Stingray Sisters – three sisters fight to stop exploration

Stingray Sisters is a highly-acclaimed documentary series set in the remote community of Maningrida, Arnhem Land about three sisters and the threat of mining on their ancestral lands.

Film maker Katrina Channells is screening all three parts of the Stingray Sisters as a fundraiser for Socialist Alliance councillor Sue Bolton’s re-election campaign on Friday 28 August at 6:30pm AEST.

Katrina is a Melbourne-based Director working across factual and fiction and is the director behind the three-part series ‘Stingray Sisters’.

The series screened in Vancouver and London was released on SBS On Demand. Katrina created ‘P-Culture’ for ABC3, a series that explores the principles of permaculture.

Katrina’s documentary ‘Leaving Allen Street’ was selected in completion at this year’s Melbourne Documentary Film Festival.

Her most recent Virtual Reality series 'Speak of Country/Yuin Djama Dhugan' was created in collaboration with Yuin Nation storytellers from the coast of NSW and will be exhibited at Sydney Carriageworks and Melbourne Museum in 2021.

About Stingray Sisters

When Michael Eather left Tasmania as a young artist on the adventure of a lifetime, he fell in love with Maningrida and with one woman in particular, Helen Djimbarrawala Williams.

On a beautiful night in July 1985, mentored by local men, Michael mastered the art of stingray hunting, catching six stingray on the night their first daughter, Noni, entered the world.

Helen gave birth to two more beautiful daughters, Alice and Grace and this story is about those daughters… the Stingray Sisters.

In 2016, thirty years later, Noni, Alice and Grace are an integral part of the Maningrida community, battling personal issues that few of us will ever face when they receive notice of an application to explore for oil or gas throughout Arnhem Land.

This threat of mining will be one of the biggest and most relentless challenge the community will ever face.

The sisters believe that the impact of exploration will destroy important, historically sacred areas, along with devastating fishing grounds that the community rely on for survival and, more than anything, it would destroy the person they cherish above anyone else, their mother Helen Djimbarrawala Williams.

The sisters have opened their world to all of us in the hope that we, as viewers, can learn something about what it means to be a young Indigenous person in a nation where being Indigenous has never been seen for what it really is, a precious gift.

Book your ticket to receive the ZOOM link to the screening.

Featuring a Q&A and discussion with the film-maker after the screening.