Ken Kelso

At eight years old, an impoverished Bert Facey was forced to start the backbreaking, dawn-to-dusk life of a farm labourer. Unschooled, his father dead, abandoned by his mother, by the age of twenty he had survived the rigours of pioneering the harsh Australian bush and the slaughter of the bloody WWI campaign at Gallipoli.

Through lyrical images, Manganinnie journeys across mountains towards the coast with Joanna, a white girl, in search of Manganinnie's vanished tribe. The poignancy of this film derives from the Aboriginal woman's gradual realization that her people and the tribal way of life are forever gone. It is the story of the Black Drive of 1830, the near-genocide of the Tasmanian Aborigines.