Shifting Sands – My Colour, Your Kind

Clip 2: Born into light

Taken from the short film Shifting Sands – My Colour, Your Kind (1998)

Original title classification not known – this clip chosen to be PG

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

A young albino girl (Melissa Middleton) is walking along a desert road and a truck pulls up beside her. The driver (Rob Wenske) asks if she wants a lift. In flashback, a nun (Sylvia Merrick) reads from the bible and in the background two dark-skinned Aboriginal girls (Amanda Nardoo, Deanne Willets) are sweeping. The girls pause to take in the scene of the albino girl who appears to be the captive audience of the nun.

Curator’s notes

The lightness and the darkness are themes that are drawn out in Danielle MacLean’s short drama about an albino Aboriginal girl trapped between two cultures by virtue of a skin condition that robs her of family and community belonging. The two Aboriginal girls of darker complexion are positioned as being of greater distance from civility than the white-skinned albino girl, whom the nun believes should be different from the rest because she is light.

Romaine Moreton, curator

Teachers’ notes

provided by The Le@rning Federation

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This clip shows a young albino Aboriginal girl (Melissa Middleton) walking along a path in a dry landscape. This is intercut with close-up shots of hands grinding ochre. The girl continues along a red dirt road as a truck approaches her. The vehicle stops and the girl accepts a lift. The driver questions her, but she neither looks at him nor responds. They pass an Aboriginal man hitchhiking, and the driver makes a derogatory comment about him. A voice-over begins; the camera reveals it to be the voice of a nun reading scripture to the girl in a flashback, as two other Aboriginal girls watch from a distance. The clip includes music.

Educational value points

The filmmaker uses the main character’s albinism to highlight her isolation. Her skin pigment is the only thing that sets her apart from other black girls, yet to the white nun, who focuses on the superficiality of colour, she is different from those girls. ‘Albino girl’, as she is named in the credits, is not black or white, but is in limbo between cultures.

The clip emphasises colour and its ramifications, both through the visual content and the script. The clip juxtaposes a scene of the girl walking through the red landscape with a close-up of dark hands crushing red ochre, used in Indigenous ceremonies as body paint. The racist truck driver assumes that the girl is white and the passage of scripture that the nun reads to the girl emphasises that ‘you were once darkness but now you are light in the Lord’.

My Colour, Your Kind dramatises a tragic period in Australia’s history, when children such as the film’s main character were taken from their families. Bringing Them Home, the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, found that between one in three and one in ten Indigenous children were removed from their families from about 1910 to 1970. This group is referred to as the Stolen Generations. The practice was based on a belief that the children’s welfare was best served by assimilation into mainstream, or European, society.

The narrative of this short film explores the consequences of taking Aboriginal children from their families and having them raised by the church. In church-run mission schools it was believed that the welfare of Indigenous children would be improved through conversion to Christianity. The Bringing Them Home report found that mission schools largely trained children to be manual and domestic workers, roles seen as being productive, consistent with their prospects and useful. The two young Indigenous girls in the clip are shown performing manual work.

Albinism is an inherited condition in which the skin lacks the pigment melanin. Albinism may affect the eyes only or both the eyes and the skin. Albinoes usually appear to be very pale, with white skin and hair, and may experience problems associated with the condition, such as sensitivity to the Sun. Albinism is not infectious and cannot be reversed. The main difficulty facing people who suffer from albinism is ignorance of the condition among the general public, partly because it is so rare – only one in 17,000 people suffers from it.

My Colour, Your Kind is a portrayal in film of a person with albinism. In film and literature, characters with albinism have often been portrayed as villains, set apart not just by different colouring but by sinister behaviour. An example of this is featured in the film of The Da Vinci Code (2006).

In the film from which the clip is taken, the main character’s albinism can be seen as a visual device that underlines the isolation many Indigenous people experience due to their being ‘outside’ mainstream European society. Extended family and kinship ties are central to Indigenous identity and help define social relationships and obligations, as well as a person’s connection to and responsibility for the land. In being separated from family and community, some members of the Stolen Generations were denied this knowledge, and this in turn meant a loss of culture and identity. Separation from family proved devastating for many children and had lasting emotional consequences.