Cirrus@Austlit

Between 2003 and 2008, more than fifteen books for children and young adults were published in Australia and at least thirteen in Canada that represent either literally or metaphorically the experiences of people whose family homes are no longer places of safety. In each of the texts analyzed in this essay - Shattered (2006) and Sketches (2007) by Eric Walters and The Island (2005) by John Heffernan - homelessness is represented not as the absence of a physical structure in which to live but as a an absence of belonging, an absence of hospitality. As the characters travel through their pathways of homelessness, they develop interdependent relationships with people, creatures, and/or structures personified as an outreached hand, a symbol and act of hospitality. In each of these books, endings are uncertain in order to offer readers not a closed, stable future, but a version of belonging that includes multiple possibilties. [Author's abstract]

Film provides a mediation space in which to negotiate the imaginative, the narrative, the social, and the political, and especially the past, present and future - in the seemingly unbridgeable gap between pre-colonial story and contemporary technology. This article argues that the films Atanarjua and Ten Canoes are complex and authentic Indigenous cultural artefacts that represent a space of Indigenous self-determination and self-representation in the modern world. They attempt to authenticate their legitimisation of ancient traditions and their positive representation of traditional life to current generations through their contribution to a bright future in the continuance of the millennia-old oral storytelling tradition. As such, they are regarded as watershed representations in the ever-evolving canon of Indigenous oral storytelling in their respective countries, and throughout the wider global context.