Cirrus@Austlit

'Nitram is a work of art, and deserves to be examined on these terms. It also demands engagement with the story it tells. But before doing either, it is important to consider what a radical and confronting act it is to make a film that explores the sources of an event that continues to throb with trauma. This film is about the Port Arthur massacre of 28–29 April 1996. Although it occurred a generation ago it is far too soon for many Tasmanians to consider the event historical, or to believe there is any merit in making a film about it. Nitram has appeared on only two screens in southern Tasmania, and has not been publicised in the state out of sensitivity for the community.' (Introduction)

'When I first encountered the name ‘Truganini’ as a young student of Australian race relations in the 1960s, she was to me, as Cassandra Pybus’s Preface infers, ‘an international icon for extinction’ (xvii). Into the 1970s, she had merely a post-mortem presence in my consciousness. I knew of her by what I then believed was her portentous absence: the supposed ‘last tragic victim of an inexorable historical process’ (xvii), before Lyndall Ryan’s monumental pioneering work of 1981 corrected that mesmerising interpretive slippage in my brain (The Aboriginal Tasmanians).'  (Introduction)