AUS 1978 | Director: Essie Coffey | Camera: Martha Ansara | Editor: Kit Guyatt | Music: Essie Coffey, Fred Edgar, Zac Martin | Colour | DCP | 49 min | aboriginal english OV with english SUB | National Film and Sound Archive of Australia

Born in 1941, Essie Coffey was a Muruwari activist and filmmaker who established the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australia in the early 1970s and was an inaugural member of the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in the 1990s. MY SURVIVAL AS AN ABORIGINAL is an autobiographical film in which Coffey recounts the entwined stories of herself and her people, drawing attention to dispossession ad marginalization while affirming strength and resilience. When asked about her intended audience for the film, Coffey answered that it was "for everyone, but primarily for Indigenous people, to give them back their identity and to show them how they can survive as a people today." ("No Master Territories" exhibition brochure, HKW 2022)

"In her voiceover narration, Coffey frequently posits her individual figure within the larger social group of Black Aboriginal people through the use of personal and possessive pronouns, such as “My” “People” and “We”, which point to an enunciative condition of plurality. Coffey’s voiceover (…) seeks to produce a filmic knowledge which is both individual and collective." (R.P. Chaves, G.K. Soundelo, D.M. Williams, Studies in Documentary Film, 2020)

Courtesy of the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia