ABSTRACT
How can good white people comprehend Indigenous sovereignty? This chapter analyses Jeni Thornley’s autobiographical film, Island Home Country (2008). Thornley wants to connect the colonial war against Aboriginal people with her peaceful family memories of growing up in Tasmania, Australia. The chapter analyses the conditions that produce the settler habit of forgetting colonial violence. Taking up the Aboriginal poet, Sam Watson’s counsel to ‘use Aboriginal sources as primary sources’, the film pursues, and becomes deeply informed by the creative work, voices and political will of Palawa writers and artists. Palawa confront the filmmaker with her own ‘possessive whiteness’ and complicity. Irene Watson proposes that what is needed is for settlers to be in a place that allows for uncomfortable conversations but questions if this is even possible. To respond to her proposition, the chapter engages with Ros Diprose’s notion of corporeal generosity. The anxious white filmmaker takes a back seat to negotiating Aboriginal sovereignty, and she (and her peaceful island home) is made strange. This chapter explores dissolving and waiting as forms of responsibility - learning the protocols to live in another’s country. Here might lurk a model for decolonising sociality: the emergence of more ethical forms of care and responsibility.
