Publications

The Farm (2009) and Indigenous Remembrance.

Romaine Moreton reflects on the making of her short drama ‘The Farm’. She writes: ‘I am not Yuin, but Yuin country raised me. The making of The Farm is an expression of this relationship’.

Indigenous Performance of History, Loss and Remembrance in Whispering In Our Hearts: The Story of the Mowla Bluff Massacre.

Draws on Romaine Moreton’s work on Indigenous phenomenology to explain how filmmaker, Mitch Torres, uses film technology as a means for transmitting Indigenous embodied ways of knowing in her documentary account of the massacre of ancestors at Mowla Bluff in 1916.

Between Worlds: Indigenous Identity and Difference in the Films of Darlene Johnson.

Looks at the films of Darlene Johnson, director of award winning documentary, Stolen Generations. Pays particular attention to a series of films she made with David Gulpilil and others in Ramingining in Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Includes an interview with Johnson.

Australian Indigenous Screen in the 2000s: Crossing into the Mainstream.

Examines key strategies pursued by Australian Indigenous screen producers in the 2000s in pursuit of mainstream reception.

Locating The Sapphires: transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of an Australian Indigenous musical film.

Examines transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of The Sapphires -- an Indigenous musical drama directed by Wayne Blair.

When we look at pictures: Travel television and the intimacy of companion memory.

Examines the historically significant TV series Alcheringa -- a prize-winning 1962 ABC television program hosted by Bill Onus, a Yorta Yorta man.

Reading the Country after travelling television.

This essay considers how some popular television engages with Indigenous experience and might connect up with the rich intellectual heritage of Paddy Roe and Stephen Muecke.

Love and Social Marginality in Samson and Delilah.

Therese Davis reviews Warwick Thornton’s first feature film Samson and Delilah in the context of his 20-year career as a filmmaker and an ongoing engagement with Indigenous social and cultural issues.

Indigenising Australian History: Contestation and Collaboration on First Australians.

Examines the themes of “remaking history” and “remapping cinema” by focussing on the construction of an Indigenous perspective on Australian national history in the seven-part television documentary series, First Australians.

"Keeping story alive" screening Indigenous resistance in Mitch Torres’Jandamarra’s War (2011) and Keepers of the Story: Jandamarra (2010).

Documentaries by Indigenous directors have played a significant role in challenging orthodox histories of colonial conflict and Indigenous resistance. This paper looks at Jandamarra’s War (2011) and Keepers of the Story: Jandamarra (2010) directed by Mitch Torres.

"A dog when you point at something, will only look at your finger": Travelling Television.

Introduces, and considers how best to write about ‘travelling television’, a genre that stretches from (before) the Leyland Brothers, and from Australian Walkabout (1958) to Bush Tucker Man (1988–1990) and Indigenous director Hetti Perkins’ series Art + Soul (2010-2014).

To look after cultural knowledge is a huge privilege, actually. I want to fight for that. I want to do my very best job. And I want to be involved in all those issues so we, as Aboriginal people, can nut them out together and detangle what they are and how they affect everyone, so we can work out the best way forward for us. And, hopefully, that will make for a better film.

Darlene Johnson, Indigenous Writer and Director. Screening the Past, 2011.