Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Part 1 Australian Cinema and the History Wars
- Part 2 Landscape and Belonging after Mabo
- Part 3 Trauma, Grief and Coming of Age
- 8 Lost, Stolen and Found in Rabbit-Proof Fence
- 9 Escaping History and Shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds
- 10 Sustaining Grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion
- Bibliography
- Index
10 - Sustaining Grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 31 January 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Part 1 Australian Cinema and the History Wars
- Part 2 Landscape and Belonging after Mabo
- Part 3 Trauma, Grief and Coming of Age
- 8 Lost, Stolen and Found in Rabbit-Proof Fence
- 9 Escaping History and Shame in Looking for Alibrandi, Head On and Beneath Clouds
- 10 Sustaining Grief in Japanese Story and Dreaming in Motion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Throughout this book we have proposed that the post-Mabo era in Australian cinema can be read through the metaphor of backtracking. This intermittent activity of reviewing, mulling over and renewing icons, landscapes, characters and stories defines contemporary Australian national cinema. In our conclusion we want to propose that, in the post-Mabo context, this brooding passion for raking over the national repertoire of icons serves as a vernacular mode of collective mourning, a process involving both grief-work and testimony. If this is the case, then Australian national cinema, since the Mabo decision, has been an occasional participant in creating and corroborating national recognition of terra nullius as the nation's troubling, founding myth. This raises the question of whether a national cinema is in the business of confirming the nation's consoling myths or contesting the nation's historical memories. As Ross Gibson says at the end of his book on the badlands of central Queensland, ‘Myths help us live with contradictions, whereas histories help us analyse persistent contradictions so that we might avoid being lulled and ruled by the myths that we use to console and enable ourselves.’ Gibson's eloquent piece of literary backtracking ends with an exemplary call to mourn the failures and losses of the past in order to overcome the denial of the violence that founded the nation. In this view, mourning is a way to achieve national maturity by ‘recognising the issues that we wish we could deny, ignore or forget’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Australian Cinema After Mabo , pp. 172 - 187Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004