A conversation with award-winning Indigenous screenwriter Steven McGregor

It’s a windy mid-week morning. The trains roll in and out of Redfern Station and a stream of commuters pours up the concrete steps. Coffees are bought, phone calls made and received. Students – all backpacks and earplugs – head reluctantly along Lawson Street towards their lectures at Sydney University.

Meanwhile, down the hill, on Eveleigh Street – known to all of Sydney as The Block – a strange tribe is camped out opposite a nondescript terrace. Nestled in the shadow of a huge Aboriginal flag painted on a nearby wall, they are engrossed in a collective act of intense concentration. They wear the internationally recognised costume of their clan: baseball caps and padded jackets. Some are sitting under a white marquee that wobbles gently in the breeze; others manoeuvre a shadecloth into position over a camera on a tripod…

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Photo: Bridget Ikin/Hibiscus Films