ABSTRACT
Indigenous people in Australia, New Zealand and Canada were amongst the first subjects recorded on film by the early colonists. British anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon’s movies shot on Murray Island, in the Torres Strait region in far northern Australia in 1898, are often claimed as the world’s first ethnographic films. Murray Island or Mer, as it is known by Torres Strait Islanders, was to become the focus of a landmark High Court decision in 1992, effectively casting aside the legal fiction of terra nullius—the notion that Australia was an empty continent at the time of British invasion. The full ramifications of this legal decision, which acknowledged the continuation of Native Title in some areas, have yet to be realized. Treaty rights have been used by indigenous people in both New Zealand and Canada to argue for greater access to cultural resources—like media. At the time of writing, this aspect of the Australian legislation has yet to be tested in areas like indigenous education and media access (Harris 1994).
