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Prospero's Island

Ambivalent theatricals, troubled memories and heuristic uncertainty in Tracey Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls

Anne Le Guellec-Minel

Abstracts

Nice Coloured Girls (1987), by Australian film, photography and video artist of international renown Tracey Moffatt, is a short film that was produced in the run-up to the Australian Bicentenary Celebrations. Despite its partly autobiographical and documentary aspects, Moffatt’s first short film has, however, outlived its topical interest as a form of anti-colonial protest to become a classic work. The article discusses the multiplicity of perspectives and overlapping narratives, the experimental aesthetics and puzzling editing of this first short film, to show how Moffatt, while emancipating herself from any militant didacticism, works to destabilize heuristic prejudices and ironically show up the blind spots still present in representations of Indigenous peoples. The article also looks at the way, from the outset of her career, Moffatt makes a stand as an artist, at the confluence of Indigenous rock-art, of the Brechtian aesthetic of distancing and that of the avant-garde filmmaking of Maya Deren.

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  • 1 The 1967 Australian referendum approved the alteration of the Australian Constitution so that Abori (...)
  • 2 This appellation refers to two distinct cultural groups, which broadly gather some 250 different la (...)

1Tracey Moffatt is an Australian film, photography and video artist of national and international fame. As a photographer, she has held around 100 solo exhibitions of her work around the world. Her second short film Nightcries—A Rural Tragedy, was selected for official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990, and Bedevil, her first feature film, was also screened in Cannes in 1993. At the 2017 Venice Biennale she represented Australia with a solo exhibition entitled “My Horizon”. Moffatt defines herself simply as a contemporary artist producing work with global appeal. Yet as an Indigenous person born almost a decade before the Aboriginal peoples of Australia were granted citizenship1, as a woman whose grandmother and mother could only find employment in domestic service, and who was herself fostered out to an Anglo-Celtic family, Moffatt is someone whose rise to international fame bespeaks exceptional talent and drive. Although she has refused “ghettoisation as a ‘black’ artist within the art world” (Newton), much of her work deals creatively with social injustice and the suffering of minorities: Aborigines, women and migrants. Her first short film, Nice Coloured Girls, was released in 1987 in the run-up to the Australian Bicentenary celebrations. While not a straightforward documentary film, it captures well the period and the dissenting mood among Indigenous communities who saw little cause to celebrate the beginning of British colonisation. Protest, in particular over the lack of appropriate media representation, put pressure on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to create the Aboriginal Programs Unit in 1987. The Department was established for the production and purchase of programs dealing with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander issues2. In keeping with this struggle by Aboriginal people to regain some control over the way they were represented in the Australian media, Nice Coloured Girls attests to Moffatt’s ambition to provide a corrective to dominant representations of Aborigines in film.

2In a 2008 article on Nice Coloured Girls and Night Cries, Janet Watson took the existing critical literature to task for variously “pigeonholing” Moffatt’s work as indigenous, feminist or postcolonial, insisting on “the way in which her works deny a unified subjectivity and coherent reality”. Yet, although some critics are indeed more interested in the indigenous perspective (Vercoe, Gauthier, Pollock), the feminist one (Weatherston, Mellencamp, Bell) or the postcolonial one (Baron), these tend to overlap, contradicting Watson’s image of mutually exclusive approaches. More importantly, none of them are blind to interpretive challenges that the film’s generic and structural complexity, its epistemic ambiguities (Gauthier, Pollock, Vercoe), and its undermining of moral binaries (Daur) raise.

3With the distance of time (almost forty years after the film’s release) and considering the international recognition Tracey Moffatt has since then earned, it is easier to balance the risk of what anthropologist Faye Ginsburg saw as a critical tendency to fetishize the text and reify “culture” and “cultural difference” (Ginsburg 14), against the idea that a close reading is necessary better to understand Moffatt’s vision of art as an invitation to an ethical engagement with the fraught issue of cultural relations. Consequently, the present study will first analyse how in Nice Coloured Girls Moffatt uses the sequencing and layering of different visual and audio devices to produce an ironic counterpoint to the patriotic rhetoric of the late 1980s in Australia, while also refusing the didacticism (Kunapipi interview) of minority reporting.

4The second part of the article will explore further how the unsettling disjunctions between sound and image, and the disruptions of narrative cinematic conventions work both to nudge the viewer towards a position of active hermeneutic participation, and allow Moffatt to stake a claim as an innovative artist, a claim which is materialized in the film by a ubiquitous hand motif. This part will also look into Moffatt’s paradoxical combination of distancing devices that seem to call for sceptical intellectualisation, with an attention to tactile, emotion-inducing physicality.

