Introduction

Since the discovery of gold in Australia in 1851, the extractive industries have been among the defining actors in the country’s commercial sector. The mining of gold, coal, copper, zinc, and iron ore has profoundly shaped the nation both economically and socially. It has led to the expansion of colonial settlement, creating infrastructure, causing a drastic increase in population, and enhancing property values. Today, the Australian mining industry remains a continuing key contributor to the national gross domestic product, since it generates economic growth both by mineral export income and by regional mining-related development (Pearson and Daff 42). This has had significant effects on the Indigenous population of Australia—the traditional owners of the land—particularly considering that, as Marcia Langton and Lisa Palmer note, it was the mining and exploration provisions given under agreements such as the Aboriginal Land Rights Act in the Northern Territory in 1976 that “caused the resource industries to lobby successive Commonwealth, State and Territory governments to diminish Aboriginal rights to enable easier access to Aboriginal land” (2). Mining and the mining industry have come to shape and control the environment and local social texture of remote Australian communities. The industry has also contributed to perpetuating racialized tensions through the continuation of violent practices such as dispossession, corruption, disenfranchisement, the demolition of sacred sites, and the destruction of the landscape and nature. These environmental considerations set the frame for an ecocritical engagement with cultural productions about, and fictional representations of, mining.

Contemporary Indigenous Australian filmmakers frequently focus on the irreversible alterations to both culture and landscape perpetrated by the colonizers and their descendants. The British colonization of Australia, starting in the eighteenth century, had a devastating effect on the Indigenous Australian populations and cultures. Due to waves of epidemic diseases brought over from Europe, including smallpox, measles, and influenza, as well as “multiple deliberate killings and a series of genocidal massacres” (Kiernan 250), the Indigenous population considerably declined: in 1788, when the so-called “first fleet” landed in Botany Bay, the number of Indigenous Australians was estimated between 500,000 and 750,000; by 1901, it had fallen to 100,000 (Kiernan 250). The introduction of a pastoral economy by the European colonizer posed a further immediate threat to Indigenous people, because the presence of large European livestock forced them into direct competition with the “settlers” for land and water. This resulted in violent encounters between colonizer and colonized, the continuous dislocation of Indigenous communities, and an ecological transformation of the Indigenous ecosphere that caused the demise of traditional means of sustenance.

The legacies of this violent history are prominently featured in the award-winning film Satellite Boy (2012), directed by Indigenous Australian Catriona McKenzie. Set in the Western Australian Kimberley region and framed as a David vs. Goliath coming of age story, Satellite Boy emphasizes the environmental and land rights issues intrinsic to this particular location by focusing on a young boy’s attempt to prevent the destruction of his home by a mining company. Criticized by some reviewers as politically elusive, the film clearly explores the transgenerational, long-term, proliferating conflicts in a region where the conditions for sustaining life have increasingly degraded. By referring to Rob Nixon’s book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), this chapter will argue that McKenzie’s cinematography consciously avoids the representation of violence as “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space” (Nixon 2) but instead alludes to unacknowledged forms of violence against humans and the environment, which is a “slow violence” of delayed destruction that, consequently, lacks instant sensational visibility. The film thereby explores the combination of violent colonial history and the slow violence of ecological destruction that plays out strongly in the Australian context.

Satellite Boy and the Effects of Mining

According to Alex Heber, Western Australia’s Kimberley Region has experienced a 500 percent increase in mining activity since 2003 and is expecting a further jump in proposed and current mining in the region. The hive of activity has been attributed to the onshore oil and gas industry in the Canning Basin, along with an increased interest in resources like uranium, bauxite, and copper (Heber; Freeman). The environmental impact of mining includes erosion, formation of sinkholes, loss of biodiversity, and contamination of soil, groundwater, and surface water by chemicals used in mining processes. According to the Centre for Conservation Geography, the extent of mining and exploration leases across the region are threatening 80 percent of the area’s rivers, wetlands, and flood plains (Heber). The surge in mining activity has thus increased calls by many environmental groups such as the Save the Kimberley Campaign, a non-profit organization that brings together Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian citizens, to enforce a regional land use plan to allot endangered areas particular protection since, as the abovementioned Campaign group argues, the damage affects and erases both nature and people:

