Peter Weir's The Last Wave (1977) Reveals the Eschatological Divide Between Settler and Indigenous Australia

“Why didn’t you tell me there were mysteries?” So asks our protagonist, the lawyer David Burton (Richard Chamberlain), of his father, Reverend Burton (Fred Parslow), midway through Peter Weir’s The Last Wave. David is defending a group of Indigenous Australians who are charged with murdering another Indigenous man, and as David’s involvement with the case deepens, he has found himself tormented by dreams that cannot be explained away. Reverend Burton tries to calm down his son, responding, “David, my whole life has been about a mystery,” referring to the mystery of Christ, but David doesn’t buy it: “No! You stood in that church and explained them away!” Even if the mystery of Christ’s simultaneous manhood and godhood qualifies as a mystery in the abstract, it’s so often presented as a fact in application, and so even though he spent his youth in church and was reared by a preacher, David is not equipped to contend with spiritual mysteries when they force their way into his life.

This conversation is the crux of David’s struggle in The Last Wave. He is a well-meaning white man who is thrust into the world of Indigenous Australian culture while trying to defend several poor men who are charged with murdering an acquaintance during a bar fight. The dead man was found drowned in a tiny puddle on the street, and the Indigenous men, who include the charismatic Chris Lee (David Gulpilli), claim they got into a drunken row, but David suspects the death was a tribal sacrifice. The dead man was found clutching stones with ancient runes carved onto them and David thinks that the man was eliminated through magic because he had broken a tribal taboo. David’s legal partners scoff at the notion, saying that these men are a thousand miles from their tribal lands in the Australian interior and thus are not beholden to tribal law, but David cannot shake the notion that there are more powerful motivations at work here. The men’s demure admission that, yes, they killed the man while drunk, only deepens David’s suspicions that they’re holding something back. Clearly, there is a hidden truth here that David must reveal.

In this respect The Last Wave resembles many other legal mysteries, but Peter Weir isn’t interested in genre convention. It’s clear that the men had something to do with the killing. Furthermore, whether they are convicted or acquitted holds no interest to anyone but David—even the men themselves are not passionate about saving themselves. So instead of playing with suspense about the murder case, Weir uses the case as a catalyst for David’s spiritual awakening. And through this awakening and David’s own journey into the Dreamtime (a parallel spiritual realm from which Indigenous Australians learn their laws and customs), Weir examines the spiritual divide between settlers and Indigenous Australians, the colonizer and the colonized. In essence, The Last Wave reveals the eschatological divide between settler Australia and Indigenous Australia.

Just as there’s an element of a legal drama in The Last Wave, there’s also an element of the familiar to the film’s conceit of a white man trying to do right by a colonized people. David Burton is a bit of a white saviour, who is attempting to atone for his culture’s erasure of Indigenous culture by saving these individual Indigenous men from prison. One of David’s colleagues even calls David out for his “bourgeois” views towards the Indigenous men. Furthermore, David’s defense relies on exoticizing the men through the idea of tribal cursing; in trying to get them acquitted, he is focusing all his attention on making them seem at a remove from white Australian society, thus “othering” them.

Of course, Weir is aware of all the ways that David resembles a white saviour, and he frustrates this dynamic of the film at every turn. David’s white saviour complex is born largely out of personal frustration, for he believes that if he helps these men, his bad dreams will cease to torment him. Weir also implies that David’s actions are driven by white guilt.  At one point, David’s wife, Annie (Olivia Hamnett), flips through a coffee table book on Indigenous Australians, musing about how their culture goes back 50,000 years. To Annie, this infinitely-rich culture, one of the oldest on the planet, is little more than an intriguing fact in a book. In other domestic moments, Weir is careful to show how David and Annie’s home is decorated with all sorts of anthropological artifacts taken from various colonized cultures around the world—they transform foreign customs and artworks into mere ornamentation. None of this is to say David and Annie are bad people—far from it, if their actions are to be taken into account—but they are clearly uneasy with their own relationship to Indigenous Australians and demonstrate normal colonial attitudes towards colonized peoples.

