Warwick Thornton's Film Samson And Delilah

This essay will analyse the extent to which Warwick Thornton’s film Samson and Delilah conforms to the conventional representations of Aboriginal Australians in the Australian context. Specifically, it will focus on three tropes that are perpetually (ubiquitously) associated with Aborigines in Australia such as poverty, drug abuse and marginalisation. These three tropes are discussed in the light of being racist notions that are attached to the concept of aboriginality by the wider Australian society. It will be argued that although Samson and Delilah’s representation of indigenous Australians does not deviate from the aforementioned stereotypes, the film gives reasons for their existence as well as real names and faces to the problems that

We see how the need to survive makes them start stealing foods from a supermarket and turn into people that the stereotypes on indigenous Australians want them to be – criminals and thieves (McClausland 19). An unfortunate string of events leads Samson’s petrol addiction to escalate and, soon enough, Delilah joins him in the effort to lessen the pain and psychological trauma after being raped by a gang of white Australians. Whereas it is indeed true that drug use inside Aboriginal communities is higher than among non-Indigenous people it is very clearly portrayed in Samson and Delilah why people resort to this kind of escape from the reality (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare 2010). The reason for that is that they are lost, nobody needs them and it seems that there is no end to their struggles. Warwick Thornton does not hide drug abuse behind the scenes but, instead, accentuates our attention on it, thus making us draw conclusions on the causes of such a terrible statistics of drug