Tracing lineages: The work of remembering, mourning and honouring in Romaine Moreton's The Farm

Abstract

ABSTRACTHow do Aboriginal people in settler-colonial Australia negotiate the entwined experiences and histories of displacement and emplacement? Romaine Moreton's short film The Farm (2009) engages with these experiences and histories through the perspective of Aboriginal people who travelled to participate in seasonal work on white-owned farms. Set against the hard physical labour of bean picking, the film is a meditation on the ‘work of mourning’ and the ‘labour of remembering’ that Aboriginal people perform to make a place for themselves within colonized landscapes and to survive under colonial conditions. By analysing the three lineages into which the film's young protagonist Olivia is invited, and the different kinds of historical traces and memorial acts that mediate her connection to various pasts and ancestors, I examine how the film engages with and contributes to discourses about place, remembrance and belonging in mid-twentieth-century settler-colonial Australia.