In revisiting Jeni Thornley’s 2008 documentary essay film, Island Home Country, I am struck by the thematic parallels between her personal journey to uncover the Indigenous past of where she grew up in Tasmania and our present, post-Voice society. The film is a reminder that even 16 years on from its release, Australia has still not reckoned with the truth of its violent colonial history. The divisive and defeated 2023 Voice to Parliament referendum reflects this sense of denial or, as Thornley refers to it in both the film and in her writing about it, an amnesia that still looms large. It is notable then that the film’s first chapter is entitled “amnesia”, where we see Thornley begin her journey from a position of not knowing about the colonial history of her birthplace, or at least, not what really happened. Island Home Country therefore becomes a film about challenging the dominant colonial narratives we’ve been told growing up in a white Australia – one that we need to see through different eyes.

Thornley began making Island Home Country in 2004 as the creative practice component of her doctoral degree at University of Technology Sydney. As she explains in the film, she initially approached its making through the lens of ‘mourning’, employing the Freudian psychoanalytic method of working through repressed history and trauma to achieve closure.1 However, as Thornley identifies in her doctoral exegesis, “There was, in fact, to be no resolution. My sought for reckoning turned out to be illusory.”2 Instead, Island Home Country presents a self-reflexive story grounded in feelings of complicity, discomfort and unease alongside a developing understanding of the work that it takes to ethically approach the subject of Australia’s intertwined First Nations and white history as part of the filmmaking process.

Thornley begins the film with a white ghostly figure running through the bush as her voice as ghostly narrator tells us – “I am white, born on a stolen island. This is a story of my journey.” The ghost, which appears as a metaphor for the white settler-coloniser, makes material Thornley’s feelings of being haunted by the history of white Australia and the desire to ‘work through’ it, motivating her journey and the film itself. It also helps to establish her subjectivity and the framing of the film: 

I did not set off to make a film about myself: I wanted originally to examine Tasmanian historical amnesia. Yet the protocols process around Communication, Consultation, Consent and Aboriginal Control push the film irrevocably to come from my speaking position – whiteness.3

Here, Thornley reveals some of the tensions that arose in the film’s production and where other filmic works focused on First Nations peoples have been significantly problematic – that is, stories told about First Nations peoples through non-Indigenous perspectives and without ethical consultation, collaboration, or processes that facilitate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander agency, as complex and nuanced as these are.4 However, it was through Thornley’s consultation with Tasmanian Aboriginal community members, specifically writer and activist Jim Everett-puralia meenamatta (clan plangermairreenner of the Turbuna), artist Julie Gough (Trawlwoolway) and Tasmanian Elder, writer and poet Aunty Phyllis Pitchford, that influenced the re-editing of the film to ensure that Island Home Country is Thornley’s story told from her point of view. 

This story is visualised through the places and people she encounters on her journey, framed through her camera lens. Shots of white colonial signifiers and histories are interspersed through the film’s visual storytelling – footage of the Queen’s visit in 2006, Scottish Highland dancers, the English countryside, brass monuments to colonial figures, museums exhibiting convict stories, shipyards, and ferries named after convict ships. We are tethered to white Australian history in these images, also visible and made personal through Thornley’s home movies and photographs of her family. But these images are placed alongside interviews, stories and artwork from Everett, Pitchford, and artists PennyX Saxon (Pyemmairrener) and Julie Gough, the latter offering a counter-narrative to dominant colonial history by pointing out that her very existence means that Tasmanian Aboriginal people resisted extinction at the hands of early colonists. We are being asked to join Thornley in not only looking at these dominant narratives and images differently, but also feeling this difference, to penetrate our ‘colonial minds’, examine our history more deeply, and for white settlers sit in the discomfort5 this can create.

