In 1918, in a German POW camp, German Jewish sculptor Rudolf Marcuse modelled a bronze bust of Australian Indigenous serviceman Douglas Grant. We discuss these two men's life-histories, the political impetus for creating racialized images of POWs, the early twentieth-century globalization of colonial power structures, and the capacity of a personal, arbitrary encounter to resist simple, deterministic imperatives.

Visual and screen-based research practices have a long history in social-science, humanities, education, and creative-arts based disciplines as methods of qualitative research. While approaches may vary substantially across visual anthropology, sociology, history, media, or cultural studies, in each case visual research technologies, processes, and materials are employed to elicit knowledge that may elude purely textual discursive forms. As a growing body of visual and screen-based research has made previously-latent aspects of the world explicit, there has been a concomitant appreciation that visual practices are multisensory and must also be situated within a broader exploration of embodied knowledge and multisensory (beyond the visual) research practice. As audio-visual projects such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel's Leviathan (2013), Rithy Panh's S-21: The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003), and Margaret Loescher’s Cameras at the Addy (2003) all demonstrate, screen-based research practices are both modes of, and routes to, knowledge. These projects also demonstrate ways in which screen-based visual research may differ from research exclusively delivered in written form, most specifically in their capacity to document and audio-visually represent intersubjective, embodied, affective, and dynamic relationships between researchers and the subjects of their research. Increasingly, as a range of fields reveal that the incorporative body works as an integrated “perceptive field” as it processes sensory stimuli, visual and screen-based research practices will fulfil an important role in facilitating scholarly access to intuitive, affective, embodied, and analytical comprehension.

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The biography of Douglas Grant (c.1885–1951) has been publicly and popularly told in media since 1916. Interestingly, Grant’s unusual life-story has consistently been deployed to serve various political agendas. This essay examines the role of popular-media biographies of Douglas Grant and the emotions embedded in them, and utilises a documentary-film production as a case study to examine relations between these emotions, activist agendas and documentary-film storytelling. Additionally, given the consistent use of tragedy as a formal narrative structure employed in tellings of Douglas Grant’s story, this essay also describes how narrative structures are not culturally neutral, but are themselves emotionally suggestive cultural productions. Analysing a century of tellings of the Douglas Grant biography, this essay also offers insights into how conquest-colonial ideology is manifest in these often ‘tragic’ tales. As an attempt at decolonising scholarship, this essay also responds to insights by Indigenous commentators within the case-study text to reflect on Indigenous ontologies and the role of Country and Indigenous futurism as places/sites/histories of hope.