5From the beginning of her career, Moffatt was involved in mediating minority perspectives. In 1982, fresh out of Art College, Moffatt shot a documentary film about an Aboriginal land rights demonstration against the Brisbane Commonwealth Games during Queensland Premier Bjelke-Petersen’s repressive rule. In 1987 she was commissioned by an Aboriginal organisation to shoot an HIV/AIDS campaign dance video better adapted to an Indigenous audience than the official videos. With funding from the Women’s Film Fund and the Australian Film Commission, she directed her first short film Nice Coloured Girls in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet of British ships at Sydney Cove. That year she was also involved in the production of another film commissioned by the Australian Bicentennial Authority to celebrate the diversity of women’s contributions to Australian life since the beginning of colonisation. Given the thematic convergence between the two film projects, local audiences and critics at the time saw Nice Coloured Girls as another of Moffatt’s contributions as an activist in Aboriginal politics, in this case in the form of a counter-narrative to the legacy of colonial discourses about Aboriginal women.

6From the start, the film establishes unexpected links between current-day Sydney and the beginning of British colonisation in Australia. The opening shot overlays an extract from A Voyage to New South Wales written by William Bradley, an officer of the First Fleet, on a bird’s eye view of Sydney by night, while the soundtrack mixes city sounds with the cries of seagulls, and the heavy rhythmic breathing and splashing sounds of someone rowing. In an ironic commentary on Bradley’s portrayal of an Aboriginal woman, rising Venus-like and primevally innocent from the sea to meet the colonizers’ boat (“One of them came into the water to the side of the boat; we ornamented this naked beauty with strings of beads and buttons round her neck, arms and waist”), the film then cuts to a handheld camera series of shots and reverse shots showing three white-clad, young Aboriginal women walking down Darlinghurst Road in Kings Cross, Sydney’s notorious night-entertainment and red-light district. The First Fleet reference does not merely serve as an introduction but runs through the 16-minute film, constituting a kind of hypotext of the young women’s progress from the street to a pub where they are picked up by a middle-aged, increasingly drunken white man who “escorts” them to a restaurant and then a nightclub. Hypertextuality, according to Genette, is a relation of derivation rather than of commentary between texts: the hypertext derives often in a parodic mode from an earlier, authoritative hypotext without deleting or masking it. Nice Coloured Girls could be described as an ironic intermedial palimpsest since the visual narrative focusing on the young women and their middle-aged escort is voiced-over with six alternating readings from colonial accounts of encounters between white settlers and Aboriginal women. The more recent, visual level of narrative brings into sharp relief the complacency of the early colonial one, but also ambiguously plays with colonial representations of Aboriginal femininity to tease out ideas of female empowerment rather than victimhood.

7The voice-overs are readings from A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, in New South Wales (1793) by Watkin Tench, an English captain-lieutenant who sailed with the First Fleet in 1788 (04:56-06:15; 08:12-09:23; 14:23-15:02), and from An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, vol. 1 (1798) by David Collins who was the founding Lieutenant Governor of the colony of New South Wales in 1788 (01:07-01:30; 06:38-07:08; 10:18-10:46). As indicated in the credits, the readings from Tench’s text are delivered in a wistful, lilting “Irish” voice which makes the text sound like poetry, while the readings from Collins’s are done in a colder, more supercilious “English” voice. Collins’s descriptions of the Aboriginal girls’ interactions with the colonists tend to be generic, resorting to a general truth present tense, stereotypical comparisons and referring to the girls as “they” by contrast to a perlocutionary “you” which invites the reader/listener to identify with the narrator:

If ever they deign come near you to take a present, they appear as coy, shy and timorous as a maid on her wedding night. But when they are, as they think, out of your reach they hollo and chatter to you, frisk and flirt and play a hundred wanton pranks equally as significant as the solicitations of a Covent Garden strumpet.

8On the other hand, Tench’s excerpts, which are much longer (4:38 compared with about 2 minutes for Collins) focus on one particular young Aboriginal woman, identified as “Gooreedeeana [of] the tribe of the Cameragal”, whom he says he met only twice. When she first comes to him “to complain of hunger”, he is struck by her exceptional physical attractiveness (as suggested by the focus on the girl’s bosom and mouth) but is at pains to present his interest in her as aesthetic and anthropological rather than sexual:

She excelled in beauty all their females I ever saw […] The firmness, the symmetry and the luxuriancy of her bosom might have tempted painting to copy its charms. Her mouth was small and her teeth, exposed to the destructive purposes to which they apply them, were white and unbroken. Her countenance though marked by some of the characteristic of her native land, was distinguished by a softness and sensibility unequalled in the rest of her countrywomen and I was willing to believe that these traits indicated a disposition of her mind.

