‘A Universal Father and Son Story’? The Representation of Father-Son Relationships in Zach’s Ceremony, In My Blood It Runs, and Robbie Hood

ABSTRACT

First Nations boys and men are heavily freighted with colonial stereotypes that give them to be antisocial, drug-addicted, violent, and harmful to their own communities. While men are consistently represented as neglectful or abusive fathers, Aboriginal boys are depicted as potential criminals whose childhood is blighted, and who lack guidance from suitable father figures or male role models. This article addresses three depictions of father-son relationships which engage different strategies for addressing negative stereotypes of Indigenous boys. Aaron Petersen and Alec Doomadgee’s Zach Ceremony (2016) is analysed in terms of its internalisation of settler-colonial problematisations of Indigenous masculinities and over-investment in the male role-model discourse that frames settler disparagement of Aboriginal communities. I then turn to In My Blood It Runs (2019) and Robbie Hood (2019) as examples of representations that articulate more complex and ambivalent navigations of colonial stereotypes and appropriations of ‘Indigenous masculinities’, and that largely avoid and critique settler discourse on Aboriginal boyhood.

KEYWORDS:

• Boyhood
• indigenous boyhoods
• settler colonialism
• Australian cinema
• Australian television
• indigenous television
• indigenous documentary

Colonialism in Australia is not only an issue concerning the nation’s past, as is commonly represented in news media, film, and television. Rather, Australian society is structured as colonial, through the differential apportionment of incentives, opportunities, blame, and punishments to coloniser and colonised populations (Moreton-Robinson 2015; Watson 2002, 2007, 2015; Wolfe 2006). This unequal distribution of wealth and power is at once material, cultural, and aesthetic. And colonial ideology is reproduced through practices of representation and meaning-making that attribute power and significance to colonisers, whilst undermining and negating the power and significance of First Peoples (Hall 1997). This has been shown all too plainly as, at the time of writing, the Australian people have just rejected by referendum a proposal to include within the constitution an Indigenous ‘Voice to Parliament’: one of the pillars of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which also included ‘Treaty’ that would recognise prior and enduring Indigenous sovereignty, and ‘Truth’ telling, so that Australians could be educated about and acknowledge the injuries First Nations people bear on a continuing and often daily basis due to colonialism. The ‘No’ campaign won by a significant margin by releasing settler colonisers from the burden of understanding what the Voice proposal addressed – their campaign slogan was literally ‘if you don’t know, vote no’ – and by spreading disinformation such as the claim that a body of First Nations Elders would hold all legislation to ransom, or that ‘ordinary’ (i.e. non-Indigenous) Australians would be taxed to pay reparations and might even lose their houses to traditional owners (Langton and Corn 2023; Remekis and Butler 2023).¹

I begin with this preface because settler representations of Aboriginal boyhood are forged through the histories of colonial dispossession that overdetermined the referendum result. In resonance with this failure to listen, settler representations of First Nations boys and men are heavily freighted with stereotypes that support coloniser interests – ‘deficit discourse’ that gives them to be antisocial, drug-addicted, violent, and harmful to their own communities (Faulkner et al. 2021; Fogarty et al. 2018; Hatchell 2004; Slater 2008). These representations support the disenfranchisement of First Peoples from the decision-making processes that affect their lives within ‘the colony’.² While Aboriginal men are consistently represented as drunkards who are neglectful or abusive fathers, Aboriginal boys are depicted as potential criminals whose childhood is ‘blighted’, and who lack guidance from suitable ‘father figures’ and ‘male role models’. Such depictions support a discourse of white saviourism that calls for ‘white families’ to be able to foster or adopt Aboriginal children;³ to take them from their communities and give them a ‘chance in life’ – discourse that recapitulates the policies that caused the Stolen Generations in the twentieth century.⁴

The racist subtext of these representations was rendered explicit in 2016, when political cartoonist for The Australian, Bill Leak, responded to news of abuse of incarcerated boys by correctional officers, by vilifying Aboriginal fathers (Kean 2019). Leak and others who engage in such characterisation argue that they are ‘realists’, merely documenting the causes of the hyper-incarceration of Aboriginal boys, which they frame in terms of a neoliberal understanding of personal responsibility. They thereby disavow the part of representation in determining Indigenous futures, and their own part in the maintenance of colonisation through such depiction.

This article examines three depictions of father-son relationships that centred the creative input of Aboriginal people, either through the formal roles of director or producer, or rigorous processes of consultation with community. Each of these works draws on very different – even contrapuntal – strategies to address negative stereotypes of Blak boys and men. Whereas Zach’s Ceremony (dir. Aaron Petersen and prod. Alec Doomadgee, 2016 ) invests heavily in the father-son relationship as a remedy and retort to those toxic representations, In My Blood It Runs (dir. Maya Newall, with Larissa Behrendt and community, 2019) and Robbie Hood (dir. Dylan River, 2019) present more nuanced, equivocal, and at times comical portrayals of that relationship and the intergenerational trauma that often confounds it, relocating the investment in fathers to human and more-than-human others in the boys’ sphere, such as grandparents, siblings, friends, and country. One question that animates this study concerns the capacity of ‘male role model’ discourse, which Zach’s Ceremony implicitly relays, to speak to the harms of colonial dispossession without further embedding its values through neoliberal paradigms of masculinity and resilience. While Doomadgee’s appeal to an ‘Indigenised’ hypermasculinity attempts to recuperate an ‘Aboriginal manhood’ supposed to be submerged beneath colonisation, to fortify his son against the apparent existential dislocation of ‘urban’ Indigeneity, this focus on fathers perhaps misses the sources of esteem found in proximal rather than hierarchical relationships, and the deeply relational character of First Nations sovereign being (Rey 2023). Teasing out the film’s own ambivalence regarding Doomadgee’s strategy, I attend to the ‘shadows’ within Zach’s Ceremony – moments of ambiguity that complicate its more explicit narrative about male role-modelling, Indigenised masculinity, and Zach’s trajectory to authenticity. While the greater part of my analysis will focus of Zach’s Ceremony, I will then read its ambivalences alongside the more irreverent and complicated narratives of Robbie Hood and In My Blood It Runs.

