Night Fishing with Ancestors

The artists of Karrabing, a grassroots media group operating out of Belyuen, an Indigenous community in Australia’s Northern Territory, bring a kind of knowing and defiant irreverence to their retelling and refashioning of historical narratives. In Night Fishing with Ancestors, they relate a tale of first encounters, when in the early-mid 18th century Makassar traders set sail from Indonesia to the shores of northern Australia in search of trepang (sea cucumbers), a coveted delicacy, and there made contact with Aboriginal peoples, a momentous and relatively peaceful encounter that left both cultures forever changed. What if history ended there, the film asks, before Captain Cook’s arrival in 1770 brought the cruelties of European colonialism in his wake?