9Historian Inga Clendinnen notes Tench’s “gentle” and “tender” style, and seems ready to take him at his word when he describes the way he dealt with his objects of study:

[He] was either unusually disciplined or unusually discreet in matters sexual. […] Tench chivalrously loaded her with all the bread and salt pork he could spare, and apparently sought no more reward than being allowed to measure her. (Clendinnen 154-155)

10Tench’s handling of the Indigenous woman in the interest of science could be considered quite “discreet” by contrast to the way other soldiers and settlers behaved. Yet his probing attitude, which even in his narrative links sexual attraction with the desire for knowledge, was clearly not to the young woman’s taste. In the fourth excerpt Tench tells us he “was seized with a strong propensity” to find out whether “the attractions of the Gooreedeeana were sufficiently powerful to secure her from the brutal violence with which the women are treated.” To satisfy his curiosity, he first asked her questions but on finding them “either ill-understood or reluctantly answered […] proceeded to examine her head, the part on which the husband’s vengeance generally alight[ed].” The final extract also mentions what he describes as his “eagerness and solicitude to inspect her” when they met again at the harbour’s mouth, but this time she managed to “elude [his] too near approach.” There is a clear disconnection between Tench’s probing, objectifying behaviour to this particularly “nice” young woman, and the way he describes his motivations as courtly manifestations of “solicitude”. Yet the gentle “Irish voice” chosen for the Tench voice-over (Tench himself was English) slyly encourages the view that the naval officer was indeed under the spell of the young woman’s “attractions”.

  • 3 Such as the 1989 Something More, or 1998 Laudanum photographic series.

11Claudia Benthien, who has explored the semantic and psychic dimensions of touch, feeling and intellectual perceptions in Skin: on the Cultural Border Between Self and World, disregards the seductive tones of the Irish voice, however, and uncompromisingly states that the alternating extracts from Tench’s and Collins’s accounts “melt into one almost seamless narration, the voice of a singular male colonizer’s discourse.” (Benthien 187) Yet what the seductiveness of the Irish voice brings across is that while the male colonizer’s discourse is always authoritative and self-legitimizing, the variations in its modes of expression can be interpreted in different ways. Firstly, of course, such variations are useful rhetorical tools to manipulate the reader/viewer into accepting the white man’s views. But, as in other later works by Moffatt3, they also reveal the complex interconnections between objectifying desire, sensuality and sexual agency.

12A non-Aboriginal audience never has direct access to what the young women are thinking as they only speak in an Aboriginal language amongst themselves and the readings—parodying the “expository” mode typified by a disembodied, authoritative narrator (Nichols 1991, 43)—replace the soundtrack of what conversation they have with their middle-aged escort. However, documentary-style subtitles in English are used to present the women’s views on the situation portrayed. The viewer learns they have no qualms in picking up a “Captain” (Aboriginal English for “sugar daddy”) on a Friday or Saturday night, getting him to pay for a night out and stealing his wallet when he is passed out drunk. We are therefore given a stereoscopic view of Aboriginal women as represented in First Contact writing and in a (partly) realist documentary-style film. Each portrayal reflects on the other, and the women’s views run through in contrast to white representations. The 18th century extracts portray Aboriginal women either as paragons of female beauty, as raucous “Covent Garden strumpets” or as shameless opportunists who spend the night on ships and come away with “spoils”. On the other hand, the subtitles reveal that the young women see the white men as “old bastards” and “creeps […] who should be with their family” and whom they feel justified to “roll and leave for dead”. Parodying anthropological films like Charles Mountford’s 1946 film Brown Men and Red Sand that present Aboriginal culture as frozen in time and tradition (Leigh), the subtitles suggest that although picking up a “Captain” has been common practice for generations, it stems less from cultural tradition than from economic straits: “Our relatives don’t like us to follow in their footsteps in this way but how can we not when we’ve got no money?” The line highlights the young women’s uninhibited attitude to a form of corrective predation that they consider justified by a continued unbalance in race relations, thus overstepping their older relatives to form a bond with earlier generations. Contrary to the racist media stereotyping of Aborigines the young women’s relatives would be chary of, the subtitle identifies the origins of this practice with the moment the settlers began to deprive Indigenous peoples of their food resources, which is why Vercoe states that “rather than creating new and empowered Aboriginal heroines for the 1990s, Moffatt chooses to site her characters in a colonial continuum”. (Vercoe 151)

13This continuum is made obvious when in the nightclub sequence, the young women who are shown dancing with their increasingly drunk “captain” are off-set by inserted shots of a tutelary-looking figure of a woman on a beach. The older woman’s hieratic pose, her bare shoulders and free-flowing hair denote a state of culture untouched by colonisation. In keeping with the “noble savage” idealising view, she seems at first to be gazing disapprovingly down the centuries at the young women. However, later, the woman nods to what the viewer interprets as justifications for their behaviour, and in the third shot, she laughs with relief when they manage to pick the man’s pocket without being caught; then she dodges out of frame, leaving the viewer gazing at an empty beach scene.

14The filmic narrative in the present thus provides a corrective for the historical representations of the readings, but the mood of the film is “cheeky” (Summerhayes 27) and also challenges the kind of political correctness that some Aboriginal and feminist activists thought was necessary at the time:

The resentment and anger from Aboriginal women and some white liberals against Moffatt’s Nice Coloured Girls were responses to its apparent failure to “salvage the denigrated image” of black women. (Langton 55-56)

  • 4 See for instance the four young women portrayed alongside a young man to illustrate why “even Austr (...)

