At 23, the Western Australian-born actor Mark Coles Smith lost his best friend, a fellow young Indigenous man, to suicide. He spent the next 10 years “not letting go of that loss”, holding the grief within.
“He was a deeply inspiring human being,” recalls the Nyikina man and Mystery Road: Origin star, now 36. “A person of joy and good humour and good nature, extreme physical strength and capability, athletic, kind, loving.
“Yet despite all of those wonderful qualities, he was battling with a sense of, I guess, distrust for his own power and potential to navigate the challenges of the world.”
On the night his friend died, in 2011, the pair had sat talking until after midnight in Coles Smith’s Broome home in the Kimberley region. By then, the actor had spent months in “different stages of a suicide watch” over his friend.
It was only a decade later that Coles Smith finally opened up – three weeks into filming his documentary about Aboriginal suicides, Keeping Hope, which premieres on Sunday 10 September. The production was filming the 21st anniversary gathering of the Yiriman Project, for which elders from four Kimberley clans take young men on to Country to reconnect them with culture. Around a campfire near the Dreaming site of Tangu Springs, the actor spoke at length about the profound loss for the first time.
As the fire crackled, Coles Smith remembered the phone call he received the next morning in 2011: “His mum called me. She said, ‘Can you find my boy? Where’s my boy? I’m looking for him.’
“I knew he’d been thinking about [taking his life] for a couple of months and I just knew at that moment he’d already done it. The police came and said, ‘Can you come to the hospital, we want you to take a look at a body.’”
The documentary, to air on World Suicide Prevention Day in September after screenings at the Sydney and Melbourne film festivals, examines why Indigenous Australians are six times more likely to take their lives than other Australians.
Coles Smith had a “lucky, rich childhood”, connected to a strong sense of culture from his mother’s Country at Martuwarra/Fitzroy River, walking the coastline with his family, catching fish and oysters, hunting along the river and camping under the stars.
But growing up in Broome, he did not know a single Indigenous family not impacted by suicide, the mainstream Australian culture having instilled upon many “a sense of isolation, anxiety, shame and hopelessness”, he says. He remembers at the age of four, hugging his cousins, the daughters of his uncle Gayden, a pearl diver who took his life in 1991 at the age of 25.
In the documentary, Coles Smith recalls losing “a lot of young mob” at Fitzroy Crossing, and coroner Alastair Hope’s subsequent 2008 report on the deaths of young people across the Kimberley, which criticised the Western Australian government for its inaction.
But Hope’s terms of reference were “too narrow”, he says, and didn’t focus on the root causes of intergenerational trauma, such as colonisation, massacres and dispossession.
Coles Smith takes his audience through Indigenous-run suicide prevention programs such as the Yiriman Project, which are receiving “woefully inadequate” funding. He meets Prof Juli Coffin and discusses her equine-assisted learning program, which enables young Aboriginal people to talk about their feelings, and he takes part in art therapy, “learning to regulate your emotions through [applying] colour”.
In 2016, the Kimberley was identified as one of 12 trial sites for the National Suicide Prevention Program. Brenda Garston, the chief executive of the Yura Yungi medical service, tells Coles Smith money was “poured” into Halls Creek, where there was a cluster of Aboriginal youth suicides emerging in 2010. But most was spent on infrastructure, housing and administration, she says, with only “piecemeal” financial support for community programs.
Coles Smith describes the struggles of families in Halls Creek as “deeply offensive”.
“There’s a profound level of disappointment that there is still such a lack of true, genuine, sustained support for the regions and for service operations; that, even with those stark [suicide] statistics, there’s still a sense of insecurity,” he says.
In 2019, a coronial report was released into the death by suicide of 13 children and young people in the wider Kimberley region, including a 10-year-old girl at Looma. “[The report] must not join the 42 reports into Aboriginal wellbeing delivered over the last 15 years that simply sit and gather dust,” Senator Pat Dodson said at the time.
“Indigenous people are continuing to battle to save our own kids,” Coles Smith says. “And in the case of Halls Creek, it’s not just service providers that are run on the smell of an oily rag; it’s family members within community investing whatever resources they have.
“People’s aunties and mothers and uncles and fathers are already struggling with the conditions living in these remote areas. It’s offensive because it’s not a new issue; it’s a deep issue, it’s gone on for so long and we just haven’t seen the kind of change we want to see.”
Coles Smith says it is clear what successful Indigenous-owned, operated and led support services and long-term strategies look like, but they are not sufficiently supported and resourced. The Yiriman camp program, for example, is “incredibly special and unique” and should be rolled out across the country, adapted by elders to meet local needs.
Coles Smith was recently “on the fence” about the Indigenous voice to parliament, concerned about how this would work at a regional level. Now, he says, he supports it, approaching it with “optimism to engage with what might be possible”.
But it would be “naive to assume there are any guarantees for the outcomes of government mechanisms”, he says. “All of the outcomes that the voice could potentially assist in achieving could be done without it, and could have been done already.
“So, it’s actually quite a challenge to not be cynical as an Indigenous person at this point. My big personal battle is getting over the cynicism of our situation, and as the documentary title suggests, keeping hope,” he laughs.
He finds some of that hope in his culture. In his early teens, Coles Smith says he “felt almost a little bit ashamed for being Aboriginal. I felt ashamed for being a part of a heritage of victims of subjugation”. But by his late teens, “I started to gain a sense of what [the Nyikina people] call Bookarrarra, the Dreaming, and I started to gain a sense of liyan, what we call spirit, and in listening and started to gain a sense of the cultivation of the relationship between the interior and exterior and the journey of discovering what spirit actually means.
“The more that I understood about my family and the more that I understood about my culture, the more I had to be proud about, and to feel really inspired, to be in service for and to honour.”
At the end of his documentary, Coles Smith speaks directly to any young Indigenous viewers: “We need to hold each other to account, we need to be strong together and we need to know we’re making choices that help us become even stronger.”
He hopes Keeping Hope not only “saves lives”, he says now, “but changes the conditions of the lives being lived”.
Keeping Hope airs on NITV and SBS On Demand on Sunday 10 September
For information and support in Australia call 13YARN on 13 92 76 for a crisis support line for Indigenous Australians; or call Lifeline on 13 11 14, Mensline on 1300 789 978 and Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636
