Tracey Moffat - Creating Narratives & Th Personal And Public

Question 1

Tracey Moffat: Personal Background

Answer 1

1. Born in Brisbane, Australia in 1960, in the working class suburb of Mt. Gravatt.
2. She was born to an aboriginal mother.
3. Her biological mother had difficulty raising her 5 children due to the economic, social and political oppressions associated with being an Aboriginal woman at the time. So, her and her siblings were fostered out to an older white woman.
4. She maintained contact with her biological mother, black family and with the aboriginal community. Privileged, as she was able to grow up with ties to her black family while being raised by her white foster mother.

Question 2

Australia History

Answer 2

1. Australia’s policy toward Aborigines into the 1920s was extermination.
2. Segregation of Aborigines on what was called “reserves” came next.
3. In the late 1930s, assimilation became the new policy. Full bloods were distinguished from those of mixed descent.
4. The aboriginal children who were forcibly removed from their parents/ families are known as the “The Stolen Generations”.

Question 3

Australia History: Assimilation Policy

Answer 3

1. Biological absorption”: the desired “removal” of Indigenous physical characteristics(“breeding out” of Aboriginality).
2. “Social integration”, whereby Indigenous cultural or social practices would yield to non-Indigenous social and cultural practices.
3. 1930 - 1970

Question 4

Integration of Australian History & Moffat’s Personal History

Answer 4

1. Interrogates the self.
2. Interrogation is predicated upon motifs that implicate her own personal history while cross-cutting into and exploring the broader arenas of interracial relationships, postcolonialism, gender ideology, and capitalism.

Question 5

Nice Coloured Girls (1987)

Answer 5

1. Nice Coloured Girls relates the survival strategies of three urban Aboriginal girls who utilise their sexual capital by luring a ‘Captain’ (sugar daddy) and encouraging him to become senselessly drunk before stealing his money.
2. Moffatt admits, this accurately depicts her teenage years when she and her sisters participated in similar activities”
3. “The overt tenor of this narrative is one of ironic vindication that inverts the power differentials inherent within a paternalistic, neocolonial, and capitalist system through empowering the marginalised at a micro-level” (Watson, 2008)

Question 6

Night Cries (1993)

Answer 6

1. Night Cries is wrenchingly emotive, capturing the tensions and frustrations of a mother-daughter relationship juxtaposed against evocations of childhood nightmare. Against the backdrop of a surreal desert setting, the film portrays a middle-aged Aboriginal daughter tending her aging and infirmed white foster-mother.
2. Night Cries realises Moffatt’s personal background of being fostered into a white family.

Question 7

Up in the Sky - photo series (1997)

Answer 7

“Black and white photographs, some of them colour tinted, set in a shanty town in the Australian outback where the meeting of aboriginal and white cultures in a desert landscape is explored in a detail which is at once surreal and comic” ( Bradbury, 1998).

Question 8

Tracey Moffat: Professional Background

Answer 8

1. Visual artist working primarily in photography, film and video art.
2. Her work often about yearning and desperation. Her work draws on the socio-political history of Australia, art history and her personal history Also draws on cinema ( including Hollywood) and the mass media including television.
3. Her art is inspired by popular culture and memories from her 1960s childhood and 1970s adolescence.