15Salvaging is indeed not what the film sets out to do. Moffatt is not interested in presenting her characters as passive victims of the colonial situation. Instead, she chooses to focus on “girls”, traditionally subaltern figures in documentary4 and in fiction films (Brickman), and empowers them. In the soundtrack (00:44-00:48), an intradiegetic man’s voice can be heard singing a snatch from the opening of the Monkees’ 1966 teenage power theme song (“Here we come/Walking down the street/…”) as the young women, three abreast on the pavement, walk down Kings Cross chatting and laughing merrily, confident in their youth, their looks and friendship. Longer sound bites from 1953 “That’s Amore” by Dean Martin when the young women and the white “Captain” go to an Italian restaurant (07:25-08:07; 09:23-09:53), 1982 “Nasty Girls” by Vanity 6 when they are dancing in a nightclub (11:25-13:20), and finally Aretha Franklin’s “Evil Gal’s Blues” that accompanies the credits (15:03-16:18) all counterpoint the many visual and aural references to violence against women by showing the sexual power not so “nice” women can wield. Just as in Moffatt’s Night Cries: a Rural Tragedy where Jimmy Little’s 1963 hit rendering of Burl Ives 1961 “Royal Telephone” is used to shed a poignant light on the Stolen Generations’ experience, here, “the ‘mainstream’ likeability” (Verass) of Black American rock music is used to shine a light on the experience of Aboriginal young women that was ignored by wider Australia.

16Moffatt is therefore not trying to gloss over the abuse perpetrated against women. Indeed, the film showcases this abuse in a powerful, albeit almost subliminal fashion with a two-second-long black and white, close-range shot of a pair of strong white hands pressing down on a black woman’s head. This shot is inserted between two sequences in the restaurant, when the young women are alone at their table, their escort having lurched off, presumably to the toilet. The shot is silent, but it immediately precedes the reading from Tench’s voiced-over account of his examination of the Gooreedeeana’s head, which covers the man’s return to the table and the seemingly one-sided conversation he establishes with the young women. While the reading denounces black on black violence, the inserted shot shows white on black violence; we also witness white on white violence when the “Captain” roughly grabs a waitress’s arm to get her attention. More master/servant, male/female abuse is suggested when the same waitress fearfully looks back into the kitchen she has just emerged from while the threatening shadow of a pair of hands raised in anger appears on the wall behind her, very much in the German expressionist style.

17Yet Moffatt refuses to simplify matters by portraying women only as victims. The pub scene shows two Aboriginal women raucously fighting over an Aboriginal man, and even the young women’s escort is presented as an increasingly pitiful figure. He is a solitary figure throughout and first gets the contents of a glass thrown at him when he tries to grab the wrist of the waitress in the pub. Later, the young women look at him with open disgust and seem to ignore him when he speaks to them. In the club, before he passes out and is robbed, he is dancing like a broken puppet. A reverse close shot shows us the blurry, madly laughing face of one of the young women swinging to and fro at the camera, amplifying the readings’ descriptions of taunting Covent Garden strumpets and Aboriginal “coquettes” while Prince’s song gives voice to a “nasty girl” scoffing at “sailors” who have got “more water upstairs/ Than sugar on the candy cane”.

18Documenting the oppression and marginalisation of the Aboriginal population by settler Australia according to a victim/villain binary was not therefore, what Moffatt was dedicated to doing in Nice Coloured Girls. She has acknowledged the importance of earlier films denouncing the Aboriginal condition in Australia such as My Survival as an Aboriginal (1978), Wrong Side of the Road (1981), and Lousy Little Sixpence (1983), but from the start, she refused to be perceived only as a “black” artist within the art world and claimed the right to make experimental films: “Moffatt reacts against ethnography, the realist tradition of representing black Australia: it’s black, we can’t experiment with form” (Mellencamp 136). To do so, she had to emancipate herself both from dominant “white” expectations, but also from culturally and politically engaged Aboriginal ones: addressing the social issue of race relations involves the telling, as well as the keeping of many “secrets”, “recalling Michel Foucault’s sense of a secrecy that simultaneously protects people’s privacy and reinforces institutionalised abuse.” (Summerhayes) As Moffatt explained in an interview for an exhibition catalogue, the experience of working on a documentary about Aboriginal land rights protest in 1983 had been “both exhilarating and a nightmare”:

Some members of the group or rather the “collective” I made it with didn’t agree with the film, so they destroyed it (literally with scissors—on the night of the film’s premiere they chopped up nine months of hard work) and it was never seen. (Matt 10)

19Nice Coloured Girls clearly plays with the viewer’s expectations of what a documentary film about urban Aborigines should look like. Initially, the hand-held camera shots and ordinary street setting suggest that this might be a low budget reportage or documentary. But soon the viewer is aware of unsettling disjunctions between sound and image such as the use of acousmatic dialogues and sounds, as well as of the replacement of intradiegetic conversations by voice-overs, thus undermining the indexical linkage to the Sydney scene although the background sounds of the “real life” sequence are retained. The cinematic norms of continuity editing are similarly disrupted by the insertion of shots of framed paintings on a wall which serve as a backdrop to performed illustrations of the readings from Collins’s account: a white man’s robust hand and forearm having a tug of war with a very slim brown hand and arm over a small pouch of coins in front of an early colonial harbour scene depicting a small group of Aborigines in the foreground; ragged girls carrying dillybags (traditional woven-fibre bags) climbing up a rope ladder in front of the picture of a boat up on blocks. The artificiality of the set itself is made obvious when the camera backs out of the pub and the reverse side of the studio set becomes visible, or when what looked like a museum or art gallery wall is toppled backwards, revealing itself to be a moveable partition in a partially spot-lit studio. The stylized composition and framing of the shots, the gradual shifts from natural colour to sepia, or to black and white in the course of a single shot also heighten the expressionist atmosphere of the film, all contradicting comparisons with documentary realism.