If we lose our land … or [if] our country is somehow compromised we will be lost both as individuals and as a race of man. We will become like others who have no place in this land or this world. We will cease to exist. (“What’s at Stake? Culture and Traditions under Threat”)

Catriona McKenzie’s Satellite Boy can be understood as part of a larger movement in contemporary Indigenous filmmaking that responds to the permanent and violent marks that European colonization and its aftermath have left on the Australian landscape. Other cinematic examples in this tradition include Beck Cole’s Plains Empty (2005), which recounts the story about a young Aboriginal woman living in an abandoned South Australian mining camp, where she begins having visions of a ghostly young girl and is hence drawn into uncovering the hidden stories of this mining town’s past; Larissa Behrendt’s short film Under Skin in Blood (2015), which deals with the asbestos mines in New South Wales, and Goldstone (2016) by proclaimed Indigenous director Ivan Sen, which employs an Indigenous detective character to discuss corporate crime committed in the name of local mining companies and their profits. Within postcolonial ecocriticism, Indigenous Australian filmmaking has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement and activism to investigate the representation of environmental violence.

The function of postcolonial ecocriticism, according to Joni Adamson, is to work for “transformative change,” to develop “more plausible and adequate foundational concepts that make critical interpretation and political action meaningful, creative—and possible” (83). Cinema as an aesthetic as well as a (globally) commercial form of representation has such a transformative potential, as it can help viewers to “understand and change the local, national, and global processes that give rise to social and ecological problems,” to understand power relations, and to facilitate “alliances” between people “by framing human experiences in ways that encourage us to be responsible to each other and to the places we inhabit” (83). This is an admittedly ambitious mission for a film such as Catriona McKenzie’s Satellity Boy, which responds to ecological violence from a specific locality and also gestures outward to a more universal responsibility to create awareness of a global environmental crisis.

Satellite Boy tells the story of twelve-year-old Pete and his grandfather, Old Jagamarra, who have made their home in an abandoned drive-in cinema in the heart of the Kimberley. Old Jagamarra still lives according to Indigenous tradition (what he calls “old ways”), of which he is the main representative in the film. Fond as Pete is of his grandfather, he nevertheless gets bored of “the Dreamtime bullshit,” as he calls it. Pete misses his mother, who left him and Jagamarra for a new life in the city several years before, and he continues to hope that she will return so that they can open a restaurant together. However, when the extractive industries, in the form of the Waterford mining company, actually encroach upon their abandoned cinema, Pete and his friend Kalmain set out on a quest to confront this corporate Goliath at its own headquarters. Their trip takes them across the Kimberley’s harsh and dry landscape, where heat, hunger, and thirst are ever-present perils. Pete has to draw upon the outback wisdom and knowledge that Old Jagamarra has shared with him in order to survive the dangerous journey.

The film has been particularly criticized for its obliqueness in approaching political issues. For example, according to critic Tim Kroenert, the filmmaker has “opted to take the boutique arthouse” and “self-consciously arty” approach (Kroenert 9). Sandra Hall in her review blames McKenzie for “tak[ing] the tactful way out, as well as the most romantic one,” as the film only “canvass[es] the values and virtues of teaching the young the traditional ways without facing any of the adjustments that they have to make in facing up to the inevitability of change.” Addressing such transformations, Hall concludes, would turn Satellite Boy into a different, “much tougher” film. For the critics, the film’s beauty, its allusions to the “magical properties of the landscape,” and the subliminal message of McKenzie’s cinematography tell a too “gentle tale” (Hall) that does not cast a critical eye on Australia’s extractive industries. However, according to the director, this was never the intention of the film in the first place:

It’s not a political film. It’s not anti-mining. But through a whole lot of means, the world is disintegrating. They’re stripping everything. Even though it’s a resources boom … on a personal level, that means you just can’t drink the water and you just can’t eat. If you stay connected to country, you wouldn’t do that. (McKenzie qtd. in Maddox)

