Related Guides
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- Academic Video Online This link opens in a new window Academic Video Online delivers more than 67,000 titles spanning a range of subject areas including anthropology, business, counseling, film, health, history, music, and more. It includes documentaries, films, demonstrations, and other content types. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- Kanopy This link opens in a new window Kanopy is a provider of documentaries, training films, and theatrical releases available as streaming video. Clips from the videos can be embedded in presentations or shown in class. Films in the Boston University Libraries catalog are licensed to Boston University for educational and research use only, for BU students, faculty, and staff.
- Ethnographic Video Online, Volume I-II: Foundational Films This link opens in a new window Ethnographic Video Online, Vol. I-II: Foundational Films contains classic and contemporary ethnographies, documentaries and shorts from every continent, providing teachers visual support to introduce and contextualize hundreds of cultural groups and practices around the world.
- BU Libraries Search (BULS) This link opens in a new window BU Libraries Search provides a single place to search for a wide variety of academic material provided by the library. The material covered by the search includes books, journals, scores, video and audio recordings, and other physical items held by the library. The search also covers ebooks and ejournals owned by the library, as well as online material provided by the library from a variety of sources.
Browse Film
- Man on the Rim: Hunters and Gatherers (streaming, Academic Video Online) Describes how Australia was settled, including the ways in which tribes adapted to the different regions
- State of shock (streaming, Academic Video Online) The 1981 murder trial of Alwyn Peter made Australian legal history when his defence lawyer successfully argued that charges of murder and manslaughter were inappropriate for dispossessed, semi-tribal Aborigines.
- Gurrumul (streaming, Academic Video Online) Celebrated by audiences at home and abroad, Indigenous artist Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu was one of the most important and acclaimed voices to ever come out of Australia. Blind from birth, he found purpose and meaning through songs and music inspired by his community and country on Elcho Island in far North East Arnhem Land.
- Ombee (streaming, Academic Video Online) Life is not always taught on school benches. In many countries, children must first learn ancestral traditions and know-hows. This series invites kids to travel the world and discover other lifestyles and ways of growing up. Each episode features a different child who is initiated by an elder to a special task in which he will have to demonstrate courage and maturity.
- Fieldwork - Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929) (streaming, Academic Video Online) Spencer represents the link between the armchair anthropologist and the modern fieldworking anthropologist. The series begins by following in the footstep of the British scientist. It shows his work with the Australian Aborigines – who had, up until then, been regarded as a step in the evolutionary ladder between Neolithic men and the 'civilised' Victorian.
- Contact: Australia's Indigenous People Confront the Space Age (streaming, Academic Video Online) As British and Australian governments began testing space rockets in the mid-20th century, members of a nomadic Indigenous population in Western Australia were still living off the land, surviving the desert’s extreme conditions. One group of 20 Martu people was maintaining a traditional lifestyle, unaware of their country’s 200-year history of colonization and the modern society that existed beyond the 141,000 square miles of desert they called home.
- The Snowy River stockmen - Australia (streaming, Academic Video Online) Introduced in Australia by the first settlers, horses became very quickly an indispensable tool in order to sustain the needs of a young and growing population. Indeed, in the 19th century, the Stockman – the Australian cowboy – and his companion, the stockhorse, were a key element in the economic development of the country. Since then, the horse has become an emblematic figure of the Australian culture and identity.
- Gas Station, Episode 3: Australia (streaming, Academic Video Online) Australia, the Northern Territory. The Outback State. The Stuart Highway runs from Darwin in the North to Adelaide in the South, dividing the island into two. A lonely road without end. No change on the horizon for hundreds of miles. A merciless sun. Dust. Flies. And solitude. Everybody who feels lost and abandoned in the outback, recognizes the importance of the remote roadhouses that provide a specific variety of services to the weary traveler: fuel, repairs, food, accommodation and means of communication. They play an important central role in traffic safety and are an essential part of the tourist infrastructure.
- A Frontier Conversation (streaming, Academic Video Online) A fascinating journey through the Top End of Australia to explore what history means to the traditional landowners. A Frontier Conversation documents a unique collaboration between Indigenous and white historians from Australia and North America.
- Island of the Hungry Ghosts (streaming, Academic Video Online) Christmas Island, Australia is home to one of the largest land migrations on earth - that of forty million crabs journeying from jungle to sea. But the jungle holds another secret: a high - security facility that indefinitely detains individuals seeking asylum.
- The destruction of Australian aboriginal societies ( streaming, University of Cambridge) Against the backdrop of an Australian forest, Alan Macfarlane describes the way in which Australian hunter-gatherers and their way of life was largely destroyed by white settlers.
- The effects of European diseases on the native peoples of Australia (streaming, University of Cambridge) Standing in an Australian graveyard, Alan Macfarlane reflects on the effects of western diseases on the Australian native populations. He explains why these diseases were less lethal for the Europeans themselves.
- The puzzle of why Australia remained a hunter-gatherer society and the west did not (streaming, University of Cambridge) Standing on a beach in New South Wales, Australia, near where Captain Cook sailed, Alan Macfarlane reflects on the large puzzle of why it was the new civilization of Europe that ended up invading Australia, and not the old Australian civilization which remained in a hunter-gatherer mode for so long.
DVDs
- Ten Canoes (dvd) In the distant past, Dayindi covets his older brother's wife. To teach him the proper way, he is told a parable of forbidden love from the mythical past, a story of wrong love, kidnapping, sorcery, and revenge gone wrong.
- Rabbit-Proof Fence (dvd) This film from Phillip Noyce is based on the true story of Molly Craig, a young aboriginal girl in Australia, who leads her younger sister and cousin in an escape from an official government camp, set up as part of an official government policy to train them as government workers and integrate them into white society
- Crocodile Dundee (dvd) Michael J. "Crocodile" Dundee (Paul Hogan) is a free-spirited Australian who hunts crocodiles with his bare hands and stares down giant water buffaloes, but his ultimate torture test is a trip to New York City. Linda Kozlowski plays the New York City reporter Sue Charlton in this comedy directed by Peter Faiman.
- Indigenous children in Australia (dvd) Originally aired on Showtime Networks (United States) as a 10-part series, "What's Going On?" that portrays the daily struggles and hopes of children living in crisis. In this segment, Rachel Ward works with aboriginal children in Australia's outback.
