Aborigines, Ambivalence, and Australian Film

'Following Homi Bhabha we want to argue that ambivalence has a tremendously disruptive and unsettling effect on the authority, identities and everyday social lives of non-Aboriginal people. This paper explores something of the diversity of this ambivalence by focusing attention on three Australian films. "Jedda" "Dead Heart" and "One Night the Moon" all demonstrate the tensions between the will of the so-called "settlers" to colonise and their economic, cultural and symbolic reliance on the efforts, knowledge and presence of Aboriginal people.'