Video: Launch of James Boyce's Van Diemen's Land

Tasmanian author and commentator Richard Flanagan launched James Boyce's Van Diemen's Land - a new, groundbreaking history of the settlement of Tasmania - at the North Fitzroy Star in February 2008.

Three Rooms of Melancholia

This week in a Seminar on Constructing the Nation I screened a montage from the opening Ceremony of the Beijing Olympic Games; a clip from Obama's Democratic Acceptance Speech and a clip from Three Rooms of Melancholia. For me Honkasalo's haunting film enters into a space which explores the traumatic consequences of militaristic nationalism. With Sarah Palan's furies unfurling across the political landscape - we need more than ever the poet's mind and eye. Thankyou Pirjo for your contemplative, thoughtful film - ultimately a film about the need for tenderness.

Pirjo Honkasalo's director's statement:
Having completed my 'Trilogy of the Sacred and Satanic”(the full-length documentary films Mysterion, Tanjuska and the 7 Devils, and Atman), I felt I had purged myself of what I had sought from the documentary film: its purifying and implacable concreteness. I had given whatever I had to give; to that concretion, an intimation of human silence.
I felt an attraction and attachment to the logic of the dream, to which the fictional film provides the most natural path. The world of the dream is half in the past, half in the future. Its gods swing back and forth between life and death. There is no sense of longing in dreams. Time in dreams is not time in time. I directed the feature film “Fire-Eater”. I have always been stimulated not only by the Sacred and Satanic, but also by the Poetic and Political. It was this that drew me back to the documentary. I don't care for truths, for I see all thought as roiling foam that adheres to nothing nor holds fast; but in the time when I am not asleep or dreaming, I wish to know how the human tribe leads its life, shapes its history and expresses its will, which always seeks to improve the human condition and yet wallows, bewildered, in its blood like some elk gone astray in the city and impaled on the spikes of a cemetery fence. It should not happen this way.
Europe is filled with people who need grace of some kind to cope with their righteous rage. The righteous rage turns, a reflection, against them. And life is no court of justice; justice does not prevail, life does. It rises out of chaos in an ascending spiral, briefly appears to have structure, and descends in the curve of a downward spiral toward fresh chaos.
Stripping away icons of the enemy calls for the acceptance of grace along with righteousness. Grace is illogical and irrational - in other words, a profoundly gratuitous liberation from the compulsion to hate.

island home country

I started to wake up to race in the 60s. We’d gone, us anthropology students, to build transitional houses for the Pitjantjatjara people…I went with my best friend Moni. I filmed with her for this film. Going to the Pitjantjatjara Lands was a life changing experience for both of us and I asked her to talk about her memories of this Abschol (Aboriginal Scholarships) Work Camp.

Moni
You go to a foreign country and that’s what it was, Central Australia, the Aboriginal Reserve. It was just a trip into a completely unknown world. And at that time, in that nineteen or twenty year old head it was just, just responding to the situation in terms of a strange experience. Strange in the sense that it’s unfamiliar.The most powerful one of almost an identity crisis was that toilet incident - where you and I went to look for a toilet, just outside Coober Pedy. It’s so Australian, a town with one pub and in that pub was two toilets, one for blacks and one for whites, obviously. And I stood between that, ‘cause I’m neither black nor white.

amnesia

An effect of amnesia is the inability to imagine the future.

strange, I meditate to try and be in the present and stop worrying about the future.....in any case here is Chapter 1 Menu design for the film Island Home Country. Thank you Tim Baines - graphic designer - for all your work these past few weeks. Making a DVD is like making another film!

