Legacies of Resistance: Australian Indigenous Resistance Leaders in Indigenous Film, Theatre and Literature

Indigenous resistance to colonisation is a key theme in Australian Indigenous frontier histories, although most knowledge on these events is drawn from non-indigenous sources of information and framed within Western historiographies that can mask continuities between past and present. This thesis develops a decolonising framework to look at how Indigenous cultural producers are redressing this rift through retellings of their stories of Indigenous resistance leaders like Pemulwuy (Bidjigal), Jandamarra (Bunuba) and Yagan (Noongar) across different media. It demonstrates how this multimodal approach constitutes a contemporary act of cultural resistance that reveals the ongoing Indigenous struggle for recognition of sovereignty.