The epic, sacred promise made to Gulpilil that finally brought him home

When filmmaker Maggie Miles asked this question of one of the late actor's kin, she was greeted with a smile.

"He didn't leave," she was told. "He was called to another life, and he carried his culture with him wherever he went. It's not as if he went off and became John Wayne. In all of his roles, he carried his culture with him."

Now, even in death, the trailblazing star of landmark feature films like Walkabout, Storm Boy and Crocodile Dundee is carrying his culture to the world once more as the remarkable story of his traditional burial celebration is told in the new documentary, Journey Home, David Gulpilil.

Before he died from lung cancer in November 2021, the Yolngu man had been living in Murray Bridge, in South Australia, far from the place of his birth in the Northern Territory.

But he left his family with a final, sacred wish: to take him home and lay him to rest more than 4500 kilometres away in the remote Arafura Swamp of Gupulul in Arnhem Land.

Journey Home, David Gulpilil invites us to witness the fulfilment of that promise. It's an extraordinary story of love, logistics and the enduring power of culture as members of Gulpilil's family travel with him over many months by plane, boat, helicopter and on foot, navigating the vast landscape, a crocodile-infested tidal river and the wet season.

Hugh Jackman, who starred with Gulpilil in Baz Luhrmann's Australia, narrates the film and Danzal Baker, aka Baker Boy - a grandson to David via the Yolgnu kinship system - is its cultural storyteller.

To understand the journey, you have to understand the man. David Gulpilil was catapulted from his tribal existence as a teenager when his talent as a ceremonial dancer led British director Nicolas Roeg to cast him in the 1971 desert horror Walkabout.

He toured with the film to Europe, where it screened at the Cannes Film Festival, and would go on to become the leading First Nations star of some of Australia's most popular and critically acclaimed films: from Mad Dog Morgan, The Last Wave, Rabbit Proof Fence and The Proposition, to his two-decade collaboration with filmmaker Rolf de Heer and partner Molly Reynolds in such landmark films as The Tracker, Ten Canoes - the first Australian feature entirely in Indigenous language - and semi-autobiographical drama Charlie's Country.

Miles, who co-directed Journey Home, David Gulpilil with Indigenous actor and film-maker Trisha Morton-Thomas, was 13 when she first saw Walkabout at school in England where she grew up.

She would go on to meet Gulpilil while living in Darwin in the 1990s working as casting director on the film Yolngu Boy.

"He was just so captivating," Miles says of the qualities he exuded in person and on the screen.

"It's like the wind flows through his body. It's like he is everything around him. I saw him in really busy rooms like at award ceremonies and, you know, it's like the whole room just filters through him. He's just there standing on solid ground because he knew where he was and where he came from."

While audiences saw the magnetic screen charisma, the deeper side of his Yolngu culture was rarely in the spotlight.

For Gulpilil, his connection to his country wasn't just a memory; it was a cultural belief that he and that country were one and the same.

Being so far from that place in his final years was a heavy burden, making his final wish - to return - a necessity.

When Yothu Yindi co-founder Witiyana Marika, another Yolngu man, sealed a promise to the ailing Gulpilil that he would lead the ceremony to send his body and spirit back to Arnhem Land, the idea was hatched for Miles, who had worked on Yothu Yindi's early film clips and produced the 2020 feature High Ground starring Marika, to document the endeavour.

"His story is a way of talking about Australia as a country - about the past and the present and hopefully, therefore, thinking about the future," Miles said.

"Indigenous culture in Australia is alive and strong and thriving. As we know, there are a lot of negative news stories, but this is a chance to focus on a thriving cultural environment, which I personally found a great honour to be involved in sharing."

The film tracks the complications and chaos of the Gulpilil family's struggle to honour his wish and their efforts to celebrate his life in keeping with their traditions.

Moving his body from the bottom of Australia to one of the most remote and inaccessible parts at the top of Australia took many months, as the extended family waited for the right seasonal conditions.

When he died, it was the wet season and the river at Gupulul crossing had burst its banks.

The film shows every step of the logistical challenge, with Gulpilil's long-time creative collaborators Rolf de Heer and Molly Reynolds helping to fly him to a mortuary in Nhulunbuy, Arnhem Land, as final preparations were made for his funeral, or Bapurru in Yolgnu language.

We see how the ancestral Djan'kawu sisters are invoked to mark the spot for his grave and witness clan leaders re-enacting the Songlines of their ancestors, powerfully reaffirming Gulpilil's - and their - connection to culture and country.

We hear how Gulpilil's spirit is to be guided back to a place known as Marawuyu, a sacred waterhole from where many Yolngu souls emerge, and to where they must return to complete their life-death-life cycle.

His families granted the filmmakers rare access to Aboriginal land for these ceremonies, which are usually kept from public view. It's an intimate look at some of the most sacred traditions of the oldest surviving culture on the planet.

"It's a window into a part of Australia that many people just won't get the opportunity to experience," Miles said.

"At a funeral or a memorial, you feel like you're looking backwards, but the activities that we see are so very regenerative. It's a time for the families to come together and dance and sing the stories. It's a time of learning as well for the young cultural leaders. And David himself made the request for the initiation of his youngest grandson, Clifton, to be tied in, which we see. So, we have the young man being created as the new man passes."

Production of the documentary mirrored the long, patient journey of the family to fulfil Gulpilil's wishes. With the crew on a shoestring budget, when the two-day funeral ceremony was delayed, only Miles and director of photography Allan Collins could stay to complete the shooting.

For Miles, a particular joy was finding never-before-seen footage from Gulpilil's iPad. It shows the actor in a red singlet standing on his homeland decades ago talking about its importance to him. This rare glimpse of him back where his journey began added poignancy to his final return.

Miles went to painstaking lengths to match those minutes of iPad-shot footage to Gulpilil's voice in four hours of audio recordings chronicling the same trip.

"There's also one bit of audio which we use while the helicopter is transporting David back to his homeland," she says. "And that's him saying, 'I'm going home now'. It was just extraordinary finding this audio, because he was actually on his own homeland, walking that country, expressing these thoughts and his tears about returning home and he says 'I live in my land, and my land lives in me. We live together. There is nowhere else I can go'."