to illustrate the shifts in social attitudes and political exigencies about Aboriginal people. This is achieved by applying French historian Fernand Braundel’s longue ←4 | 5→durée approach. It provides the necessary historical distance to trace the minute changes in the relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians. Each film is historically emblematic of these shifts, signposting changes in the representation of Aboriginal peoples. The approach to the films differs from other important studies of Australian documentary films. Unlike Ian Bryson’s valuable Bringing to Light: a history of ethnographic filmmaking and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (2002) and Lisa Milner’s insightful Fighting Films: a history of the Waterside workers’ Federation (2003), which concentrate on specific institutions, this book considers a range of institutions that made films about Aboriginal peoples to examine their ideological motivations for making the films. The book also examines a range of filmmakers, rather than focusing on a specific individual like Anna Grimshaw’s valuable work on David and Judith MacDougall in The Ethnographer’s Eye (2001), and Graham Shirley’s informative piece on Cecil Holmes for the National Sound and Film Archive (NSFA). Tracing the production of documentary films about and then by Aboriginal people, the book traces the journey from early ethnographic films to a recent and critical phase in the trend toward decolonisation of the documentary screen.
Decolonising the Documentary Film in Australia
Decolonisation of research methodologies is especially important to documentary film production by Indigenous filmmakers. Māori academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s work outlines the importance for the Other to “research back” to challenge the “underlying code of imperialism and colonialism”.10 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers now engage with all aspects of film production; not only do they use cameras they are sophisticated and conversant with the intricate processes of ←5 | 6→funding applications, utilising government incentives, negotiating the legal aspects of filmmaking and distribution rights to name just a few. In other words, they have “researched back” the film industry, using and defining it to meet their needs and desires. The degree of self-determination achieved to date strengthens the platforms from which serious challenges to colonial “ideological constructions of the Other” can be propelled.11 Documentary film production by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is but one area where these challenges may originate. The activities of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander filmmakers have re-shaped Aboriginality in ways that successfully challenge previous colonial constructions and imaginations about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander lives.
Stages of the Journey
The extended timescale helps to arrange and accumulate the numerous small fragments of change. Collected piece by piece they provide a fuller picture about how the production of documentary films had a role to play in the way Aboriginal people were represented on documentary film. It illuminates the discourses documentary films kindled about how the public and governments perceived Aboriginal peoples. The timescale helps us to appreciate shifts in documentary film production values when Aboriginal people began to control more aspects of documentary film making from the 1970s. The journey of how these values developed provide a unique way of assessing the social and technological impacts related to the films selected. The ability to collect in one volume a study about the imperceptible changes taking place – often missed when the inquiry focuses upon the works for example, of an individual filmmaker or the productions from a single institution – is a fresh way of approaching the important role played by documentary film production and the genre’s influence on ←6 | 7→the human networks of societies and identity formation. Using the films as periodic markers enables a panoramic view that asks us to consider the inescapable consequences of our present environment.12
The structure of the book follows a lineal chronological time, ordering the films according to their production dates with the exception of two films arranged thematically into the sections that best reflect their ideological premise. This concession also acknowledges the unevenness of these changes. Arranging the films in this way makes it easier to identify shifts, demonstrating how the representation of Aboriginal people corresponded to shifts in scientific and anthropological practice alongside improvements in film stock and camera technologies.
Sectioning the time line is determined with some consideration of the development of anthropological practices during the twentieth century. In the first part, “Exotic Subjects, 1901–1966”, the examination of prominent ideas and attitudes of the period in relation to Aboriginal peoples is represented in four documentary films: Aboriginal Life in Central Australia (1901); Life in Central Australia (1931); Aborigines of the Sea Coast (1950) and Desert People (1966). The technological changes in film and camera technology between these films are significant but the ideological premise on which they were conceptualised remained static; the filmmakers represent Aboriginal peoples as a “stone age” or timeless people in the ethnographic present, as people from “deep history” but who were also a “dying race”.
The term “deep history” is defined as an inter-disciplinary approach to studying the human past. It draws from an array of disciplines including archaeology, anthropology, primatology, genetics and linguistics to piece together a more comprehensive over-arching narrative about the beginnings of humans. The ideology behind the films in this part draws on the premise of finding the authentic Aborigine, a mythic identity formed in the imagination of people of European descent about Indigenous populations.13 ←7 | 8→The films in Part I represent Aboriginal peoples as relics from an ancient pristine past where their cultural authenticity bound them permanently to the deep past; it helped view their extinction as a fait accompli. For many Anglo Australians the belief in the inevitable extinction of Aboriginal peoples rationalised their social and political marginalisation from mainstream Australia, including the destruction and dispossession of their lands and culture. Langton’s idea that Aboriginality is not fixed, creates a tension between this fluidity and the embedded timelessness of the “authentic” Aboriginal visualised in the films. This timelessness is challenged in the following sections.
In Part II, “Voices for Change, 1957–1972”, the three films Warburton Aborigines (1957), Change At Groote (1968), and Ningla-A-Na (1972) foreground the growing overt agency of Aboriginal people as political actors in their quest for recognition and identity. As political advocacy films rather than ethnographic films, they demonstrate the first glimmers of shifting non-Aboriginal views about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples; the imperceptible changes that signalled the beginning of an acknowledgement that they are survivors rather than destined for extinction. In these early filmic documents, the sound of Aboriginal voices was a relatively new feature in documentary films. Heralded by developments in film sound technologies as well as an interest in hearing the views of Aboriginal people. The inclusion of their voices relating their experiences under government assimilation policies alert us to the first signs of the formation of a more militant Aboriginal activism.
The third part, “Counting the Cost, 1978–1987”, investigates three films: My Survival As An Aboriginal (1978); Lousy Little Sixpence (1983);
