Australian
Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This clip shows a young albino Aboriginal girl (Melissa Middleton) walking along a path in a dry landscape. The scene is intercut with close-up shots of hands grinding ochre. The girl continues along a red dirt road as a truck approaches her. The vehicle stops and the girl accepts a lift. The driver questions her, but she neither looks at him nor responds. They pass an Aboriginal man hitchhiking, and the driver makes a derogatory comment about him. A voice-over begins; the camera reveals it to be the voice of a nun reading scripture to the girl in a flashback, as two other Aboriginal girls watch from a distance. The clip includes music.

Educational value points

• In the film from which the clip is taken the main character’s albinism can be seen as a visual device that underlines the isolation many Indigenous people experience due to their being ‘outside’ mainstream society. Extended family and kinship ties are central to Indigenous identity and help define social relationships and obligations, as well as a person’s connection to and responsibility for the land. In being separated from family and community, some members of the Stolen Generations were denied this knowledge, which in turn meant a loss of culture and identity.

• Indigenous filmmaker Danielle MacLean uses the main character’s albinism to highlight her isolation. Her skin pigment sets her apart from other darker skinned Indigenous people such as the two young Indigenous girls dressed in mission clothing shown performing manual work. To the white nun, who assumes a hierarchy of colour privileging white over black, she is different from those girls. The ‘Albino girl’, as she is named in the credits, is not black or white, but is trapped in limbo between cultures.

• The clip emphasises colour and its ramifications, both through the visual content and the script. The clip juxtaposes a scene of the girl walking through the red landscape with a close-up of dark hands crushing red ochre, which is used in Indigenous ceremonies as body paint. The non-Indigenous truck driver assumes that the girl is white, and the passage of scripture that the nun reads to the girl emphasises that ‘you were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord’.

• The narrative of this short film explores the consequences of taking Aboriginal children from their families and having them raised by the church. In church-run mission schools it was believed that the welfare of Indigenous children would be improved through conversion to Christianity. The image of the young Albino girl walking alone on an isolated track in an attempt to return home to her mother is presented by the filmmaker as a challenge to this belief.

• Albinism is an inherited condition in which the skin lacks the pigment melanin. Albinism may affect the eyes only or the eyes, hair and skin. Albinos usually appear to be very pale, with white skin and hair, and may experience problems associated with the condition such as sensitivity to the sun. The main difficulty facing people who suffer from albinism is ignorance of the condition.

A young albino Aboriginal girl walks along a path in a dry landscape. The scene is intercut with close-up shots of hands grinding ochre. The girl continues along a red dirt road as a truck approaches her. The vehicle stops and the girl accepts a lift. The driver questions her, but she neither looks at him nor responds.
Driver Oi! Want a lift? Fair way out of town. Where are you heading? What’s the matter – lost your tongue?
They pass an Aboriginal man hitchhiking.
Driver Won’t bother wasting my time picking him up. Be better company, though. At least he’d talk.

A voice-over begins; the camera reveals it to be the voice of a nun reading scripture to the girl in a flashback, as two other Aboriginal girls watch from a distance. The other Aboriginal girls are sweeping.
Nun God’s wrath comes on those who are disobedient. Therefore, do not be partners with them for you were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord. Live as children of light for the fruit of the light consists in all goodness, righteousness and truth and find out what pleases the Lord. Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness but rather expose them, for it is shameful even to mention what the disobedient do in secret. But everything exposed by the light becomes visible for it is the light that makes everything visible. This is why it is said…
The nun abruptly stops talking. The girls can be heard whispering in the background.