About

Join multidisciplinary artist Dr Fiona Foley in conversation with Associate Prof Sandra Phillips, from the University of Technology Sydney, following a screening of her new film Out of the Sea Like Cloud (10 mins). Dr Foley will also be joined by musicians Joe Gala and Teila Watson who perform in the film.

A Badtjala woman from Fraser Island, Queensland, Foley’s film looks at the oldest recorded encounter in song, by the Badtjala, of the 1770 Endeavour ships voyage when it and its crew sailed past Takky Wooroo, K’gari (Indian Head, Fraser Island). Activating a space not embarked on previously, and one little known to the Australian nation, Foley brings Indigenous Knowledge’s to the fore of the film by profiling the surviving English component of the Badtjala song which details the ships voyage and its observation of European men handed down over generations of Badtjala oral history. The film also pulls on another thread of Queensland history, the legal use of opium in the state of Queensland prior to the introduction of the 1897 legislation, The Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act.