Maidens an autobiographical essay film (1978)

A clip from Maidens


In a way making Island Home Country has been a revisiting of both Maidens and Tasmania, growing up, as I did, in the repressive era of the 1940s-1950s on that island. Returning to Tasmania in 2004 to make this film I began to excavate into the hard crust of my early childhood memories of a peaceful island with the reality of colonisation and the attempted genocide of the island peoples. When I made Maidens I had no idea of colonisation and 'what had really happened'. I lived in an all 'white world'. The Island Home Country project was conceived amidst the bitter time of ‘the history wars’ as ‘a work of mourning’, utilising psychoanalysis to make some kind of reckoning with history. I was interested in the relevance of the Mitscherlich’s research on post war Germans and their seeming total repression of Germany’s painful past straight after the war. As well I wanted to explore the kinds of amnesia represented in both my upbringing and in my films. As Christopher Koch (1987) writes in Crossing the Gap: A Novelist’s Essay, "we who lived (in Tasmania) between the thirties and the fifties were living in the half-light of a dying British Empire; but we only slowly came to realise it. The culture based in London was the imaginary pole star of our world. "

The Visual Representation of Developing Countries

Bangladeshi photographer Shahidul Alam wrote this essay The Visual Representation of Developing Countries by Developmental Agencies and the Western Media in May 1994. But it's still relevant in 2008.

Download This: The Future of Distribution is Just a Click Away

The future, and this present moment of documentary distribution- on line and the role of the traditional educational distributors is discussed in this article in independent, the new on line Independent Film & Video Monthly. This is a timely article as I look at the distribution choices I have for Island Home Country. To be continued....

remembering, repeating, working through

We finished the film last night. Assistant editor Andrew Corsi and I working through this last (almost) year to bring this project to completion, a project that began in 2004. Karen Pearlman joined me as editor in 2005. I keep Karen's text on my mobile: when she got my 4 hour assembly (from 40 hours). She texted: A cut is born - 90mins 35sec and 15 frames. Karen delivered picture lock off (52mins)last June 07 and due, in part, to the film's commitment and responsibility to the the Tasmanian Aboriginal Protocols process, Andrew and I have taken almost a year to make the required changes and to then complete the online work. Sharon Jakovsky completed the final mix two weeks ago; So many people to thank - but a special thank you right now is due to Sarah Gibson (script and project consultant), Toula Anastas (production supervisor), Megan McMurchy (consultant producer), my whole extended family, especially Stephen Ginsborg and of course all those who appear in the film: my sister Jan Thornley, Auntie Merle Archer, Cousin Leigh Archer, Aunty Phyllis Pitchford – nunarng, Jim Everett - puralia meenamatta, Julie Gough, Penny X Saxon, Clive Atkinson, Moni Lai Storz, Dur-e Dara, Julie Janson, Anthony Bell, Rinki Bhattacharya and Arundhati Roy.
And here is a 3 min quicktime (Thanks Andrew.) It is from a sequence of the film about private memory and public memory and the fluid movement between the two. I have called the clip remembering, repeating, working through after Freud's 1914 essay. Also the film, for me, is about this process of remembering the past and working it through - both personally and in the public arena. The 2008 Apology is perhaps the most recent example of historical memory enacting and reverberating through our lives in so many ways. Yet, as Noel Pearson says in When Words Aren't Enough, "Blackfellas will get the words, the whitefellas will keep the money. And by Thursday the Stolen Generations and their apology will be over as a political issue."

Australia's Sacred Sites Anzac Day - my pa

Dear Pa,
I am writing this letter to you on Anzac Day eve. Here you are as a young Anzac and this is my narration in an Anzac sequence in my current documentary ISLAND HOME COUNTRY. I am writing to ask your permission to use the photo in the film along with this narration: Here’s some film I shot of white Australia’s national day of mourning - where we remember the dead - fallen in World War 1 at Gallipoli. The old diggers remind me of our Pa. The World War 1 gunner, dying of mustard gas poisoning in his sick bed. A historian says Australia can mourn these soldiers, but what about the Aboriginal warriors who fought for country when the British invaded? Can they be mourned by the nation as well?
The historian I am referring to is Henry Reynolds. I like the way he opens the map to include the colonial war fought between the British and the First Australians as a war we must commemorate too. And that it is important to move beyond Britain and Germany's war, a war we sent our service men to with such blind obedience to Mother England. Here Reynolds talks about these wars, these events we mourn and make monuments to ( or not) , with Rachel Khon and Ken Inglis on The Spirit of Things, ABC 2001.
Henry Reynolds: If we make the centrepiece of our celebration, our invasion of Turkey, a country we knew nothing about and had no direct experience with, I can’t see why we can’t come to terms with our invasion of Australia.