The film may not openly condemn the mining industry in the way that some critics might have wished, but I would contend that the movie is still efficacious when it shows the forced removal of Pete and his grandfather to make room for mining priorities: they are asked to leave their home without recognition of land rights, without compensation, and without any replacement housing. Furthermore, I would argue that by focussing on Pete, the eponymous “satellite boy” who represents a young generation of Indigenous Australians straddling the worlds of Aboriginal tradition and Western law, the film shows an explicitly Indigenous perspective on the country’s mining boom. Satellite Boy therefore explores the tension experienced by young Aboriginal people in rural communities, who are torn between, on the one hand, “modernity,” the wish to gain material advantages (represented by Pete’s mother, who left her son for a job in the city) and, on the other, rediscovering traditional, spiritual, and practical ways of life (represented by Old Jagamarra). The vast landscape, fractured by mining activities, acts as a metaphor for the now fractured Aboriginal cultures and families, a situation which, in the face of the environmental and human atrocities committed by the mining company, makes it inevitable for Pete to take action, and hence become political. The “symbolically pregnant image” of the run-down and hole-ridden drive-in cinema screen in the middle of the desert is therefore not “reduced to [a] mere oddit[y]” as one critic claims (Kroenert 10), but instead offers a blank page ready to be filled with an Indigenous perspective of the story that is unfolding. The holes in the cinema screen reveal like a window the landscape that extends beyond the protagonists’ home; a landscape whose importance resonates beyond the confines of the film because of the environmental crises intrinsic to the entire area (Judah 18).

In what follows, I will elaborate on the film’s more subtle political undercurrents, perceptible in its representation of the natural landscape as well as of man-made machinery, materials, and non-biodegradable objects scattered across the land. Crucially, I wish to suggest that images of extreme soil erosion and aridity amount to more than the “harnessing [of] the implicit existential awe of a veritable sea of heat-cracked mud and of the looming ringed-tone domes of the Bungle Bungle” (Kroenert 9). Rather, these images point to attritional and delayed destruction, as well as to the relative invisibility of the slow violence described by Rob Nixon.

The Representation of Slow Violence

Although climate catastrophes will or already do affect all of us and may ultimately lead to life becoming unsustainable for everyone on earth, most Indigenous scholars across the globe would agree that it is not the privileged who suffer most from environmental destruction but rather it is Indigenous peoples around the world, those whom Greta Gaard calls the “ground zero victims of climate change” (48). In places where environmental degradation is directly linked to colonialism and discrimination, the people from low socio-economic backgrounds are most profoundly affected by, for example, the extractive industries (Dolezal 2). This observation was taken up by Rob Nixon in his book Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, an extensive study on the interconnectedness of economic interest, political decision-making, and environmental degradation affecting the world’s most marginalized peoples. As the title of Nixon’s book suggests, these populations are the victims of “slow violence”—a type of violence that is not as overt or visible as armed conflict, but which erodes human socio-economies, livelihoods, and subsistence in an unhurried but steady process. As Nixon argues, slow violence “occurs gradually and out of sight”; it is “a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2). A major challenge posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence is, therefore, representational: “how to devise arresting stories, images, and symbols adequate to the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects” (Nixon 3)? How to accurately and engagingly account for and represent “climate change, the thawing cryosphere, toxic drift, biomagnification, deforestation, the radioactive aftermaths of wars, acidifying oceans, and a host of other slowly unfolding environmental catastrophes,” violent conditions that are “neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive” (Nixon 2)?

Nixon’s compelling questions allow us to better understand why criticizing Satellite Boy for being “earnest and eccentric but not wondrous or exciting” (Kroenert 9) fails to acknowledge the film’s representation of previously invisible forms of violence, which now materialize in environmental devastation and ecological crises. Pete finding and picking up an abandoned seashell in the middle of the rocky desert is more than an incidental and negligible reminder of former more fertile times, as it highlights the temporal dimension of the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects, namely the permanent marks that European colonization and its aftermath has left on the Australian landscape. Nixon argues that “violence is customarily conceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility” (2). Representations of slow violence, however, need to engage with a kind of destruction that is “playing out across a range of temporal scales” (2). Environmental violence, especially, he argues, “needs to be seen—and deeply considered—as a contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time” (8).

