, and in his left hand he's holding a sugar bag. He walks towards me and he sits down in the red dirt. He looks up at me, he turns around and he goes thump..thump..thump.”

“Then, before I know it, I have another telegram from my mother that my father's really ill and I must come home immediately. And I'm coming home, and as we're going over Central Australia, and I'm looking at those serpent tracks across it from the air. And this rainbow comes around in the aeroplane. And I'm thinking: Oh yeah. Anybody else got that? Nah. Like, what's going on?”

It was this dream and her return to Australia that had led Juno and Mick to be working together in the Yellow House and that then led to their journey to Uluru so that Mick could shoot material for his film. Juno continues

“and the deal was he's gonna get the car ready. Jack [Myer] was making the lenses, the time lapse machine. We'd already talked about how the stories are activated by light moving across the landscape. And this is the way traditional people, read it. This is the way we're gonna film it. So we were already talking about those kind of strategies for filming. And at a certain point, I got a tremendous feeling of unease, [that] we can't make it without the people.”

Juno then preceded Mick to the central desert and Mick was going to meet her when he had all his equipment organized. She spent some time with the elders there and Mick finally arrived. Once they met up again they headed out to Uluru, going with three of the elders: Lively No.1, Captain and a woman elder named Mary.

“The elders made their camp in their area, and not far away, about 300 meters away, we found a kind of camping area, and Mick put up [his] geodesic dome... which he used as a place for storing equipment away from the dust.” They slept under the stars.

“Gradually Mick got to know them a bit, but it was a huge learning curve for him, too. And my position was, If they ask you to do something, you do it. And he wasn't quite there with that. He wanted to do some things his own way. Anyway, we got permission from them.

“On the top of Uluru is a water hole called Wonambi. The all-seeing eye of Wonambi that you'll see in the film. So Captain gave us permission to go up there. It was a real act of trust. And he said, “Not only should you go up there,” he said, “because that is where...” He could see we were looking, looking, looking, all the time through cameras. And Wonambi's looking, looking... The All-Seeing Eye... of course they might go there. And he trusted us to do that. He said, “It's gonna be hard because you've gotta take all your things up there, you've got to stay up there a few days. You can't just go up there and come down 'cause it's too exhausting, for one thing.

“So at dawn we go up to Wonambi's water-hole. And it was exquisite up there, you could feel the sacredness of it. It's the rainbow serpent's eye. It's actually, in translation from the Pitjanjatjara, it is the all-seeing eye, Wonambi. The all-seeing eye of the rainbow serpent.

“So we had a few days up there, camped there. We were able to shoot through the prism. We were able to do all that colour stuff, shoot through different lenses and prisms and getting that rainbow serpent feel. And we shot for two, three days.”

After all that Mick and Juno returned to Sydney.