A VIOLENT “bushranger western” has broken new ground with its depiction of the ethnic conflicts that underpinned the creation of modern Australia.

The Proposition, which premiered last night at The Times bfi London Film Festival and is showing again today, shows white colonialists hunting down and massacring Aborigines and exposes the bitter racial tensions between English and Irish settlers.

It shows Aborigines collaborating in the murder of their own people and, for the first time in Australian cinema, includes a scene where one Aboriginal kills another.

Guy Pearce, the Australian former soap actor who is now one of Hollywood’s most respected actors, said that he had jumped at the chance to be in the film in the hope that it would “wake people up a bit” to the fate of the Aborigines, an area where he believes the Australian Government has failed in its responsibilities.

He told The Times: “It seems that there’s a lot of sweeping things under the carpet even now. Our Government was asked a couple of years ago to say sorry for what happened to the aboriginal people and they wouldn’t do it. I think that was a really sad thing.”

For 40,000 years Aborigines were the only people in Australia. Now, after two centuries of mistreatment, they make up 2 per cent of the population and have living standards comparable to the most deprived countries in the world. Unemployment is high, drug and drink dependency is rife and life expectancy for males is 20 years less than for their white Australian counterparts. Last year ethnic tensions between black and white Australians boiled over twice. In February there were race riots in Sydney after the death of an Aboriginal teenager. In November there was rioting on Palm Island, off the northeast coast, after the death of an Aboriginal man in police custody.

Tom E. Lewis, one of Australia’s most recognisable indigenous actors, was particularly pleased that the film dared to go beyond the usual depiction of Aboriginal men as impotent victims. His character, an Aboriginal, kills an Aboriginal collaborator after he witnesses the aftermath of a massacre. “This is the first film made in Australia where a black person kills another black person,” he said. “It wasn’t in the script — it was my idea.”

It is the latest in a succession of recent films that have attempted to address white Australia’s treatment of the continent’s indigenous people.

Rabbit Proof Fence, which starred Kenneth Branagh as an English colonial official who advocated eugenics to breed out aboriginal characteristics and produce a “superior” society, was an art-house hit in 2002. But with Pearce on board and a script by the singer Nick Cave, as well as star turns by the British actors Ray Winstone, John Hurt and Emily Watson, The Proposition is set to take its message to a wider audience.

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