‘I just felt sad and angry all in one thing’: Jim Everett in conversation with Rebe Taylor on making the Nightingale

ABSTRACT

The symposium ‘The Nightingale: Gender, Race and Troubled Histories on Screen’ opened with a discussion between Jim Everett, the film’s associate producer and Aboriginal consultant, and Associate Professor Rebe Taylor, Senior Research Fellow in the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. Rebe and Jim have known each other since 1999, when they met at a history conference: as Rebe noted, ‘we’ve never really stopped talking since then.’ Jim is a Senior Indigenous scholar at the University of Tasmania and he is currently working on a Master’s thesis with Rebe. In this (edited) transcript of their conversation, Rebe and Jim discuss the way he came to be involved with the film, the casting and production process, and his reaction to the finished film.

KEYWORDS:

• Film
• history
• Aboriginal
• Tasmania
• Indigenous

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors

Jim Everett – puralia meenamatta – was born at Flinders Island, Tasmania in 1942. He is from the clan plangermairreenner of the Ben Lomond people in Tasmania. Jim left school at 14 years to start work. His working life includes 15 years at sea as a fisherman and merchant seaman, Australian Regular Army, and over 50 years formal involvement in the Aboriginal Struggle. With a long history in government Aboriginal Affairs, he has travelled Australia visiting many remote Aboriginal communities. Jim wrote his first play We Are Survivors in 1984, produced and directed, and acted in it. His written works now include plays, political and academic papers and short stories. Jim has produced and been associate producer on many documentary films. He is published in many major anthologies. Jim lives on Cape Barren Island writing and maintaining involvement in cultural arts nationally.

Rebe Taylor is a Senior Research Fellow at the College of Arts, Law and Education at the University of Tasmania. She is an award-winning historian with more than 20 years of experience researching and writing the histories of southeast Australian indigenous peoples and European settlement for academic and literary publications, web resources and museum spaces. Until early 2018, Rebe held the inaugural Coral Thomas Fellow at State Library NSW. She has also held numerous Fellowships at The University of Melbourne and Kings College London. Rebe’s most recent book, Into the Heart of Tasmania: A Search for Human Antiquity, published by Melbourne University Press, won the 2018 Tasmanian Book Prize, the 2018 Queensland Premier’s Award for history, and the inaugural Joan and Dick Family Green Award for Tasmanian History.