Resting Place SUBVERTING THE PLUNDERER’S GAZE IN ETCHED IN BONE

Arnhem Land. Smoke billows from a small tuft of green ironwood leaves, rustling in the wind. Two men hold a portable hard drive up to the smoke. This hard drive, the narrator tells us, contains the raw files for the film we are about to watch.

Etched in Bone (Martin Thomas, 2018) opens with the standard preamble for films about Indigenous Australians – that the film contains images of deceased Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, a widely recognised avoidance practice considered a mark of respect for the dead in Indigenous cultures – and immediately follows it with the scene in which two Aboriginal men smoke the raw data of the film itself. Smoking an object is believed to calm the spirits of the deceased and protect those who come close. Here, it has a dual purpose: it’s a practical spiritual measure designed to protect us, the viewer, as well as an early signal of the film’s intent – to subvert the gaze of documentary cinema and turn control over to its subjects.

Protection and permission are at the heart of . The remote town of Gunbalanya, 300 kilometres east of Darwin along roads that are entirely cut off in the wet season, has a chequered