But more than ever before, Pa, I can hold the memory of you and honour your life and what you suffered in the trenches of World War 1. You were a kind and loving grandfather to us all. I think I felt something of the pain you carried from that war, even when I was a child at Invermay at your and Nan's house.
I am thinking of you,
your loving grand daughter, Jeni.

me and mr greenaway

The frame is from Island Home Country. The text - a quote from David Tiley at AIDC 08 on Greenaway's plenary at the Conference. I, didn't go, of course. No money and at the beginning of the fifth year of making a film that defies completion....how to explain this rabbit hole I am down? Who would understand? I can't.

"He is also unimpressed with the documentary tradition, which he calls “false and phony – this desire to tell the truth, the truth is untellable.” We create subjective, individual truths; to assert they are more is “an act of extreme arrogance. I would rather advertise and proselytize myself as a liar in order to be able to tell you the truth of those lies than the opposite way round.”

“I’m duty bound I think as a self conscious filmmaker to always tell you that when you are watching one of my films that you are just watching a film. You are not looking through a window on the world. I’m giving you a film. An extraordinary vocabulary and language which is deeply, deeply artificial.” Peter Greenaway

The end of empire: Jarman, Swinton and "pre-industrial filmmaking."

Isaac Julien and Tilda Swinton, at the filmmaker's grave. Julien has curated a retrospective on Jarman. Photo Nina Kellgren.

On August 17, 2002, eight years after Jarman's death, Tilda Swinton, published an epistle to  Jarman entitled Letter to an Angel:

 Derek made filmmakers out of all of us who worked with him. Our work came out of the pre-industrial atmosphere of an art context, not the segregated professionalism of industrial filmmaking. This is the atmosphere I carry with me everywhere, like an amniotic sac.  It is the only way I know to work.

Well, some call her essay a lament for a lost era, yet I love the way she keeps it alive in her mind and the way it influences how she thinks and works today. A thinker, is Swinton.

navigating jonas mekas

Immersed in links to international distribution of documentaries - in this era of multi platforms - traditional and new paradigms circling each other...and I stumbled on Jonas Mekas's site: what a find! And then STREAM.

documentary: A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

documentary: A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

why Jonathon..I was so happy to get a response to my blog - so thanks for that (it hardly ever gets a response;  my daughter says: "well Mum, it's because it's so boring like your films." ) And then, the only response I get from you is navigational advice for the poor user who doesn't realise that the link is always in the header of each post I write! I must say I'm more interested in what you think of Tilda's essay than navigational advice...maybe it was irony.....By the way, what do you feel about Tilda's essay?

A Letter to a Boy from His Mother

Boy , my darling is how Tilda Swinton starts her beautiful essay on cinema and dreams and possibility and ethics : You asked me the other day, just as you were dropping off, what people’s dreams were like before the cinema was invented. You who talk blabberish and chase rabbits in your sleep, hurrumphing like a dog..you who never watch television..I’ve been thinking of your question ever since. I need to print her essay out and read it slowly, savouring each word as this actor/writer/cultural activist speaks in a voice little heard in the speed of the age, in the age of speed. 
Tilda Swinton’s State of Cinema address, San Francisco, 2006. First published in Critical Quarterly, vol.48, no.4. Now in Vertigo

the apology

This moment has been a long time coming and it is a watershed. It has reverberations into this film 'Island Home Country' ; so much of the film has been constructed as way through the past, beyond the 'denialism' of the last era(s). And now the bolted door has been unlocked....

Monday 7:40 Feb 14 2008 Michael Mansell. An apology without compensation is a 'half measure'. Michale Mansell,Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. He's calling for a one billion dollar fund from the federal government and says his home state has set a precedent for paying compensation. Tasmania established a $5 million fund in 2006 for Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families, the only state to have done so.