This temporal dimension of environmental violence in Australia is highlighted in Satellite Boy through the vivid depiction of non-Indigenous man-made materials and non-biodegradable, inerasable objects within the natural landscape. After realizing that he and his grandfather have to leave their drive-in cinema, Pete tries to burn a plastic cinema chair, only to find the plastic half-melted and the steel structure still in place. The natural elements, the scene seems to be saying, cannot erase something so grossly unnatural (Judah 19). Apart from the cinema screen, there are other large-scale structures that rot and rust in the landscape: a satellite dish in which the boys take refuge, and an abandoned camper van. When Pete and Kalmain set the latter on fire, they get into trouble with the police. The boys see no harm in their actions as the van is, for them, yet another “unnatural” structure that has no place in this landscape. Surely, as Tara Judah asks, “the abandoned, non-biodegradable object spoiling the stunning landscape ought to be the act of crime?” (19).

In Satellite Boy, the permanent markings left by colonization and Western industries upon the landscape contrast with the way Indigenous people relate to the land: whenever Indigenous characters write on the earth, they then erase the marks, leaving no physical blemish impressed upon the land. For example, when Pete’s “Uncle” draws directions on the sand, he immediately wipes away the markings. This demonstrates an understanding of nature, it seems, that is deeply rooted in traditional culture, as the viewer is told in the very first scene of the film. When Pete draws a line in the earth with a walking stick, his grandfather Jagamarra tells him to be careful: marking the land is telling a story, and Pete does not yet know what story he will tell. It is precisely the contrast between these two ways of marking and using the land—permanently versus temporarily—that compels the viewer to discern that nature is a witness to human violent acts.

Consequently, the representation of the land as filled up and marked by industries and technologies offers an acknowledgement of the slow violence of colonial history and its aftermaths. In contrast, Indigenous stories and knowledge are not necessarily literally but metaphorically imprinted upon the land, and the Indigenous protagonists are struggling to reclaim their position in such a permanently marked natural landscape. The protagonists are, however, not entirely unsuccessful. Indigenous films such as Satellite Boy, therefore, “prompt us to consider our quickly evolving subject positions, characterized by oscillating feelings of agency and helplessness in the face of contemporary ecological traumas” (Narine 9). Indigenous peoples are not only aware of the environmental violence enacted upon them but also they are developing various forms of interventions (aesthetic, political, or both) to expose the practices of international resource industries as a new form of continued colonial violence. In this way, Satellite Boy takes part in the transformative change where the aesthetic becomes the political, and where the political employs aesthetic means.

The reason why this interaction has been missed by many critics is that Satellite Boy, although it depicts the catastrophic effects of dispossession and destruction of landscape for Indigenous people, does not address a classic apocalyptic version of Australia (in the tradition of George Miller’s Mad Max, for example), and nor does it show explicit scenes of a conventionally spectacular environmental catastrophe. Different kinds of disasters, according to Nixon, possess unequal political and emotional weight:

avalanches, volcanoes, and tsunamis have a visceral, eye-catching and page-turning power that tales of slow violence, unfolding over years, decades, even centuries, cannot match. Stories of toxic buildup, massing greenhouse gases, and accelerated species loss due to ravaged habitats are all cataclysmic, but they are scientifically convoluted cataclysms in which casualties are postponed, often for generations. (3)

Films about environmental violence caused by mining therefore urge for another imagination outside the scope of a spectacle- and special effects-driven cinema. Instead, “from a narrative perspective, such invisible, mutagenic theater is slow paced and open ended, eluding the tidy closure, the containment, imposed by the visual orthodoxies of victory and defeat” (Nixon 6). I would therefore argue that McKenzie’s subtle yet pervasive aesthetics of environmental destruction emphasize the continued helplessness of the region’s inhabitants facing man-made environmental damage and hence illustrates the effects of environmental racism. If, according to Slavoj Žižek, more subtle creative renditions of contemporary ecological crisis prompt us to “look” at it “awry,” whereas more “direct” representations may cause us to disengage (Žižek; Narine 9), then choosing not to depict an action-fuelled catastrophe that overloads the senses allows the viewer to engage more seriously and thoughtfully. What is more, the effect is more profound than news sources and even scientific findings may be able to elicit.