Before proceeding further, I want to note my own position within the relations of power through which these representations bear their meaning, as a settler coloniser woman, mother, and grandmother, living on land to which Gadigal and Wangal peoples belong and working on Dharug country. I wish also to pay respects to elders, past and present, whose cultures and knowledges have nurtured these places since the beginning of time. I hope that the critique of settler colonial representations of Aboriginal childhood in which this article participates will contribute to the work of listening to First Peoples’ truth that is part of a process of renegotiation of power and restoration of land.

An Indigenous Masculinity Crisis?

Depictions of Indigenous masculinity such as Leak’s draw from and contribute to a dense reservoir of colonial tropes that represent Indigenous men, on the one hand, as violent – endangering the social fabric and their own people – and, on the other, as infantilised, emasculated wastrels or lickspittles. Such caricatures participate in a colonial tradition of representing Indigenous and enslaved peoples as weak and unworthy of bodily autonomy or sovereignty (Hall 1997, 263). As Yiman and Bidjara geographer Marcia Langton writes, ‘icons of “Aboriginality” are produced by Anglo-Australians, not in dialogue with Aboriginal people, but from other representations such as the ‘stone age savage’, the ‘dying race’, the ‘one penny stamp Aborigine’, … ‘the received wisdom’. They are inherited, imagined representations (Langton 1993, 34–35). As such, they structure power, presenting ‘the Aborigine’ as a dehumanised construct of colonialism. As early as 1938, on the inaugural Day of Mourning (today celebrated as ‘Australia Day’), the Aboriginal Progressive Association issued a scathing rebuke of media framings of Aboriginal people as part of a plea for equal citizenship rights:

The popular Press of Australia makes a joke of us by presenting silly and out-of-date drawings and jokes of ‘Jacky’ or ‘Binghi,’ which have educated city-dwellers and young Australians to look upon us as subhuman. Is this not adding insult to injury? What a dirty trick, to push us down by laws, and then make fun of us! You kick us, and then laugh at our misfortunes. You keep us ignorant, and then accuse us of having no knowledge. Wake up, Australians, and realise that your cruel jokes have gone over the limit! (Patten and Ferguson 1938, 10)

To be clear, such meaning-making practice is not simply mistaken or ignorant, but, rather, a strategy – or settler move to innocence, in Tuck and Yang’s terms (2012) – to neutralise the genuine threat First Peoples’ very existence presents to settler sovereignty claims. It transcribes the relationship of coloniser to colonised from one of conquest and exploitation to a relation of governance over and protection of/from Indigenous peoples. This practice of depicting Aboriginal men as ‘hopeless’, ‘lazy’, or ‘deadbeat dads’ is coextensive with a practice of representing Aboriginal boys that erases their sovereign inheritance through what Gumbaynggirr scholar Lilly Brown names as ‘hypervisibility’, in settler-colonial imagination, as ‘damaged in policy, discourses of criminality and education’ (Brown 2021, 161).⁵ In this way, the idea of ‘Indigenous masculinity’ – understood, within a binary gender system, as a culturally and historically elaborated repertoire of traits and behaviours maintained in opposition to, and in repudiation of, ‘femininity’ (Connell 1995, see esp. chapter 3) – is problematised by colonial regimes of representation as both excessive and deficient; pathological and in need of continuous monitoring for the sake of Indigenous women and children and civil society (Brown 2021; Moreton-Robinson 2009). Such problematisation must itself be understood as a practice of representation that structures policy and other responses to whatever or whomever is its target. As Carol Bacchi and Joan Eveline state,

[P]olicy ‘problems’ do not exist ‘out there’ in society, waiting to be ‘solved’ through timely and perspicacious policy interventions. Rather, specific policy proposals ‘imagine’ ‘problems’ in particular ways that have real and meaningful effects. Hence, to understand how policies operate requires that we ask of policy proposals ‘What’s the Problem Represented to be?’ (Bacchi and Eveline 2010, 111)

‘Problems’ thus cannot be separated from the desire, or interests, of those who frame them as such, actively constituting fields of power and rank orderings of beings. In this case, problematised stereotypes of Indigenous men and boys, as bearers of a ‘masculinity in crisis,’ support and justify the settler-colonial project of replacing Indigenous peoples with the invasive ‘settler’ population (Prehn et al. 2021). They play a part in coloniser stories to maintain extractive dispossession and elimination as a way of life on ‘Terra Nullius’ – a legal fiction (Moreton-Robinson 2015, 4), component of the ‘kettle logic’ of settler colonialism.⁶

Within this scene, Indigenous boyhood assumes a significance within the settler imaginary as a potential agent of latent retributive violence, which colonial disciplinary regimes must therefore contain. Recent sensational news coverage of underage drinking, truancy, and crime in the Northern Territory, such as the Daily Telegraph’s two – part documentary ‘Cry from the Heart’ (Hanrahan and Bharadwaj 2023; see also White 2023), dramatises this elaboration of Indigenous childhood. The narrative of episode one, ‘Children of the Night’, oscillates between the fear for and of the children who occupy Alice Springs streets at night because, we are told, they are unsafe at home. Examples of their crimes cited by townsfolk centre on destruction of property (chiefly broken windows), but news commentary continually returns to reportage of a machete wielding 13-year-old boy who forced Woolworths into lockdown. By framing the ‘youth problem’ with reference to this most extreme example, Indigenous boys are represented as more dangerous, unpredictable, even monstrous than adults, because of the apparent purity of their violence juxtaposed against children’s putative ‘innocence’. The violent boy is understood as incapable of rehabilitation because they are ‘blighted’ from the outset, with no redeemable innocence. Through such framing, news media skirt the issue of colonial violence by pathologising Aboriginal peoples more generally (Moreton-Robinson 2009), via the synecdoche of the violent boy.⁷

