Abstract
Public Lecture by Dr Romaine Moreton
Interrogating Western Media Art Forms in One Billion Beats (2016)
Dr Romaine Moreton is Goenpul Jagara of Stradbroke Island and Bundjulung of northern New South Wales. An internationally recognised writer of poetry, prose and film, she has published over 100 poems, prose and short stories and three anthologies of her poetry. She has also written and directed two short films, the award winning The Farm (2009) and The Oysterman (2012), and is currently working on three feature films.
In this lecture she will discuss the historicising of Indigenous family storytelling and interrogation of western media art forms performed by her in her new transmedia project “One Billion Beats” — co-written and co-directed with Alana Valentine, music and sound design by Dr Lou Bennett, and visual artistry by Sean Bacon; staged earlier this year at Campbelltown Art Centre, NSW to sold out audiences.
One Billion Beats is a multi-disciplinary work for performance presentation. Combining spoken word poetry, contemporary theatre techniques, music, song, and audio visual imagery, it is an excavation of historical cinematic representation of Aboriginal people in Australian film, interlaced with an autobiographical reflection by Moreton on her experience of being both hostage to and liberated from the constraints of Western paradigms in relation to Indigenous identity. Using a Decolonising framework to interrogate Australian cinematic archive, One Billion Beats examines the colonial gaze and dissects colonial cinematic representations of the Indigenous body to assert new frames of understanding by engaging with works held at the Australian National Film and Sound Archive.
