I’m The Captain Now

(2016)

I’m The Captain Now is a personal re-authoring of Aboriginal histories combined with inherited familial archival imagery. This reauthoring, a fusion of fact and fiction, creates an alternative paradigm, offering a fresh lens to view and understand the complexities of conversations concerning faith, spirituality, and social justice from an Indigenous perspective. Through a combination of fictitious and honest narratives that parade playful references to assimilation through forced religious participation and Western instruction, these constructed visual narratives critically interrogate the multi-layered reality of growing up Aboriginal in a settler-colonial project during the time of The Policy of Assimilation, the Integration Policy, and the Australian 1967 Referendum change.

I’m The Captain Now provokes alternative realities, such as what Aboriginal culture might look like within the settler-colonial project of Australia if it were not forbidden and what Aboriginal culture might have looked like if Aboriginal people had been controlling the ‘settlement’ of Europeans throughout Australia.