The images of extreme soil erosion in Satellite Boy, a vast terrain of pieces, literally broken up and separated, show that even Australia’s remotest territories are affected by the history of the political violence and the related ecological traumas wrought by Europeans in the years since their first arrival, therefore further upsetting the difficult relationship between Aboriginal people, early colonizers, and the land that sustained them. Once Pete and Kalmain reach the headquarters of the Waterford Mining Company, the film visually elaborates on the massive terrain of the mining site. These images are cross-cut with scenes of Jagamarra, eventually forced to empty his shed at the drive-in cinema where large trucks and excavators are already busy transforming the location into a site similar to the one where the boys are currently wandering around. They are impressed by the maze-like steel constructions and carefully study the site map to find the manager’s office. Traditionally, the cinematic setting of mining sites, towns, and regions are depicted as “ghost towns,” as infertile, unnatural areas of disruption, “where colonial forces excavate and cut into the Indigenous soil, unearthing, generating, but also burying violent histories” (Turcotte 12). However, as Pete and Kalmain’s initial fascination shows, there is also beauty and spectacle in the expanses of such a mining site, something McKenzie very much acknowledges in her cinematographic consistence. According to Zeller and Cranston, “development can mean such things as exploration and settlement, land clearing, agriculture, mining, urbanisation, the creation of national parks, and tourism. [But] there can also be a development in people’s ways of seeing a place and of their attitudes toward it” (21). It is also along those lines that I would read the filmmaker’s choice to shoot technological non-degradable wasteful and destructive advancements such as satellite dishes and mining sites in similar aesthetic panoramic long-shots as the Kimberley’s beautiful landscapes. One could argue that this depiction possibly weakens the political criticism of the extractive industries, as Sandra Hall does when she claims that this “picaresque tale” prefers to focus on “the magical properties” of the landscape and environment Pete and Kalmain journey across rather than on the people that they meet en route. Moreover, even after the boys have reached their destination, the direct confrontation with the mining manager is similarly absent from the film, as the encounter never actually takes place. However, these visual and narrative choices could also be regarded as reflecting McKenzie’s wish to present a balanced picture, to acknowledge environmental problems without blaming industrial developments as a whole. For all its illustrated preference for the so-called “old ways,” the film also reveals how the bush—with its bull ants, heat, and dryness—can be harsh and unforgiving. Exhausted from the heat, Pete and his friend find comfort in entering a family house—that is, a man-made structure—while the owners are not at home. Similarly, they later take refuge as “space cowboys” in a satellite dish, finding solace in its distance from the earth (Judah 20). The boys’ journey thus acts as an acknowledgement that integrating the old with the new, making use of westernized technological developments within certain limits, can be a path to follow. The film apparently weakens this affirmative ambiguity when Pete claims at the end that it was entirely the grandfather’s “old ways that saved [his] life.” However, it is possible to read this emphatic statement as a necessary acknowledgement of the crucial importance of retaining traditional ways in a contemporary environment in which Indigenous cultures are continually under threat. In short, I would argue that the film’s coming of age narrative, with Pete embodying the possible transformation of a young generation accepting and understanding the challenges of keeping their Indigenous culture alive, offers a cautiously positive stance towards the reconciliation between “modern” and traditional ways of life.

Utopian Transformations

As stated above, the difficulty of representing slow violence and its effects is that such damages are metaphorically speaking “driven inward, somatized into cellular dramas of mutation that—particularly in the bodies of the poor—remain largely unobserved, undiagnosed, and untreated” (Nixon 6). Satellite Boy uses precisely the inward-driven sentiment of its transgenerational story to emphasize the changes inflicted on the environment.

The film ends with Pete’s return to his grandfather and to the camp where he now lives and where a celebration dance is performed. There are no further mentions of the mining company or shots of the now damaged site of the drive-in cinema. Only a brief excerpt from news coverage explains that a media outcry after the boy’s experiences at the mining site has stopped all work at the old cinema. On the one hand, this announcement of Pete’s victory is so brief and oblique that the film again evades a strictly political reading and rather concentrates on the transgenerational relationship between Pete and his grandfather—and by extension, between Pete and Indigenous tradition. On the other hand, this happy ending and “path to wonderland” (Hall) nevertheless expresses the hope for a transformative, utopian future.