Maidens: four generations of a (white) Australian family

I made Maidens over 3 years (from 1975-1977) with a small grant from the Experimental Film Fund. While making my current documentary Island Home Country(in post production) I have thought about this earlier autobiographical film I made thirty years ago.
In a way Maidens reflects a "terra nullus mind" – a mind that perpetuates the white conceit that there were no Aborigines (left) in Tasmania. Returning to the island in 2004 to make Island Home Country I began to excavate into the hard crust of my early childhood memories of a peaceful island with the reality of colonisation and the attempted genocide of the island peoples. It's taken 30 years of digging into the crust of repression, to start to face my own white colonised mind
to be able to make this current film and along those foggy years to make To the Other Shore and co-make For Love or Money, films that pave the way to this film, really. Now I'm nearly 60, perhaps I have the maturity to reflect back and think forwards into what it is to come into country the proper way.

Film For Discussion 1974

This is a still of me and screen mother Jovana Janson from Film for Discussion a film Sydney Womens Flm Group made in the early 1970s. The film was nominated for Best Documentary, Greater Union Awards, Sydney Film Festival 1974. SWFG was one of the first Australian groups to establish itself in the name of “Women’s Liberation”. Film For Discussion is a docu-drama shot in 1970, but not completed until 1973. The film sought to encapsulate in an experimental form issues that were under discussion within the Women’s Liberation Movement and so contribute to action for change. The link is to Ballad Films the website of Martha Ansara, my friend and colleague. Martha was a key person in my becoming a filmmaker. Alongside my Dad who was a film exhibitor. It was Martha who introduced me to the actual possibility of women making their own films. It doesn't seem that radical in 2008. But in 1969 it was! Go on this site and order a copy of the film and also see other films to purchase by Ansara. Film For Discussion screened this year (2017) in the Feminism & Film: Sydney Women Filmmakers, 1970s & 1980s retrospective at the SydneyInternational Film Festival.

Island Home Country's 'ghost of history'

The ghost of history.....in the final edit of the film I use an image of me from Woo Joung Kim's short film Mad Woman's Mountain. I play a madwoman - now for my film I re-use it...perhaps an image of an inner voice, a clue to the madness in the substrata  - of the history of colonisation here - in Australia...once you dig into this history it can drive you mad.

I am working on the very final draft of narration before recording when composer Sharon Jakovsky gets back from holidays. I can't believe I am four years into this film now and it's still not finished...I'm not sleeping, worried if I can finish...now using a credit card to complete...don't know why the film faced such a hard road with raising a budget. I think it's a great film for SBS also ABC; no luck with FFC, and AFC am not eligible as they reckon I am a developed filmmaker...so step by step 5th year now it's coming to completion! I hope with some film festivals and internet that people will begin to see the film and gradually it will find its audience.

The avalanche of documentary on the web can be overwhelming: how to navigate and get some kind of overview - that's the archivist - the librarian in me: here's a technorati link :documentaries

death opens up a hole in the real

Found this as an unpublished draft from last year:"Last night's Issues in Documentary Seminar was on autobiography.
Mark presented on Tarnation: and
Carolin presented on a Swiss autobiography by Jan Gassman and Christian Ziörjen, 2007

