Clip description
Donkey teams in the North are shown pulling large wagons of supplies along dusty tracks. The camel team of an Indian hawker near Wave Hill brings supplies to people of the outback to whom ‘shops are not available’.
The main homestead and buildings at Victoria River Downs cattle station are shown. The station store sells clothing, tools and food supplies. Meanwhile, the wives of the Aboriginal workers on the station queue up with their children for their weekly food rations handed out by a white man.
Curator’s notes
The Indigenous women are referred to as 'black gins’ by the voice-over narrator – a derogatory term for Aboriginal women used at the time, both in Government documents as well as colloquially. The term was reclaimed in recent years by the Indigenous Sydney musicians Kaleena Briggs & Nardi Simpson, who call their group 'The Stiff Gins’.
The voice-over narrator makes a number of derogatory comments in joking style about the women and their children, which is indicative of the prevailing attitudes of white Australians towards Indigenous people at the time.