Cirrus@Austlit

This paper addresses two recent Aboriginal ghost stories produced by Aboriginal film-makers Tracey Moffatt (beDevil) and Beck Cole (Plains Empty), in order to examine the relationship of these films to a type of spectral rewriting of the Australian nation state. This paper examines the role of spectrality as a revisionist process that exorcizes, but also celebrates, the ghosts that underpin and/or undermine narratives of belonging and place and investigates the dynamic potential of Indigenous film, not so much as a device that eradicates colonial encounters and their postcolonial legacy, but as texts that unsettle and contest, that empower and initiate debate by way of dismantling, or at least diminishing, dominant representations of Indigenous identities.