The discursive context of this reportage and the political response to it (Breen and Dick 2023; Fancourt and Havnen 2021; Garrick 2023; Garrick and Truu 2022; Office of the Chief Minister 2021) – colonial logics of elimination and terra nullius – is intensified by recent discourses about ‘boyhood’ more broadly, as at risk or in crisis – a position championed by the very same conservative media who pathologise and stereotype Aboriginal peoples. The notion, nurtured by anti – feminist commentators, that there is a ‘war against boys’ in education (Reeves 2022; Sommers 2015) articulates a larger anxiety that it’s no longer acceptable for men to behave in a ‘masculine’ way, or that men no longer know how to be men. While, undeniably, social change has placed pressure on the construct of masculinity in disruptive and potentially generative ways (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005), much ‘masculinity crisis’ rhetoric is grounded in a perception that men have been displaced from the apex position, causing an existential crisis dramatised by titles such as The End of Men (Rosin 2012), and the framing of concern for boys in terms of suicide (Allan 2015). This sense of urgency is especially prevalent in discourse addressing socially marginalised men and boys who have come to represent social (or anti-social) problems (Titus 2004, 151–152).

Rumours of the end of men, however, are as exaggerated as those reports of the end of empire in Alice Springs, at the frontier of ‘civilisation’. For, what these moral panics articulate is a crisis of patriarchal imperialism, which is, in turn, reinvested or projected onto the colonised ‘other’ through tropes of failed Indigenous masculinity (see Hokowhitu 2012; Coulthard 2014, esp. chapter three). Media in the metropole, ‘little Britain’, problematise working-class boys and youths by characterising them as lazy, violent, and directionless ‘chavs’, principally because ‘[t]heir class backgrounds, their accents and their (often) aggressive performances of masculinity are considered redundant[…] in a de-industrialized society’ (Tarrant et al. 2015, 62). Objects of anxiety because they are thought to introduce disorder into the system, in fact, they have been constructed as scapegoats to bear public anxiety about the future: a future characterised by a contraction of global power that is displaced onto working class boys and men.

Likewise, in the colony, settlers confect a crisis of Indigenous masculinity to skirt any meaningful discussion about colonial violence in Australia’s past and present. Constructions of traditional Aboriginal men as violent, abusive warriors who have lost an outlet for their ‘instinctive’ aggression are not only essentialist but also intrinsically racist. As Moana Jackson argues, with reference Pakēhā Allan Duff’s Once Were Warriors, ‘the book could more properly have been called Once Were Gardeners, Once Were Poets, Once Were Singers, and if you’re from Kahungunu, Once and Always Were Lovers (Jackson 2009). Settler media is invested in the representation of Aboriginal men as violent, and Aboriginal boys as untethered from morality, community, and modern society, because that rhetoric maintains settler innocence and the colonial structure of Australian society and law. These racist deficit discourses, applied to Indigenous children, thwart the capacity to imagine a future for them beyond a risk-management approach that primes officers of colonial law (child protection and police) to oversee their apparently inevitable institutionalisation (Brown 2021, 121–143).

Colonisers’ solution to ‘the Indigenous masculinity crisis’ is to appoint an exceptional Indigenous man to demonstrate the kinds of behaviour and demeanour that would, supposedly, ensure successful assimilation in Western neoliberal society. Conservative commentators frequently attribute the cause of ‘Aboriginal problems’ to the absence of appropriate male role models:

It is curious that while researching Bad Dreaming there were many solutions put forward to combat these issues, yet men were rarely mentioned. But they are the problem and the solution. The men not only have to realise their behaviour is undermining Aboriginal culture but also that they are creating a generation of boys without good role models. (Nowra 2007. Emphasis added)

Many Aboriginal men in this community thought they were weak if they didn’t control their girlfriends or wives, and saw women as objects to control. These men did not grow up with good role models and lived in fear that their peers would see them as weak if they did not put women in their place by means of jealousy, threats, the use of weapons, put-downs, and public humiliation. (Cashman 2016, 15. Emphasis added)

Bill Leak’s cartoon, too, refers its audience to this ‘want of role models’ narrative by ridiculing the Indigenous father who fails to model ‘appropriate’ masculinity to his son. Many Aboriginal people responded to that image on social media by powerfully and collectively repudiating that story and colonising strategy: the cartoon launched hundreds of images celebrating Aboriginal fathers, bound together by the hashtag #IndigenousDads. As Carlson and Frazer point out (2021), social media gave place to a counter public, to recover the Indigenous father from colonisers and reinvest that figure with love and power, through the online circulation of affect that the hashtag both represented and enabled. I would contend that it also did this while, for the most part, sidestepping the kind of ‘role model’ discourse proffered by Indigenous and non-Indigenous conservatives, by expanding the ways of imaging Aboriginal childhood and fatherhood. #IndigenousDads affirmed the relational complexity of First Nations identity and sovereignty by launching a photo gallery of images refuting Leak’s attempted character assassination of Aboriginal fathers.

Zach’s Ceremony (2016) and Male Role-Model Discourse

Gangalidda, Waanyi, and Garawa man Alec Doomadgee was among those celebrated on Twitter under #IndigenousDads (Figure 1). Pictured with his son Zach, both are shirtless, and Alec paints Zach’s face with ceremonial white ochre. The hashtag #AwakenTheWarrior is also included, so that the image communicates a strong cultural connection transmitted from one generation to another: a warrior masculinity conceived of as the sovereign connection to country and intergenerational responsibility to protect it. Zach’s Ceremony tells their story through observational documentary interposed with historical narrative and animation. I want here to analyse Zach’s Ceremony as a film about modelling Indigenous masculinity – specifically, it is about a father who wants to be a good role model to his son. Implicitly, the film invests in the assumptions of male role-model discourse: that if a boy can identify with men who share the situation of their birth and nonetheless become successful, then all the structural inequality in the world shouldn’t be an obstacle.

Figure 1. #IndigenousDads tweet, Alec and Zach Doomadgee (@flashblak, 6 August 2016). Source: Reproduced with permission.

As with other problematised masculinities, Aboriginal male role models are often athletes, particularly football players (AFL and NRL). Sporting heroes are sometimes scouted from remote communities, and increasingly elite sport is valued as a viable pathway out of those communities. The ‘role model’ model of improvement is a quick-fix, depoliticising strategy that fails to address the root causes of entrenched poverty and substance abuse: structural inequality, low social mobility, and, in the case of Indigenous children, also systemic racism and the persistence of colonial violence (Corum 2007). It is also an essentialising strategy, prioritising gender as a site of vertical identification for the child, and disregarding horizontal relationships between friends, siblings, and cousins, as well as boys’ relationships with mothers, grandmothers, aunties, and sisters (Tarrant et al. 2015). The relationship between the ‘Aboriginal child’ and ‘Aboriginal athletic role model’ shares these problems but is freighted with an additional burden of having to appear to transcend – or, better, obscure – the settler-colonial situation. Adnyamathanha and Narungga man Adam Goodes, exemplifies the high cost to Aboriginal men of playing that role. Goodes was relentlessly scrutinised by commentators, who caricatured him as an ‘angry Black man’ because he celebrated wins on field by performing a traditional war dance. Settler fans tolerate Indigenous footballers if they are skilful and demonstrate humility and gratitude but turn against sporting heroes who demonstrate cultural pride and perform a masculinity that is settler-coded as aggressive or threatening. After persistent subjection to booing and racist taunts from crowds, Goodes retired in his prime.

Similarly, in Aortearoa/New Zealand, elite sport offers social mobility to Mãori men and boys. As Māori academic Brendan Hokowhitu (2004) writes, however, the virile physicality expected and even celebrated in Māori men is a colonial strategy that maintains settler colonial power by associating Māori men with the body in a binary relation of subservience to Pakēhā mind or thought. Further compounding this significance is, again, the role of Māori warrior, exemplified by ritualised performance of the haka before football games. For Hokowhitu, this type fixes Maori culture in a tourist-ready presentation of ‘tradition’ entirely mediated and constructed by colonisers. Returning to Zach’s Ceremony, the colonisation and commodification of ‘Indigenous masculinity’ as ‘sporting spectacle’ that Hokowhitu elaborates in the Aortearoa/New Zealand context, reverberates through Alec Doomadgee’s modelling of Indigenous masculinity to his son in #AwakenTheWarrior Twitter post. Overburdened by contested meanings, Aboriginal corporeality is appropriated to maintain colonial power, but it is also subjectively lived – sometimes as alienated and sometimes as a site of resistance.

Indigenous embodied sovereignty[…] refers to a critical bodily practice that brings into question those subjugating forces written upon the Indigenous body, that is, the very materiality of Indigenous existence, whilst affirming the complexity, diversity and multi- dimensional ways of being Indigenous. Moreover, practices of embodied sovereignty must be aware of the way that discourses of Indigenous authenticity and tradition haunt them. As a consequence, part of the study of embodied sovereignty should be an analysis of how the specter of tradition remains written upon the Indigenous body. (Hokowhitu 2012, 112)

*  *  *

The film that Doomadgee made in collaboration with settler Director Aaron Petersen had set out to represent the continuity of Doomadgee’s ancestral cultures into the present and Alec’s successful navigation of life between two worlds – urban and the homelands of his ancestors. But, he says, as the film evolved,

‘naturally the camera turned to Zach. I figured if could tell the story of our world, our culture and ceremonies through the eyes of a child, mainstream Australia would let down their guard and see the beauty of our people. (Keast 2016, 6)

Doomadgee’s sense that non-Indigenous viewers would find Zach’s experience more sympathetic than his own conforms to a strategy often employed in dramatic cinema and literature, wherein identification with the child’s subject position disarms audiences, making available a different perspective on the everyday injustices they are conditioned not to see (Donald 2018; Faulkner 2016; Wilson 2003). As Petersen tells it, however, the film originated in conversations they shared as fathers of boys, while working on another film together. By his telling, culture recedes in importance behind a universal (and presumably culturally neutral) experience of fatherhood.

Over the years as we filmed, we discovered that this wasn’t just an Indigenous-themed documentary following a boy into his ancient rite of initiation. This was a universal father and son story unfolding in front of us. (Keast 2016, 7)

A second point of identification and connection for settler viewers is thus the struggle between father and son and the passage from childhood to adulthood that the father oversees. This ambiguity between the unfolding of a culturally specific, sovereign Aboriginal manhood and the universal experience of parenting boys into men, however, produces some equivocality in the film and the story/ies it tells. The concessions it makes to appeal to a general audience at times compromise its coherence, revealing a structure of ‘Indigenous masculinity’ that is impossibly demanding, and responds to the call of settler-colonial stereotyping by retaining some of the binary oppositions that presume to decide who is authentic and who is inauthentically Aboriginal. A key aspect of this structure is played out through the father-son dyad: an intense, even Oedipal rivalry (absent the mother) that positions the son as ‘urban’, stressing the journey he must take to become a warrior and one day accede to the father’s apex position.