Chrigu

The opening image is a a projector on fire; the film is about death and life..and it affects/sears the senses in the intensity of its images and their juxtapositions. I am still thinking/feeling through the class discussion. Natalie spoke about how the film affected her: 'uncomfortable', l recall was her word. I clumsily tried to tease open the discussion, attempting to link Chrigu to ideas around death and representation in documentary film studies and to some of the thinking and writing around works of mourning. I was thinking of Hayden White's essay 'The Modernist Event'and his discussion on the dangers of narrativising trauma as a defense against mourning (in Vivian Sobchack, The Persistence of History, Routledge, NY 1996). And Susan Sontag's essay Plato's Cave in On Photography
where she probes the risks and delights inherent in 'taking' photographs. Or when I read Michael Renov's essay Filling up the Hole in the Real: Death and Mourning in Contemporary Film and Video"I was affected by his sentence death opens up a hole in the Real that will be filled by a "swarm of images" (125).
I thought of my own long alliance with psychoanalysis and cinema...which has (over thirty years) shown me to be ethical with the camera (when I wasn't) and to be wary of replacing film with life...to try and be insightful with the swarm of images - their seduction. So in considering my autobiographies Maidens and To the Other Shore. 1996, complex and difficult works in the context of my own family, where the ethical encounter - permission to film and circulate private images into the public domain is a mine field more now than when I made either film. Death and the image..I sense danger...yet last night I couldn't explain what I meant..it wasn't a criticism of Chrigu, not at all...as I sense the film is a gift, too, from this young creative filmmaker taken too soon by death at his door...and his friend and co-director Jan, who carries this burning camera/projector around with him screening this film.

Voices of Resistance

Voices of Resistance - Northern Territory Traditional Owners Speaking Out
“The link [between Howard’s plan for a nuclear waste dump in the NT and the military intervention] is unbreakable. Because we have stood up so strongly saying we didn’t want a waste dump. We have stood up strongly again against uranium mining. We have strongly said no to both issues. I think this is Mr Howard’s way of saying ‘we’ve gotta put those blackfellas back in their place, we have to take their land away from them, we’ve got to demoralise them, we have to break their self esteem, we have to break any connection they have with their lands by taking through leases. It’s time now, it’s time to bring the Aboriginal communities into town. It’s time to be a political force.” In Alice Springs, hundreds of people attended the rally to mark the beginning of the fiftieth anniversary of the National Aboriginal Islander Day of Celebration (NAIDOC).
from Mitch, an Eastern Arrernte and Luritja woman, from the Engawala community (Harts Range, east of Alice Springs), posted on intercontinental cry.org 13.8.07

her words are taken by the wind

"We’re in Truganini’s country. She cries, my sister. I forget to turn on the microphone. Her words are taken by the wind. But it’s not guilt or moral outrage. It’s sadness at the trauma of what happened here. There’s a wound in the coloniser’s mind. We have to go there, open to other possibilities: land rights, treaty and a deep connection to country and other ways of remembering. Truganini, then, not a victim of our white guilt, but Truganini a survivor of depth and complexity." Narration extract from Island Home Country, my documentary film in post production, 2007.

She had the longest funeral in the history of the world. From the time of her physical death in 1876 to her cremation in 1976, it took a hundred years. Not that she wished it that way, but others thought her to be so important that they could not let her depart this life until they had finished with her. Andrys Onsman, Truganini's Funeral, Island No. 96.

"we hope to fly out of the United Kingdom with our ancestors in our possession," Aboriginal negotiator Caroline Spotswood

Members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community have been fighting to have their ancestor's remains returned from both local and international museums since the 1980s. Aboriginal elders in February won a court injunction stopping a series of DNA and imaging tests on the remains by Britain's Natural History Museum, which holds the remains. The bones of 13 Tasmanian Aborigines held for more than 100 years at a British museum will be sent home within days, ending a two-decade fight for their return...The bones were taken without permission in the 1880s in a case which has been called "Australia's Elgin marbles", a reference to the row between Britain and Greece over Parthenon sculptures held in the British Museum in London.
SMH May 11 2007

on commemoration and super/vision

In this fourth year of the doctoral process - scholarship ending September - yet the film's fine cut, sound post and thesis still to come, it is time to make a commemoration; not at the end when I finish, but right now in the thick of things.
To my partner, Stephen, for his acceptance, so steadfast.
To my principal supervisor Sarah Gibson. Sarah, you hold the space for an inner process to take place with a creative work; the Jungians call it soul work, and that's the level on which we work together. Thankyou for providing that space for me in here at UTS; without you I couldn't have come thus far with the film.
To Toula Anastas, your smile, open heart and intuitive understanding of the creative process, translated into the complex machinery of film and digital media, makes the whole process heartening; you listen and give back; you inspire and demonstrate the patience and endurance required to deliver works such as these.
To Karen Pearlman, the film's editor, for lightness and insight in the edit process.
To my daughter, step daughter and grandchild - for their love.
To Dr.S. For thirty years of reading together and for the distinct possibility of celebration.

