The Black Line

The stories colonial history fails to see.

Set in Van Diemen's Land in 1830, THE BLACK LINE is a two-protagonist frontier drama about vision, violence, country and the stories colonial history fails to see.

The film follows George Templeton, an ambitious Anglo-Irish naturalist and artist who attaches himself to Governor George Arthur's Black Line: a vast human cordon of soldiers, settlers and convicts designed to force Aboriginal people from the Settled Districts. George tells himself he is there only to observe, draw and search for the seemingly mythical platypus, a creature European science still struggles to categorise or understand. But as the line advances through mud, rain, fear and bureaucratic violence, his scientific quest becomes a journey into moral disintegration.

Running alongside George's story is that of a Palawa fighter moving across the same country, attempting to evade the line and warn his people before the cordon reaches them. When the two men's paths violently converge, the film's perspective shifts, revealing that the Irishman's story was never the whole story at all.

Conceived as a formally ambitious Australian-Irish co-production, THE BLACK LINE explores the relationship between the colonisation of Ireland and the colonisation of Van Diemen's Land, while foregrounding the survival, resistance and continuing presence of Palawa people. The project will be developed through sustained Tasmanian Aboriginal collaboration, with creative authority over Palawa language, character, country and cultural material.

Elemental, severe and cinematic, THE BLACK LINE is a film about the limits of European knowledge, the brutality of men who believe themselves righteous, and a country that continues beyond the frame of colonial history.

Further details will be announced as the project develops.