Dancing with the Prime Minister (2010)

On an unseasonably warm evening in 1968 Australian Prime Minister John Gorton, wearing evening dress, walked slowly along a line of 25 young Aboriginal women, dressed in white satin, standing silently in the Sydney Town Hall. Gorton was in Sydney for the first ever national Aboriginal debutante ball, held to celebrate the previous year's landslide referendum when 90.77% of Australians voted ''Yes" to Aboriginal rights. Dancing with the Prime Minister is a half hour documentary about that remarkable night in the winter of 1968 and the place it holds in Australian history. The film brings to the screen this extraordinary story and the context it was played out in - an era when Australians were optimistic about race relations, but still living with the stain of the Stolen Generations policy. Through the experiences and lives of those who were there on that balmy night - the Indigenous debutantes, the Aboriginal activists, the white establishment and the fashionable society set - Dancing will shed new light on a largely unexplored but absorbing area of modern Australian history and culture. Forty years on Dancing also stops to reflect on what happened to the sense of confidence in race relations, felt so strongly on the night of the ball. Dancing is a universal story of ordinary women who came to represent something extraordinary, and how that has played out in the rest of their lives. This is a contemporary, human story with broad public appeal that will educate, entertain and engage and provide an alternative vision to the current focus on the abuse and breakdown of Indigenous communities. The complexities involved in an Aboriginal debutante ball will help thwart simplistic attempts to define what is to be Aboriginal. Through the stories of three of the '68 debs the film will reveal the pride and laughter that an occasion of joy, of dressing-up and feeling good, amidst hard times, can engender. This is a film about searching for acceptance; a story about trying to fit in to a culture that rejects you, and learning how sometimes fitting in means changing, not yourself, but the culture that defines you. Audiences will delight in the joy of the evening, be fascinated by the historical significance of the event, and come away with a richer understanding of Australian identity. Although Aboriginal debutante balls have been largely ignored outside the communities they take place in, they tap into some of the core issues affecting Indigenous communities today; how to grow people up the 'right way', how to celebrate and respect burgeoning sexual maturity in young adults, how to re-build and maintain community in the face of the ongoing fall-out from the policies of dispersal, assimilation and stolen generations of the past decades, and how to get positive representations of Indigenous community life into public consciousness.