Cinematic Representation Of Australian Aboriginality

The colorful Aboriginal arts and culture have always been a fascinating source for study, as well as for ethnographic researches, but most people come to understand them only from tourist advertisements, in which they are represented almost only as totems, evoking outback exotica. The Aboriginal Australia used to be considered a primitive world both challenging and seductive. In surveying Australian feature film production over the last 100 years, what clearly emerges is a general avoidance of Aboriginal themes and a lack of any balanced representation of Australia's significant Indigenous population; at least that was the case until recently. Up until the 1930s Australia's silent cinema tended to representing Aborigines - if they were represented at all - as the evil hordes stalling white Australia's attempts to colonize the country. But now more films with Aboriginal themes are coming up, and more recognition of Aboriginal culture is being shown in the films. The dissertation chooses five films shot in different times with Aboriginal themes in discussing the changes in the representation of Aboriginal images in films. The first chapter is the general outline of the project and a select survey of relevant literature, encompassing general Australian works on the cultural construction of race and analyses of Aborigines in Australia. Chapter Two discusses two films which deal with the theme of assimilation. Chapter Three moves to the 70s and discusses the more contemporary representation of Aboriginality. Chapter Four is an analysis of a feature about Aboriginal women. Chapter Five is a discussion about Aboriginal adolescents. Through the analysis of the 5 films, what appears is that that Indigenous representation in Australian film has, to some extent, entered the mainstream and at the same time, become more accurate in its portrayal.