For the screen

Two documentaries I was involved with.

I spent more years than I care to remember trying to become a screenwriter. There were all the film scripts for Jandamarra, that got close, but no cigar. I wrote all of the treatments and most of the scripts for a 13 x half hour kid’s TV series that came within a whisker of happening, and became my Barefoot Kids novel.

There was some serious development work on a couple of other projects. And in the mid-2000s I did a lot of the production grunt work and writing on a privately produced documentary called Liyarn Ngarn that featured Pete Postlethwaite and Archie Roach.

The only formal credit I ever achieved though, was as the writer of a documentary called Jila: Painted Waters Of The Great Sandy Desert that screened on SBS in 1998. This was about the amazing Ngurrara Canvas, a giant-sized work  that was created by a collective of Indigenous artists from the Great Sandy Desert as evidence for their native title claim. View the video below.

Jila: Painted Waters Of The Great Sandy Desert that screened on SBS in 1998