Celebrating Australian Documentary Film Today: Invited class to teach in Venice 

Well, this was a both an pleasure and an honour: to be invited into a doco film class in Venice and to teach a class of students about Australian doco today! The class  I presented was called: "Under the same sky: Documentary and identities in Australia."  I began with exploring a couple of short recent works by Liz Baulch, a celebrated queer director from Melbourne (with first nations heritage) who makes films from her family archive. Then I explained and showed "The Earth Above: A Deep Time View of Australia's Epic History", a 30-minute immersive full-dome planetarium show funded by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage (CABAH) and produced by Deakin MotionLab in Melbourne, in collaboration with the First Nations communities in Australia and the University of Wollongong Science Space.  So good to be speaking about identity, in all its forms and formats, in the context of a city that is foregrounding issues around the changing scopes and shapes of personal and familial identity,