uncanny

Last night I found myself in a back street of Sydney I had not visited since the late 70s.I had a direct experience of the uncanny.
like falling between reality and unreality; of being in a landscape both familiar, yet as if in a dream; a corridor in my mind opened up to that historical period , as if right there in the dark on that fragment of earth, the space opened up and the line between past and present dissolved. I was at the Rozelle Psychiatric Hospital site. And then the images in Kenneth Loach's startling 1972 film Family Life ran through my internal projector along with experiences that led to a long alliance with filmmaking and psychoanalysis .

there shall be no mourning

Derrida in The Work of Mourning (2001) ruminates on Lyotard's injunction, "there shall be no mourning...It could be said that this spectral echo roams about like a thief of the Apocalypse; it expires in the exhalation of this phrase, comes back to haunt our reading, respires or breathes in advance...and that is why whoever thus works at the work of mourning learns the impossible--and that mourning is interminable. Inconsolable. Irreconcilable."

Giving an Account of Oneself

Approaching Jericho, Tasmania. Photo by Stephen Ginsborg
I am at an impasse with the edit of the film and the re-write of the edit script. Co-supervisor Katrina Schlunke, looked at the edit and raised tricky questions about narrative certainty:
1. For a postcolonial text the film/me has too much authority
2. She wants a more sophisticated take on who I am
3. I maintain the centre...I need to lose it
4. More of the process of making it...the difficult spaces; the intractability
5. The ongoing force of Indigenous sovereignty - where is it?
6. She interrogated my use of the words amnesia, mourning
7. She said 'reading' a film text was hard for her...not like reading a written work
8. She said perhaps non-Indigenous Australia has a very persistent and creative and pervasive practice of forgetting that works through 'knowing' - that its styles and sets of knowledges that have arisen through western enlightenment etc but have been honed through the process of colonisation.

It sent me back to reading philospher Judith Butler's, Giving an Account of Oneself . How to translate into images:
Since I cannot tell the story in a straight line, and I lose my thread, and I start again, and I forget something crucial, and it is to hard to think about how to weave it in, and I start thinking, thinking, there must be some conceptual thread that will provide a narrative here, some lost link, some possibility for chronology, and the "I" becomes increasingly conceptual, increasingly awake, focused, determined, it is at this point that the thread must fall apart. The "I" who narrates finds that it cannot direct its narration, finds that it cannot give an account of its inability to narrate, why its narration breaks down, and so it comes to experience itself, or, rather, re-experience itself, as radically, if not irretrievably, unknowing about who it is... The "I" is breaking down...It does not know itself, and perhaps it never will. But is that the task, to know itself, to achieve an adequate narrative account of a life? And should it be? Is the task to cover over the breakage, the rupture, which is constitutive of the "I" through a narrative means that quite forcefully binds the elements together in a narration that is enacted as if it were perfectly possible, as if the break could be mended and defensive mastery restored?" Judith Butler, Diacritics 31.4 (2001) 22-40

So my attempt to confront cultural amnesia and the repression of the violent face of colonisation in Tasmania has become an enactment of defensive mastery? Yet another colonial gesture disguised as reparation?

