AustLit

'Catherine Kevin, the author of Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country, tells us that this book was a long time in the making. In some ways, it is a very personal book for Kevin because it emerges from her own white-settler family history in the heart of grazier country in the Yass Valley, where a lucrative wool industry was established on Ngunnawal land. The time and care that Kevin has put into this book is evident in the complex, difficult and evocative story that it tells about colonialism through an account of the making of one of the most historically significant films to address the question of race relations in Australia. As Kevin acknowledges, there are many scholarly analyses of Jedda, notably in Indigenous Studies and Film Studies. But what makes the focus of this book especially arresting is its unearthing of the local, intimate and exploitative economic relationships between white pastoralists and black labourers in the Yass Valley/Ngunnawal country that supported the making of Jedda. Without sizeable investment from wealthy pastoralists in the wool industry, the film would never have been made. ‘The central paradox of this book’, Kevin writes, ‘is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community for a film that directly addressed the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism’ in which the very same pastoral community itself was complicit (1). These were people who benefited from the state policies of racial assimilation and segregation that Jedda had attempted to scrutinise.' (Introduction)