"Eating one's own kind is completely natural behavior in thousands of species, including humans. Throughout history we have engaged in cannibalism for reasons relating to famine, burial rites, and medicinal remedies. Cannibalism has been used as a form of terrorism but also as the ultimate expression of filial piety. With unexpected wit and a wealth of knowledge, Bill Schutt, a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, takes us...

Numbers and the Making of Us examines the origins and effects of numbers--words and other symbols for quantities. It focuses on the influence that numbers have had on human thought. As a result of this influence, the book claims, numbers transformed the human narrative. This transformation is supported by data from many disciplines: archaeology, linguistics, psychology, and primatology. The book surveys the types of number systems that have been innovated...

Follows the daily lives of seven children from around the world, including such places as Japan, India, Uganda, and Italy, and discusses how schools, meals, and play can be different or similar in different places in the world.

This is a personal film about Dundiwuy Wanambi over the years that Ian Dunlop knew and worked with him. It is made up mainly of interviews filmed with Dundiwuy at Yirrkala and at his Marrakulu clan centre at Gurka'wuy between 1970 and 1982. This film reveals something of the struggles, and the thoughts, of one man in the face of the huge changes brought about by the coming of the Nabalco bauxite mine and the mining town of Nhulunbuy to the Gove Peninsula.....

An archival record film of life at the small Madarrpa clan settlement of Bäniyala on Blue Mud Bay, some 200 kilometres south of Yirrkala. The film is in two parts.. The first part covers everyday events at Bäniyala. The settlement's first corrugated iron house is built. A water resources team discuss their problem of trying to find a site for a fresh water bore with clan head Wakuthi Marawili and his son Miniyawany. We see the little school, a plane...

One of the most positive aspects of traditional Aboriginal Australia today is the outstation or clan homeland movement. Throughout central and northern Australia, groups have left the large centralised government settlements and church mission stations to form small communities on their own land.. Yirrkala, in northeast Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, used to be a church mission station and is now an Aboriginal township. Today it is one of...

A collection of 22 films made by Ian Dunlop over a 30 year period with the Yolngu, the Aboriginal people of northeast Arnhem Land. Yirrkala was an isolated mission station until the coming of a huge bauxite mine in the late 1960s. The impact of the mine on the Yolngu and their response is a major theme of this long-term film project.. Each film stands on its own but each is also part of a rich mosaic. The relationship between people and their clans,...

1974 was a troubled time for the Yirrkala community. The Gove bauxite mine, on its doorstep, had been operating for four years. The effects of alcohol, from the newly built mining town of Nhulunbuy, were causing grave concern to the Yirrkala leaders. There was, we are told, a breakdown in social values among young people. This film shows the Yolngu's attempts to come to terms with, and solve, these problems. Despite the gathering storm clouds, Yolngu...

In 1976, Ian Dunlop was invited by Dundiwuy Wanambi, a leader of the Marrakulu clan, to Gurka’wuy on Trial Bay in the Gulf of Carpentaria. He wanted Film Australia to record the first major Marrakulu ceremony to be held at Gurka’wuy since its recent establishment as a clan settlement. While they were there, a baby boy died. The Madarrpa men, including the child’s father and Dundiwuy, asked for the funeral to be filmed.. Mortuary rites of the...

In 1978 Narritjin Maymuru and his son Banapana were awarded fellowships as Visiting Artists to the Faculty of Arts at the Australian National University in Canberra. For three months they and their families worked in their campus studio.. In the film, Narritjin conducts a seminar for anthropology students. He explains his technique of bark painting and discusses some of the meanings behind the paintings.. At the end of their stay in Canberra, Narritjin...