AustLit

'In Dispossession and the Making of Jedda: Hollywood in Ngunnawal Country, Catherine Kevin presents an elegant and engaging insight into the social, political and personal terrain upon which Charles Chauvel’s 1955 film Jedda was made. Jedda continues to endure in Australian cultural and intellectual life. The film is remembered as a classic piece of Australian cinema and has received significant attention from scholars of film, gender and race alike. Kevin extends this rich body of literature. Dispossession and the Making of Jedda is at once a detailed account of the film’s production, release and reception, a rigorous examination of how the settler colonial project operates and a powerful encounter with Kevin’s own family’s history. Begun from ‘fragments of family stories’ (4), Kevin has written a book that suggests what it is to understand your family as agents of settler colonialism and how such agency has ‘generated privilege that travelled through the generations and into the present’ (113).' (Introduction)