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First Australians. Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole, dirs. 382 mins. Sydney: Blackfella Films/First Nation Films Pty Ltd., Special Broadcasting Service Corporation, Screen Australia, New South Wales Film and Television Office; Adelaide: South Australian Film Corporation; and Perth: Screen West, 2008.
First Australians is a seven-episode television series that premiered on the Australian network SBS in October 2008. 1 A compelling, character-driven retelling of Australian history from the perspective of the land's original peoples, the story begins with first contact in 1788 and ends in 1992 with the overturning of Australia's foundation in the legal doctrine of tena nullius.2 Each episode is grounded in a particular region and era of Australian history, emphasizing the courage and creativity of extraordinary individuals Indigenous to the lands we now call New South Wales, Tasmania, Victoria, the Northern Territory, Western Australia, Queensland, and the Torres Strait Islands and respectfully conveying the complexity of their relationships with white Australians. The series produces a history of the Australian polity that is multivocal, within which the role of Indigenous peoples is ever available to renegotiation.
Episode 1, "They Have Come to Stay," is an account of Eora man Bennelong and the first governor of New South Wales, Arthur Phillip, and how each man strategically learned about the other to protect his own people. Episode 2, "Her Will to Survive," seeks to dismantle the myth that Indigenous Tasmanians were eradicated in the early- 19th-century Black Wars by chronicling the steely resilience of Trugannini and the resourcefulness of Palawah women in the face of great disruption and violence to their lifestyles and land.3 In Episode 3, "Freedom for Our Lifetime," Wurundjeri leaders Simon Wonga and William Barak draw together many clans to resist increasing administration of Indigenous lives by Victorian government forces. In Episode 4, "No Other Law," we learn about the threat of pastoralists and missionaries to traditional ways of life in Central Australia and about how telegraph operator Frank Gillen and anthropologist Baldwin Spencer intervened to record and preserve Arrernte cosmology,...