Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on the Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART ONE DOCUMENTARY PRACTICES
- PART TWO DOCUMENTARY THEORIES
- PART THREE FEMALE AUTHORSHIP AND GLOBAL IDENTITIES
- ‘Being a Woman Documentary Maker in Taiwan’ – An interview with Singing Chen and Wuna Wu
- Select Bibliography
- Index
9 - To::For::By::About::With::From:: Towards Solid Women: On (not) Being Addressed by Tracey Moffatt’s Moodeijt Yorgas
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Notes on the Contributors
- Foreword
- Introduction
- PART ONE DOCUMENTARY PRACTICES
- PART TWO DOCUMENTARY THEORIES
- PART THREE FEMALE AUTHORSHIP AND GLOBAL IDENTITIES
- ‘Being a Woman Documentary Maker in Taiwan’ – An interview with Singing Chen and Wuna Wu
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
I’ve always looked up to the idea of communications ‘cos I worked at the A.B.C. [Australian Broadcasting Corporation] for three and a half years and appreciate the power that a control of communications gives you … the spoken word [has] more communication value for Aborigines than the written word, in this context. But then of course the written word is preserved. I still think the most effective means of communication is … we call it the ‘noongar grapevine’. It's quicker than news. More effective, too. It uses a sort of communication that can only be understood by Aborigines and it's highly functional.
Gloria Brennan.Gloria Brennan was a Wongi speaker of Pindiini (Nyanganyatjara) descent; claiming Weebo as her doogurr (birthplace), she was a linguist and anthropologist deeply concerned with speech and story. Reflecting on the contemporary cultural use of the Nyungar phrase ‘murdidj yorgas’, which translates as ‘strong/ clever women’, feminist anthropologist Pat Baines cites Brennan as a shining example, noting that Tracey Moffatt's film Moodeitj Yorgas (Solid Women, 1988) was ‘a tribute to Wongi academic Gloria Brennan, who in her middle years had died of cancer’. In its celebration of Brennan's legacy as a community organiser, linguist and anthropologist, the film confirms that ‘the notion of strong and talented women is part of Nyungar cultural representations’. As Baines notes, Nyungar/noongar is a post-settlement nomenclature adopted by a collective of distinctive communities in the southwest of Western Australia,
from just north of Gingin and Moora, eastwards to just beyond Merridin but west of Southern Cross, and southwards includes Hyden and the Stirlings to the south coast. The western boundary is provided by the Indian Ocean … The term ‘Nyungar’ means ‘man’, a fact that cannot go unnoticed in a discussion about southwest women.
Looking at the work done by Nyungar grandmothers on land claims, Baines is keen to establish both the traditional and contemporary continued usage of murdidj/moordeitj yorgas as referring to respect for women's law within Nyungar communities, a respect that settler writers had argued was absent.
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- Information
- Female Authorship and the Documentary ImageTheory, Practice and Aesthetics, pp. 159 - 170Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018