Koorine is a young fair-skinned Koori girl growing up in a country town in 1957. At that time, Aboriginal people were not welcome in public swimming pools and had to sit separately at the movies. Koorine desperately wants to enter the 'million dollar mermaid' swimming contest. She has a choice because she 'looks white.' Then a fight breaks out at the swimming pool between her Koori friends and her white friends. She has to decide what is more important to her, her white friends or her Koori identity.
'The article looks at the contributions of writer and director Darlene Johnson to an emerging Australian Indigenous cinema. It discusses the ways in which Johnson draws on her experience as a young, urban Indigenous woman and her knowledge of Aboriginal culture to explore the postcolonial subjectivity of being caught between two worlds in her documentary and short fiction films, including River of No Return (2008), Gulpilil: One Red Blood (2002), Crocodile Dreaming (2006), and Two Bob Mermaid (1996). It argues that these films offer unique insights into the history of Indigenous involvement in cinema as a global system, and into the complexity of contemporary Indigenous filmmaking in Australia as a specialist sector that operates within while remaining different from the state-funded national film industry.' (Publication summary)
'The article looks at the contributions of writer and director Darlene Johnson to an emerging Australian Indigenous cinema. It discusses the ways in which Johnson draws on her experience as a young, urban Indigenous woman and her knowledge of Aboriginal culture to explore the postcolonial subjectivity of being caught between two worlds in her documentary and short fiction films, including River of No Return (2008), Gulpilil: One Red Blood (2002), Crocodile Dreaming (2006), and Two Bob Mermaid (1996). It argues that these films offer unique insights into the history of Indigenous involvement in cinema as a global system, and into the complexity of contemporary Indigenous filmmaking in Australia as a specialist sector that operates within while remaining different from the state-funded national film industry.' (Publication summary)
