Issue Details: First known date: 2021... 2021 [Review] Dispossession and the Making of Jedda : Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country
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'Catherine Kevin, the author of Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country, tells us that this book was a long time in the making. In some ways, it is a very personal book for Kevin because it emerges from her own white-settler family history in the heart of grazier country in the Yass Valley, where a lucrative wool industry was established on Ngunnawal land. The time and care that Kevin has put into this book is evident in the complex, difficult and evocative story that it tells about colonialism through an account of the making of one of the most historically significant films to address the question of race relations in Australia. As Kevin acknowledges, there are many scholarly analyses of Jedda, notably in Indigenous Studies and Film Studies. But what makes the focus of this book especially arresting is its unearthing of the local, intimate and exploitative economic relationships between white pastoralists and black labourers in the Yass Valley/Ngunnawal country that supported the making of Jedda. Without sizeable investment from wealthy pastoralists in the wool industry, the film would never have been made. ‘The central paradox of this book’, Kevin writes, ‘is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community for a film that directly addressed the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism’ in which the very same pastoral community itself was complicit (1). These were people who benefited from the state policies of racial assimilation and segregation that Jedda had attempted to scrutinise.' (Introduction)

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    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies Special Issue : Australia and the ‘End’ of World War I vol. 52 no. 1 2021 21211138 2021 periodical issue 'At dawn on Saturday 25 April 2020, hundreds of Australians gathered in their driveways to observe a minute of silence to commemorate Anzac Day. In suburbs across the country they found inventive ways to mark the occasion, decorating fences with rosemary and wreaths, letterboxes with paper poppies, and pathways with candles and chalked messages ‘Lest we forget’. Anzac Day fell during the national COVID-19 pandemic shutdown and ‘Light up the Dawn’ or ‘Stand at Dawn’, as the Returned Services League (RSL) termed it, was a response to the cancellation of dawn services around Australia. After the recent decline in Anzac Day Dawn Service attendance of post-centenary celebrations, it was a poignant act of remembrance and one that was perhaps all the more moving given its disconcerting echoes with history. Only once before in its over one-hundred-year history had Anzac Day ceremonies been similarly disrupted, during the public health crisis brought about by the Spanish influenza pandemic in 1919, when most events were postponed and some even cancelled. Anzac Day 2020 was not only a commemoration of the country’s military past but also an event, like Anzac Day 1919, that connected communities in the face of a global pandemic and the social isolation that it brought in its wake. The traditions sparked by World War I still hold an important place in Australian political and cultural life, and today, as the country deals with crises that resonate with those of a century ago, the history of this conflict has a heightened relevance.' (Romain Fathi, Andrekos Vanarva, Michael Walsh : Editorial Introduction) 2021 pg. 128-130
Last amended 3 Mar 2021 14:47:16
128-130 [Review] Dispossession and the Making of Jedda : Hollywood in Ngunnawal Countrysmall AustLit logo Australian Historical Studies
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