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'While postcolonial critique has been a remarkably fertile field within the humanities, the concept of the postcolonial has been problematic when applied to the peculiar situation of settler-colonial nations. In such nations, the colonial period has been largely relegated to the past. Yet, unresolved issues of treaty, sovereignty, native title and reparation for discriminatory policies such as child removal provide clear evidence that the nation states that replaced colonial regimes have yet to be decolonized.' (From Authors introduction)
This article considers the potential of a decolonizing poetics, evident across Tasmanian Aboriginal arts and cultural works, to contribute to a distinctively Aboriginal film-making practice in Tasmania. The potency of this body of work, alongside the Aboriginal community’s vigorous political campaigns for cultural rights and land rights, has not translated into a distinctively Tasmanian Aboriginal film culture. Apart from several significant documentary films and photographic works that indicate the emergence of a powerful decolonizing poetics there are no fictional feature films by Tasmanian Aboriginal film-makers. Moreover recent feature films produced by non-Indigenous film-makers about Tasmania invoke the ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ trope, imagining an island without any Aboriginal presence. This article considers processes that contribute to decolonizing through the contemporary work of Tasmanian Aboriginal writers and artists, including Jim Everett, Julie Gough, Greg Lehman and photographer Ricky Maynard. I suggest their poetics are more than textual. They are grounded in country and community – linked to another realm beyond the ‘shallow’ time of colonization. Their decolonizing poetics are shared with Maori film-maker Barry Barclay’s ‘Fourth Cinema’, where the camera is firmly in Indigenous hands, based in community and cultural practices.' (Author's abstract)
'This article examines the ways in which Ten Canoes (de Heer and Djiggir, 2006) works as what Nicholas Rothwell has called ‘an inter-cultural membrane’. The article scrutinizes the rhetoric developed around the film, exploring questions around ownership, cultural mediation and the authorial voice. An extended interview with the co-director, Rolf de Heer, examines the production process to explore the structuring of the film through script, shooting and editing and the double process of pragmatics and aesthetics that drove the production process. The article proposes reframing the question of authenticity as fidelity to the complexities of the present, rather than fidelity to the past. It argues that an attempt to fully understand and articulate the complex dimensions of cultural exchange, collaboration and cultural translation, and the complex intermeshing of hybrid cultural and aesthetic notions, would produce a more productive and dynamic debate around the interface of cultural exchange than currently emerges from the rhetoric around the film. The article argues for an engaged and dialogic approach to film criticism, grounded in cultural research, in which the conceptual paradigms and speaking positions of the critic are equally opened to scrutiny.' (Author's abstract)
'In the 1940s and fifties, wealthy woolgrowers in and around the rural southern New South Wales town of Yass gave generously to Charles Chauvel to enable the making of Jedda (1955). These same farmers employed members of the local Ngunnawal community in domestic and rural labour. The issues of segregation, assimilation, child removal and Aboriginal employment that are represented in Jedda resonate in the histories of communities in this region. When the film was released some watched it at a glamorous official opening in Sydney while others attended the local, segregated cinema. This article places oral history accounts of seeing Jedda (at the time of its release) alongside the archive, to explore the nature of the intersections and segregations that shaped relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents of this area. It also explores the complex subject positions articulated in these memories that attempt to come to terms with personal histories of segregation in an era of revisionist histories and reconciliation.' (Author's abstract)
'How do Aboriginal people in settler-colonial Australia negotiate the entwined experiences and histories of displacement and emplacement? Romaine Moreton’s short film The Farm (2009) engages with these experiences and histories through the perspective of Aboriginal people who travelled to participate in seasonal work on white-owned farms. Set against the hard physical labour of bean picking, the film is a meditation on the ‘work of mourning’ and the ‘labour of remembering’ that Aboriginal people perform to make a place for themselves within colonized landscapes and to survive under colonial conditions. By analysing the three lineages into which the film’s young protagonist Olivia is invited, and the different kinds of historical traces and memorial acts that mediate her connection to various pasts and ancestors, I examine how the film engages with and contributes to discourses about place, remembrance and belonging in mid-twentieth-century settler-colonial Australia.' (Author's abstract)
'This article takes issue with the colonial imaginary of Indigenous people in Australia that is deconstructed by contemporary Indigenous films. It briefly discusses the concept of ‘decolonizing the lens of power’ and ‘returning/reversing the colonial gaze’. Through a close analysis of the two films Stone Bros. and Samson & Delilah, both made in the spirit and context of Kevin Rudd’s national apology to the Indigenous people of Australia, it will present Indigenous decolonizing work in cinema. It concentrates on their presentation of modern Indigenous life and cultural traditions, political and historical criticism, play with stereotypes, film-making aesthetics and employment of mainstream genres.' (Author's abstract)
'RAN: Remote Area Nurse is a six-part mini-series first broadcast on the Australian Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) in 2006. Described by co-producer Penny Chapman as ‘the first screen fiction set in Torres Strait islander [sic] culture’, the series is loosely based on the work of the health centre on Masig, a tiny island in the central group of Torres Strait Islands. This article traces the working modes of the largely non-Islander production team, as they followed the guidelines and strategies laid out in SBS’s ‘The Greater Perspective: Protocol for the Production of Film and Television on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities’ (1997). In light of interplay between protocol and the production team, the article explores how a modally conventional mini-series nevertheless successfully made space for Islander collaboration, and attracted online engagement and approval from both Torres Strait Islanders and others.' (Author's abstract)
'Redfern Now has been acclaimed as the first Indigenous television drama series to be produced in Australia. With the support of Indigenous executive producers, Sally Riley at ABC Television and Erica Glynn at Screen Australia, the anthology series was produced by Blackfella Films and featured Indigenous writers, directors and actors in leading roles. This article argues that the decolonizing lens of Redfern Now is evident not only in Indigenous creative control but also in the immersive aesthetic and ethical dilemmas that invite the viewer to experience Redfern from an Aboriginal vantage point. This hospitable invitation offers a mode of assimilative spectatorship that redresses the paradox of Aboriginal erasure/visibility in the settler colonial nation.' (Author's abstract)
