Shooting the other: representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander masculinities in 21st Century Australian Cinema

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine how White male hegemony over Aboriginal masculinity has been defied in recent years through the process of film representation. In order to do so, standard schemes in Australian modern cinema are analysed through examples of films representing Aboriginal male identities, such as "Yolngu Boy" (Stephen Johnson, 2001), "Ten Canoes" (Rolf de Heer, 2006) and "Red Hill" (Patrick Hughes, 2010). A critical study of these three films produced over the last decade provides significant examples of how Western patriarchal power is destabilized through the process of "decolonizing" the central Indigenous male roles in films, allowing Aborigines to take over the centrality in the narrative. The diversity of themes and genres are also studied to compare and contrast the ways in which the depiction of Indigenous masculinity, coexisting with the gaze of the colonizer (either on screen, behind the camera or in front of the screen), weakens past assumptions about power relations between communities in Australian history.