Deborah Mailman sat in rusty red sand on Arrernte country in central Australia, and she felt her character’s deep grief. She was filming a scene in Warwick Thornton’s 1930s frontier western Wolfram, playing Pansy, an Indigenous woman whose children have been stolen from her. As her bundled baby cries, Pansy silently cuts her hair off with a knife – “a grieving ritual”, Mailman says – even though her missing children might still be alive.
Mailman is the mother of two boys herself, Henry, 19, and Oliver, 16. Portraying Pansy’s anguish, she says, “requires no acting”.
