Campora’s video essay productively illustrates how videographic studies can extend on, and even amend, ideas within existing scholarship, in order to reflect for subsequent changes in both cinematic representations and the critical methods for exploring them. In this case, the ideas and focus are related to the presentation of homelands in Australian cinema, as framed in relation to white or Aboriginal characters. The article Campora initially illustrates – Douglas Keesey’s “Weir(d) Australia: Picnic at Hanging Rock and The Last Wave (1998)” – is very much of its time, in the sense of using psychoanalysis (Freud’s notion of the uncanny) as the grounds for analysis of how landscape is presented in two of Peter Weir’s films. What Campora succeeds in doing via a more current film methodology (the practice-based video essay) is to efficiently map out Keesey’s interpretation, and to demonstrate how subsequent 21^st century cinema (by Indigenous filmmakers) has reworked those same spaces. This is an important addendum, reflecting the very overt changes in representation that can result from recent initiatives to diversify film production to include more films by Indigenous artists, ones focused on their stories, and including their distinct experiences of Australian landscapes.

The scenes in both sections are well chosen, persuasively encapsulating the sharp contrasts between characters’ relationship to the land in, say, Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) and Samson and Delilah (2009), The Sapphires (2012) and Goldstone (2016). Both parts present young women being initiated into the dramatic Australian vistas by older, maternal figures, with the anxieties of those in Hanging Rock giving way to the warm welcome home of an Indigenous girl. This video essay has further value as an educational tool, which could serve as an entry-point into the complex interrelations between diversity in film personnel and the potential impact on everything from narrative to mise-en-scène. For those of us at a literal distance from such spaces, this study – and the films it examines – highlights the importance of these ongoing cultural and political issues, within the audio-visual space of a videographic study.