Sites of Instability and Disturbance

'Remembrance, in the wake of suicide'

If you haven't read any Deborah Bird Rose (anthropologist, eco-philosopher in environmental humanities) – her recent blog: "Remembrance, in the wake of suicide" is a confronting beginning: she offers her very thoughtful reflections on the disturbances in the ongoing colonising nation called Australia: "Gerry Georgatos, a specialist on Indigenous suicide, describes the problem as a ‘humanitarian crisis’. Also read Bird Rose's ground breaking 2004 book: "Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation"

'Discovery, settlement or invasion?'

One might hope that the tired old (fundamentally racist) 'history wars' argument was a thing of the past, but no! Sydney's 'Daily Telegraph' front page (March 30) headlined: "WHITEWASH: UNSW rewrites the history books to state Cook ‘invaded' Australia...Nutty professors want to Cook the record books".  In another thoughtful essay in The Conversation: "Discovery, settlement or invasion?" Peter Kilroy (Postdoctoral Fellow, King's College London) argues for critical thinking around language: "there is a link between the language you use, the recognition of Indigenous peoples today and the redistribution of wealth, property and power to those peoples. It is not merely about being “politically correct” nor is it restricted to the past".

'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times'.

The other day I read of a new light show art installation by British artist Bruce Munro at Uluru: "Field of Light": the tourist mecca – canapés and champagne while gazing at the wonders of the Red Centre at sunset...meanwhile Rosalie Kunoth-Monks (OAM, 2015 NT person of the year and Arrernte-Alyawarra Elder) says that Aboriginal people living in remote outstation Utopia are starving:

"Utopia represents sixteen remote outstations 260 kms north east of Alice Springs. Rosalie lives in one of the outstations with her daughter Ngarla and grandchildren. Rosalie and Ngarla have reported that the elderly in the communities have not been receiving their regular daily meals as expected through the current aged care program. When meals have arrived they have not been nutritious".

ethics and documentary film

A few years ago I was at a Conference and Michael Renov gave a paper where he spoke about his notion of the 'four fundamental tendencies of documentary' : 

1. To record, reveal, or preserve 

2. To persuade or promote

3. To analyze or interrogate 

4. To express

He then named a 5th tendency - which he called 'the ethical'. I have been searching for further writing by him on this - in order to extend documentary theory into thinking around the site of the web 2 environment and to extend, Adrian Miles essay, 'Blogs: Distributed Documentaries of the Everyday',  Metro.143 (2005): 66-70: a conversation with Renov and André Bonotto and Gabriel de Barcelos Sotomaior, in São Paulo, April 2nd and 8th 2008: What’s at stake for the documentary enterprise? Conversation with Michael Renov.

Also my documentary  Island Home Country (2008), was deeply engaged in a process around ethics, memory and  history and Tasmanian Aboriginal protocols - Renov's conversation around ethics and documentary is relevant to my process with the film. See my doctorate (UTS 2010) Island home country : subversive mourning : working with Aboriginal protocols in a documentary film about colonisation and growing up white in Tasmania: a cine-essay and exegesis. 

Patterns of attachment to the land

Hetti Perkins' article, Patterns of attachment to the land (The Australian May 30, 2013)  is worth reading. It is an edited extract  from the publication accompanying My Country, I Still Call Australia Home: Contemporary Art from Black Australia at the Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane.

Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori's Dibirdibi Country (2008)

The sentient power of country and the spirits who reside within it is not to be underestimated. Still today, trespassing on another's country is a reckless and dangerous act. It is customary in many parts of Australia to be formally "introduced" to country by traditional custodians, which can take the form of an exchange of sweat or a baptismal dousing so the land will accept or sense one as a countryman or woman and not make the newcomer sick. Almost invariably, senior community members will walk ahead at a special site, calling to their ancestral spirits so they will recognise and not harm the visitors.

It is in this context that the "welcome to country" has evolved; and it is a culturally appropriate means of brokering a social engagement with another community by formally recognising their ties to their homelands in the contemporary world.

