9:30 MIN | 2024 | DIRECTOR: PATRICK WATERHOUSE | AUS

This film is the story of making Revisions or fixing up whitefella documents, a collaboration between Warlpiri painters of Central Australia and the British artist Patrick Waterhouse.

When the first British colonialists disembarked in Australia in 1788, they looked hopefully at what for them was terra nullius: an empty, barren land that belonged to nobody. However, Australian Aboriginal society, the longest continuous culture in world history, operated so differently to their own that the settlers found it hard to comprehend what they were seeing. They were unaware of the fact that these people had survived the Ice Age, successfully modified and managed the landscape, and handed down from generation to generation one of the longest oral histories on Earth, one that is derived from the belief that people and the land upon which they live are at one with each other. Ignorant of these facts, the settlers started drawing maps, dividing the territories, erecting houses and churches, searching for gold and laying down train tracks.

SCREENS WITH BLAK DOUGLAS VS THE COMMONWEALTH