Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows three prominent Indigenous women. Writer Sally Morgan and singer Lois Olney talk about their lives, and activist Ulli (Helen) Corbett discusses concerns such as the deaths in custody of Indigenous women. The clip is from an experimental documentary film and the women’s voices here are deliberately out of synchronisation with their images on screen. In another scene a woman’s body is shown in silhouette while a voice-over in language, with English subtitles, tells a story about the past. An intertitle details the death in custody of Christine Jones, followed by the image of a hanged woman in front of a painting of a prison cell.

Educational value points

• The interviews in this clip from Moodeitj Yorgas were shot in a studio and take the form of visual portraits in which the interviewees’ voice-overs are out of synchronisation with the images. While this technique may be disconcerting at first, director Tracy Moffatt (1960–) says she used this approach to create the sense that while the film presents the achievements of powerful individual Indigenous women, their stories can be seen to represent the experiences of a wider community.

• The third and fourth sequences in the clip use sound and image to portray emotionally the content underpinning the interviews. The first subtitled story appears to relate a past experience of non-Indigenous contact with Indigenous women. The second sequence graphically introduces the concerns expressed by Ulli Corbett. The intertitle and the hollow sound of footsteps, along with the image of the hanged woman, illustrate the horror of Christine Jones’s death in custody.

• The stories related by Sally Morgan and Lois Olney reflect the consequences on their lives of being from Indigenous families who were directly touched by the forcible removal of the children now known as the Stolen Generations. The children so removed were taken to church-run or state institutions to be raised, or could be adopted by a non-Indigenous family, as Olney was. Between 1910 and 1970 up to one in three Indigenous Australian children were removed in this way.

• Sally Morgan (1951–) talks about writing My Place (1987) in part to offer greater understanding about Indigenous people and their experiences to the wider community. My Place relates how Morgan searched for her Indigenous identity, having discovered when she was 15 years old that she was not Indian, as her mother had told her. Afraid that Morgan would be removed from her family as they had been, her mother and grandmother had concealed her Indigenous identity.

• Jazz singer Lois Olney (1963–) is a Yindjibarndi–Yamaji woman of mixed Indigenous Australian, Scottish and Afghan descent who at eight months old was removed from her mother. As an adult Olney traced her Indigenous family but found that her mother had recently died. Two of her brothers died shortly afterwards in police custody. After meeting her birth family Olney learnt Yindjibarndi and set lyrics in Yindjibarndi to jazz.

• Ulli (Helen) Corbett (1953–) explains that one of her chief concerns is the disproportionate number of Indigenous women in prison compared to the non-Indigenous prisoner population. In 1998 Indigenous women in Australia were 18.6 times more likely to be imprisoned than non-Indigenous women, 18 times more likely than in 1988. In 1988 there were 105 Indigenous women in prison nationally and the number had increased by 148 per cent in 1998, when there were 261.

• Yamitji–Noongar woman Ulli Corbett has worked for a range of Indigenous community groups including the Western Australian Aboriginal Legal Service. She co-founded and chaired the National Committee to Defend Black Rights (1983), which led the campaign that was influential in the establishment of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody (1987). Corbett was instrumental in drafting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (1994).