David Gulpilil AM (1953-2021), actor and dancer, was a Yolngu man of the Mandhalpuyngu language group and was born near Maningrida in Arnhem Land. Having been raised in the bush and educated in the customs of his people, Gulpilil was sixteen when British film director, Nicholas Roeg, saw him performing a traditional dance and cast him in the film, Walkabout, released in 1971. Subsequently, he appeared in Storm Boy (1976), Mad Dog Morgan (1976), The Last Wave (1977) and Crocodile Dundee (1986); and portrayed Bennelong in the television series The Timeless Land (1980). His performance in The Tracker (2002) saw him named Best Actor at the AFI Awards, the Inside Film Awards and the Film Critics' Circle Awards. Gulpilil's further film credits include Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), The Proposition (2005), Australia (2008), Satellite Boy (2013), Charlie's Country (2014), for which he won his second Best Actor AACTA award, Goldstone (2016), Cargo (2017) and the 2018 remake of Storm Boy. Gulpilil developed the Yolngu-language Ten Canoes (2006) with director Rolf de Heer, in which he starred alongside his son, Jamie. Gulpilil returned to his ancestral lands to subsist through crocodile hunting and fishing. The contradictions and difficulties of his existence between Yolngu and balanda (European) cultures were examined in his one-man autobiographical stage show Gulpilil, conceived by Neil Armfield and Stephen Page, which premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2004. In 2013 Gulpilil was awarded the Red Ochre Prize, Australia's highest peer-assessed honour for Indigenous artists, at the National Indigenous Arts Awards.
