TIP As well as thinking about grammar, you should also be thinking about collocation: which words tend to go together. For example, what nouns usually go with the verb express?

Outback on Screen

Shirley Graham

Many of Australia's creative interpretations of the outback over the last two centuries have reflected a mostly immigrant people's interpretation of a landscape very different to the lands which they or their forebears came from. But like artists, poets and novelists, Australian film makers from the beginning have used the outback to define a sense of belonging.
Covering 70 per cent of Australia, the outback is remote, arid and lightly populated. Most of the remaining continent has been defined as 'the bush', comprising the well-watered domesticated or semi-domesticated coastal fringes east and south of the Great Dividing Range flanking eastern Australia, moving west via Melbourne to Adelalde as well as incorporating the island of Tasmania. Today, when most of Australia's almost 23 million people live in urban areas, the character of the outback survives as a major ingredient in the nation's novels, poetry, paintings, feature and short films, TV drama and advertising.

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In 1896 cinema made its first global appearance at a time of intense nationalism for Australian identity, especially as interpreted through literature and painting. Australian novelists, short story writers and ballad writers of the ·1880s and 1890s used the bush and outback to define what it was to be Australian. The painters Tom Roberts, Frederick McCubbin and Arthur Streeton created their own myths about frontier and farm life. From the 1890s onward Australian cinema would perpetuate these myths, eventually questioning and extending them.
Prior to white settlement, Aboriginal people had occupied Australia for at least 50,000 years - not a single Aboriginal nation but a gathering of several hundred communities or tribes, each with its own language, set of beliefs and territory on which many lived a nomadic and spiritual existence that recognised a community's unique relationship with the land. Whites occupied much of that land after European settlement in 1788, dispossessing most tribes except those. living a very remote existence.
Aboriginal people were first officially recognised as Australian citizens in 1967, one year after the Northern Territory Gurindji tribe launched the first Indigenous bid to obtain title to traditional land. They were among the earliest Australians filmed in the 1890s. In 1898 Cambridge University anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon filmed Torres Strait Islanders and mainland Aborigines, making this the world's first film of an anthropological field trip. In 1901 and 1912 Professor Walter Baldwin Spencer filmed the lifestyles and spiritual activities of. the tribes of Central and Northern Australia.

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Aborigines on screen in early filmmaking were often exploited subjects rather than people who had any say in how they were filmed and who would see the results. With rare exceptions, it was not until the 1960s and '70s that documentary filmmakers sought to include the perspective of Aboriginal people. David Roberts in 1976 made the documentary Walya Ngamardiki: The Land My Mother, featuring Arnhem LandAboriginal people talking about traditional attachment to their land and their attitudes to the uranium mining that could change it irretrievably. Oliver Howes's documentary On Sacred Ground (1981) looks at the dispossession and loss of identity that provideS a backgroUnd to the late 1970s Noonkanbah land rights confrontation between traditional Aboriginal owners and miners in the Kimberley region of Western Australia.
Over time, Aboriginal people gained opportunities to speak for themselves about their relationship to and ownership of land, a number of whose landforms had sacred associations. More recently a new generation of Aboriginal filmmakers, producing for a variety of screen media including television, have been telling stories otAboriginal history, myths, legends and connections with the land.

Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. The full essay appears at aso.gov.au