Martin Thomas

Martin Thomas is a cultural historian, documentary maker, broadcaster, and professor of history at the Australian National University.

Thomas's books include The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (2011), winner of the National Biography Award of Australia.

For more than fifteen years, he has been working with Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land, northern Australia, interpreting historic film and sound recordings with elders. This gave rise to Etched in Bone (2018), a feature documentary film about the theft of human remains by the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land and their eventual repatriation from the Smithsonian Institution. The film, which Thomas directed and co-produced in collaboration with Béatrice Bijon, has been shown many times on Australian television (NITV) and in festivals around the world.

Filmography

ETCHED IN BONE » When the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC agrees to repatriate stolen human bones from northern Australia, an Aboriginal elder creates a ceremony that restores his ancestors’ spirits to their homeland...