The Story of the Moving Image -- First Peoples' Perspectives

Vicki Couzens is a Keerray Woorroong Gunditjmara artist and her artwork welcomes visitors as they enter The Story of the Moving Image and then farewells them as they leave the gallery at the end of their visit.

Yanmeeyarr, which means flickering in the firelight, celebrates First People’s storytelling and the way stories can be brought to life through movement, light and shadow. We think this is the perfect way to frame an exhibition about the moving image.

The welcome

Look up to see the first part of Yanmeeyarr as you enter the gallery. You look through a huge, textured acrylic lens to see a painting representing storytelling through dance, and how ochre markings on the body capture and reflect light during corroboree, or ceremony. If you move or sway as you look up through the gigantic textured lens, the dancing figures appear to ripple and move.

The farewell

As you leave The Story of the Moving Image, you see that the dancers have come down from the ceiling to connect with visitors walking past on their way out. Cut out of metal with a mirror finish, the figures are etched to give the impression of movement and of 'flickering in the firelight'.

Vicki Couzens describes her work in terms of inclusion and connection -- "The viewer in movement and reflection becomes part of the dance, as the figures become animated."

Ali Gumillya Baker is a Mirning woman from the Nullarbor on the West Coast of South Australia. Her art resists the history that has been written since the British colonised her people's land. Her work The colonial imagination/down among the wild men is a looped mixed media video installation that uses shadow play, projection and performance to question the history of colonisation.

In this work, Gumillya Baker is enacting the fear the British invaders/colonisers had of her ancestors and what this fear led the colonisers to imagine about the the Mirning people.

She writes, "Dressed in a tall ship hat pretending to be a colonialist, the Mirning artist writes with her feather quill back to the colonial-mother-monarch of her times ‘down among the wild men’. From the shade of the gum tree. At the same time as her chronicling, she is attacked by a wild man, (fellow sovereign Yanyuwa artist), who with a super large fork pretend stabs her in the back and the pretend explorer/tall ship coloniser collapses. Even the trees are scared of us blackfellas the hand holding the tree is shaking in fear. The background soundtrack that the viewer cannot hear is us all laughing maniacally at the re-enactment of the anthropological and colonial gaze.”

Canopy is a moving image artwork projected onto four floor-to-ceiling screens surrounding the Moving Australia section of The Story of the Moving Image. Created by artist, filmmaker and storyteller John Harvey, the work blends personal home movies with excerpts from Harvey's short films Water (2017) and Out of Range (2019).

Harvey has conceived the work to be an intimate meditation on interconnected lives and experience, which he represents through non-linear fragments and impressions. He points out that “We feel and experience things at different times, and engage with things at different levels. It’s not so neat and packaged as a three-act story. For me it was the opportunity to really step away from that.” The film gives visitors the chance to feel and experience without having to understand or explain their response: "It’s okay to just feel something and take that with you."

The choices Harvey has made around the shape and content of Canopy connect with a tradition of First People's self-representation through the moving image. This tradition began in the 1970s when First Peoples stepped behind the camera to control how they are represented and to capture and tell their own stories. In the present-day, self-representation is at the heart of First Peoples' diverse and vibrant moving image creation and contribution to Australian screen culture.

Once First Peoples found opportunities to get behind the camera and work together to tell their own stories, they could present experience and culture from their own perspective and in their own way. In The Story of the Moving Image, First Peoples: Our stories, our way recognises trailblazers who led the way in using the moving image to connect First Peoples with culture, language, history and each other.

Bill Onus

A Yorta Yorta man, Bill Onus was a filmmaker, activist, artist, theatre producer and entrepreneur. Among his many achievements, Onus was a trailblazer in his recognition of the possibilities that film and media held for First People's self-representation.

After performing in several minor roles in Australian films during the 1930s, Onus began filming his own super 8 videos and is very likely the first Aboriginal filmmaker, credited as the maker of a previously unseen silent film believed to be shot in Heidelberg in 1946.

Through the documentary film Forgotten People (1967) and the TV series Alcheringa (1962), Onus demonstrated his ongoing commitment to self-representation through screen culture.

Essie Coffey
Essie Coffey was the first female Aboriginal documentary filmmaker. She was a Murawarri woman who taught culture and the importance of cultural knowledge to her children and other young Aboriginal people in her community.

Her 1978 film My Survival as an Aboriginal highlights both the oppression and strength of Aboriginal people in her community of Brewarrina NSW. My Survival as an Aboriginal is “…one of the first Australian films where an Indigenous Australian was directly involved in deciding how she and her community would be represented...” The film had extensive reach, screening at several prestigious Australian and international film festivals, and won major awards at the Sydney Film Festival.

Basically Black

Basically Black was a groundbreaking television show, commissioned and aired by the ABC in 1973. The show featured Bob Maza, Gary Foley, Aileen Corpus, Zac Martin and Bindi Williams in a series of politically-charged sketches.

