Martin Thomas

Roles: Director

Martin Thomas (Director, Producer and Narrator) is Professor of History at the Australian National University. He is the author of The Artificial Horizon: Imagining the Blue Mountains (2003) and The Many Worlds of R. H. Mathews: In Search of an Australian Anthropologist (2011), which won the National Biography Award of Australia. He is editor or co-editor of several volumes on exploration including Exploring the Legacy of the 1948 Arnhem Land Expedition (2011), Expedition into Empire (2015) and Expeditionary Anthropology (2018). While Etched in Bone is his first film, Thomas has made numerous radio documentaries for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The best known is This is Jimmie Barker (2000), a portrait of an Aboriginal sound recordist from Brewarrina which won the New South Wales Premier’s Audio/Visual History Prize. As an interviewer for the Oral History and Folklore Collection of the National Library of Australia, Thomas has recorded more than 30 whole-of-life interviews with prominent Australians. For more than ten years, he has been working with Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land, interpreting historic film and sound recordings with elders. In 2019-20 he will be based in Ireland where he has been appointed Keith Cameron Professor of Australian History at University College Dublin.