THE SKIN OF OTHERS

The Skin of Others is a story of modern Australia and the way we understand our national history. It is told through two extraordinary lives: Aboriginal WW1 soldier Douglas Grant (c.1885-1951), and Balang Tom E. Lewis, the charismatic actor who plays him in this film.

Douglas Grant was a famous man in his day, and can be imagined as a kind of a Forrest Gump figure … if Gump had been black, an intellectual, a journalist, a soldier, and a bagpipe player with a fine Scottish accent. His life is Gump- like in the sense that it connects some of the most famous figures and events of the 19th and 20th Century. These figures include Archduke Franz Ferdinand, Adolf Hitler, and Australia’s most famous writer of the time, Henry Lawson. The events include the two foundational conflicts of Australian and world history: the Frontier Wars that remade sovereign Aboriginal nation-territories into the Commonwealth of Australia, and WW1, a conflict that has provided Australian histories with a foundational narrative of tragic heroism and national pride in the ANZAC story.