‘Uncle Major Sumner on the Coorong’ from ‘Ringbalen River Stories.’
Ringbalin – River Stories is a geo-located documentary that invites you on a journey along Australia’s great Murray Darling Rivers, with Aboriginal Elders from the oldest cultures on earth acting as your guides. It contains dozens of traditional and personal stories and takes the form of a film, an iPad/iPhone App, and website.
This story starts in 2010 during Australia’s worst drought in history. The Murray Darling River was dying. A group of Aboriginal nations united to try to save the river and the life that relied on it by performing the traditional Ringbalin ceremony.
It took them on a 2,300 km journey following the river system, and we captured this historic experience on film. We went along to film what happened. By the time they had finished dancing, the rain was falling, and what followed were the biggest floods on record.
At the SCANZ 2015 residency we would seek to create a geographical cycle of storytelling with local traditional owners and investigate extensions of our current successful work Ringbalin River Stories as an international layer of geolocated narrative and knowledge.
As a part of our residency project we want to take field trips to connect with local traditional owners and investigate their methods of story telling and collaborate to make content such as short films, audio stories and photo stories which we would hope could be presented in a variety of forums and platforms.