It is a matter of no small concern that there has been the inevitable invasion of anti-political correctness creeping into this profoundly symbolic gesture of respect, particularly in areas where the Western legal criteria used to determine native title rights dispossess the traditional custodians from any other form of public recognition. The criticism of federal Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that the protocol is merely a "genuflection to political correctness" could be applied equally to singing the national anthem. How many Australians know all the words of the anthem, and how many really believe that we are a nation "young and free"? 
The welcome is an appropriate way of reiterating the message that Australia is home to the oldest continuous cultural tradition in the world, as a counterpoint to the endless parade of men on horses immortalised in bronze that line our city streets.

remembering mumirimina

Today someone called ("unknown") commented on a 2011 post I wrote: "save the mumirimina-kutalayna heritage" along the Jordan River, Tasmania. I find it very moving and would like to share it. We can also "remember them" and acknowledge that their descendants "walk where they once walked" and it is their country.

ya pulingina milaythina mana mapalitu
mumirimina laykara milaythina mulaka tara
raytji mulaka mumirimina
mumirimina mapali krakapaka laykara
krakapaka milaythina nika ta
waranta takara milaythina nara takara
waranta putiya nayri
nara laymi krakapaka waranta tu manta waranta tunapri nara.

Greetings to all of you here on our land
It was here that the Mumirimina people hunted kangaroo all over their lands
It was that the white men hunted the Mumirimina
Many Mumirimina died as they ran
Died here on their lands
We walk where they once walked
And their absence saddens us
But they will never be dead for us as long as we remember them.

This is the eulogy of the Risdon Cove Massacre of 1804 where Tasmanian Aborigines were killed in an encounter with British soldiers. Greg Lehman says, "Regardless of the debate over how many were killed, it certainly constitutes Tasmania’s first massacre. But was it simply a regrettable over-reaction to the accidental appearance of a hunting party? Or was it something much more tragic?" His (2006) article is entitled,  Two Thousand Generations of Place-making.

Putuparri Tom Lawford by Nicole Ma

Putuparri Tom Lawford by Nicole Ma

This film Putuparri  is in process and raising money via crowd source funding site  Pozible.
Support this film now; you can  make a donation and receive a DVD of the finished film.
 But hurry....52 hours only left on pozible!

"Ten years in the making, Putuparri is a compelling feature length documentary about an extraordinary 42 year old Wangakjunga man living in Fitzroy Crossing. Located in the remote Kimberley region of north western Australia, Putuparri Tom Lawford lives a two way life - traditional and contemporary".

Manu Tutura by Barry Barclay

I am only beginning to get to know something of Barry Barclay's significant contribution to documentary film in New Zealand and his notion of 'Fourth Cinema', described by Stuart Murray in his book: Images of Dignity: Barry Barclay and Fourth Cinema as:

"An umbrella term referring to the multiple forms of Indigenous cinemas that operate at local, national and international levels, Fourth Cinema is primarily guided by the desire to provide the conditions for the expression of Indigenous voices and ways of seeing... Barclay's mode of practice insists upon the importance of linking cultural production to the community from which it emerges.

I am currently reading Barclay's book Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights (Auckland University Press, 2005). Part One, 'Before the Beginning' takes an extraordinary perspective –  Barclay imagines 'what if' Lieutenant James Cook and his Endeavour crew arrived with a film camera and started 'shooting' documentary footage on the west side of the Turanga River that October day in 1769 on Rongowhakata lands. Barclay's way of thinking about The British Crown's assumption that all land belonged to the Crown (for its taking), turns the whole story of colonial possession around and makes us think deeply about the way any of us might use 'camera' - in any situation. It accords with my view that the the kind of deep philosophical thinking by Indigenous filmmakers around 'filming people' has something very profound to teach all of us.

The ethnography of compassion

Recently I went to Vietnam to  the inaugural International Anthropological Film Festival in Ho Chi Minh City. Realtime (Issue 13, 2013) has just published my review of that Festival: The Ethnography of Compassion

The drawing is from We Want (U) to Know (2011) by Ella Pugliese (Italy) and Nou Va (Cambodia). This participatory documentary was created with survivors of the Khmer Rouge period. The intended audience is Cambodian, and the film has been used over the last couple of years by NGO's and outreach programs to teach villagers about the Khmer Rouge regime and about the country's ongoing Khmer Rouge tribunal. 

