Our dear friend Dennis has died. I have posted this on Facebook, but I think that this is such a fitting tribute to a man who was a one-off in our lives, that it deserves to be spread far and wide
Born 14 August 1945
Died 15 June 2013
Dennis O’Rourke, who died last week, was a Big
Game Hunter. He was after truth rather than tusks
or antlers, but he shot big contentious stories with
a passion and contempt for danger that set him
apart from the merely curious storyteller. Wading
up the Sepik River, or looking for a bar in Kabul,
he was never simply a bystander.
A passionate witness to injustice wherever he
found it, O’Rourke dared to turn the confessional
glare of the documentary camera on his own
motivations, to a degree that was at times
shocking, even to the documentary community.
He never shied from controversy and vigorously
defended his film making in person on the
numerous occasions when he had stirred his
audience into a hornets’ nest of outrage. He was
a big man in every sense, but he was also
painfully vulnerable and agonized over what he
keenly felt was the lack of recognition in his own
country. Despite numerous prestigious
retrospectives in major films centres from Berlin,
to Los Angeles, New Delhi, New York, Singapore,
and Taipei, he felt like a tall poppy at home, and
took his share of cuts and critiques to heart.
O’Rourke’s combative maverick style went hand
in hand with a gentleness, good humour and
compassion that allowed him to strike up an
intimacy with his subjects that bordered on the
love affair, convincing people to open up to a
degree they sometimes regretted afterwards. He
worked off gut rather than rationale but his films
had the clarity of a robust intelligence, and his
professional approach was meticulous and multilayered.
Long before Joshua Openheimer’s The
Act of Killing or Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell,
O’Rourke was exploring the “fiction” of
documentary film making. He played games with
representational shifts that were not always
appreciated, and on at least one occasion
wound up defending his methods in court (in
2007 he was completely exonerated of
“unscrupulous” behaviour during the making of
Cunnumulla, and awarded damages). Of his
most controversial film, The Good Woman of
Bangkok, he once said, “many people just don’t
understand.. they think that Aoi was the prisoner
of my camera. We were just in love in a way. We
were prisoners of each other.”
O’Rourke’s own story was every bit as hungry
and edgy as those he documented on film.
He grew up very close to his fiercely supportive
mother Hazel, and his younger sisters Caroline
and Teresa, in a parochial country town in
Queensland that was probably too small for him.
Not content with the path well travelled,
O’Rourke turned his back on university and
career, and from the age of 18 to 24 lived on the
lam, shoplifting to eat, pulling off petty scams to
keep moving on. He once said these were the
best years of his life, and perhaps his narrative hunting
skills, as well as his addiction to adrenalin,
were forged at this time.
The lifestyle came to an end when he discovered
something more thrilling in the act of creation,
and developed his first photographs. It didn’t
stop him doing dangerous things, in fact his
creativity facilitated a lifelong immersion in
dangerous places and dangerous ideas. By the
time he reached Sydney in the mid 1970s he had
worked as a cowboy, seaman, farm hand and
salesman. He got a gig with the Australian
Broadcasting Commission as an assistant
gardener but swiftly worked his way out of the
flower beds and into cinematographer. At 29 he
made his first documentary film, Yumi Yet in
Papua New Guinea, where he lived between
1974 and 1979, and where he also met and
married Roseanne Paisawa. She was essential to
his first four films, and they had three children
together (Bill, Davy and Celia). The family moved
to Canberra in 1984 and although Roseanne and
Dennis divorced in 1990, they remained a
constant in each other’s lives.
Despite his empathy for the rough shod and
homeless, and the long periods he spent making
films, largely by himself whenever possible,
O’Rourke was a prodigious homemaker who
loved cooking, designing living spaces, and
being a father. He met Catherine Vandermark in
1990 and two more much loved children soon
arrived (Sophia and Xavier).
In 2002 O’Rourke met his final partner Tracey
Spring, and they lived together in Bondi until he
built the house he had been dreaming of for
years in Cairns. To his great joy his three eldest
children and their mother Roseanne moved in
nearby shortly after.
In recent years illness slowed O’Rourke down as
nothing else ever had, and his output is confined
to ten muscular, riveting documentary films,
although he continued to work on his final
project I Love A Sunburnt Country for several
years. He won and roundly deserved many
awards and sustained critical acclaim. He had
begun film making in pursuit of social justice,
cutting through to the core of people and
situations with a keen sense of black comedy.
Cannibal Tours which he made in 1988 is possibly
one of the greatest documentaries about post
colonialism ever made. Yet O’Rourke’s most
enduring characters are the leading ladies of his
last three films. He saw something heroic in the
teenage girls from Cunnumulla, the prostitute in
Bangkok, and the one legged woman begging
on the street in Afghanistan. He took their stories,
so often overlooked in favour of mannish
narratives, capturing the poetic temperature of
their lives, giving them the chance to speak as
eloquently about their worlds as any professional
orator.
Expansive, restless demanding personalities like
Dennis O’Rourke are disappearing as the digital
era shrinks the globe, inflating the egos of the
unaccomplished. Perhaps he was too big for
these trivial times, and it is fair to say we may
never see his like again.
Just as he had lived, O’Rourke did not die
without making a statement. An athiest to the
last, he donated his body to the Human Bequest
program. Surrounded by his family, he died
peacefully. He is survived by Tracey, his five
children, grandchildren and sisters.
Obituary by Martha Ansara
