Heads up, ABC1 Thursday 4th 9.25pm - Contact

Thursday night this week - 4th March there is to be a program on the search into the impact area for the Woomera rocket range impact area for inhabitants. There are some interviews and also some 1964 b/w film of the heritage with some of the people found there at the time. I won't be home so have set to record that night. Link to program info

To quote from the ABC "In 1964 Yuwali was 17 when her first contact with ‘whitefellas’ was filmed. Now at 62 she tells the story behind this extraordinary footage.

Her group of twenty were the last remnant Aboriginal mob still living traditionally, without any contact or knowledge of modern Australia, in the remote Great Sandy Desert.

A huge space rocket test - Blue Streak - was to be fired in May 1964 at their home in the dry Percival Lakes. The authorities sent in patrol officers to evacuate anyone living there to protect them from rocket debris.

The days counting down to blast-off drive the narrative of the film. Back at the Lakes, Yuwali gives a riveting account as she and her group are chased hundreds of kilometres around the desert trying to escape the ‘devilmen’ in the ‘rocks that move’ (four wheel drives). The climax is both extraordinary and emotional." Unquote

I am looking forward to it