Seven Versions of an Australian Badland and two films: Jindabyne and The Drover’s Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson

As a debt of remembrance, I begin by extracting seven versions of Ross Gibson (1956–2023) from my heavily annotated copy of Seven Versions of an Australian Badland. I then draw on Seven Versions to illuminate a no-go zone film, Jindabyne and a badland film, The Drover's Wife: The Legend of Molly Johnson. Both films were shot on Ngarigo, Ngambri and Walgalu Country, transformed in recent decades by the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme (1945–74), a nation-building project that I viewed from the back seat of the family car in the 1960s. In my discussion of settler-colonial blind spots in Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne, I draw on Gibson's concept of no-go zones and Deborah Bird Rose's concept of ethical violence. Turning to the rabid sexual and racial violence unleashed on the body of Molly Johnson in Purcell's badland film (2022), I deploy Gibson's concept of ethical murk with reference to Jonathan Lear's concept of radical hope.