David Gulpilil, Aboriginal actor in “Crocodile Dundee”, has died

David Gulpilil, Australia’s most acclaimed and famous Indigenous actor in Crocodile Dundee, has died of lung cancer, a government chief said on Monday.

During a career that spanned five decades, Gulpilil found his widest audience thanks to his roles in the hit 1986 film Crocodile Dundee and in director Baz Luhrmanns’ 2008 Australian epic. He has often been portrayed like a bridge between native Australia and the outside world that never fits comfortably into either place.

It is with deep sadness that I share with the people of South Australia the passing of an iconic artist from a generation who shaped the history of Australian cinema and Aboriginal portrayal on screen, said the Prime Minister of South Australia, Steven Marshall.

An accomplished didgeridoo player, Gulpilil has rubbed shoulders with Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. He was celebrated in New York and Paris. He also spent periods of his life roaming, drinking and sleeping in parks in the city of Darwin in northern Australia and spent time in prison for alcohol-related offenses.

Gulpilil was born on tribal lands in the sparsely populated wilderness of Australia’s northern border in the early 1950s, his friend and caregiver Mary Hood said. His date of birth was recorded as July 1, 1953, a date of conjecture set by local missionaries. He was thought to be 68 at the time of his death.

Gulpilil said he had never seen a European Australian before he was 8 and considered English his sixth language, his biographer Derek Rielly wrote. The first name of Gulpilils was imposed on him at school.

Gulpilil was a 16-year-old ceremonial dancer performing in the indigenous mission of Maningrida in 1969 when he met British director Nicolas Roeg, who was researching locations. Gulpilil starred in Roegs’ acclaimed 1971 film Walkabout as a young loner wandering the Outback as part of a tribal rite of passage, which meets and rescues two lost British children. The British siblings were played by teenage Jenny Agutter, who later rose to fame in Hollywood, and the director’s 7-year-old son Lucien.

The roles followed in the popular films Storm Boy in 1976 and The Last Wave in 1977.

His last role was in the 2019 remake of Storm Boy, in which he played the central character’s father, Fingerbone Bill.

Gulpilil recalled learning how to binge on alcohol and drugs from counterculture icon Dennis Hopper, who starred in the 1976 film about an Australian outlaw from the 19th century Mad Dog Morgan. The 22-year-old Indigenous actor had third place on the film poster after Hopper and Jack Thompson, a mainstay of Australian cinema.

Gulpilil won multiple lead actor awards for Rolf de Herr’s 2002 film The Tracker, in which he played one of the many Indigenous men that Australian police routinely used as fugitive stalkers in the Outback.

Weeks before the film’s release, reporters visited him in the small indigenous community of Ramingining on its tropical tribal lands infested with crocodiles. He lived in a hut with his then-partner, the native painter Robyn Djunginy, without electricity or running water.

They cooked kangaroo meat and fish over an open fire under a tin roof. Hunting spears hung from a rafter, and Gulpilil kept a wooden native fighting club known as nulla nulla for protection.

I was brought up in a tin shed. I wandered around the world Paris, New York now I’m back in a tin shed, Gulpilil said.

He presented himself as a victim of his own fame and of his own people’s misunderstanding of his position in the world.

People tell me: you are a big name. You have money. Why don’t you buy yourself a house? get out of Ramingining? he said.

It’s my country. I belong here, and I’m broke, he added.

It wasn’t clear exactly why he was broke. He was vague about what he earned over the years, and the wealth in Indigenous Australian society is communal, tending to permeate relatives and friends.

Back then, Gulpilil liked to drink beer, smoke marijuana, and take kava, an herb that acts as a sedative. But because all three were off limits in Ramingining, he avoided some of the temptations of excess city living.

Hood, a friend and caregiver of Gulpilils, first met him in 2006 at the Darwin premiere of Ten Canoes, the first feature film in an indigenous Australian language.

Gulpilil narrated the film and his son, Jamie Gulpilil, was part of the cast mostly drawn from Ramingining.

When I first met him, I saw real cuteness, Hood said. She recognized that there was also a dark side.

A Darwin judge sentenced Gulpilil in 2011 to one year in prison for breaking the arm of his then partner, Indigenous artist Miriam Ashley, during a drunken argument at a Darwin home. He used his time in prison to turn away from alcohol and cannabis.

Hood regularly visited Gulpilil in prison. He was released to live with her and she became his caregiver after he was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer in 2017.

He is survived by his sisters Mary and Evonne, his daughters Makia and Phoebe and his sons Jamie and Jida.