Locating The Sapphires: transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of an Australian Indigenous musical film

Abstract

This essay discusses transnational dimensions of the Indigenous musical film The Sapphires, based on the true story of an Aboriginal all-girls soul band that entertained American troops in the Vietnam War. It suggests that there are strong resonances between the film's story of four young Indigenous women who affirm their Indigenous identity while negotiating their way across national and cultural borders and contemporary Indigenous filmmakers operating in Australia's rapidly internationalizing mainstream screen industry. It argues that while the original Sapphires' adopted the American musical genre of soul as a means of breaking free from colonial forms of social restriction and racism, The Sapphires appropriates the film genre of the musical to tell the story of this all-girls group in ways that transpose the musical into an Indigenous cultural realm.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge Jodi Brooks, Adrian Martin, Romaine Moreton and Jorge Carmona for teaching me, in their different ways, how to ‘listen to the music’. I am also very grateful to Mark Gibson, Tony Moore and Continuum's anonymous readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts.

Notes

^1. ‘Heart and Soul: The Sapphires’, a panel discussion at the 2012 Melbourne International Film Festival with director Wayne Blair, producers Rosemary Blight and Kylie du Fresne, screenwriter/associate producer Tony Briggs, and two of the original Sapphires, sisters Lois Peeler and Laurel Robinson (Briggs' mother). Moderated by Jason Di Rosso, host of ABC Radio National's Indigenous programme Awaye! as a live broadcast (4 August 2012).

^2. Spelling of ‘Indigenous’ in this article follows the Australian Federal government Parliamentary Counsel Drafting Direction No. 2.1 on English usage (September 2008), ‘Part 4, Spelling of “Indigenous”’, 34. Always capitalize ‘Indigenous’ when it refers to the original inhabitants of Australia – as in ‘Indigenous Australians’ and ‘Indigenous communities’. It needs no capitals when used in a general sense to refer to the original inhabitants of other countries. http://www.opc.gov.au/about/docs/drafting_series/DD2.1.pdf

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Therese Davis

Therese Davis is Head of Film and Screen Studies, School of Media, Film and Journalism, Monash University. She has published articles on Australian Indigenous film and television in Camera Obscura, Screening the Past, Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies and Senses of Cinema. She is currently working on a co-authored book on the history of Australian Indigenous film-making with Romaine Moreton.