20The most obvious purpose of the short film, therefore, is to play up and subvert the artificiality of the anthropological discourse used to document the “truth” about Aborigines. Moffatt’s expressionist temporal and spatial disjunctions, as well as her narrative dislocations are devices that produce what Bertolt Brecht termed the “A-effect”. This defamiliarizing effect was intended to make audiences distance themselves emotionally from the theatrical illusion and, in reflecting on its artificial environment, also question how it relates to real-life events. In his typology of documentary reenactments, Ben Nichols lists “Brechtian distantiation” as a form of typification from which, however, any realist dimension is absent (Nichols 2008, 85). While the bag-toting girls shown climbing a rope ladder might be reenacting the “typical” behaviour of Aboriginal women towards passing sailors alluded to in the readings, the museum setting and city sounds that frame the action clearly mark this performance off from the historical events it represents. Yet,

[t]he deflection away from realist representation allows, paradoxically, a stronger link to historical specificity to come into play through the filmmaker’s choice to go through the motions of gesturing to the historical rather than illusionistically representing it. (Nichols 2008, 74)

  • 5 Vercoe calls it “gold dust” (157), reading it as a metaphor for the projection of stereotypes.

21The nature of this link is “fantasmatic”: by forfeiting its indexical bond to the original event, the reenactment simultaneously acknowledges its disappointing inability to retrieve a lost object while generating a new object that can be a new source of pleasure for the viewer. A good example of the film’s haunting reenactment of historic relations between settlers and Indigenous peoples is the sequence which comprises a series of four shots involving a colonial black and white drawing of a river winding off between densely wooded banks towards the open sea in the background. In the foreground the powerful shapes of four massive rocks add a picturesque touch to the natural scene. The only visible signs of human presence are a small farm on some cleared ground on the far bank of the river, and the white triangle of a sail. The picture belongs to the kind of landscape art that is common in Australian museums’ early colonial sections, as is suggested by the gilded frame and the bare white wall on which the picture is hung. But our first fleeting glimpse of the picture is unusual: a cropped, frame-less view of it is partially revealed when an unseen person holding a fist-sized stone shatters the black glass obscuring it (9:47-9:49). This is followed by the first shot of a completely different series in the sequence, showing a white man’s laying his thick, powerful hand on a black woman’s back. Once a greenish wash5 has been sprayed over both, the hand is withdrawn, leaving a negative handprint on the woman’s skin. Next, we are given a more comprehensive view of the picture, hanging in its frame on the white wall (10:00-10:06). This is followed by another shot of the woman’s back, down which the paint is beginning to run, some drops trickling over the print left by the man’s hand like blood seeping from a wound, although here as in a following shot, Moffatt choses colours (green and yellow) that steer away from such an interpretation. Then (10:11-11:01), we return to a cropped view of the landscape. There is the sound of a spray-can being shaken and the hand seen in the first shot carefully covers the whole picture with black paint, retroactively explaining the first shot of the series. Next, the hand reappears, this time holding the piece of rock, and delivers a few blows that first bounce off the surface of the protective glass, leaving white scratches, then smashes it as seen in the first shot. Most of the picture is once more visible, except for some large shards, probably caught in the cropped-out frame, that still obscure the bottom third of the picture. Then we are back in the body-painting series, with the next shot reversing the white-on-black printing process: this time, a slender black hand is gently placed on a freckled expanse of fair skin that takes up the whole screen. Yellow paint is sprayed over it, revealing a clearly defined pinkish print when the hand is removed. In the last shot of the landscape drawing (11:11-11:24) that follows, we again see the partly obscured picture in its frame on the wall. But loud blows delivered behind the wall are heard and more shards fall to the floor. Finally, the whole “wall” topples backwards, substituting pitch-black darkness for the obdurate blank of the white partition and the indestructible painting. There is the sound of someone stomping off, off-camera.

