The Director-General of the National Archives of Australia, Ross Gibbs, has announced that the winner of 2006–07 Frederick Watson Fellowship is Australian National University researcher Pip Deveson.

Ms Deveson, who works in the university’s Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, will use the fellowship to explore the work of ethnographic filmmaker Ian Dunlop and his 22 documentaries on Aboriginal communities in northeast Arnhem Land.

‘New stories and new aspects of history will emerge as a result of Pip’s research of the Archives collection and these will be of immense interest to students of Australian history and Indigenous culture,’ Mr Gibbs said.

The documentary films date from Australia’s first Aboriginal land rights cases. They examine the impact of the Nabalco bauxite mine on the Yolngu people of Yirrkala in the Northern Territory from 1970 to when the last film was made in 1996.

As researcher, writer, and editor, Pip Deveson was a central figure in the production of these films. Her analysis of the original archival resources on the documentaries held in the National Archives will enlighten other researchers about the film creation process and show how decisions were made during the various production phases.

The National Archives film collection is a unique and important historical record, as the Archives stores both the final production and, in many cases, ‘outcuts’. This enables researchers to analyse film footage that did not make the final release version.

The National Archives Frederick Watson Fellowship was established to encourage and facilitate use of the Archives’ extensive collection of files, photos, films and other records dating from Federation in 1901.