Australian
Screen

an NFSA website

Shifting Sands – My Colour, Your Kind (1998)

play May contain names, images or voices of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
clip
  • 1
  • 2
Rugged cross education content clip 2

This clip chosen to be PG

Clip description

The clip opens with billowing curtains, a statuette of Christ and the close-up of a young albino girl (Melissa Middleton). In flashback the young albino girl closes her eyes as her mother (Christine Palmer) smears her with mud. A cross crashes through a pane of glass, and the young girl is running towards a security fence.

Curator’s notes

It was a resistance tactic by Indigenous parents to smear any fair-skinned children with mud or charcoal with the intention of fooling the authorities – usually the police – who were employed to remove children from their families and place them in welfare. The writer/director Danielle MacLean references this strategy but makes it an extreme circumstance by introducing an Indigenous girl who is born albino, a condition where an individual is born without any skin pigmentation.