Today I decided that I would sort through all of the Aboriginal names I collected and remove any that I didn't want, to narrow down the choices. I haven't entirely decided, but it's narrowed down to less than twenty per character.
I picked two names purely based on the animal meanings of them: Arinya (kangaroo) and Banjori (koala), to use in a back story. The back story explains everything from their mother's forbidden romance and their births, to how they got their animal hats and ended up alone.
Then I spent the rest of the day preparing my front and side photshop files for importing into Aftereffects. Also yesterday my brother kindly composed some music for me which I may be able to use in my animation, although not all of the samples suit the feel I was going for in their particular animation.
And here is my back story as it is at the moment (a big improvement on what I would have originally wrote as part of an assignment earlier this year):
Robyn, a young white girl lived with her English mother, Louella, in Australia. When she was sixteen she fell in love with a young Aboriginal man named Jirra. She met him in the store where she had a part time job after school. Jirra was seventeen and had been working at the store full-time as the cleaner since he finished year 10 and was completing his VCE part-time at tafe. He was handsome, sweet and had a good sense of humour. It didn’t take long for her to develop a crush on him. She constantly found herself daydreaming about him and staring at him between customers. After working there for more than half a year, without her feelings fading, she learned that he shared her feelings. They started seeing one another.
When her mother found out about their relationship she forbid Robyn from seeing Jirra again. She didn’t approve and thought that Robyn should be with someone her own race, although she hid her racism by claiming his job and lack of education were the only reasons she was against the relationship. She refused to listen when Robyn told her that he planned to study to become a doctor. Her mother would not budge on the matter but Robyn was madly in love and continued to see him behind her mother’s back, even if it meant sneaking out of the house while her mother was asleep. They managed to keep it a secret for six months, but one night her mother woke earlier than usual and caught her sneaking back into the house the next morning.
That was the last straw. Her daughter would not see that [insert racist word here] ever again. They were moving to another state where Robyn would finish school. She kept Robyn locked in the house until the move. They never even got to say goodbye. Louella may have succeeded in separating the couple but she was too late. Robyn was pregnant with Jirra’s child. Robyn refused to have an abortion so her domineering mother hid her away in the house and home schooled her until the baby was born. Louella secretly hoped for a miscarriage but alas the beautiful baby girl was born. Robyn named her Arinya after her father, as both Jirra and Arinya mean “kangaroo”.
When Robyn was nineteen she married a man named Jayden who her mother approved of, despite him being eight years older than Robyn. Louella would have rather her daughter marry a white man with a high paying job who was much older than her than a poor Aboriginal man of any age. She was happy to have her daughter marry this man as soon as possible to avoid her daughter trying to find her lost love, or to end up with another man she didn’t approve of. Robyn never stopped loving Jirra, but she didn’t think she could ever find him and she saw marrying Jayden as an easy escape from her mother’s clutches. She couldn’t afford to move out on her own and Jayden was kind and could provide for her. Robyn grew to love Jayden but never as much as Jirra the love she had been robbed of. Jayden sensed her distance but he still loved Robyn and her daughter as though she were his own.
After being married for two years Robyn fell pregnant. A month before the baby was due her husband died in a car crash. Robyn inherited the house and enough to live alone with her daughter and newborn son whom she named Banjora, she had developed a liking for Aboriginal names while she was with Jirra. Robyn raised her children alone but when they were only 5 and 10 Robyn grew ill and died of a severe infection. The children were sent to their grandmother’s house to live. Their grandmother favoured Banjora but called him Benji or Ben rather than by his given name. She tended to ignore Arinya, as she was still resentful of her daughter’s betrayal and couldn’t see past her tainted blood. Louella took care of the girl as her granddaughter but never loved her as one.
Arinya often looked after her brother while her mother was sick. She told him stories and taught him everything that her mother had told her about her father and what their names mean. She knew that he was in Western Australia and that he was a doctor. Arinya saved up her pocket money for weeks and for Christmas she bought animal shaped hats from an Australian gift shop for her and her brother; a kangaroo hat for herself and a koala hat for Benji, as their given names meant Kangaroo and Koala. Benji loved his hat and never took it off.
Benji looked up to Arinya and has called her Ari since he was old enough to talk. He thought she was really special because she was the only person he knew who had dark skin. He also knew that their grandma wasn’t always very nice to Ari and when he got special treats he shared them with his sister.
By the time Arinya was 11 Louella was 68, as she had been an older mother having her daughter when she was 38. One night Louella was outside on a cold winter’s evening trying to find Benji, who was playing a game of hide and seek with his sister and hadn’t yet come out of hiding. She tripped over a branch and broke her ankle. Benji had since gotten cold and gone to bed. Neither of them realised that their grandmother hadn’t come inside. There was a storm that night so they didn’t hear her calling out and she was soaked by the rain. By the time she was found she had a bad case of phenomena and despite staying in bed and having a live-in nurse to take care of her and the children she died after a week. The children now had no one to take care of them.
Arinya overheard the nurse talking to a social worker who was planning to separate them and put them in foster homes. She didn’t want to be separated from her brother and she had heard that foster homes were terrible places, so she packed up two bags with some clothes, food and a map. She told Benji that the bad people wanted to take them away so they were going to go on a journey to find her Dad. They snuck out of the house and headed off through the Australian desert to find their father, before anyone knew they were missing.
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