Keeping Country Alive Dreaming, Decolonisation and the Karrabing Film Collective
Karrabing is not a clan, not a language group, not a nation. It is an aspiration.1
There is just one fixed protagonist in the installations and short films of the Karrabing Film Collective: the Australian landscape features prominently in each of its works. However, the reality of life in the Northern Territory’s Indigenous Belyuen community makes such continuity difficult for the human cast and crew. Such factors as economic and health status, legal interventions and premature death rates make this grassroots collective a somewhat-unstable group. In fact, it isn’t unusual for a character to be played by one performer, only to be inexplicably taken over by another later in the film. The reason? Incarceration.
‘[P]art and parcel of the politics and aesthetics of Karrabing films are the constant disturbances that compose their everyday life,’ explains Elizabeth A Povinelli, anthropology academic and a founding member of the collective.
[I]ndigenous people represent 3% of the national population but 28% of the prison population. In these contexts, politics and aesthetics cannot be unwound […] What might appear to be aesthetic slippages are actually the aesthetic registers of Indigenous life in settler liberalism […] We could insert extradiegetic footage but we think that allowing unavoidable inconsistencies to be a part of the visual field might
