Blackfulla Ways in a Digital World: The Book, the Film and Mobstock

Recently, I saw some of your kind of storytelling, you know, capturing images, especially drone images, videography of country.

Can you share with my listeners your country?

yeah yeah um i i've always loved drones and i've always been afraid to get one because of crashing it and the fear of that so there's a fear um but i through a recent contract was spending a lot of time across new south wales traveling to a lot of communities i was doing some consultation work with the new south wales treaty commission and my job was to tell stories from these consultations With all my first kind of consults, I was like, these are great, but I think there's a bigger kind of story that's missing from these yarns.

And that was the story of Country.

So I bought a little DJI drone.

It's like a Neo 2.

It's a tiny little drone that sits in hand and launches.

And that gave me the ability to shoot from up there and I could see Country better.

And I know western Victoria, so I know Gunditjmara country really well.

I was sent there from Brisbane to the southwest when I was a child to go and know country through my dad.

Even though my parents went together, mum made sure that happened, right? Whereas mum's from central New South Wales, so she's Wiradjuri and Wangabon, and I don't know her country well.

But through this work, I've been able to go out and learn more about it.

And the diversity of the Wiradjuri nation is, it's quite incredible because it goes from these kind of more mountainous areas of the orange region, you know, in Bathurst.

And then it goes down into this more plains as you go down towards Griffith and Lake Argelico.

And then you go out to up towards Forbes and then across to Ningen.

Ningen's quite, it's red dirt.

It's very... desert-like and putting a drone up.

So when you go to these country towns, everyone knows country towns, you get the same thing, right? You've got a pub, they've got a post office, they've got all the amenities, maybe a Kmart or country Kmart.

But if you look outside the towns, everywhere has these small national parks.

And so what I was doing was when we'd have a consultation in a town, I'd just go and map on the map a national park or I'd ask for locals recommendations where I should go and where I should put the drone up.

And that was, that's been an amazing opportunity to, to learn more about the country from that perspective.

And some of it doesn't get published.

Like it's not, but the footage is incredible to sit back at night and to be able to look at what the land looks like from the sky.

So it's a, it's from the view of our birds, you know? So the birds are seeing this every day they fly across it.

We don't get to really, cause we're not in a plane all the time, but the drone allows you to really see perspective and, And you can see story in the land.