Quotes of the Day

Whether they found it on the tribal battlefields of Papua New Guinea or among satraps in Sydney council politics, Robin Anderson and Bob Connolly made films that brimmed with life. Australia's most acclaimed documentary makers for two decades, they shared a prodigious partnership at work - Anderson once said they worked so well together because "he thinks I'm better than him at what we do, and I think he's better than me" - and two daughters at home. There seemed much more to come, until Anderson died of cancer in 2002, at just 51. After that, "I didn't want to make films anymore," Connolly says. "I didn't want to do anything."

Going through his wife's possessions in the dark months that followed, Connolly came across the diaries she'd kept in 1990 during their year living in a grass hut making Black Harvest (1992), the third in their trilogy set in the wildly beautiful Highlands of Papua New Guinea. A planned book on their experience was never finished, waylaid by other projects, such as their celebrated 1996 take on the overheated jostling during the mayoral contest in an inner-Sydney city council, Rats in the Ranks. So when Connolly took up the book again 12 years on, it was a way of revisiting a time he remembers as "our high point, our year on the edge ... Days when we edged along rope bridges spanning churning rivers; or listened to funeral chants floating over the hills, to screams and gunshots and battle cries, the twang of taut bowstrings, the phtt of arrows fired in anger and passing close by." The result, Making 'Black Harvest' (ABC Books; 296 pages), reveals a talent for lyrical narrative that matches his cameraman's eye for detail.

By 1990 the pair had already spent several years off and on living in the Highlands among the Ganiga tribe of the Nebilyer Valley. For First Contact (1983), which was nominated for an Academy Award, the pair discovered silent 1930s footage of dumbfounded warriors meeting the first white men to enter the area. Combined with the present-day memories of old people who could vividly recall the arrival of the gold-seeking Australian Leahy brothers and their "giant bird" planes, the effect was hypnotic. Joe Leahy's Neighbours (1989) followed, charting the struggle of Mick Leahy's mixed-race son Joe to be both a traditional bigman and a modern businessman running a lucrative coffee plantation on Ganiga land. The cash economy was seeping into their remote world, and the Ganiga longed for Joe's wealth. Black Harvest revisited the Ganiga five years later, on the eve of the long-awaited first harvest of coffee from a joint venture with Leahy that the tribe hoped would make them rich too. When harvesting was interrupted by an outbreak of tribal warfare, and international coffee prices plummeted, Connolly and Anderson were there to capture the mayhem and lost chances.

Sixty hours of footage were distilled into the 90 minutes of Black Harvest, and Connolly's reflective, droll prose further illuminates an extraordinary year. Characters from the documentary - like gentle clan leader Popina Mai, whose hopes would be broken before the year was out - come more fully to life in Connolly's lively retelling, as do the Highlands, steeped in old ways and oratory, yet riven by fighting. The book also does much to answer the question that teased the film's audience: How did two white foreigners, along with their two-year-old daughter, manage among people who had been in contact with the outside world for only 60 years? If they stayed long enough, the pair reasoned, the Ganiga would eventually lose interest and resume their lives - the trick being, says Connolly, "to never interfere, never divulge a confidence and only ask people questions if it can't be avoided." Black Harvest was testimony to their success - in a cloistered society which few outsiders penetrated, these two filmmakers, laden with modern ways and equipment, established themselves in the Nebilyer, and then vanished into it to eavesdrop on the tribe's world.

Documentary making, says the amiable Connolly, wearing a green scarf on a cold Melbourne afternoon, is a craft in which "all the bets are off - you stand and fall on the accuracy of your capturing of spontaneous human relationships." Remaining neutral in a world where clan allegiances are paramount made for some of the hardest work of all. Connolly is frank in his assessment of his and Anderson's ability to remain objective as tribal frictions intensified and the harvest's prospects faltered. He confesses the horror the pair privately felt when they heard that the international coffee price looked set to rise - it didn't - and spoil their film's premise. "Robin and I both felt really bad about that for years," he says.

When the fighting worsened, Anderson and Connolly found themselves on the front line, witnessing a new intrusion by the outside world - the arrival of high-powered guns to replace bows and arrows. They also found themselves, as the book reveals, confronted by wounded friends and new dilemmas. They took one man to hospital but refused to take another for fear of seeming to align themselves with either side. The extent of their unwitting role in sparking the conflict - when their pig was stolen one night - still troubles Connolly. As does the memory of hurrying to the side of their friend Popina Mai after he was hit by an arrow and of Connolly's first question: "Can we film?" The resulting footage is profoundly moving, but 14 years on Connolly writes of his "cold-blooded prioritising" that day: "I can offer no defence. That's how it was, that's what we had become."

Connolly's account of how he and Anderson navigated the undertow of tribal life - the extortion attempts, deep friendships and, finally, death threats - tells as much of life in Papua New Guinea as the Ganiga's grim story does. When Connolly found himself armed and listening for assassins in the dark, they knew it was time to leave. Now, three years after Anderson's death, he remains ambivalent about another major documentary project. He says Anderson herself, whose voice, analytical and wry, runs through the book, was having doubts about observational documentaries before her death: "The whole moral thing about 1990 being a bad year for the Ganiga, but a good year for us," as Connolly puts it. Readers of Making 'Black Harvest' might harbor a similar thought: that it was out of Connolly's own great loss that such a compelling book was born.

• Lisa Clausen
• A documentary maker recounts the off-camera dramas and ethical dilemmas of filming village life in the Papua New Guinea Highlands