Night’s High Noon: An Anti-Terrain (1988), 7:26 mins, Sydney.

Created amidst Australia’s 1988 bicentenary celebrations, Night’s High Noon proposes a very different interpretation of recent Australian history and identity. For Australia’s Aboriginal peoples, the Bicentenary represented two hundred years of dispossession from their land, cultural destruction and racial prejudice. Proposing an ‘anti-terrain’ or flipside to stereotyped notions of Australian identity, abstract ambient imagery is intercut with figurative references, including the image of outlaw and national hero Ned Kelly. Representations of indigenous peoples allude to the appropriation and objectification of Aboriginal peoples, their artforms and traditions, in white Australian popular culture. Truth and meaning are similarly problematised.1

• 1. Rachel Kent from “Peter Callas: Initialising History, video works 1980-1999”