Unsettling migrant frames: Reflections on the cinematic encounters between Italian migrants and Indigenous Australians

Stories of encounters between Italian migrants and Indigenous Australians have rarely been portrayed in film and documentary form by either Italian or Australian filmmakers, reflecting a lack of interest that is not incidental but constitutive to how migrants’ sense of belonging and identity is negotiated in contemporary Australia. This paper explores a series of on- and off-screen stories, such as those of Alessandro and Fabio Cavadini, of Jan Cattoni and of Clely Quaiat Yumbulul, that counter this absence. It argues that in doing so, these stories and works complicate our understanding of the position that migrants and Indigenous people occupy in contemporary Australia, un-settling dominant settler colonial frames of belonging and foregrounding the creative and decolonising power of transcultural storytelling.