22It should be noted that the way a spray-can works is similar to the mouth-spraying technique traditionally used in rock-art stencilling of spread hands, which may also have been used to spray the coloured wash in the film’s body-painting shots. In spite of this, and of the way the two series of shots—the first with voiced-over readings—are intricately woven together, commentators tend to deal with them separately. Thus dissociating the two series of shots, Lisa French suggests that a possible meaning for the spraying of the landscape picture could be that the unseen person is “metaphorically rewriting history by spraying over the image”, although she acknowledges that “the landscape remains intact underneath implying the dominant representations are always there”. She quotes another commentator’s interpretation of the shot as “metaphorically describing the impact of white settlement on Aboriginal culture” but points out that this commentator has wrongly described the hand spraying black paint over the picture as white, a mistake which would somehow invalidate the interpretation. French also mentions another reading suggesting that the sequence showed an Aboriginal woman expressing her rejection of the European depiction of the landscape by spray-painting it black and shattering the glass (Harding 11). Although painting over and smashing art are generally considered as similar acts of protest vandalism, in this case the protest seems quite pointless as the shattering of the blackened glass only reveals that the painting underneath is intact. French then turns for support to the voiced-over extract overlaid on the sequence. This is Collins’s account of how a native woman “not knowing how to account for” her mixed-race baby’s lighter skin-colour “actually held the poor babe repeatedly over the smoke of her fire and rubbed its little body with ashes and dirt to restore it to the hue with which her other children had been born”. According to French:

The voice-over perhaps supports this reading: during this sequence the audience hear the story of a black woman who had a half-caste child and attempted to “supply by art what she found deficient in nature.” Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and each culture beholds in its own way.

23However, as Moffatt is an artist who was raised in both cultures, such cultural relativism comes across as rather too unproblematic. Besides, the vandalising sequence is followed by the gentler black-hand-on-white-back printing referred to above. Certainly, at the end of the sequence, the whole museum-space illusion is knocked down, suggesting that since the seeming transparency of cultural constructs like this colonial view of the land cannot be smashed, a more radical solution is needed: doing away with institutionally-approved representation altogether. But such an option in a film that thrives on palimpsest, that is to say the overlay rather than the obliteration of images, can only be a temporary or humorous solution.

24This is why suspicion of, rather than trust in, Collins’s account seems to be called for here. A well-known meaning-creating device in film representations consists in synchronizing visual and aural material. When one is not a mere illustration of the other, the viewer more or less consciously attempts to recreate a meaningful link between the two, usually on the assumption that both visual and aural levels are meant to deliver the same message. Yet here the visual performance arguably works better as a criticism rather than as an illustration of the excerpt that is read out as the performance unfolds. Indeed, the idea that an Aboriginal mother should want to blacken up her mixed-race new-born may sound convincing when the proposition is uttered in an educated-sounding voice. There is no way to ascertain whether the scene actually took place, and if it did, what the Aboriginal woman’s intentions really were. But smoke is traditionally used in ritual Aboriginal ceremonies, in particular to welcome a baby in the community. In this case, the practice is under the responsibility of women. (Seymour) It is possible to argue, therefore, that Collins reinterpreted an Aboriginal mother’s customary ministrations to her child to suit his purpose: he othered the woman’s behaviour as dangerously naïve or stupid, while also implying that she shared his racist outlook since she supposedly considered that her baby’s lighter skin tone was “deficient”. Whether Collins believed in his own story or just wanted to entertain his English readers, this exotic representation of a first-hand encounter was obviously produced within the framework of the colonial ideology of the time. One strand of Moffatt’s visual performance works to denounce this framework, whose enduring power of conviction is symbolized by the untouched painting hanging neatly on the white wall, while the other strand, that of the body-painting shots, complexifies representations of racial relations.

25That colonial historical accounts should be unproblematically enlisted to support postcolonial readings of Moffatt’s film may strike as surprising, but French’s interpretation is not the only one attesting to the power of persuasion such accounts hold. For instance, referring to Martine Spensky’s study of imperial biopolitics and colonised women’s bodies, Anna Doyle has recently stated that Collins’ comment “supports this reading of women’s tactical yet tragic desire to take control on their reproductive capacities and children.” (Doyle 63) Collins claimed the woman was using smoke to blacken up her baby, but Doyle seems to be suggesting that this woman was so traumatised that she was trying to scorch it: “[she] put it next to a burning fire so to turn its skin blacker and hide the “whiteness” of the baby that would betray the traumatic trace of sexual abuse.” (Doyle 63) This other form of othering only confirms the relevance of the sequence’s ironic closing performance which results in the whole partition being knocked down. The fact that shattering a colonial discourse’s claim to unmediated truth about objectified “Aboriginality” remains an on-going process confirms the relevance of Moffatt’s 1987 demonstration. As stated by Benthien:

Literature—the genre of travel accounts in particular—has played a pivotal role in perpetuating and normalizing colonial oppression and exploitation. Colonial literature, colonial discourse, is a discourse of strangers, but one that is still such a given that it easy to be blinded by it. (Benthien 189)

26What is particularly interesting about the whole sequence is that although Moffatt’s film targets enduring colonial prejudices, it does so in a very roundabout way, which allows for much perplexity and a variety of interpretations. As Daur puts it, “we can never be sure if our filling in of [the] gaps are exactly the narrative version(s) that the artist had in mind, since there are always other options for telling the story.” Yet I would disagree with her view that Moffatt, “reduces her authorial prerogatives” by leaving “more room for spectators to make their own connections” (Daur 206).