Produced around the time of the Tribunal, amidst the painful process of remembering, the film reveals its own methods of storytelling and re-enactment, along with the potency of the children filming their elders. These participatory methods become part of a restorative justice process. The film develops as a work of mourning—a catalyst to transformative emotional change. Drawing, painting and working through trauma with re-enactments were part of the filmmakers process with the villagers.

The energy of cultural exchange and shared consciousness is a significant quality that visual ethnography offers the documentary tradition. It is also a mode of filmmaking with a strong foundation in Vietnam and in its tertiary education. Vietnamese visual ethnographers are making films from perspectives within their own culture, not as observers representing ‘the other’ —perhaps as a consequence of having achieved liberation from French and American colonisation. Also, it is not surprising that many of the films are working through complex issues around tradition and modernity given the largely agrarian population and its multi-ethnicity—with over 50 distinct groups, each with its own language and cultural heritage. I appreciated many of the films and the engaged discussions that took place around them. 

Filmmaker Tu Thi Thu Hang participated in many of the discussions and she often shared deeply about Vietnamese history and events that had affected her family in the immediate post war period. Tu Thi Thu Hang  structures her recent film, The Old Man Who Sells Bananas (2012), so that the audience starts out with ‘her’ mis-perception of the Old Man. 

We see him as a victim too—he seems poor, elderly and abandoned. Skillfully filming with him over one and a half years Hang draws us closer into this man’s life, step by step—from lone individual to family man, to respected wise elder of the village with his Confucian ethics and responsibilities. In discussion the filmmaker describes her process: “Now I have a completely different way of looking at him.” (And so do we). “He is the ‘last man’ who lived in a previous epoch. In his 84 years he has lived through the French and American occupation, and liberation. He has passed through the main eras of Vietnamese history. He has applied traditional wisdom to develop what is an ethical way to live.” 

Michael Renov, documentary film scholar, refers to the '5th tendency' of documentary as 'the ethical', in "What’s at stake for the documentary enterprise? 

I think that the ethical in itself. . . has a sort of functioning dimension, and it is also glued to this notion of a common desire or impulse: an ethical impulse, that one can see as an underlying and consistent theme that cross the history of documentary. How do I. . . what is my relationship with this other? What do I mean to that person, what does that person mean to me, what’s at stake in representing others?

So I think Renov's finely tuned insight that 'the ethical' is fundamental to documentary is so relevant - not only to today- but to the whole history of documentary. The 'ethical'  is the frame by which we both make and study documentary.

There is a ticking time bomb in the remote economic heart of the nation

On a visit to Broome (and south of Broome) I witnessed first hand the kinds of inequities that Marcia Langton discusses in her Griffith review essay The Resource Curse (Edition 28, Still the Lucky Country). I was shocked to see the rapacious 'resort tourist' development in Broome, the fast escalating rents and house prices and the seeming marginalisation of many Aboriginal people from access to any social or economic benefits from the 'boom'. The issues are systemic and huge. I don't always agree with what I perceive as Langton's sometimes 'pro-mining' stance, but in this essay she gets to the heart of the many contradictions in the continuing colonisation of Aboriginal lands.

"The effects of the current resource curse in the Pilbara are reminiscent of the mining boom in the 1960s. Aborigines were the intended losers then; now all locals, regardless of background, are losers if they do not work in the industry. My question is this: are there any policies to counter the growing disparities in income, living conditions and opportunity in the mining provinces?....The mining regions are the source of enormous revenue, yet their residents are disadvantaged and deprived of services...the traditional owners of the land are the most disadvantaged living upon it....many Aboriginal groups were not opposed to mining but concerned about racist and inequitable practices being replicated in new ventures. What the groups wanted was guaranteed recognition of their inherent rights and interests, and acceptable terms for cultural, social and economic futures".

My Survival as an Aboriginal

Dear Martha

How great to see Essie Coffey's  film  My Survival as an Aboriginal  (1978) last night on NITV (and all the other great films screening on NITV on Survival Day yesterday! 

