Screen memories: film’s knowing and historical trauma in The Tracker

This paper examines Rolf de Heer’s 2002 film, ‘The Tracker’, in the context of the ‘history war’ debates relating to frontier violence that were rehearsed in the Australian public sphere during the 1990s/2000s. I examine how ‘The Tracker’ challenges the very terms underpinning conventional forms of historiography, wedded to discourses of ‘fact’ and ‘truth’, in the way it investigates what it means to ‘screen’ memory within the context of the politics of the present. Focusing on ‘The Tracker's' self-conscious use of Peter Coad's arresting paintings of frontier violence, I argue that ‘The Tracker’ develops a nuanced engagement with frontier history in the way it highlights the dialectics of ‘revealing’ and ‘concealing’ – rupture and disavowal – at play in the nation’s ‘screening’ of frontier violence.