27Indeed, by off-setting First Contact testimonies with stylized yet recognisably realistic night-life scenes in Kings Cross, Nice Coloured Girls seems to issue a “truth claim” of a sort, “positioning a relationship to history which exceeds the analogical status of its fictional counterparts” (Renov quoted in Summerhayes 36). But the film does so in what could be described as both poetic and performative documentary modes. According to Nichols, the poetic documentary mode involves the exploration of associations and patterns established by temporal rhythms and spatial juxtaposition:

[T]he poetic mode is particularly adept at opening up the possibility of alternative forms of knowledge to the straightforward transfer of information, the prosecution of a particular argument or point of view, or the presentation of reasoned propositions about problems in need of solution. (Nichols 1991, 102-103)

28Instead of straightforward denunciation of colonial prejudice, the sequence invites the viewer to work out a way of understanding the juxtaposition of seemingly unrelated visual and aural elements. It can also lead us to consider how exotic, othering discourses or spectacles distract from the ethical responsibility owed to another human being, as suggested by the two-way body-painting sequence. In this case, acknowledging a sense of a shared humanity with the native woman would entail putting into doubt Collins’s view that she would endanger her baby’s life just to give it the right skin tone.

29As for what Nichols describes as the performative documentary mode of filmmaking developed in the 80s and 90s, it presents truth as relative, placing greater emphasis on the affective dimensions of experience for the filmmaker, and giving the human body pride of place as focal point for emotional affect (Nichols 1991, 95). Insofar as Nice Coloured Girls can be considered as offering a counterpoint to straightforward documentary filming, the silent body-painting sequence fits Nichols’ “performative” category in that it reminds the viewer of the intimate, tactile experience of either violent or loving interracial relationships, the very same the colonial accounts seek to repress by invoking a pseudo-scientific, objectifying gaze.

30The sensual physicality of some of these shots could also support the argument that Nice Coloured Girls holds out an interesting alternative to the kind of cultural defeatism identified by anthropologist John von Sturmer:

There is […] a destructiveness directed at Aboriginal societies, that they […] can only be treated as spectacle, as tableau. Is it because they lie beyond the possibility of a truly lived engagement? (von Sturmer 128)

31Moffatt, however, is wary of the prelapsarian sensuality that a filmmaker like British Nicholas Roeg in Walkabout (1971) looked for in his Aboriginal characters as a cure for destructive white constructs of sexuality and attitudes to Nature. Her approach is much more imaginatively ambivalent and formally self-conscious. In an interview before her Venice Biennale exhibition, Moffatt spoke of her fascination with film noir grainy suggestiveness:

I draw on cinema, old movies, particularly film noir, late 40s film noir. It’s before the 50s started, so it’s not that sharp or stylish; it’s sort of poor film noir. […] I love a dirty old glass plate image that you’d find in an antique shop, or daguerrotypes […] because often they were capturing something that wasn’t intended. (Convery)

32A sequence in Nice Coloured Girls that is particularly emblematic of Moffatt’s somewhat tongue-in-cheek “poor film noir” aesthetic shows one of the young women following a young man “outside” the “pub”. The “door” is just an oblong, smudgy pane of clear glass, or more probably lowgrade plexiglass, that the actors just edge around. The sheet has black hand-painted borders and the word “PUB”, visible in reverse. The pair stand framed behind this screen which distorts the light and blurs the outline of their backlit profiles. A tracking shot moves closer to them then retreats, the colours gradually changing from low-key natural to bluish-black and white, then again to sepia, while the lilting “Irish” voice recites the account of the Gooreedeeana’s fabled beauty. The highly self-conscious mise en abyme effect of the black frame within the doorframe within the framing shot is reminiscent of the highly stylised conventions of film noir. The “dirty old plate glass image” effect produced by the blurry sepia shot of the young couple could be meant to create a mood of compassionate nostalgia, softening the edge of the postcolonial critique Tench’s portrayal would otherwise call for. The “something that wasn’t intended” that the scene brings out in Tench’s narrative is perhaps a yearning for a form of non-exploitative connexion with the young Aboriginal woman that Moffatt, against all historic evidence, may suggest was/is/will be possible. At any rate, the movingly unsettling power of evocation of the image that accompanies the voiced-over quotation makes Benthien’s claim that “[w]hat’s at stake here is not esthetics but the de-assimilation, the othering of dominant discourse” (Benthien 189) sound too reductive. Moffatt mentioned the 1940s and 50s “avant-garde anthropological artist” Maya Deren (Beaulieu) as one of her sources of inspiration (Moffatt interviewed by Lehan). Like Deren, she clearly uses film as a way to create an experience.

33As an attentive viewing of the short film reveals, the hand motif, so forcefully foregrounded in the sequence described earlier, runs throughout the film. In the diegetic scenes, a waitress looks up at gesticulating hand shadows projected onto a kitchen wall; one of the young women’s friends, who appears both in the pub and the nightclub scenes, wears a T-shirt with a handprint motif. Spread hands are also conspicuous in the non-diegetic scenes of the tug-of-war over a small purse, and of girls clambering up a rope ladder. But with the white-hand-on-black-skin/ black-hand-on-white-skin sequence, Moffatt is literally making her mark as an artist. The age-old hand-print resist technique was used in rock art, and has remained alive for much longer in Australia than anywhere else in the world. So, by adapting a performance of this cultural ritual in her film Moffatt asserts the existence of a creative continuity between her own work and her Aboriginal forebears’. However, by extending the positive/negative print concept, with a white hand as well as a black one taking part in the printing process, the artist also insists on the racial and cultural interconnections both in contemporary Australia and in her work.

