Issue Details: First known date: 2022... 2022 A Migrant Filmmaker at the Aboriginal Tent Embassy : Alessandro Cavadini’s Ningla A-Na (1972) as a Transcultural Space of Encounter
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Ningla A-Na is one of the most important documentaries on the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Often used as a primary source by historians, little attention has been paid to how the film emerged from a transcultural collaboration between Italian filmmaker Alessandro Cavadini and Indigenous activists. Approaching Ningla A-Na through an analysis of its production and distribution history, this article argues that the film should be understood not only as the record of a crucial time in the history of Indigenous activism, but also as an integral facet of Australia’s migration history and as a tool for transcultural activists’ engagements in the present.' (Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies vol. 53 no. 4 2022 25494069 2022 periodical issue

    'At the end of the last century, Ann Curthoys outlined the history of ‘two distinct yet connected public and intellectual debates concerning the significance of descent, belonging and culture’ in Australia. The first revolved ‘around the cleavage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples’, and especially the issue of how to grapple with the lingering effects of past colonialisms. The second centred on immigration and the challenge migrants – particularly non-Anglo migrants – have presented to Australian society at large. Curthoys argued that in public commentary and within numerous scholarly fields, including history, these debates were kept largely separate until the 1988 Bicentenary and its celebration of multicultural Australia, which included Indigenous people amongst the country’s broader diversity. Pauline Hanson’s ascendancy to Federal Parliament in 1996 pushed these debates into ‘uneasy conversation’ with each other as her public rhetoric frequently attacked both Indigenous people and migrants from Asia as groups who, in her view, were unable to assimilate. Curthoys argued that the two debates ‘can neither be conceptualised together nor maintained as fully distinct’, but rather must be situated within an understanding of Australia as a ‘society which is colonising and decolonising at the same time’. ‘All non-Indigenous people, recent immigrants and descendants of immigrants alike’, wrote Curthoys, ‘are beneficiaries of a colonial history. We share the situation of living on someone else’s land’. (Editorial introduction)

    2022
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Last amended 1 Dec 2022 11:34:23
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