Shifting Sands – My Colour, Your Kind
Clip 1: Rugged cross
1 min 23 sec
Taken from the short film Shifting Sands – My Colour, Your Kind (1998)
Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be PG
Availability of the complete title
Please be aware that this clip may contain the names, images and voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who may now be deceased.
Curator’s clip description
The clip opens with billowing curtains, a statuette of Christ and the close-up of a young albino girl (Melissa Middleton). In flashback the young albino girl closes her eyes as her mother (Christine Palmer) smears her with mud. A cross crashes through a pane of glass, and the young girl is running towards a security fence.
Curator’s notes
It was a resistance tactic by Indigenous parents to smear any fair-skinned children with mud or charcoal with the intention of fooling the authorities – usually the police – who were employed to remove children from their families and place them in welfare. The writer/director Danielle MacLean references this strategy but makes it an extreme circumstance by introducing an Indigenous girl who is born albino, a condition where an individual is born without any skin pigmentation.
Romaine Moreton, curator
have teachers’ notes.