And good on you Martha (Ansara...and others) for making this film with Essie back then! Thirty- five years ago! I think I appreciate the film much more now, in 2013,  than when I first saw it in 1978.  I love the pace of the film and Essie's narration. I love the fridge sequence. I always did! And I love the sequence where Essie introduces all her family to us....and the way you film them as they come out the front door of the house and each person says hello. Essie's love of country and family is strong- as is her sadness....

The ongoing issues of colonialism and dispossession raised by Coffey continue to affect Indigenous peoples today. 'My Survival as an Aboriginal', though a call to justice, is also tempered with beauty, and the audience is allowed to glimpse the private world of Essie Coffey and the people of Brewarrina. Coffey is very strong in her fight for justice, and equally committed to ensuring that the next generation are taught cultural knowledge as a means of ensuring an identity invested in the ongoing relationship to land.  Romaine Moreton, Curator's Notes, Australian Screen

So I am encouraging any reader of this blog to watch this film. It is as relevant to day as when it was made. Purchase a DVD of My Survival at Ballad Films and visit Australian Screen, which, along with Moreton's curator's notes on My Survival  also has a good essay called :  A Short History of Indigenous Filmmaking.

'One of the tropes of reality TV shows is the promise and tracking of transformation'

In a recent review I wrote about the SBS documentary reality TVseries Go back to where you came from (in on-line magazine The Conversation), I explore whether the 'transformation' of attitudes amongst the six 'characters' is more than an 'unhappy performative'.

 

Individuals might genuinely change their minds as a result of what they’ve experienced, but do the state’s refugee policies change? Sara Ahmed discusses similar questions about  racism/anti-racism in her essay, Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-Performativity of Anti-Racism. 

There's an interesting response to the series by Klaus Neumann in  Inside Story, 

'Matters of the Heart', 

 30th June 2011.  

Neumann discusses whether 'compassion' can be ‘a motivator for action'. He examines the series in the context of its reception: 'the debate rages on blogs and in the twittersphere rather than on the opinion pages of newspapers'…suggesting that 'the creators of the program have been right in not trying to use the show to campaign for a change of policy, but instead focusing on the paucity of the debate'. Neumann also explores how the emotions aroused by the series, and viewers' 'identification with the six participants, has played a crucial role' in the impact of the series. I agree to some extent,  yet the Gillard Government's (almost) confirmed 'Malaysian Solution' suggests its questionable refugee policies continue apace, despite any intense transformations of heart by onscreen characters in a tightly constructed reality TV series. Developing compassionate government immigration policies remains a major concern. 

  

anger is turning to sadness, but future action is not ruled out

Jim Everett at the kutalayna site, April 2011

Jim's face says it all -  as the Tasmanian Government arrests protestors and proceeds to build the Brighton by-pass over  mumirimina-kutalayna  heritage along the Jordon River;  kutalayna is a significant link to the Tasmanian Aboriginal community’s history of over 40,000 years (see The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre's (TAC) Draft Report on the Mumirimina People of the Lower Jordan Valley).

"What kind of things I can share with non Aboriginal people so that they can start  to understand that there is a different way of seeing this world... and their identity cannot be Australian with this country until such time as they get here – they will always be bringing the Northern hemisphere down here and constructing a landscape instead of living in country; landscape is just another  image of the colonial construct... whereas connecting to country goes outside of the colonial construct."  Jim Everett.

"There’s No Such Thing As Post-Colonialism". Jim Everett

This month I was pleased to read Will Owen's blog: Aboriginal Art & Culture: an American eye and his thoughtful response to my documentary Island Home Country: 
Although Island Home Country may have begun as a film about her childhood, Thornley quickly became swept us in the larger questions of history, and then just as quickly in the questions of cultural protocols.  She visits with Jim Everett, with Aunty Phyllis Pitchford, with Tasmanian artists Julie Gough and PennyX Saxon.  Gough in particular raises the issues of image making and image use; Everett and Pitchford urge her to tell her own story and not try to tell the Indigenous stories (although they do contribute their own in snippets throughout the film).  Thus the weave become tangled as Thornley struggles to explore, to learn, and to tell what she learns: to tell a story that is both hers and not hers... She knows as she does so that she is laying a landscape atop country, and knows there is no other way to do it.  It is Jim Everett who speaks the phrase I’ve chosen as the title for this essay: “There’s no such thing as post-colonialism.”  Unless and until the white man leaves and leaves the country to its original inhabitants, whatever remains is still colonial.  There is no escape from history....