34The sequence may also tap into the kind of poetic exploration of the photographic imprint, the “That-has-been” that Roland Barthes developed in Camera Lucida and Rhetoric of the Image. The process of light-writing in photography proves that something “had to be there” to shape the light. Visual perception also involves an imprinting process (in this case on the retina), but only the photograph holds a lasting trace of a former presence:

[The photograph] establishes not a consciousness of the being there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spatial immediacy and temporal anteriority, the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then. (Barthes 44)

35Barthes’s amazement at what he sees as the photograph’s scandalous transgression of the logocentric association of the real with the present is particularly relevant here. In the film, the hand-printing shots are entirely silent and once each hand is removed, the camera lingers on the fixed resulting image for several seconds.

36If one agrees with Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s view that “interpretation, that is, the identification and/or attribution of meaning” should not be considered as “the exclusive core practice of the humanities”, then it is possible to experience this performance as a “production of presence” (Gumbrecht 3). Building on Gumbrecht’s concept in the context of transcultural relations, Bill Ashcroft explains that:

The tangible effects of the particular communication media (sound, print, and computer screen, for instance) will affect the meaning, and this production of presence will occur in any form of communication, in which its material elements will “touch” the bodies of the persons communicating. (Ashcroft 114)

37The trickle of colour on the woman’s skin, the freckles mapped out by the woman’s hand on the man’s, the scratches made by the rock when it first bounces off the painted-over glass pane, the shapes and sound of the shards when it shatters, or the shape of the three young women’s dark profiles when they lean forward to light their cigarettes, do not just document “reality”, nor are they just explorations of visual form. The way they are woven into the narrative suggests that they are an invitation to lean in, to pay closer attention to what Ashcroft terms the “material resonance” of the text:

Being open to Otherness in the transcultural text by being open to the materiality of its language—is […] to enter into a subtle ethical engagement in which true dialogue is enabled, as Bakhtin suggests, but where the reader goes further by refusing to capture that Otherness in an act of interpretation. (Ashcroft 126)

38Since the controversy surrounding the Bicentenary celebrations of the late 1980s, several ground-breaking legal decisions (the 1992 Mabo decision, the 1996 Wik decision) have helped alter mainstream Australian perceptions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations and of their claims for recognition in contemporary Australia. The negative outcome of the 2023 Indigenous Voice for Parliament campaign shows how hard some media and politicians work to thwart the movement towards fairer political representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, but in the art world more artists identifying as Indigenous have gained national as well as international recognition. Twenty years ago, Tracey Moffatt herself was presented as “probably Australia’s most successful artist ever” (Fink), and although her current work is quite different from Nice Coloured Girls in that it has moved even further away from the documentary approach, this early piece remains very representative of a creative process which has allowed her so signally to make her mark. In 2008, for instance, Moffatt was invited to participate in an exhibition entitled “Female Trouble: the camera as mirror and stage of female projection”. Her signature reversal of what was long considered to be the “Aboriginal (and female) Problem” into an exploration of the mechanisms and the blind spots of dominant representations is quite as relevant today as it was in the eighties. The troubled sense of uncertainty that Tracy Moffatt’s work creates in the viewer’s mind leaves room for what could described as a transcultural contact zone where the fierce desire to “know” the Other has not always already policed cultural and gender difference into meaninglessness.

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Bibliography

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Notes

1 The 1967 Australian referendum approved the alteration of the Australian Constitution so that Aborigines could be counted in the national census and giving the Federal Government the power to make special laws for Aboriginal people in states. This provided Aboriginal people with a symbol of their moral and political rights even if voting only became compulsory for Aboriginal people as it was for other Australians in 1983.

2 This appellation refers to two distinct cultural groups, which broadly gather some 250 different language groups and cultures.

3 Such as the 1989 Something More, or 1998 Laudanum photographic series.

4 See for instance the four young women portrayed alongside a young man to illustrate why “even Australian savages” might enjoy “a little piece of paradise” in William Jackson’s 1917 Chez les sauvages australiens.

5 Vercoe calls it “gold dust” (157), reading it as a metaphor for the projection of stereotypes.

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References

Electronic reference

Anne Le Guellec-Minel, Ambivalent theatricals, troubled memories and heuristic uncertainty in Tracey Moffatt’s Nice Coloured GirlsMiranda [Online], 30 | 2024, Online since 20 September 2024, connection on 19 April 2026. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/61268; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/12hwb

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About the author

Anne Le Guellec-Minel

Maîtresse de conférences
Université de Bretagne Occidentale
anne.leguellec@univ-brest.fr

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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