Also included in the latest acquisitions of Gordon Stewart Fine Books , Melbourne , are rare items connected to the above controversial l930s film , banned in Australia . One intriguing offering , a June 1931 Austin ,Texas, movie theatre program advertises the film as The Weirdest Story Ever Told featuring Neanderthal savages long thought extinct...animal monstrosities...flyingPterodactyls...fur bearing, duck-billed animals (platypus) ...dudongs ( sic ) that graze at the bottom of the sea .
Priced at $750 , there is a l932 Columbia Pictures promotion program for the film , The Blonde Captive , showing a group of Aboriginal women displaying the printed title produced by the Northern Australian Expedition Syndicate , an authentic , amazing adventure .
There is another advert from a Viennese theatre magazine , in German , above , for the movie , highlighting a Balinese woman with a group of Aboriginal women thought to be from Central Australia .
Here at Little Darwin we were blown away with surprise when we came across the film acquisitions and immediately identified it as being inspired by the March 1923 disappearance of the SS Douglas Mawson in the Gulf of Carpentaria .
Owned by the Queensland government , it was under private charter to a firm trading between Brisbane and Gulf ports. On a run between Brisbane and northern ports , it was thought to have gone down during a cyclone .
More than a year later , wreckage was washed up in the north-east of the NT , and a bungled search was launched from Darwin . There were wild rumours that two women survivors were being held by Aborigines . Male survivors were said to have been slaughtered , the women taken bush . Questions were asked in Federal parliament about the embarrassingly slow Territory search .
The suggestion that white women were being held by "savages " gripped the imagination of the overseas media . The San Francisco Examiner ran an exclusive beat up report from Sydney about the fate of passengers on a similar sounding vessel , Daniel Dawson . It came with dramatic illustrations and a scoop interview with the skipper's wife, Mrs Speare, who had been tied up and forced to watch as Arnhem Land "cannibals " killed , roasted and ate her daughter, while tom-toms played . Somehow, poor Mrs Speare had managed to escape on a raft and had been near death when found by native pearl divers near Broome .
The Sydney Truth newspaper attacked the American newspaper and " our gilded ambassador " who had done nothing to contradict the concocted US report .
Australian author Xavier Herbert , who first went to the Territory in l927, said people there were still speculating about what had happened to the people aboard the Douglas Mawson . Women survivors had borne children to their captors, according to some rumours . Herbert actually used the bizarre situation in his award winning novel, Capricornia , calling the vessel the SS Rawlinson , to highlight the fact that government would spend thousands on an inept and futile search for a few whites , but next to nothing on the health of NT Aborigines .
The Blonde Captive had taken previously released anthropological footage of native people in the Pacific and Australia and added a sensational storyline about a white woman , survivor of a shipwreck , married to a tribal Aborigine , mother of a blonde-haired daughter , who refused to return to civilisation .
The 59 minute National Geographic-style anthropological documentary, narrated by explorer Lowell Thomas , was released in New York in l931 by William Pizor's Imperial Pictures . It was produced by Porteus' North Western Australian Expedition Syndicate with a grant from the Australian National Research Council .
It opened with Dr Paul Withington of Harvard University and archaeologist Clinton Childs , members of an explorers club in America , meeting to discuss an expedition to try and find the people most connected with mankind's ancestors, Neanderthals . With two cinematographers , they set out in l928, filmed in Hawaii , Bali , Fiji, New Zealand and lobbed in Sydney .
From there they made their way by train to Ooldea , South Australia , where Irish writer Daisy Bates worked with Aborigines , went to Broome , along the way ventured into the Timor Sea , met Aboriginals who had" not lost their cannibalistic instincts " , watched a dugong , alias the dudong mentioned above , being killed , and declared Aborigines the nearest link to Neanderthals.
Following release of the documentary , Columbia Pictures reedited the film and added 15 minutes of subplot about a white American woman shipwrecked and married to an Aborigine, called it The Blonde Captive .
Following release of the documentary , Columbia Pictures reedited the film and added 15 minutes of subplot about a white American woman shipwrecked and married to an Aborigine, called it The Blonde Captive .
Contrary to the title, she was not a blonde and only appeared in the last five minutes of the film , reissued in 1935 and l947 .
The film was denounced by the scientific community because of the false addition to the documentary . Also attacked were racist and paternalistic comments about indigenous peoples, comparing the "attractiveness " of various Polynesian peoples to the "grotesque" cannibalism of Aboriginals .
There were accusations that it was promoted as an educational film to bypass censorship laws governing nudity .