The film begins with the ten-year-old Zach and traces the precarious navigation of his identity, dispersed between where he lives in Sydney and his ancestral home of Doomadgee. The rupture between life ‘on country’ (coded as ‘authentic’) and his messier city existence (coded as lost; alienated) echoes colonisers’ denigration of First Peoples who live in cities as ‘inauthentic’ and unrepresentative of Aboriginality (see Behrendt 2006; Bodkin 2013; Fredericks 2013).⁸ Zach lives in that schism of double disparagement, a symbol of the situation of being in-between and neither-nor lived by many fair-skinned Aboriginal people: ‘Not black, not white, sort of in the middle … I feel like I don’t know myself’. Throughout the film, Zach anticipates his initiation ceremony, which Alec says will ground him in tradition and strength in himself as a foundation for authentic sovereignty, closing the split in his subjectivity. As the ten-year-old Zach puts it, ‘I want to be a man, not just a little boy who thinks he knows everything’. The film’s purpose is to follow this trajectory, over six years of Zach’s life, from the unknowing child to the adult who knows himself. Zach’s lessons include how to be present to land, on his homelands but also wherever he is. The film’s urban landscape features the Block in Redfern, just prior to its demolition and gentrification.⁹ A powerful and admirably concise history of colonisation and political resistance follows, in the form of an animation. For Alec, education in these histories is essential to raising his boys, to convey an inheritance of awesome responsibility, whether on or separated from country.

Alec Doomadgee is a strong and formidable man. The film establishes his rough start in life: he left school at fifteen to assume a father’s responsibility, and is now a boxer, actor, media presenter, and activist. A proud Aboriginal man whose surname connects him to the place where he belongs, Doomadgee exudes security in his identity, even delivering a TED talk on that subject (TEDxSydney 2015). For Doomadgee, sovereignty is a belonging to the place of his ancestors that secures his belonging wherever he finds himself. A prominent man who takes up space and commands attention and admiration, at times Alec does not leave space for Zach to grow in his own way. Known only as ‘Alec’s son’ in Doomadgee, Zach does not share Alec’s security in belonging. He feels keenly the weight of his father’s expectation, saying tearfully, in the hours before his initiation, that he is anxious to become the man Alec wants him to be. Alec presents himself as a role model, but as such cuts an unforgiving and inflexible figure, with little patience for the insecurity of adolescence. This places a palpable distance between them. As Zach bemoans, ‘[o]ne thing I’ve learned, no matter what it is you’ll never satisfy Alec Doomadgee’.

Despite Alec’s certainty, and at times didactic tone of the film, several moments of ambiguity erupt before and after the ceremony, punctuating and motivating the drama. These unplanned moments are most revealing, showing up the contradictory expectations placed on boys growing up Aboriginal under settler colonialism. While Alec is away Zach stays out drinking with his friends. His stepmother has no authority, and without Alec Zach appears lost, acting out his father’s fears for him. Upon returning, Alec’s rebuke is heavy-handed: he tells Zach that he’s ‘the biggest fucking disappointment’ he’s ever known.

The pendulum swings of Zach’s excitement and doubt about ceremony also produce a discomforting ambivalence regarding whether he is mature enough to undergo initiation. Such doubts are delivered to camera – presumably to Petersen – as Alec shows impatience towards Zach. Then an intertitle announces that ‘ … of a population of 1000, 14 people committed suicide in Doomadgee over the past year. One of those 14 people was Zach’s cousin, Brandon’. It’s a poignant moment, as Zach and Brandon were to go through initiation together. Alec reflects that even having been raised on country, Brandon still ended his own life. This throws him and upsets the certainty of his plan for Zach.

After the ceremony, Zach says he and his younger brother (who is also initiated, but peripheral to the story) are more ‘bonded’, whilst gripping the reluctant boy in a gridlock and pretending to kiss him.¹⁰ A sense of growth is conveyed, and reconciliation between the boy and the man Zach will become. This security is punctured again during preparations for his sixteenth birthday party in Sydney. Zach hangs fairy lights on the fence while bemoaning that his father is being a control freak; his friend takes them down again after Alec directed they should hang elsewhere. Alec catastrophises about what could happen were someone to bring alcohol. As the party starts and Zach relaxes and enjoys himself, Alec closes everything down because it got out of control – or his control – and Zach cries, humiliated. This scene is the most uncomfortable of the film: its ambivalence blurs boundaries again between childhood and adulthood and opens a chasm between son and father. Viewers bear witness to the excesses of parenting and joylessness of a responsibility that denies all risk and eschews vulnerability.

A scene towards the end of the film shows Zach visiting his mother, absent until now. Thumbing through a photo album, he ruminates that when he was small everyone said he looked like his mother, but as he neared adolescence, they recognised in him his father too. As the film closes, Zach accedes to his role as initiated man by leading a smoke ceremony for his grandparents. He is muscular, looking more man than child – more like his father. And he has found a way to inhabit his sovereignty:

Dad’s taught me a lot. When I reflect on my culture sometimes and look back and I think how far I have come now and what I’ve learnt, you know, connection to land is all we have. Our culture is everything, it’s basically, it’s our life. It’s what we live, breath, and eat every day.

The schism of identity – between the child and the adult self, and between the self on homelands and in the city – is thus articulated as the separation of a people from their land, apart from which there is no purpose. Veneration of this connection to land is disclosed as the key to Zach’s capacity to become an adult.

The film’s moments of ambivalence and interstitial friction demonstrate that, within the colonial frame, the father role model position makes impossible demands of both father and son. Alec’s power lies in his capacity to code shift apparently without loss, and so to exemplify an ‘exhibition’ Aboriginality that is ‘authentic’ and impressive without threatening the coloniser. As Hokowhitu’s critique of ‘Indigenous masculinity’ as a colonial construct shows, such a position is constitutively unstable (2004; 2012). Rather, in the film’s most ambivalent moments, the incoherence of the demand both to appear sovereign and enact a normative, non-threatening Aboriginal masculinity, is played out through the primal struggle between Father and Son (‘the universal father son story’). Doomadgee’s determination to model for his son an essentialised, idealised, invulnerable masculinity, uncannily responds to the call of conservative news media, self-authorised to pronounce on Aboriginal authenticity. Carrying Leak’s grotesque of Indigenous fatherhood as a burden he must ceaselessly repudiate, that racist stereotype defined him as an always-imminent disappointment, the threat of failure forever his horizon as what others would see in him, had Zach not succeeded.