save the mumirimina-kutalayna heritage along the Jordon River, Tasmania

Yesterday 15 April 2011 - 25 police arrested 8 camp members: a further 12 people have since been arrested for trepass with no signs of when the conflict will stop. The day before this Jim Everett, respected Tasmanian Aboriginal activist writer, filmmaker, sent an email letter across Australia (and internationally) asking for support to protect this significant Tasmanian Aboriginal site. I post his letter in full and ask all readers to re-post it across their networks. Also visit The Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre's website to learn more about the campaign and give your support.

"Friday 15th April looks like being a very important day in our history and our struggle for respect of who we are, and respect for our culture and heritage. The Tasmanian Government is about to destroy the mumirimina-kutalayna heritage along the Jordon River. Kutalayna holds the Tasmanian Aboriginal community’s history of over 40,000 years. Today, Friday 15th April, our community and our supporters will be at kutalayna to defend our heritage left by our Old People. Constructing a bridge over kutalayna exposes the current Tasmanian Government’s disrespect for our heritage, and our community. Premier Lara Giddings knows that the bridge will destroy the cultural and historical integrity of kutalayna: she dismisses Tasmanian Aboriginal community knowledge about kutalayna boundaries to save 20 seconds of driving time for traffic entering and leaving Hobart. Premier Giddings has a reasonable option to re-route the bypass over the existing bridge to the north, and along and around kutalayna.

Over 40,000 years of Tasmanian Aboriginal heritage, a unique record of human experiences covering at least 2 Ice-ages, is about to be seriously interfered with. Yet we continue Our Struggle for respect and rights inherent in who we are. This has serious consequences for our community. We believe that the police will arrive today to order supporters away from the kutalayna camp, or arrest the people who refuse to leave: supporters and ‘activists’ standing strong as one body to defend kutalayna. Our action will be a passive and send a clear message to the Government that our heritage is not a bargaining tool. Promises of replacing the out-dated Aboriginal Relics Act 1975 with stronger protection laws of our heritage can’t seriously be considered a bargain for agreeing to the destruction of our heritage. Kutalayna, is our oldest ‘library’ book, it holds the stories of our Old People going back over 40,000 years. Our community has suffered many years of destruction to our heritage since Invasion Day: we must make a stand now, leaving it to our grand-children, and theirs’, must not be allowed to happen.

The issue in focus at kutalayna brings a strong opportunity for developing better relationships between the Tasmanian Aboriginal community and white-Tasmania. To make this happen, a genuine demonstration of meaningful progress in respecting our culture and heritage must be shown by the Tasmanian Government.

I know that we all have hoped that after all of the many years we have struggled to be acknowledged as the contemporary Tasmanian Aboriginal Community; with our objective to be genuinely respected for who we are, and with respect of our rights as Aboriginal people: and, after significant agreements have been achieved with previous Tasmanian Governments: our hope has been that we would not again be forced to to protect our heritage from destruction by a Tasmanian Government. The progress we have achieved in relationships between white-Tasmania and our community, encouraged by previous Tasmanian Governments, is being trashed by Premier Giddings’ Government. Whatever active part you play now, urgently, to increase pressure on the Government to stop the threats to kutalayna, may open some positive outcome for our community.

To be short, we are demanding respect by all of Tasmania, represented by the Tasmanian Government, of our rights concerning the protection of our heritage. I ask you to encourage others to come to the kutalayna camp and show support in saving our heritage from this pending threat."

Oprah’s generosity is a smoke screen

Oprah’s generosity is a smoke screen. Given her audiences are predominately women I am concerned by my gender’s complicity in this government PR campaign. Worth examining is Oprah’s gift of 6000 Kimberley Coast pearl necklaces to Australian audiences. Several family-work visits to the Kimberley this year have revealed to me the huge social and environmental issues facing people here. Most stark are housing, health and educational issues for Aboriginal people. Many struggling ‘settler’ Australians also face a housing crisis and rapidly rising rents. As well, myriad issues around energy company Woodside’s gas project, north of Broome, needs an informed local and national polity to cut through the ‘environmental’ versus ‘development’ split.

