Richard Frankland

Richard Joseph Frankland (born 16 December 1963) is an Australian playwright, scriptwriter and musician. He is an Aboriginal Australian of Gunditjmara origin from Victoria. He has worked significantly for the Aboriginal Australian cause.

Richard J. Frankland was born on the coast in south-west Victoria. Frankland has worked as a soldier, a fisherman. He worked as a field officer to the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. This experience inspired him to write several plays, including No Way to Forget, Who Killed Malcolm Smith and Conversations with the Dead.

Frankland won an AFI Award for Best Screenplay in a Short for his short film No Way to Forget. It was the first film by an indigenous director to win an AFI Award. It was broadcast nationally on SBS TV. It screened at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival in the category of Un Certain Regard.

He wrote and directed Harry's War, a feature film based on his uncle's role in World War II on the Kokoda Trail. The film was screened at the British War Memorial in London and won Best Short Film at Spike Lee's alternative Oscars for black film-makers in Hollywood. In 2004, his play, Conversations with the Dead, was performed at the United Nations.

Frankland is also an acclaimed musician whose music features on the soundtracks to many of his films. In 1991 his first band Djaambi supported Prince on his Australian Tour.

In the early nineties he founded Mirimbiak Nations Aboriginal Corporation (MNAC) which was the first Indigenous statewide land organisation in some twenty five years. MNAC was responsible for representing traditional owners and lodging all Native Title claims throughout the state of Victoria (excepting the already lodged Yorta Yorta claim but including the recently successful Gunditjmara claim). Richard was also instrumental in forming Defenders of Native Title (DONT) which later became Australians for Native Title and Reconciliation (ANTAR).

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