In My Blood It Runs (2019): A Relational Sovereignty

In My Blood It Runs navigates the depths of ambiguity and complexity from which Zach’s Ceremony shied away. Centring the boy’s perspective and capabilities, the paradoxes of Indigenous sovereignty within a settler-colonial state hostile to those interests, are palpable. As Lilly Brown articulates,

Watching In My Blood It Runs, the viewer is forced to witness an impossible dynamic—the constitutive interplay of resistance and domination where the former justifies the latter. In Dujuan we see a cultured, knowledgeable and discerning Garrwa and Arrernte child actively navigating his interpellation by political institutions founded on genocidal intentions. (181)

Dujuan’s Hoosen’s sources of support and esteem are relationships with the women of his Arrernte and Garrwa families, who scaffold him with a cultural education in healing, hunting, and language (he speaks three), so he can tolerate a culturally unsafe state education system and avoid the seeming inevitability of incarceration. His mother and nan want him to learn both systems, Arrernte/Garrwa and Australian, to increase the opportunities available to him. Ten-year-old Dujuan lives in Hidden Valley, an Aboriginal town camp near Alice Springs. He is known for the healing powers and knowledge of bush medicine that came to him from his grandpa, and has a strong and lucid sense of his responsibilities as a healer, and his relationships with others – family, community, ancestors, and more-than-human beings intertwined with his being – and how those relationships tether him to place as its sovereign custodian: ‘I was born a little Aboriginal kid. That means I had a memory, a memory about Aboriginals. I just felt something, a memory. History, in my blood it runs’. By carrying this memory, Dujuan represents hope for the future of his people.

A formidable presence informed by sophisticated values and philosophies, Dujuan is irreducible to news media caricatures of Aboriginal boys as unruly and dislocated delinquents. Yet he is failing at school and faces expulsion and is continuously encroached on by social workers and law enforcement. Through his experience of these institutions, viewers are invited to indwell with Dujuan, to see how colonial violence continues to shape Aboriginal children’s lives, and the perversity of a system that requires children like Dujuan to learn a worldview that excludes him and be told that the complex web of relationships and beliefs that anchors him to the earth is nothing but magical thinking.

Teacher: Listen carefully! Now this one isn’t a story. This is information, or non-fiction. It’s fact: The Australia Book [she presents to the children a children’s history book from the 1980s, with stereotypical drawings of colonial era settlers and an Aboriginal man holding a spear]. It’s about the history of our country. At Botany Bay, Cook landed for the first time in a new country. Then he sailed up the coast, mapping as he went. He was nearly wrecked on the coral of the Barrier Reef, and only because he was a great sailor did he manage to save his ship. On an island of Cape York he raised the English flag, and he claimed for the English country the whole of this new land … 

Later, reading a book that tells an Aboriginal creation story, the teacher pauses to ridicule its narrative. One of the children – possibly Dujuan – interjects, ‘the spirit is real, eh’. She continues, apparently chastened, before mocking it again only a few moments later, in compulsive derision of First Peoples’ truth. Dujuan reflects that ‘the history that we’re told at home is in language and it’s about the Aborigines. But the ones back at school, that was for white people not the Aboriginals’. Through his schooling, Dujuan has direct lived experience of the epistemological injustice of colonialism. He fails his subjects, and wonders if something’s wrong with him. When he is on his homelands, ‘out bush’, he says, ‘you learn how to control your anger, and you learn how to control your life’. Conversely, when in town to go to school, his healing is ‘wobbly’.

In frustration, Dujuan acts up at school, smashing a window, and is suspended. His family worries that he will end up in juvenile detention, like the boys who were tortured (‘cruelled’) at Don Dale. The viewer eavesdrops on conversations between Dujuan and family members, talking through his options, their people’s history, and warning him away from going down the school to prison pipeline (Hemphill, Broderick, and Heerde 2017; Rudolph and Thomas 2023). But Dujuan continues to run away from school and is finally expelled. As the film draws to a close and he comes to the attention of the local police, Dujuan is sent out bush to stay with, Jim Jim, his dad. Jim Jim is neither ‘good’ nor ‘bad’, from a role-model perspective. Their relationship is not hierarchical, but rather, grounded in mutual respect. He expressly recognises his limitations and hopes he can be the father Dujuan needs him to be at that moment.

Newell and her team earned access to Dujuan and his family over time, by building relationships of trust and involving Indigenous people at every stage of the film’s production, following Screen Australia’s protocols for working with and telling stories about Aboriginal people (Janke and Gray 2009). Perhaps because of this process of forming bonds with the family and community, In My Blood It Runs is an advocacy film. It closes with an intertitle stating that at the time of filming, 100% of children in detention in the Northern Territory are Aboriginal, inviting viewers to help children and families living in the NT ‘fight for justice for their kids and the right to lead their own education systems’. In 2019, in addendum to the film, Dujuan addressed the United Nations, on behalf of Aboriginal children, speaking of the overincarceration of Aboriginal children in Australia and advocating for Aboriginal-run schooling (Guardian Australian 2019). Like Zach Doomadgee, Hoosen’s sovereignty is located in his relationship to kin and country, but this time more immanently – whereas Zach’s feeling of un-belonging and schism motivates the narrative in Zach’s Ceremony, for Dujuan, belonging is never questioned. Through a tone that is both sincere and urgent, each film takes seriously the mandate to nurture sovereignty by reappropriating, and perhaps also refiguring, Indigenous childhood.

