Ten Canoes and 1066

This chapter examines the 2006 film Ten Canoes, an acclaimed Aboriginal Australian cross-cultural text in which a ‘Middle Age’ is both invoked and portrayed in an entirely defamiliarizing way. It explores the surprising potential, in the hands of indigenous agents, for invocations of a ‘Middle Age’ that displaces the Western timeline on which the idea of the medieval depends. The chapter raises the question of whether including pre-colonial-contact Aboriginal culture within the scope of world medievalism is an inescapably colonizing gesture that can only reinforce Eurocentric epistemologies, or whether this problem can be offset by bringing perceptions of the global medieval into dialogue with Aboriginal perceptions of time and history. It argues that the complexities of medievalism as a ‘world’ phenomenon are thrown into sharp relief by Ten Canoes as a text that narrates pre-contact time in a way that simultaneously addresses itself to Western and Yolŋu audiences.