Contemporary Australian Aboriginal art can be argued to be one of the most well known examples of collaborative ethnographic practice using creative art – the multiple functions of works, the layers of inter and cross-cultural collaboration shaping the works, the underlying relationship of Aboriginal painting to story, culture and cultural expression – all qualities...
How do we use visual ethnography to represent places? Landscape images alone often render a place somewhat opaque – capturing a static moment, leaving out the dynamism of country, weather, sensory experience, encounters, people and their lived stories. For me some of the most successful uses of the visual in telling stories of place...
Recently published by Magabala Books is “Our World: Bardi Jaawi Life at Ardiyooloon”, a collaborative ethnography of Bardi culture as enacted through the One Arm Point Community School Culture Program. One Arm Point is an Aboriginal community on the Dampier Penninsula, North West of Broome, Western Australia. The book draws on materials made out...
Out of South Australia comes the newest incarnation of Big Stories Small Towns, a project in which resident film makers have made portrait films about people in the communities of Port Augusta, Murray Bridge and Raukkan. There are also some films made by community members themselves, these are well worth having a look at,...
Have a look at the latest posting from the Stories Project - “Villawood Mums” is a powerful film telling the stories of the mothers of two young refugee film makers living in Sydney that contrasts the experience of the two women who arrived in Australia as refugees with their families, a decade apart. Nothing...
Check out a cool project that is using participatory video making to link communities in the western desert and the western suburbs of Sydney. The Stories Project – hosted by Curious Works in collaboration with Martu Media has brought together young film makers from the western desert and refugees living in western Sydney to...
Following the boom of media making by Indigenous people in Australia in recent years the challenges of how to archive and make accessible Indigenous-made materials, as well as repatriate historical and anthropological materials to Indigenous communities, have led to a some interesting community based archiving and multi-media projects. The Mulka Project, is based in...
On the theme of digital stories (see previous post) I realised that I have not posted anything about some of the foundation organisations of the digital storytelling movement- for example the Center for Digital Storytelling in Berkley California which has established a model of digital story telling that has been widely taken up and...
Launched this week at the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra, Australia was a series of short films (digital stories) made by people who have experienced mental illness about their paths to recovery. They have been posted on the Mental Illness Education ACT website as part of their community education and storybox program....