The first TV program performed by an all-Indigenous cast and led by Blak writers, this groundbreaking program tackled serious issues, like racism and white paternalism, through humour.

Despite being well-received, it did not go on past its premiere, and it emerged later that parts of the original script had been censored by the ABC. Despite this, the show is a cult classic and is regularly shown on the ABC today.

Birth of Indigenous broadcasting

Aboriginal people in Central Australia were concerned about the negative influence of mainstream media and the dominant culture on their young people.

From 1982 to 1984, several Aboriginal media organisations became involved in creating and broadcasting local content, with Ernabella Video Television (EVTV, now PY Media) and the Warlpiri Media Association (WMA, now PAW Media) filming and distributing programs out of Ernabella and Yuendumu via videotape and pirate (unlicensed) television. Filmed in Indigenous languages, these videos included local content such as football matches, community events, ceremonies, lore and culture.

The Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) also played a key role during this time, moving into video and television in 1984 and launching Imparja Television in 1988.

How we tell our stories showcases the diversity of Indigenous storytelling through the moving image where First Peoples tell their own stories in their own way, using the moving image to resist and assert agency.

Television presenter and educator Shelley Ware is a Yankunyjatjara and Wirangu woman from South Australia. In her film Where the Desert Meets the Sea, she pays her respects to her father by visiting Koonibba Football Club, Australia’s oldest continuing Aboriginal football club in her hometown of Ceduna.

Filmmaker Dylan River is a Kaytetye man from the Northern Territory whose film A Good Eye for Story reflects on his practice as a filmmaker and a storyteller and on his place in a long tradition of storytelling through the moving image.

Visual artist Julie Gough is a Trawlwoolway woman from Tasmania. In her film The Silenced, she reflects on the impact of colonialism on Tasmanian Aboriginal people and the fate of children stolen from their families and forced into labour in white homes and stations.

The Moving Minds section of The Story of the Moving Image explores the power of the moving image to shape and communicate ideas. Aboriginal activist Professor Gary Foley has responded to this brief with a range of material drawn from the Aboriginal History Archive.

The archive looks at the intersection of activism and filmmaking and documents the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Activists of the era saw the power of film and television to tell the truth, advocate for justice and resist oppression, as well as galvanise other First Peoples into action. Their involvement in films, documentaries and later, during the 1980s, television gave activists the chance to champion the rights of First Peoples while also increasing representation in Australian screen culture.

In collecting and building a record of this period, the archive resists colonial narratives and celebrates self-determination. It features thousands of photos, videos, campaign materials, media and manuscripts with the aim of reinterpreting and reframing Australia’s Aboriginal political history.

Memory Garden invites visitors to pause and reflect as they literally hold someone’s recorded memories in the palms of their outstretched hands. The home movies shared in this installation include films from the Bill Onus family archive and the Koorie Oral History Program.

Home movies emerged in the 1930s and became increasingly popular through the 1950s and 60s. The majority of home movies from this period were made by wealthy white families, but Yorta Yorta leader and activist Bill Onus was quick to take up this technology, pioneering the Indigenous use of 8mm home movies to document his life and the Aboriginal communities of Victoria and beyond.

Other First Peoples films projected in Memory Garden are sourced from the Koorie Oral History Program created by Dr Wayne Atkinson senior Yorta Yorta Elder. The program was designed to document Koorie life with audio recordings and on camera, as a way of preserving culture, maintaining oral traditions and ensuring the next generations had access to their stories. This work is continued today by the Koorie Heritage Trust.

Maya Hodge, a Lardil & Yangkaal woman who is an assistant curator at the Koorie Heritage Trust, highlights the importance of these captured moments of self-representation: "The snippets of film in Memory Garden of people like Aunty Winnie Quagliotti feeding rosellas, kids playing tug of war, eating, playing music and marching together during NAIDOC week highlights the love, joy and pride of Aboriginal South-East Victoria."

The Story of the Moving Image exhibition emphasises and acknowledges the powerful contribution made to Australian screen culture by First Peoples seizing the opportunity to tell their stories through the mediums of film and television. As Rachel Perkins has commented in respect of her landmark television series First Australians, her determination to look at the nation and its history "from an Indigenous point of view" is about telling a "fuller Australian story".

In twenty-first century Australia, First Peoples are at the centre of screen production and culture, thanks to storytellers such as Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton, Ivan Sen, Wayne Blair, Miranda Tapsell, Leah Purcell, Stephen Page, Nakkiah Lui, Dylan River and so many more. With their film, TV and web-based projects driven by having something to say and important stories to tell, these artists are connecting with audiences both within and outside of Australia.

As well as celebrating Rachel Perkins, Warwick Thornton and David Gulpilil in Spotlights in Moving Australia, installations in Moving Worlds focus on set design concept art created for the gorgeous animated children's TV series Little J and Big Cuz, set design, costume design and props from Sweet Country and the character design process for the action-based fantasy TV series Cleverman.