According to Bill Ashcroft in his work Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures, postcolonial utopianism is “the persistent belief in a transformed future” (4). In contrast to some critics’ habit of seeing the postcolonial as locked into “simple anti-colonialism,” Ashcroft argues that postcolonial utopianism arises from an unrecognized but powerful reality: “that successful resistance is transformative, and transformation rests on the belief in an achievable future” (4). Although not everything imaginable may be achievable, what is never imagined cannot be achieved. Two young boys’ journey to a mining site may not solve the dispossession of an Indigenous family’s home quite so easily in reality, but the hope represented by such a utopian ending lies at the heart of postcolonial liberation.

Following Homi Bhabha, Ashcroft cautions against the common tendency “to fall into the trap of installing a ‘unity’ of binary oppositions in the practice of critique, the desire to seek a ‘resolution’ of real or symbolic contradictions by asserting one dogma over another” (10; Bhabha 25). Instead, Ashcroft argues, there should be a shift from a “language of critique” to a “language of the possible,” “the utopian language of liberation without the necessary insistence of resolution. This is entering the area of continual negotiation rather than conclusive negation” (10, italics in original). Accordingly, I wish to argue that one can find such language of negotiation in McKenzie’s Satellite Boy. The filmmaker avoids presenting all technological advancements and environmental transformations as harmful to the Aboriginal boy’s reconnection to his land and culture, and instead emphasizes his potential to make use of the multitude of technologies, materials, and developments. In a scene towards the end of the film, Pete, his mother, and her boyfriend drive to Perth to start a new, “proper” life in the city. While Pete looks at the high-voltage power line along the road they are travelling, he hears his grandfather whispering and calling. He is determined to stop the car and return to his grandfather to live with him. In earlier scenes, Pete had heard such whispers when looking at “natural” sights such as the stars; now, it is a man-made power-line that has left an imprint on the landscape and triggers similar reactions. The very last shots of the film confirm this ambivalence: Pete and his grandfather go into the country, the boy now understanding that the “home” he fought for (the drive-in cinema) is not the grandfather’s “home country,” but that their battle against the loss of connection to their land has united them. To cite Bill Ashcroft again: “Abyss though it may be, the future is the necessary horizon of our being—it is the space of becoming, the horizon of possibility within which our being gains life, and only the work of the creative spirit can give form to that possibility” (7). By emphasizing Pete’s in-betweenness and position as an intermediary between his grandfather’s “old ways” and the technologies of the non-Indigenous world, McKenzie presents a positive future that successfully stands against the violent tendencies still in force in Australia.¹

Conclusion

In The Environmental Imagination, Lawrence Buell writes:

If, as environmental philosophers contend, Western metaphysics and ethics need revision before we can address today’s environmental problems, then environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it. (2)

The arts and humanities are continuously participating in the necessary effort to engage with current ecological crises. Film has taken a powerful position alongside the global environmental movement to represent the harm that humans have inflicted upon their natural surroundings. Film is indeed a medium that can turn the long emergencies of slow violence into stories compelling enough to rouse public sentiment and warrant political intervention. However, as discussed in reference to Nixon, filmmakers also need to engage the “representational, narrative, and strategic challenges posed by present formidable representational obstacles that can hinder our efforts to mobilize and act decisively” (Nixon 2). The challenge is how to account for and represent the temporal dimension of slow violence that affects the way the public perceives and responds to environmental calamities, how to represent the pervasive but elusive violence of delayed effects (Nixon 3). It takes artists who are “enraged by injustices they wish to see redressed, injustices they believe they can help expose, silences they can help dismantle through testimonial protest, rhetorical inventiveness, and counterhistories in the face of formidable odds” (Nixon 6). Catriona McKenzie has chosen a politically indirect narrative and visual style to explore the transgenerational, long-term, proliferating conflicts in the Kimberley, where the conditions for sustaining life have been increasingly disrupted, and where it is time to recognize the very mechanisms responsible for the mining-induced environmental destruction. This chapter has shown that, although Satellite Boy is not straightforward in conveying this critical message, it nonetheless offers an Indigenous intervention that poignantly exposes the injustices against Indigenous lands and people. Contrary to what many reviewers have previously suggested, the film thus subtly mobilizes critical engagement with the environmental violence caused by the mining industry in Australia.

