which many of the earlier films trapped them. Finally, Aboriginal historical accounts, such as Torres’ Whispering in Our Hearts: the Mowla Bluff Massacre (2002), and Tranter’s Willaberta Jack (2007) are reminders that Australia does indeed have a black history and Aboriginal perspectives form an important understanding of colonial dispossession from their point of view. The Aboriginal sense of visual performance and their agency, so clearly apparent in the film by Spencer and Gillen, continues in the later films. What is uncovered is that film is a comfortable medium for many Aboriginal people because it relates readily to an intimate understanding of the visual – a fundamental concept practiced in oral societies.
Unfortunately, there is scant reliable evidence with regards to audience numbers and individual reactions to many of the films. Television and cinema attendance numbers were not reliably accounted for until quite recently in a systematic way. The analysis relies on how the films, given their historical context, were both products and drivers of social changes in relation to Aboriginal people on a broader scale. The advantage of this study is that it provides a longitudinal view to explore the changing relationship between Indigenous peoples and non-Indigenous Australians through the medium of documentary film. It raises awareness that the power of the image to create and sustain stereotypes also contributed to shifting and at times conflicting attitudes toward Aboriginal people, challenging the understanding about “race” in Australia.
1 The term “Indigenous” includes all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. “Aboriginal” is used to specifically identify those people belonging to communities on the mainland and Tasmania.
2 Marcia Langton, Well I Heard It on the Radio and I saw it on the Television …: An essay for the Australian Film Commission on the politics and aesthetics of filmmaking by and about Aboriginal people and things, Sydney: The Australian Film Commission (1993), 81.
3 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: issues and concepts in documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press (1991), 3–4.
4 Belinda Smaill, The documentary: politics, emotion, culture, New York: Palgrave Macmillan (2010), 3.
5 Nichols, Representing Reality, 3.
6 Smaill, The documentary, 5.
7 Smaill, The documentary, 5.
8 Smaill, The documentary, 6.
9 Dennis Cali, Mapping Media Ecology: introduction to the field, New York: Peter Lang (2017), ix.
10 Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, London: Zed Books & University of Otago Press (1999), 7.
11 Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 8.
12 Daniel Little, New Contributions to the Philosophy of History, Dordrecht: Springer (2010), 19.
13 Frances Peters-Little, “The Return of the Noble Savage By Popular Demand: A Study of Aboriginal Television Documentary in Australia”. Submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy of the Australian National University, April 2002, 72–3.
14 Cali, Mapping Media Ecology, 25.
15 Cali, Mapping Media Ecology, 25.
16 Romaine Moreton, “Curator’s Notes”, <http://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/my-survival-aboriginal/notes/> [Accessed 30 August 2016].
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The people of Melbourne have never before had presented to them such a vivid picture of aboriginal [sic] life in Central Australia as given last evening in the Town-hall by Professor Baldwin Spencer to an overflowing audience. It was much more than a lecture – it was a diversified entertainment, in which an intensely interesting descriptive account of the nature of the lives of the people was freely interspersed with lantern slides, cinematograph pictures, phonograph records, and other material secured by Professor Spencer and Mr F. J. Gillen during their recent expedition.1
This breathless account appeared in The Argus the morning after Spencer and Gillen presented their cinematic films in Melbourne’s Town hall. It conveys the excitement about the first screening of a documentary film featuring Aboriginal people. The acclaim was indicative of the fascination with not only the novelty of the new technology of cinematic, or moving photography, but with the allure of the Aboriginal image; an exotic image that simultaneously threatened and titillated Anglo Australian audiences.
Spencer and Gillen’s films ushered in a new dimension to the relationship between Aboriginal and Anglo Australians. Although visual representations of Aboriginal people in the form of paintings, drawings and still photographs were widely available, moving films added another platform to the media environment of the day. It was rare that many urban-dwelling Australians had seen Aboriginal people in their traditional environment. Understood as “the last of their kind”, the screening of the films confirmed the construction of Aboriginal people as apolitical beings, hopelessly primitive; the moving images effectively distanced them from the rest of the Australian population. The introduction of moving film into the early twentieth-century media environment profoundly affected ←13 | 14→how Aboriginal Australians were understood. In a new century, Anglo Australians were intent on projecting a progressive and positivistic image of their country, celebrating the pioneering spirit of its white settler history and the achievements made in its industrialisation and technological developments. The Aboriginal population represented the antithesis of this conception and early documentary films presented a set of images that demonstrated this contrast. To Westerners, Aboriginal society appeared static, engendering the development of attitudes and policies that ensured their aggressive marginalisation; after all the doctrine of progress was unique to Western society.2 On film, Aboriginal people were exposed visually to a wider audience. The moving images fed a Western imagination about primitivity, expressed through the intertwining of two discourses. One was the Doomed Race Theory which, as historian Russell McGregor points out, persisted in Australia from the middle of the nineteenth century and well into the early decades of the twentieth century.3
