
With his heroin supply dried up, Lionel goes into severe withdrawal and begs Tracy (Cate Blanchett) to buy him some heroin. She is appalled, but she does it, buying heroin on the street for the first time since she gave it up four years earlier. She is about to use some of the drug herself when she stumbles on a children’s choir, singing an old Cold Chisel song, in a school hall. The sight of these children stops her in her tracks. Summary by Paul Byrnes.
One of the most powerful sequences in the film, and one of the most memorable. We don’t know for sure that she was looking for a place to shoot up, but that’s definitely inferred by Tracy’s urgent desire to find somewhere private, now that she has bought heroin for the first time in years. The fact that she is stopped by the sound of a children’s choir is a superbly original device. Earlier in the film we have seen Tracy reluctantly attend a school reunion for her class of ’89 – and on the way in, after she has passed through metal detectors, she looks at a memorial board with the pictures of 10 people who have died already since leaving high school.
Tracy Heart (Cate Blanchett) has been off heroin for four years, when old boyfriend Jonny Nguyen (Dustin Nguyen) comes back to Sydney. Tracy is 32, living with her mum Janelle (Noni Hazelhurst) and working in a video shop in Cabramatta. Her brother Ray (Martin Henderson) sells amphetamines. The only man she has ever loved like a father, ex-rugby league star Lionel Dawson (Hugo Weaving), is hopelessly heroin-addicted. When big-time dealer Brad ‘The Jockey’ Thompson (Sam Neill) decides to retire, the decision has an impact on all their lives.
Little Fish arrived, in late 2005, at just the right time, after a couple of lean years in which Australian cinema seemed to have run out of ideas. Rowan Woods and Jacqueline Perske showed what was wrong – the film was intensely moving, dramatic and fresh, but that came out of years of research, including more than 100 hours of video-taped interviews with people just like Tracey Heart and Lionel Dawson. The film was about real people’s lives, in fact, places like Cabramatta, a notorious centre of the heroin trade in western Sydney. Very few Australian filmmakers are interested in the suburbs, as a source for dramatic stories, especially the poorer suburbs that have been transformed by mass migration since the Second World War, but Little Fish shows what we’ve been missing.
Woods grew up with strong links in Sydney’s Asian migrant communities, because both his parents taught English to migrants in the 1960s and ‘70s. In Little Fish he shows Cabramatta as a vibrant community, where heroin is only part of the story. The film is very clear-eyed about the damage the drug is doing, and the grubby politics of the trade, but it’s about much more than heroin. It’s about the choices you make in life, and the consequences. The climax of the film is an amazing scene in which Cate Blanchett convinces a man with a gun that he has a choice about what to do – and that the wrong choice will ruin his life. There’s never really been a scene like it in another Australian film, because guns once drawn tend to get used. It’s a very powerful subtle message, especially for young viewers used to violent resolutions to complex problems.
Notes by Paul Byrnes
This clip from the award-winning film Little Fish shows an ex-drug addict, Tracy (Cate Blanchett), at night on a street corner in Cabramatta, Sydney, waiting to buy heroin. After phoning a number she is given a car pulls up, she gets in and buys the drug from two dealers. Back on the street Tracy asks a passer-by if there is a toilet in the local hall. She follows her directions into the building where young schoolchildren, the Sacred Heart Cabramatta School Choir, are rehearsing a Cold Chisel song called 'Flame Trees’. Tracy is deeply affected by the performance.
Education notes provided by The Learning Federation and Education Services Australia
A train rushes past Tracy. It is night time as she walks through the outer city streets. She stops and waits on a street corner.
Dealer Tracy, what the fuck you been doing?
Tracy It’s not for me.
Dealer So how much do you want?
Tracy Three g’s.
Dealer Yeah, I can do it. You call this number in ten minutes.
It is raining. A car pulls up and Tracy enters.
Drug car driver Got the correct money?
Tracy Yeah. You right?
Drug car driver Alright.
Tracy gets out of the car and waits on the footpath. A woman and her son walk past with an umbrella.
Tracy Excuse me, is there a toilet in there?
Woman Yeah, in that door.
Tracy enters the door. We hear a children’s choir singing the Cold Chisel song ‘Flame Trees’.
... and there’s nothing else could set fire to this town
There’s no change, there’s no pace
Everything within its place
Just makes it harder to believe that she won’t be around
Tracy looks towards the ladies toilets, but is transfixed by the children singing in the choir.
And I’m wondering if he’ll go or if he’ll stay
Do you remember, nothing stopped us on the field
In our day
Oh the flame trees will blind the weary driver
And there’s nothing else could set fire to this town
There’s no change, there’s no pace
Everything within its place …
Tracy is outside, smoking a cigarette.
The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia acknowledges Australia’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the Traditional Custodians of the land on which we work and live and gives respect to their Elders both past and present.