Note

1. 1 It should be noted that only Pete reaches such a hopeful conclusion, whereas his friend Kalmain, who does not share the same Indigenous traditional knowledge and has not reconnected to Indigenous culture, is in the end caught by the police and sent to a boys’ home.

Works Cited

1. Adamson, Joni. American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and Ecocriticism: The Middle Place. Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001. Print.

2. Ashcroft, Bill. Utopianism in Postcolonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 2017. Print.

3. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

4. Buell, Lawrence. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard UP, 1995. Print.

5. Dolezal, Joshua A. “Literary Activism, Social Justice, and the Future of Bioregionalism.” Ethics and the Environment 13.1 (2008): 1–22. Print.

6. Freeman, Wade. “Kimberley under Threat from Mining Boom.” ABC. 11 June 2012. Web. 26 July 2019.

7. Gaard, Greta. “Global Warming Narratives: A Feminist Ecocritical Perspective.” The Future of Ecocriticism: New Horizons. Ed. Serpil Oppermann, Ufuk Özdağ, Nevin Özkan, and Scott Slovic. Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011. 43–65. Print.

8. Goldstone. Dir. Ivan Sen. Perf. Aaron Pedersen, Alex Russell, and Jacki Weaver. Bunya Productions, 2016. Film.

9. Hall, Sandra. “Path to Wonderland. The Beauty of the Outback Shines in This Touching Screen Fable.” Sydney Morning Herald 22 June 2013. Web. 26 July 2019.

10. Heber, Alex. “Kimberly Mining up 500 Per Cent.” Australian Mining. 20 Nov. 2012. Web. 26 July 2019.

11. Judah, Tara. “Call of Country: Satellite Boy.” Metro Magazine 177 (2013): 16–18. Print.

12. Kiernan, Ben. Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Dafur. New Haven: Yale UP, 2007. Print.

13. Kroenert, Tim. “Remote Aboriginal Boy’s March against Miners.” Eureka Street 23.11 (2013): 9–10. Print.

14. Langton, Marcia, and Lisa Palmer. “Modern Agreement Making and Indigenous People in Australia: Issues and Trends.” Australian Indigenous Law Report 1 (2003): 1–31. Print.

15. Mad Max. Dir. George Miller. Perf. Mel Gibson, Joanne Samuel, and Hugh Keays-Byrne. Kennedy Miller Productions, 1979. Film.

16. Maddox, Garry. “Red Dust Dreaming.” Sydney Morning Herald 19 June 2013. Web. 26 July 2019.

17. Narine, Anil. “Introduction: Eco-Trauma Cinema.” Eco-Trauma Cinema. Ed. Narine. New York: Routledge, 2015. 1–24. Print.

18. Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011. Print.

19. Pearson, Cecil A. L., and Sandra Daff. “Indigenous Workforce Participation at a Mining Operation in Northern Australia.” Australian Bulletin of Labor 39.1 (2013): 42–63. Print.

20. Plains Empty. Dir. Beck Cole. Perf. Ngaire Pigram. Scarlett Pictures, 2005. Film.

21. Satellite Boy. Dir. Catriona McKenzie. Perf. David Gulpilil and Cameron Wallaby. Hopscotch Films, 2012. Film.

22. Turcotte, Gerry. “Spectrality in Indigenous Women’s Cinema: Tracey Moffatt and Beck Cole.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 43.1 (2008): 7–22. Print.

23. Under Skin in Blood. Dir. Larissa Behrendt. Perf. Aaron Pedersen and Margaret Harvey. Brown Cab Productions, 2015. Film.

24. “What’s at Stake? Culture and Traditions under Threat.” Save the Kimberley: Wildness. Culture. Heritage. n.d. Web. 26 July 2019.

25. Zeller, Robert, and CA. Cranston. “Setting the Scene: Littoral and Critical Contexts.” The Littoral Zone: Australian Contexts and their Writers. Ed. Cranston and Zeller. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 7–30. Print.

26. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. Print.