As mentioned above and crucial to Thornley’s filmmaking process was her introduction to Respecting Cultures: Working with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community and Aboriginal Artists (2004) – a tool developed to provide a Tasmanian perspective on national protocols for “the ethical use of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and arts.”6 In the film’s chapter titled “encounters”, Gough brings up the importance of ethics and protocols in creating a work inclusive of First Nations history, suggesting that if Thornley continues, she should speak with more members of the Tasmanian Aboriginal community. In doing so, Thornley realised, “I had to let go of my control of the project into a process of negotiation and dialogue.”7 Here, she had to learn to listen differently, aware of her position as a white ‘other’ – an outsider, an interloper – and to wait at the ‘borderline’ until she is invited in. 

However, it is fitting that in the final moments of Island Home Country, Everett shares the story of the borderline with Thornley and with us as a way of looking towards the future of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations. While stating earlier that we remain living in a contemporary colonised place (“there’s no such thing as post-colonialism”) Everett shares his thoughts on how we can move forward together:

We’re all the same species, we’re humans. And we all have different cultures. That is up for people to have their identity and their cultures the way they want them. But if they want to actually know what they are as human beings on this planet connecting with the country that they belong to and it’s their belonging place, then they need to understand the Aboriginal connection. They don’t have to be Aboriginal. They just need to be able to say, “Oh, I can share that connection with Country and my identity will be whole.”

Island Home Country presents a counter-narrative that challenges and recontextualises the historically dominant myths about Australia’s past, and it does this through Thornley’s personal and affective journey into the ‘deep history’ her own settler origins in Tasmania. Considering that we are still yet to fully and properly acknowledge the truth of the colonial invasion and its traumatic legacies for First Nations peoples, watching Thornley’s film now, post-Voice referendum, acts as a provocation for us white settlers-colonists-newcomers to delve into this history, listen, and as Everett through Thornley’s film suggests, “learn to come into Country the proper way.”

Island Home Country (2008 Australia 52 min)

Prod, Dir, Scr: Jeni Thornley Ed: Karen Pearlman Mus, Sound: Sharon Jakovsky Prod Co: UTS Sydney and Anandi Films

Endnotes

  1. Jeni Thornley, “Island Home Country: ‘Subversive Mourning’, Working with Aboriginal protocols in a documentary film about colonisation and growing up white in Tasmania. A cine-essay and exegesis,” (Sydney, University of Technology Sydney, 2010), p. 24.
  2. Thornley, “Island Home Country: Subversive Mourning,” p. 24.
  3. Jeni Thornley, “Island Home Country: working with Aboriginal protocols in a documentary film about colonisation and growing up white in Tasmania” in Passionate Histories: Myth, memory and Indigenous Australia, Frances Peters-Little, Ann Curthoys and John Docker, eds. (Canberra: ANU E Press, 2010), p. 268.
  4. Thornley notes the 1978 documentary, The Last Tasmanian, was a film made with minimal protocols process (as there were no protocol guidelines then). Subsequently the film could be seen as an example of what Moreton-Robinson calls ‘White possession’” (Thornley, “Island Home Country: working with Aboriginal protocols”, p. 252). The film suggests that due to British colonisation from 1803 and the subsequent death of Truganini in 1876, the entirety of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and people were eradicated. However, this has been actively challenged especially by Tasmanian Aboriginal descendants.
  5. In thinking about herself as white ‘other’, Thornley draws on Aboriginal philosopher and lawyer Irene Watson’s “meditation on discomfort” to describe a way of reflecting on and answering questions of white sovereignty and its legality. Thornley, “Island Home Country: working with Aboriginal protocols,” p. 260.
  6. Jim Everett, Respecting Cultures: Working with the Tasmanian Aboriginal Community and Aboriginal Artists (Hobart: Aboriginal Advisory Committee, Arts Tasmania, c2004 (2009)), p. 6.
  7. Thornley, “Island Home Country: working with Aboriginal protocols,” p. 253.

About The Author

Sian Mitchell is a Lecturer in Film, Television and Animation at Deakin University, Australia. She is also the Festival Director and co-founder of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival, an annual festival showcasing the work of Australian, Aotearoa New Zealand and Pasifika women and gender diverse screen creatives. Her research in areas of film festivals, the Australian moving image and women’s screen practice has been published in journals such as Camera Obscura, Historic Environment, and Peephole Journal, as well as online for the AFI Research Collection and the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra.

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