Audrey Napanangka is a documentary that tells the story of the unique lives of Santo Giardina and Audrey Napanangka. This couple has been together for 37 years and has grown more than 30 foster children, including young relatives of Napanangka and other indigenous children who needed a safe haven for weeks, months or even years. The film follows their lives for a decade, showing remarkable scenes where they shop in supermarkets and add Italian olives and kangaroo tails to the trolley for their big, extended family to enjoy. The couple’s family regularly eats pizza in the Italian restaurant in Mparntwe/Alice Springs, where Giardina works. At other times, on Napanangka’s Warlpiri country, her family will pull a goanna from a hole to cook on an open fire, an act that her ancestors have done to stop them from getting sick.
The film also showcases Napanangka’s paintings of goanna Dreaming and bush food stories, and a story of her family’s journey with her niece who was serving jail time for violent offenses connected to alcohol abuse. The film shows how Napanangka connects her niece back to Warlpiri country at Mount Theo, and how the couple raised her daughter during her niece’s incarceration. The couple struggled with another foster child who was returned to them with behavioral challenges after two years with white foster carers, and we watch as Napanangka flies to Canberra with a group of Indigenous grandmothers to protest “a new stolen generation.”
Napanangka is a person with a heart so open to children that she has taken care of many children, mainly because she could not have any of her own. She lost two children before a road accident that rendered her infertile at the age of 17. She only recently received death certificates for her babies, with no indication where the infants might have been laid to rest and is unconvinced about the death of her second child, Kingsley Jagamara. She believed that she would get her baby back when she was driving back to Yuendumu from that hospital stay, but she never did.
When asked what could help young people in Alice Springs, a town facing increased rates of assault, domestic violence, property damage, and theft that sparked « crime wave » headlines, the couple believes that one key to the complex problems is community intervention programs run by Aboriginal people. They highlight the cultural programs aimed at treating and diverting young people from substance abuse such as those run at Mount Theo outstation, where Napanangka has worked, and the Central Australian Youth Link-Up Service, which runs programs within communities.
Audrey Napanangka hopes to offer an insight into lives not typically shown on screen and shows a glimpse of a blended family that has made a notable contribution to the communities they belong to. The documentary should be shown worldwide, according to Napanangka, to educate people on the importance of family and cultural roots.
