A long Sunday breakfast, with visiting Melbourne space kid and activist Alex K and my friend and neighbour Ali B, an awesome Nunga filmmaker and academic. We’re discussing the controversial new film made by a whitefella which references an extremely painful deaths in custody situation in Point Pierce, and how the release of this film has angered and upset some members of the family and an already fragile community. Ali talks about who has the right to tell whose stories. The European notion of artist as auteur with inalienable rights to tell any story they choose just doesn’t cut it in Indigenous culture. What parts of my story are your story? She quotes Aboriginal filmmaker Ivan Sen, who has just made his first feature, Beneath Clouds, who says at his recent screening “I only make films about what I know.” At one point in the conversation Ali says “Capitalism already has its claws in the land” and her words stay with me all week.

It becomes clear that trans/Actions is more than a neatly contained project, discretely posited in time and space. It is a beginning towards creating a way of learning, of coming together with activists and the communities and networks they are part of, to work together for common goals, to be part of building a future and a heritage that all of our children to come can benefit from, to dispel or perhaps to heal the ghosts of history that haunt us all now.