Celluloid Subjects to Digital Directors

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank my husband Graeme for his continued support in all my endeavours and for his patience and forbearance through the long gestation period of writing this book. To my three daughters, Felicity, Katie and Imogen, who were children at the beginning and are now grown women who have found their ways in the world. And to my four-legged companion, Alfie, who reminded me to take breaks from my desk. Many thanks and much appreciation goes to my mentor, the fabulous Professor Lyndall Ryan, who believed in the worth of the project. Her support and academic advice and companionship have always been inspirational. I feel privileged to be one of her students. Many thanks to the amazing Dr Wendy Michaels, friend and mentor who, like Lyndall, gave patient advice on numerous drafts. Advice on earlier drafts was enhanced by input from Dr Michael Kilmister, colleague and friend.

I have benefited from the advice and help of the librarians at the Ourimbah Campus of the University of Newcastle (Australia), Fiona Neville; Julie Mundey-Taylor; Narelle Lawrence; Lorraine Millar; Jenny Shephard; Catherine Moffat and Ruth Talbot-Stokes. They are all great colleagues and friends who provided a very supportive environment.

I would like to acknowledge the assistance of Lea Gardam and staff at the Museum of South Australia, Robin McWilliams, and staff at Museum Victoria who provided some salient information and access to films, crucial in writing this history. The crucial support of the staff, including Graham Shirley and Sam Bateman at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra played an important role.

I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Warwick Thornton, David Tranter, Dena Curtis, Mitch Torres, Troy Albert, Stephen Albert, Henry Augustine, Miriam Corowa and Ian Dunlop for their interviews. Without their personal insights into filmmaking and television experiences the study would lack depth in its treatment of the films.

Cultural Warning and Acknowledgement

Readers of this book should be aware that if members of some Aboriginal communities see names or images of the deceased, particularly their relatives, they may be distressed. Before using this work and the related documentary films in such communities, readers should establish the wishes of senior members and take their advice on appropriate procedures and safeguards to be adopted.

I also acknowledge and respect the Darkinjung people, past, present and emerging leaders, the traditional custodians of the land where this book was written.

Introduction

The phenomenon of using film to inform a mass audience began in the early twentieth century. Its invention coincided with three critical moments in Australian history: the federation of the six Australian colonies to form the Australian nation; the rise of the academic discipline of anthropology; and the widespread belief that the nation’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island peoples were on the brink of extinction. In this environment, biological and medical scientists used the medium of film to make what they believed to be permanent records of Aboriginal people for posterity. A century later, the descendants of the “extinct” people were making their own films to tell their own stories for fellow Indigenous¹ peoples and to inform a non-Indigenous audience.

This is a survey of the extraordinary journey taken by Australian documentary filmmakers from 1901 to 2017 in the visual representation of Australia’s Aboriginal people. Its purpose is to explore the filmmakers’ key role in constructing attitudes towards Australia’s Aboriginal peoples over the last century. The documentary films are a creation of and by Australia’s history, and play a significant role in national identity formation and nation building. But the films do more; they demonstrate how at different times Australians understood Aboriginality and how the extinction of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population could be rationalised as the inevitable outcome of the colonial process.

The over-arching discussion connects the exploration of the documentary films to developments in scientific discourses with political and social debates about Aboriginal peoples. Rather than examining the films entirely through the theoretical models employed in film studies, the methodological approach uses the films to anchor the discussion about the nature of race relations in Australia. It emphasises their value ←1 | 2→as cultural and historical artefacts and demonstrates how each film graphically illustrates the continually shifting relationship between ideology and technology.

Each film signposts shifts in how Aboriginalities were understood by both Aboriginal people and non-Aboriginal Australians. Bidjara/Iman descendant and public academic Marcia Langton’s incisive observation that “‘Aboriginality’ is remade over and over again in a process of dialogue, imagination, representation and interpretation” provides an important framework for the study. “Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people create ‘Aboriginalities’” in an infinite array of intercultural experiences.² Recognising that Aboriginality is not static underlines the importance of these modalities in which documentary films play a significant role. Indeed, Langton’s appraisal of the social and cultural dynamics in her description of Aboriginality embraces the similar dynamics of media ecology and the emotional investment inherent in documentary film production used in this study. First let us consider the emotional dynamics inherent in the making of documentary films.

The work of scholar Belinda Smaill (2010) draws attention to the role emotion plays in documentary film production. Traditionally documentary films are associated with what Bill Nichols refers to as “discourses of sobriety” and the genre’s connections with science, education and social responsibility.³ Exploring the importance of the emotions produced by documentary films, which include pleasure, hope, pain, empathy, or disgust, Smaill is interested in how the audience is ←2 | 3→addressed by and how they relate to these emotions. In particular “how emotionality marries with the social project of documentary in ways that make the non-fiction genre a compelling site for understanding how fantasies of self and other circulate through specific textual practices”.⁴ Recognising these emotions circulate in the public sphere connected as they are with instrumental power structures that include “science, economics, politics, foreign policy, education, religion and welfare”,⁵ Lauren Berlant argues that “public spheres are worlds of affect”. It is where Jim McGuigan maintains that “popular culture, including television and cinema, offers a mass mediated aesthetic and emotional form of communication that is integral to perceptions of collective life”.⁶ In synthesising these views, Smaill “indicates that emotion can be thought of not only as a psychical response to particular stimulus, but also as integral to the way subjects experience public spheres at particular historical moments”.⁷ The films in this study are emblematic of the conditions in which Aboriginality was constructed, negotiated and comprehended in the public sphere, simultaneously driving and reflecting these changes.