The Other War: An investigation via documentary film into images of race and otherness in WW1 and their implications for Indigenous communities today

The Other War: An investigation via documentary film into images of race and otherness in WW1 and their implications for Indigenous communities today. . In 1915, German scientists began an immense task of wartime science designed to categorise 'the peoples of the world'. This ideological experiment involved Indigenous Australian and Pacific prisoners of war, and paved the way to post-war Nazi racial ideology. The sound, image and other cultural records captured during this wartime experiment are now listed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. This project will use documentary film and will apply innovative and socially inclusive 'reconciling' research methodologies to repatriate significant Australian cultural records from this World War I prisoners of war archive. It will document a post-colonial chapter in the aesthetics of 'otherness', and describe an important history of indigenous involvement in the foundational Australian narrative of World War I conflict.