Aboriginal servicemen and women in separate Anzac Day march

Well, Robert Manne, just a few months after your Turkish Tale on Anzac Day lecture there is a wind in the air. Perhaps it is happening - holding together the memory of Gallipoli along with honouring those Aboriginal fighters who died on the frontier protecting their country. There were no marching bands or Australian flags when Indigenous Diggers march set out from the Block in Redfern yesterday. Sydney's first indigenous Anzac Day parade - proudly decked in black, red and gold - set off to the accompaniment of a single didgeridoo. The 500 marchers were led by about 15 veterans. Then a service was held at St Saviour's Church to commemorate the fallen.
In Canberra, ACT Chief Minister Jon Stanhope is being urged to consider a commemorative day for Canberra's Indigenous groups who died at the time of European settlement. ACT Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Centre spokeswoman Ann Jackson-Nakano says an ANZAC-type day should be established, and a monument erected to recognise Aborigines who died during European settlement and during the settlement of the Canberra region. She says at this stage it is only a suggestion, but she says it is something that Canberrans should consider. "I'm not meaning in any way, shape or form to disrespect the ANZACS," she said. "I'm just saying that, you know, we celebrate this day every year, and I don't see why we couldn't sort of move back a bit." She says there should be a monument recognising the plight of the Indigenous people. "The Australians are a very enlightened people, so I think it's time to demonstrate in real terms the way Australians themselves stand on this issue, and hopefully also the leaders," she said.

A Turkish Tale on Anzac Day

photo source: The Heritage of the Great War.

I just heard Robert Manne speaking on the Armenian Genocide

"despite the fact that the Armenian Genocide was one of the great crimes of history; despite the fact that it took place on Ottoman soil during the precise months of the Dardanelles campaign; despite the fact that that campaign is regarded as the moment when the Australian nation was born, so far as I can tell, in the vast Gallipoli canon, not one Australian historian has devoted more than a passing page or paragraph to the relationship, or even the mere coincidence, of the two events...
Ernest Renan once argued that an act of forgetting can be discovered in the foundation of all nations. Sigmund Freud agreed: "It is universally admitted that in the origin of the traditions and folklore of a people care must be taken to remove from the memory such a motive as would be painful to the national feeling.” According to Renan and Freud, all countries seem to feel the need for a noble myth of origin from which dark deeds and moral ambiguities have been erased."

What a relief to hear some analysis, some thinking that digs into the layers of this day of mourning and expand ideas about the character of the nation:

whether or not we can learn, without flinching, to hold the memories of the triumph of Gallipoli and and the tragedy of the Dispossession (of Aboriginal Australia) together in our minds.

Australia and Turkey: Uncomfortable Thoughts on Gallipoli and the Armenian Genocide' by Robert Manne, Professor of Politics. La Trobe University

Race wars written out of Australian history

What has this photograph got to do with race wars and Australian History? It's a photograph of my grandmother in 1921 on her wedding day. Pa, my grandfather was just back from the war fields of France. Historians Henry Reynolds and Lyndall Ryan woke me up to another story, another war in Tasmania, where I was born. These race wars were a secret during my entire childhood in the 1950s and into the 1980s. So I began this research project and film - to find out how could I grow up in Tasmania and know nothing of the race wars? And now that I know something what am I going to do about it?

maralinga - a strange colour in the sky

A few years ago I worked as a researcher on a documentary series about Australia and war; in the script there was a sequence set in the 1950s on the setting up of Woomera in preparation for the British Tests. I did a lot of research, including extensive research into the impact of the tests on the Yankunytjatjara, Antikarinya, Kokatha, Pitjantjatara and Yalata communities, the traditional owners. None of this research was used in the series. This response made me determined to at least name what happened there in this documentary ISLAND HOME COUNTRY. The tests represented another phase of the further colonisation of Australia by Britain.

Several weeks ago SBS news did an item on an anniversary of Woomera - and once again- no mention of the traditional owners. As if they don't exist. SBS is a national broadcaster. I am still amazed that they can make a news item that is so ignorant. It makes me more determined to show it in the film. I heard about the Oak Valley Community cultural project. The older men and women of the community said they wanted to paint the story of the land including the history of the tests and the fight for reclamation. This article says that "in the minds of many Australians still, the most prevalent image of Maralinga is of a mushroom cloud, while the community lives in the Great Victoria Desert, a land of immense beauty and incredible bio-diversity." This is interesting as so often Maralinga is represented by the atomic explosion images. I have now located some of the paintings by Jonathan Kumintjarra Brown and they are full of life in the face of death.