Robbie Hood (2019): Subversion of the Criminality Trope

In contrast to Zach’s Ceremony and In My Blood, Robbie Hood is less serious and so, at least ostensibly, demands less of non-Indigenous viewers. Released as a series on SBS, and adopting a more light-hearted, mocking tone, Robbie Hood is laugh-out-loud funny, and its ten-minute long episodic format engenders a ‘bite-sized-snack’ digestibility. Robbie can be described as ‘black’ (or perhaps Blak) comedy in both senses of this term, however, by bringing a sardonic wit and Indigenous perspective to the depiction of Aboriginal childhood. This approach encourages a different, perhaps even more demanding engagement, which brings into the frame for ridicule and critique settler representations and investments so that, to get the joke, non-Indigenous viewers must recognise their personal implication in the situations that the comedy unfolds (see Faulkner 2019; Neill 2015; Watego 2014).

Written and directed by Dylan River, son to Indigenous filmmakers Warwick Thornton and Beck Cole, the series features teenage Robbie (Pedrea Jackson), referencing the English folktale to signal that there is a serious social justice significance behind the antics of Robbie and his band of ‘merry men’ – ‘Little Johnny’ and ‘Georgia Blue’. From the first scene of episode one, Robbie’s voiceover identifies him as ‘a thief’, as he blows a kiss to the supermarket security guard who follows him around, ‘like I’m a star’, Robbie’s mother has died, so he lives with his nan, and his useless (non-Indigenous) father, played by country singer Andy Golledge, is mostly peripheral to his life – and comically so. Robbie’s dad is an ineffectual and entirely irrelevant white man who wanders the streets with his guitar, providing the series’ musical backdrop: ‘He’s a dickhead. But mum always said, ‘you’ve gotta make the most of what you’ve got’. Robbie quotes his mother’s pearls of wisdom throughout, and it is clear he takes direction from her, as well as his nan and friends. ‘My mum always said, not all white fellas are pricks, they’re just mostly misunderstood … My dad on the other hand, he’s a prick’. Robbie’s voiceover continually and gratuitously takes pot shots at his father.

Notably, Robbie Hood subverts news media representations of Aboriginal boys by making fun of them. Stereotypes are reinterpreted from a vantage that refuses to regard settlers as authoritative or white ways as a yardstick for a good life. Robbie answers to the hoodlum stereotype with the retort I know you are, but what am I? – laying bare the hypocrisy of colonisers calling Indigenous kids ‘thieves’. Neither scary nor desperate, these kids are having fun. As Dylan River states in an interview,

It’s inspired by my own life and the first-hand experiences of my friends and family[…] The show is a combination of the highs and lows of our upbringing in a small desert town that we have a love hate relationship with. (Guest author 2020)

In episode four, the series takes a swipe at do-gooder white foster carers (the subject position of ‘good coloniser’) when the kids are briefly put in foster care because their nan’s house is deemed overcrowded. She constantly patronises them with the phrase ‘It must be so hard’, and Robbie tells the others to be nice to her because ‘she needs us more than we need her’. The uncanniest moment of this episode for me was SBS’s sponsored advertisement, which implored viewers to become foster carers. Like a collective unconscious, the algorithm that placed this advertisement had triangulated an urbane SBS audience and key words relating to the episode, thus interpellating me as the kind of ‘good coloniser’ who might be tempted to indulge in a little white saviourism. Robbie’s refrain, ‘she needs us more than we need her’, returned to haunt the viewer through this unintentionally ironic ad placement.

There is a lot more to say about this series and its differential effects on Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences, and I hope we will see scholarly writing take up its potential as an anti-colonial text. Speaking from my own experience, as a viewer who materially benefits from colonisation, the critical attention Robbie Hood brings to settler representations of Aboriginal boy – and man – hood – enabled by its satirical framing – make room for reflection on settlers’ part in the structures that constrain the lives of Indigenous boys. Robbie declines taking on the burden conventionally placed on the Aboriginal boy. Rather than the duty to assume responsibility for country, represented by both Zach and Dujuan, Robbie represents lightness, ennui, and boredom, as resistance against settler schedules and timeframes, and refusal to answer to (be interpellated by) the expectations encoded by settler stereotypes. Returning the burden of colonisation to the non-Indigenous viewer, Robbie identifies the cultural work settlers must do before ‘national conversations’ that do not perpetrate further violence against First Peoples could be possible.

Conclusion: Representing Aboriginal Childhood as Sovereign

Zach’s Ceremony, In My Blood It Runs, and Robbie Hood each responds differently to settler colonial stereotypes of Aboriginal boyhood – stereotypes that cast a shadow over children’s lives, whether or not they are raised to be proud of culture and with or without ‘good’ role models. This is because negative representations shape settler colonial responses to Aboriginal children and their fathers, they represent actual power dynamics that structure inequality, and they are internalised in ways that harm self-esteem and limit action. Zach’s Ceremony attempts to defeat stereotypes by taking them on directly, but in so doing arguably surrenders too much power to them by misrecognising invulnerability for strength. The most powerful moments of that film, conversely, were those in which Doomadgee lost control of the narrative – where his attempts at control were undone, and we find that the best course may have been to relinquish it. In My Blood It Runs shows the infinitely small difference between becoming a stereotype because that’s the only option available and finding a voice to speak truth to power. Dujuan, watching footage of teenagers being ‘cruelled’ in detention, could imagine himself in their place. Just as Dylan Voller was able to speak truth to the Royal Commission into the Protection and Detention of Children in the Northern Territory, Dujuan spoke his truth to the United Nations. Still, each would be haunted by those representations of them, which takes enormous reserves of strength to push back against. Robbie Hood, conversely, weaponises the hoodlum stereotype against itself, neutralising colonial power by laughing at it.

The use of genre to orient settler viewers to the messaging of these films brings different affordances to each of these texts. The fly-on-the-wall positioning of the viewer in the two documentaries allows settler audiences to forget their complicity in colonialism, to an extent – although In My Blood addresses viewers directly at the film’s close, asking them to support organisations doing decolonising work in education. As a comedy series, there is arguably more scope for Robbie Hood to amplify the irony within settler representation of Indigenous boyhood, which projects the violence of colonial systems onto those subjected to them. The structure of comedy reduces the burden placed on Aboriginal protagonists, instead throwing it back to colonisers who live in bad faith. As with Dujuan, their sovereignty is not an issue to them; but unlike Dujuan, they seem relatively unconcerned with the consequences of settlers’ denial of that sovereignty. All these texts and the boys they centre share a connection to place, whether that connection is one of veneration (Zach), immanence (In My Blood), or ennui (Robbie). That connection is sovereign, regardless of whether colonisers recognise it as such, referendum or not, and whether their fathers are ‘good’, ‘bad’, or indifferent.

