AustLit

'In 1955 ‘Jedda’ was released in Australian cinemas and the international film world, starring Indigenous actors Rosalie Kunoth and Robert Tudawali. That year Eric Bell watched the film in the Liberty Cinema in Yass. Twelve years later he was dismayed to read a newly erected plaque in the main street of the Yass Valley village of Bowning. It plainly stated that the Ngunnawal people, on whose country Bowning stood, had been wiped out by an epidemic of influenza. The local Shire Council was responsible for the plaque; they also employed Bell’s father. The Bells were Ngunnawal people.

'The central paradox of 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community, made wealthy by the occupation of Ngunnawal land, for a film that addressed directly the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism, a legacy that was playing out in their own relationships with the local Ngunnawal people at the time of their investment in the film. While the local council and state government agencies collaborated to minimize the visibility of Indigenous peoples, and the memory of the colonial violence at the heart of European prosperity, a number of wealthy and high-profile members of this pastoral community actively sought involvement in a film that would bring into focus the aftermath of colonial violence, the visibility of its survivors and the tensions inherent in policies of assimilation and segregation that had characterized the treatment of Ngunnawal people in their lifetimes.

'Based on oral histories, documentary evidence, images and film, 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' explores the themes of colonial nostalgia, national memory and family history. Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), a shared artefact of mid-twentieth-century settler-colonialism, is its fulcrum. The book newly locates the story of the genesis of ‘Jedda’ and, in turn, ‘Jedda’ becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells.' (Publication summary)

'When tasked with teaching a class on South Australian women's suffrage some years ago, Catherine Helen Spence was the name I associated most with the campaign. What did I know about Mary Lee? Only that she was a mother of limited means. Thankfully, I had Susan Magarey's wonderfully readable Passions of the First Wave Feminists (2001), which devotes four pages to Lee's work, but it was still difficult to get a handle on who Lee was. Magarey included Spence's observation, on the eve of the crucial vote in 1894, that Lee seemed ‘miffed that she, Spence, should be gaining so much attention in this moment, a moment for which Mary Lee has campaigned with all her considerable skills and energy’. In 1986, Helen Jones remarked in the Australian Dictionary of Biography that Lee's work had gone unrecorded until 1980. It seems in death she was overshadowed by Spence, as she had been at crucial moments in the life of the suffrage campaign.' (Introduction)

'In the 1940s and fifties, wealthy woolgrowers in and around the rural southern New South Wales town of Yass gave generously to Charles Chauvel to enable the making of Jedda (1955). These same farmers employed members of the local Ngunnawal community in domestic and rural labour. The issues of segregation, assimilation, child removal and Aboriginal employment that are represented in Jedda resonate in the histories of communities in this region. When the film was released some watched it at a glamorous official opening in Sydney while others attended the local, segregated cinema. This article places oral history accounts of seeing Jedda (at the time of its release) alongside the archive, to explore the nature of the intersections and segregations that shaped relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents of this area. It also explores the complex subject positions articulated in these memories that attempt to come to terms with personal histories of segregation in an era of revisionist histories and reconciliation.' (Author's abstract)

'In this article I consider approaches taken to questions of intimacy and estrangement in feminist history in Australia since 1975. Pioneering works, namely Damned whores and God’s Police (Summers 1975); The Real Matilda (Dixson 1976); and My wife, my daughter and poor Mary Ann (Kingston 1975) demonstrated that in order to understand the nature of women’s subordination, feminism needed histories that would describe the changing contexts in which oppressive forces had shaped women’s relationships, as well as the variety of their oppressive effects. The trajectories of feminist engagements with theory in the 1970s generated particular historical questions that enabled accounts of intimacy and estrangement to feature in these early works. This ambitious body of scholarship laid a solid foundation on which Australian feminist historians have since built, offering vivid depictions of women and the contexts and dynamics of their relationships, but the story of the emergence of this rich body of work is complex and at times contested.' (Source: Author's introduction)

'This article examines the depiction of Jedda's Sarah McMann and Australia's English-born Sarah Ashley. In each character there is a maternal desire that drives the plot to which responsibility for the children's fate is attributed. National assimilation policies are expressed emphatically through Sarah McMann's desires for the Aboriginal child, Jedda, and the failures of assimilation are played out in the child's tragic fate. In Australia the plot is resolved by returning the Aboriginal child, Nullah, to his grandfather. This only becomes possible because Sarah Ashley's agenda for intervening in the removal of Nullah by the state, in the hope of raising him as her own child, is realized. Within the logic of the narrative, the outsider status of the recent immigrant Sarah Ashley enables her to become a clear-sighted agent in the return of the child to his family. This article considers the significance of these two representations of the white maternal in the context of the history of child removal policies, Bringing Them Home and the National Apology.'

Source: Abstract.