Sadly Oprah’s circus, in tandem with a misguided Federal government, is ‘pulling the wool’ over the eyes of the woman in the street. Australian women, try not to be bought off by these ‘pearls’! Investigate the gas hub debate; research the history of the pearling industry in Broome; examine Indigenous infant mortality across northern Australia. Perhaps then you may consider donating your pearls to Aboriginal medical centres and schools in the Kimberley where your gift will be more than decorative.

on the road

On the road, staying in Halls Creek. I have just finished reading Alexis Wright's Grog War. She describes it as:

The book that I wrote for the people, the Aboriginal people in Tennant Creek, the Warramunga people. 'Grog War', it is a book that they asked me to do to document 10 years of an enormous struggle that they had to introduce some pretty, I don't think they were major restrictions, simple restrictions to the availability of alcohol in Tennant Creek and they took 10 years just to bring in some restrictions in that town and they had to fight every inch of the way.

KERRY O'BRIEN: You wrote in 'Grog War' Aboriginal people are still being forced to hold much of their contact with white people locked away inside of themselves. The best parallel which describes that hidden history is describe that it's trapped like angry hornets inside Pandora's box. Those words must still resonate with you?

ALEXIS WRIGHT: Well, they do. If we expose our anger, sometimes if we express our anger we're criticised for being too emotional or too angry.

KERRY O'BRIEN: After 'Carpentaria' and with Aboriginal, Chinese and Irish blood in your veins you reflected on what might constitute a lasting form of reconciliation.

You wrote, "I've often thought about how the spirits of other countries have followed their people to Australia, and how those spirits might be reconciled with the ancestral spirits that belong here. I wonder if it is at this level of thinking that lasting form of reconciliation between people might begin, and if not, how our spirits will react."

It is very soft and very hard out here....both at the same time.

tayenebe and meditation on a photograph

I am coming across a range of links to the Oyster Cove photographs by Nixon and representation; yet both unsatisfying - neither of them approaching nearby the heart of the matter. At least the The Representation Of Trucanini essay acknowledges the subjectivity of the photographer or the observor: "It is clear that no archival photograph of the Tasmanian Aborigine can be viewed as a document of truth, as the decisions of the photographer inadvertently affects the way in which the subjects were represented" . But how in 2009 can this writer place his whole study within the 'doomed race' theory of Tasmanian history! It's incredible. Just visit tayenebefor the living dynamic presence of the culture of Tasmanian Aboriginal people today.

Bishop Nixon's photograph of the Elders at Oyster Cove (1858) haunts me. It always has – from the moment I first saw it in 1982 in the State Library of Tasmania collection. The photograph is a ‘trace’ of the real. But, I am white and I have obtained a copy of it, and now I carry it around – slowly becoming aware of the ethics involved in having it in my possession; There is no return back to some fantasy of Tasmania as a ‘good’ white place. Sitting with this photograph, with the survivors of invasion, I look at the hands of the women, the comfort of their physical closeness to each other and their dogs. As the camera apparatus captures their image on silver nitrate for me to gaze at them – they look back at me – and for this moment, as observer, I stand in photographer Nixon’s place . I am his camera. I look at the women – Emma, Trucanini, Flora, Wapperty. They look back at me. I know it is their country. They belong to this island. Dispossessed by the British, yet the photograph speaks their possession.

This is a photo of their sovereignty of their own country. I allow this photo to possess me back. The women, their dogs – their gaze at me – is grounded, strong: ‘this is our country, back off, you stranger – white ghost’. They speak to me, not in words, but they affect me. I dream of them, at night. I see them as I walk the streets of Hobart. Their spirit is there, whispering to me to reckon with their presence. They are not gone, as the British hoped, as most of the whites in Tasmania hoped, that they would be gone forever. No, I ‘let them come visit. I allow myself to be haunted and, as I do, I sense myself as the stranger: ‘making whiteness strange’ and the risks involved. I am the interloper. Once, this island felt like home, but now I am in another country – strangeness, dislocation. I do not belong to this nation called Australia. This nation is a Thing, a fantasy space. The Oyster Cove photograph disturbs; it is a kernel of The Real.

tayenebe is now; tayenebe makers discuss their work today.

