Jazz Money reflects on making WINHANGANHA and engaging with the audiences and communities who are encountering it at screenings in Australia and around the world.
Commissioned by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, WINHANGANHA is a feature-length examination of how archives and the legacies of collection affect First Nations people and wider Australia.
When I first began working on WINHANGANHA, I imagined that searching through the archives would involve the creaking door of a vault swinging open to reveal rolls of film neatly stacked on towering shelves, lengths of cardboard boxes with carefully numbered labels, and vast servers with blinking lights hinting at the treasures held inside their databases. I pictured the containers, not the contents, of what is held in the National Film and Sound Archive, my mind focusing on the Western cataloguing systems that hold our national memory of audiovisual content.
But what I sought there, in those vast collections of memory, was something alive: singing, dancing, breathing, laughing, yearning bodies and their depictions. I wanted to find the trace of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as we have been recorded, depicted and mythologised in cinema, television and audio recordings over the past hundred and thirty years in this place called ‘Australia’. Creating WINHANGANHA was an endeavour to locate our bodies as the true archives of our memory – the place where our survival, suffering, love and joy are located. The records that we find on the shelf are only ever the evidence of who holds power to shape a story in any given moment, and while they can tell us a great deal about myth-making, they can rarely offer any sort of complete truth.
WINHANGANHA began as an attempt to unravel the way that these mediums have been part of our dispossession, and the ways that Blak filmmakers, musicians, activists and archivists have reclaimed that narrative, to forcefully insert ourselves back into a national memory that has consistently misrepresented us. The colonial assault on our people happens on many fronts, including in film, television and music, and so our protest must be there too.
My journey into the archive was fraught and furious and overwhelming at times – the vast majority of content about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in historical archives depicts our bodies and stories as sites of suffering and trauma. But in and amongst those painful records I found the remedy to the sadness and fury – the persistence of our people to laugh and dance and fight and sing and tell our stories. Spending time deeply immersed in the archive meant encountering First Nations activists and academics (officially recognised or otherwise) who have left their mark in the collections. I spent countless hours listening to oral histories, watching documentary footage and witnessing the determination of storytellers to leave a record for the future. The generosity of those acts is the reason I was able to make this film, not simply from the content created, but in the strength and wisdom of those Elders and ancestors who have left accounts of their histories and legacy. In the times when I felt overwhelmed, terrified or exhausted by what I had seen, watched or read, it was those Elders who would encourage, redirect me, and ground me, these recordings through time echoing in the present.
Encounters in the archive are what made this film possible, and it is the community that attends screenings and engages with the film that have continued to make the project meaningful as WINHANGANHA has toured Australia and around the world. The reception from audiences, especially Indigenous audiences, continues to change the way I understand what is happening in these archives. WINHANGANHA was made for our community, it was made by our community; these hundreds and hundreds of pieces of footage made over many decades, pulled together to create a film that tells a vast deep-time story of this continent. After every screening that I attend, different folk come up to me and tell me about their relationship to the footage in the film, the protests that the Auntys marched in, the stations the Uncles worked at, the grandkids remembering old songs, folk connecting with the epic original score by DOBBY, and all the many ways we as Blakfullas locate ourselves in place and time, up there on the screen. WINHANGANHA is not about dusty records, it is about the way that these stories are still living and breathing and affecting the present. We too are in the endless sweep of history and WINHANGANHA doesn’t finish at the credits.
Trailer for WINHANGANHA, 2023.
It is the communities that have come to watch and support WINHANGANHA that continue to make the film anew. When it premiered in November 2023 I was incredibly nervous – the huge weight of the responsibility of trying to tell this story from all over the continent. I worried about what I might have got wrong and whether I was in way over my head. But sitting in that big fancy cinema at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on the opening night I felt the energy of the room shift and change with the beats of the film. I heard big Blak laughs at the things I also found hilarious, saw the steely knowing expressions as the film charts colonial violence, and watched a room full of hundreds weep during the emotionally charged moments of seeing our bodies celebrated as sites of love.
While WINHANGANHA is a story specific to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander experience, our histories resound globally and are in solidarity with Indigenous struggles and liberation around the world. I hear this again and again after international screenings in contexts very different from here – the familiar struggle of marginalised peoples to tell the story in our own terms, and the power that follows when we do.
What I have learnt time and again is that this film is not mine. WINHANGANHA belongs to the people who made all those histories, who fill the archives with singing, dancing, poetry, protest, fire-starting and countless embraces. It belongs to the community that made me, and to the archives of the future. This film was made for the people looking to see how the story was told, to see that we’ve been here, always, abundant, beautiful, loving and joyous. That our story is the truth of this place, and it never ends, but the way we tell it continues to grow.
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Main image: Jazz Money at Deckchair Cinema opening night screening of WINHANGANHA in Darwin, 2024.
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