Samson and Delilah

I have just finished viewing Warwick Thornton's Samson and Delilah (2009) and I must say that despite the lack of any substantial amount of dialogue, I am blown away and I feel emotionally torn. I have always been a silent advocate for the rights of Aboriginals, yet now I feel empowered to be a whole lot more.

A few weeks ago I was in an English classroom filled with sixteen year old girls who had to study pictures of white settlement in Australia. They took the subject rather lightly, most of them attempting to obtain a new record score on Piano Tiles on their iPads. I was rather ashamed due to the fact that so much is happening in parts of the world that we do not know of, yet most of our population remains ignorant. Why is it that we do not sympathise for others lest we are in their shoes? Why do we lack compassion for things we have not felt, towards people we do not know? We do we ignore those who seek help?

I think it is because of our comfort. We are so comfortable with our repetitious lives filled of all that we could really ask for, filled with things ever evolving and ever giving that we cannot bear to sacrifice any part of it. We do not necessarily need to have a religious background in order to feel as though we have a sense of compassion towards fellow human beings. I feel ashamed in myself that I worry about the things I have to do and the places I have to go when there are people out there worried about when they will see water for the last time, where they will have to camp out while it rains or snows or when thunder pierces through the sky. There are mothers out there who have children crying for a taste of their breast-milk, when they themselves cannot produce any due to the fact that they are starving to. How would it feel to fall asleep cradling a child that is slowly slipping away from the one chance that they will never experience?

I am shivering now, my fingers are aching from the cold and my nose is mildly runny. I have the heater set to twenty-three degrees softly blowing above my head, filling the room with comforting heat, and I have a heated bedroom waiting for me, one which I have to share with my sister. And to think that I am complaining about the back of the milk-bar that I live in, to think that we complain about the lack of a 'proper' house all while there are people like Samson and Delilah who have nothing but the occasional passing kangaroo for a dinner, muddy tap water to live on through the hot desert heat. This movie has assisted me in thinking twice when complaining about 'first-world problems'.

One thing that hit me the most, though, was not from the movie itself, rather from an interview with the director, wherein the number of Aboriginal dialects were mentioned: there were eight-hundred. Now, there are around two-hundred left. Six-hundred dialects have died off, have suffered from extinction. That is quite a sad thing, that somebody's heritage, that somebody's way of communicating with another has died off. On average, most Aboriginal people know how to speak eight languages, proving that they are more learned than most 'white' people. To this day it disgusts me how 'white' people think that they can colonize a group of humans and force them to 'live a better life' than the one they are accustomed to, turning most of these humans to alcoholism and drug addiction, raping their women and exploiting their art. The list goes on.

While many will pride themselves on Australia Day from next year onwards, I will be sure to do something more productive than hosting a barbecue at my house, such as spending the day pampering a homeless person. Compassion needs to return to our society. Thank you, Warwick Thornton, for making me realise this, and thank you for your superb feature film.