Oyster Cove, Tasmania, photography and Bishop Nixon 1858

"The fact that Nixon saw art as a means of recording may explain why he was one of the first people in Tasmania to experiment with the newly invented camera.... About 1858 he visited Oyster Cove and made several photographs - the earliest known - of the Aboriginal community" (SLTAS website). In Island Home Country (2008) , my recent documentary film, there is a discussion around the ethics concerning the use of these photographs.

Nixon's work as a photographer is little researched. I am gathering material on his work. Please post any links you may find. Here is one I have recently located: Thomas J. Nevin, Tasmanian photographer 1842- 1923.

Martha of the North

I haven't seen Martha’s film yet, only the trailer. I have ordered the film for UTS library. But have a look at this clip here: Mary May Simon, a dynamic activist for her people, former Canadian diplomat, Fellow of the Arctic Institute of North America, introduces Martha Flaherty's film Martha of the North at its launch in this year in Ottawa. In this intro I think she acknowledges that Martha’s father Josephie Flaherty, (Flaherty’s Inuit son), is in the audience. I am not sure: watch this clip! Also today I learned of a 1990 documentary, Nanook Revisted which revisits the site of Flaherty’s filming. Here too is a wiki on Nanook Revisted that furthers discussions around these complex issues in documentary

Robert Flaherty's Secret

‘It seemed ironic that the global popularity of “Nanook”, had served to freeze the Arctic and the people who live in it, including Robert’s (Flaherty) own son and granddaughter, in a version of a past that never was, in a land that could never be.’ (The Long Exile by Melanie McGrath, 2006).

After reading The Long Exile - a tale of the betrayal of the Inuit people – in their 1950s relocation to barren islands far away from their homelands, I found Martha Flaherty's email address and wrote to her. In my mind the relocations and subsequent struggles for justice by the Inuit people cry out for a broad contextualising of Flaherty's 1922 documentary Nanook of the North, from its time of production right up to the present. Martha Flaherty wrote back and told me about a new film about her life, Martha of the North and how she is planning a book about the true story of what happened during the relocations. I have been very touched by this correspondence and how it contributes depth of understanding around the complex site of documentary film-making process and ethics.

One of the exiles was Robert Flaherty's son- Josephie Flaherty - a child he had (and abandoned?) with Inuit woman, Maggie Nujarlutuk (who plays Nyla in Nanook of the North). The story of Flaherty's relationship with Maggie (and his son) is never told in the documentary film scholarship (or rhetoric) of Flaherty's film-making - so obsessed is it with textual analysis and 'the past' and whether the dramatizations are ‘documentary’ or 'ethnographic'. Such debates may be functioning as smoke screen to developing a contextual analysis that really changes the way we think about Flaherty and his film. Martha Flaherty's documentary (and for me also McGrath's book) opens up present day realities of the Inuit people and the role Nanook of the North played in forming a certain idealized and heroic narrative of the Inuit people that fed into racist stereotypes - which contributed to the disastrous relocations of the Inuit people in the 1950s.

Island Home Country- Current news 2009

Distribution of Island Home Country: where to purchase DVD's, & the recently published ATOM Study Guide. Island Home Country is a poetic cine-essay (52 mins) about Australia’s colonised history and how it impacts into the present. It offers insights into how various individuals reckon with the traumatic legacies of British colonialism and its race based policies.

Island Home Country was recently offered a broadcast contract with National ABC Television: Sunday Arts Program July 2009.
Screenings:
TAC International Film and Video Festival, Oregon USA May 2009.
Premiered at Brisbane International Film Festival August 2008.
Screened in the Film Program, 'Re-Orienting Whiteness' Conference (Monash University) December, 2008.
Awards
Nominated: Best Achievement in Sound for a Documentary, Australian Screen Sound Awards 2008. (Sound Designer Sharon Jakovsky; Sound Consultant Danielle Weissner).
High Commendation - UTS Reconciliation Award, UTS Human Rights Awards, October 2008.

The Island Home Country ATOM Study Guide is now available a free PDF from Metro ATOM (Australian Teachers of Media)

Purchase DVD's direct from Anandi Films or
The Education Shop