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank members of the Feminist Boys Studies Research Group – particularly Catherine Driscoll, Grace Sharkey, Tim Laurie, and Shawna Tang – for providing feedback on an early version of this article, and Zain Swaleh, Hsu-Ming Tao, and Iqbal Barkat and other members of the Cultural Theory Group at Macquarie University for feedback on a draft. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their generosity and wisdom. This research was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowships funding scheme (project FT170100210). The views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily those of the Australian Government or Australian Research Council.

Disclosure Statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number: FT170100210].

Notes on contributors

Joanne Faulkner

Joanne Faulkner is a Senior Lecturer in Media and Communication at Macquarie University, Sydney, researching the cultural and political significances of childhood in the settler-colonial Australian imaginary. Her most recent book is Representing Aboriginal Childhood: the politics of memory and forgetting in Australia (Routledge, 2023).

Notes

1 More explicitly racist were claims by Sky News presenters Cori Bernardi and Andrew Bolt (Bolt 2023) and unattributed No campaign social media advertisements, declaring that the voice would ‘create a race-based apartheid system’ (see Davidson 2023; Bogle 2023), giving preferential treatment to Aboriginal people over settlers; or the incredible claim by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price that there are ‘no ongoing impacts of colonisation’ (Price 2023).

2 I refer here to Chelsea Watego’s book, Another Day in the Colony (2021), which itself references a phrase often spoken by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people when reflecting on the everyday racism of events that illustrate well the structure of colonialism in Australian society.

3 I reference here a morning television segment on Sunrise in 2018, where an all-white panel of media commentators – with no expertise or even acquaintance with the laws and practices of child protection in the relevant state or elsewhere – who pronounced that Aboriginal children in the Northern Territory were being abused by their fathers and the solution should be that the laws are changed so that ‘white families’ can foster and adopt child victims. The ‘laws’ they referenced were in fact guidelines – the Aboriginal Child Placement Principle (ACPP) – that recommends that when children at risk are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander children, services should first assess family members as foster carers, then potential Indigenous foster carers within the child’s community, then Indigenous foster carers, then non-Indigenous carers only as a last resort. While the ACPP appears clearly to favour First Nations over non-Indigenous carers, in practice it is rarely applied (see Davis 2019, xiv).

4 Notably, it is arguable that the Stolen Generations has continued into the present, notwithstanding the shift away from assimilation policy and state control of Aboriginal affairs after the 1967 referendum that gave the Commonwealth the capacity to make laws about Aboriginal peoples (‘race powers’), thus formalising the end of the Protection Act era. States still remove Aboriginal children from their families and communities disproportionately under Child Protection powers, as negative stereotypes shape the decision making of ‘street level bureaucrats’ and decision makers above them. This is amply demonstrated by Davis’s review of the NSW Child Protection system (2019).

5 Lilly Brown discusses a particularly vivid instance of the hypervisibility of Indigenous children within state apparatuses, and particularly characterisation of them as potential criminals, in the NSW police force’s Suspect Target Management Plans (STMP): ‘proactive’ policing, or an effort to prevent crime by means of the racial profiling of First Nations children. I owe a debt of gratitude to one of my anonymous reviewers for directing me towards Brown’s work.

6 A ‘kettle logic’ is the term Derrida (1998, 6–7) ascribed to an incoherent but comprehensive set of arguments made to deflect responsibility for a wrong, after a scene Freud describes in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). In Freud’s example, one person returns another’s kettle after it has been damaged, but shifts blame for the damage by making three contrary statements: (1) the kettle’s not broken; (2) the kettle was like that already when you gave it to me; and (3) I’ve never borrowed a kettle from you. In the case of settler colonialism’s kettle logic, we might say that the coloniser argues (1) Indigenous people are not ‘broken’ – rather, they have benefited from colonialism; (2) Indigenous people were already broken before ‘we’ arrived here – their culture is inherently violent and maladaptive; and (3) they were never here in the first place (Terra Nullius).

7 As I have argued elsewhere, the theme of ‘blighted childhood’ characterised The Australian newspaper’s commentary on the killing by police of Walpiri youth Kumanjayi Walker and correctional officers’ torture of inmates of the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre. See Faulkner (2023).

8 Larissa Behrendt (2006) describes the experience of having her Indigeneity questioned because she lives in Sydney, emphasising the many layers of history that marks land and continuity of First People’s presence in cities. Bronwyn Fredericks (2013) discusses the disparagement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who live in cities alongside a related racism against fair skinned First Nations peopled (including Behrendt), referring to News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt’s campaign against Indigenous people with light complexions, predominantly in academia and the culture industry. Frances Bodkin’s work (see 2013) cultivates conceptions of urban custodianship and the preservation of stories on country that is intensively colonised.

9 The Block was significant to generations of Sydney-dwelling Aboriginal people as the seat of life and activism. See Lorna Munro and Joel Sherwood-Spring’s podcast Survival Guide, and particularly episode one, for an account of the continuity of colonization through the gentrification of Redfern and adjacent suburbs:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/2qM1jeBw9u53kNGVMe1jd1?si=pq33HrVJQuO15ObF8e-8pQ.

10 The relegation of Zach’s brother to the margins of the film, when he had also been selected for initiation, reveals Alec’s limited conception of Indigenous masculinity to an individualist frame. Zach’s lateral, filial relationship with his brother is evident, notwithstanding the film’s skirting of the younger Doomadgee.