AustLit

'“…I am dispended”, says Dujuan Hoosan, the Arrente/Garrwa little Aboriginal boy at the centre of the documentary, In My Blood it Runs (2020). “… suspended”, corrects his mother. But “dispended” like “Desperance”, could well be a coinage in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria about a town that disappears. Though Dujuan got the word wrong, what we saw of his experience in the class-room at his Alice Springs public school certainly made him feel dispensable. The vicissitudes of Dujuan’s education are at the centre of this ambitious film, directed by Maya Newell, in collaboration with the boy’s kin group of elders and First Nations educators both local and international, developed over a period of more than three and a half years. Here, I want to explore the fictional child Nullah in Baz Luhrmann’s Australia (2008), together with Dujuan (the former about 7 or 8 and the latter 10 years old), in terms of how theses films present their effective experience of pedagogy. In a volatile social field such as ours is now, with the global Black Lives Matter Movement demanding fundamental changes to entrenched institutional racism, it’s easier and indeed desirable to think together an activist film with an experimental attitude to lived reality, and Australia with its playful high-camp attitude to history as story, by focusing on their common ambition of placing an Indigenous child at the centre of the action. Equally, the imaginative power of these films (qua film), to become agents of pedagogy will be considered, elaborated for our social context.' (Introduction)