Furthermore, David takes on an apocalyptic role within the film’s narrative. David often dreams of water and speaks of an image of a “last wave” coming to wash everything away. The film even opens with images of water. We first see a freak hailstorm in the heart of the Australian Outback, where rain is rare and hail even rarer, before we find David in his car stuck in Sydney traffic during a downpour. David begins to dream of storms destroying his home and, of course, the dead man at the centre of the legal case drowned in a few inches of water. Weir makes the water imagery omnipresent; he shows it in dreams and in ordinary domestic scenes. Through a conversation with an academic, we learn that Indigenous custom holds that the world passes through cycles, with each cycle often ending with a deluge of water that washes away the old world and ushers in a rebirth. Thus, the water in The Last Wave shows the bleed between dream and reality, which is key to an understanding of the Dreamtime, but it also portends death and rebirth.

The apocalyptic associations of water also plays into David’s role as a figurative destroyer of worlds. Through his conversations with Chris and an older Indigenous man named Charlie (Nandjiwarra Amagula), David learns about a figure named Mukuru, who portends doom for these people and all who surround them. As he digs into the meaning of his dreams, he starts to see himself as Mukuru. When he finally descends into a tribal vault located in the city’s sewer system—allowing for more water imagery in David’s descent into the subterranean world—David discovers a mask of Mukuru’s face, only for the mask to resemble his own face.

Through this association with the apocalyptic Mukuru, David stands in for settler Australia as a whole, which had an apocalyptic effect on Indigenous Australia after contact. Most colonial narratives up to his point, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness or Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), to name a cinematic example, follow white colonialists who are overcome by the chaos of the Indigenous culture and land which they seek to colonize. Thus, The Last Wave was ahead of its time in taking the destructive and apocalyptic tone of these sorts of colonial narratives and transposing that chaotic destruction onto the colonizers themselves instead of the Indigenous people and land. Most importantly, this approach forces us to consider David’s destructive role within the narrative itself; even though he’s our point-of-view character, The Last Wave does not force the audience to align with his understanding of the world.

Thus, as David awakens to the divide between settler Australia and Indigenous Australia, he also awakens to the mystery of reality. He starts to see that all of his old understandings of reality and the relationships that underpin that reality are lacking—he starts to comprehend that there’s a mystery he doesn’t know the answer to, as I referenced off the top. David also comes to understand that the divide between settler Australia and Indigenous Australia resembles the divide between the Dreamtime and the waking world. Thus, each side of the divide interacts with a different reality; not only do settlers have different customs than Indigenous Australians, but they literally comprehend a different dimension. However, Indigenous Australians are capable of bridging this divide in ways that settlers cannot; they exist in the Dreamtime and in the waking world simultaneously, just as they are a part of white culture and separate from it.

David is the rare white man to see beyond the veil dividing these worlds, and that peek into the Dreamtime helps him to comprehend the inherent destructiveness of his own world. Like David, we end the film not knowing for sure what sort of destruction lies in wait, whether a literal or spiritual destruction, but we do know that the previous normal has been permanently dismantled. David cannot go back to his previous life. Instead, he must face what is coming, represented by the apocalyptic wave crashing down on David, which is the image that ends the film. Thus, The Last Wave not only examines the cultural differences between settler Australia and Indigenous Australia, but it examines how colonization manifests an eschatological divide that ripples out across the spiritual world.

In the film’s ultimate act of reverence to Indigenous Australian culture, Weir also shows just how alive Indigenous culture is through the Dreamtime. It is true that the material reality of the Indigenous characters in The Last Wave have been decimated. As one character comments, “We destroy their languages, their ceremonies, songs, their dances—and their tribal laws.” But the character goes too far in thinking that Indigenous Australian culture has been totally destroyed when he suggests that “the people we call ‘aborigines’ in the cities are no different culturally from depressed whites.” For the reality of the Dreamtime as seen in The Last Wave presents a culture that the white man can never truly destroy. It is eternal and beyond time. At most it can only be glimpsed from afar. Thus, because Indigenous Australian culture perpetually draws on the Dreamtime, which is infinite, it is born from a reality that no white man can ever colonize.

The Last Wave (1977, Australia)

Directed by Peter Weir; written by Peter Weir, Tony Morphett, Petru Popescu; starring Richard Chamberlain, Olivia Hamnet, David Gulpilli, Fred Parslow, Vivean Gray, Nandjiwarra Amagula.

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