Stephen Johnson

Stephen Maxwell Johnson is an Australian filmmaker, best known for his films Yolngu Boy (2001) and High Ground (2020). He is also known for directing Yothu Yindi's music videos in the late 1980s to early 1990s. Early life and education Johnson was born in England. His parents were teachers, who worked in several places around the world. He grew up in the Bahamas, Africa and the Northern Territory (NT) of Australia. His father became a senior teacher at Kormilda College, a secondary school for Aboriginal students in Darwin, and Johnson made friends with many of the students there. He has spoken of his appreciation of his "incredible childhood growing up in the wild and all of those countries and then being immersed also in the culture of those countries, particularly very, very intimately with Aboriginal culture [in Australia]". He has spent most of his life in Arnhem Land, where he became friends with Witiyana Marika when quite young. He also learnt much about the history of the area from the Aboriginal perspective, which involved "chaos" and massacres of Indigenous people, although this was not taught at his school. Johnson went to an acting school in London, where he also trained as a cameraman, before returning to the NT with the aim of making his first film.