Deliberately isolated from all contact with her birth family and relations, Jedda, is unsure of her identity until she meets Marbuck, a tribal Aboriginal man in trouble with the European system of justice.

[3] After the show young Charlie McMahon had been so absorbed by his cinema experience he tried to imitate the gut-stirring didge sound he heard in the movie by blowing into a garden hose and various hollow household objects like vacuum cleaner nozzles.

The Sydney Morning Herald newspaper report of the incident stated that the friend, Ron Carley, had some of his fingers amputated so presumably both boys were holding the cylinder at the time it exploded.

[6] During a lengthy recuperation period getting used to his new metal arm (which, true to character, he wrapped in goanna hide) McMahon reactivated his earlier interest in didgeridoo playing, this time as therapy.

During study breaks McMahon used to relax by going off to the sand flats of the Windsor River with his bongo playing brother Phil and some mates and the "westie tribe" would dress up in loincloths, paint their faces and have a corroboree.

[8] One fateful weekend at Australia's equivalent of Woodstock, the 1973 Nimbin Aquarius Festival, McMahon found himself intrigued by the performance of The White Company an experimental Theatre Troupe featuring a number of alternative culture artists including one Peter Carolan, a 25-year-old actor with roles in Australian TV's Skippy the Bush Kangaroo, The Rovers, and stage productions such as Servant of Two Masters, and Graham Bond's Drip Dry Dreams.

[11] After two and a half years of labouring and living on his diminishing savings he finished his bush retreat and was fortunate to be offered a job working for the Federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs in the position of a Development Coordinator in the Northern Territory, supervising outstation work grants to tribal people living hundreds of kilometres west of Alice Springs at the settlements of Kintore, Kiwirrkurra Community, Western Australia, and Papunya (the 1971 birthplace of the Australian Aboriginal dot painting revival).

An important part of McMahon's initial work program to supervise the building of a store and meeting place for the local people as the levelling of an air strip for the Royal Flying Doctor Service.

In 1980, encouraged by Tony Walker, an announcer from Triple J (an Australian alternative music radio station), McMahon sold his Toyota Land Cruiser work truck and embarked on a two-month exploratory holiday to the United States starting in San Francisco, then going on to Los Angeles and Fresno.

Some soundtrack work beckoned in Hollywood on a 1981 horror film called Wolfen but a musician's strike delayed the recording and, returning to San Francisco, McMahon, in the same week, missed his plane flight home and had his wallet, containing all his money, stolen creating the urgent need to find some way to earn a living wage and save for the air trip back to Australia.

He found gigs on the daunting (and taunting) San Francisco punk club circuit and survived spectacularly with an improvised solo act alternating original didgeridoo compositions with stories based on memories of his desert experiences.

Another notable combination was with punk electronics group Indoor Life whose songs of urban frustration "buried in cement" were dominated by the sound of a trombone fed through a synthesizer.

After five months of work he found himself earning about 500 dollars a week and quickly developing a fan base but, having reached one goal, financial, it was time to aim for the next one, creative, which for McMahon meant the recording of an album which he felt could only be done in Australia, the source of his musical inspiration.

[13] McMahon returned to Sydney and, in 1981, received his first major Australia-wide publicity when the Adelaide music paper Roadrunner published a lengthy article with the intriguing heading "This Years Thing?

In the following months Carolan continued to create ideal music settings for McMahon's didgeridoo and expanded on his key image ideas such as an emu running, a drought, an eagle flying, and a landscape stretching beyond the horizon.

Carolan's use of simple but powerful melodies linked to intelligently emotional arrangements openly conveyed in sound those poetic moments "when time stops and the joys, and mysteries of life are felt.

In October 1984, shortly after the debut of the first album, McMahon went "on the swag" again, only to be caught up in a sensationalist media drama when a group of nine Aboriginals, known as the Pintupi Nine, were encountered near the last of a chain of water bores he had been overseeing between Kintore and "the remotest outpost in Australia"—Kiwirrkurra.

The small tribal group managed to go through their usual birth, initiation, marriage, and death rituals for decades, living off the natural resources of their desert environment before "coming in" to face the anger, and relief, of their relatives.

One track from this collection, the outstanding "Landmark," features a dramatic use of McMahon's re-invention of an instrument first made in the 1970s in the UK by Dr Peter Holmes, the multi-tone, slide didgeridoo called "didjeribone."

In 1994, after the great leap forward of Wide Skies, McMahon formed a second band, Gondwana, with an emphasis on rhythm and increasingly dominant bass and experimental didge sounds.

The band released three albums: Travelling, Xenophon, and Bone Man, with the last two featuring another McMahon innovation: the mouth-held use of a geologist's seismic microphone to amplify the growling subsonic didge dynamics.