Eternity the Butterfly

(2025)

12:03 minute single-channel film.

Curators can request a preview link by emailing hayleymillarbaker@gmail.com

Eternity the Butterfly illuminates Aboriginal people’s transcendence through a dual narrative rooted in deep spiritual bonds. The film weaves two interconnected threads, delivering a political message through layered metaphors that honour the strength, agency, and ancestral wisdom of Aboriginal peoples. It recognises the colonial horrors they continue to endure while affirming the sovereignty, resilience, and unbroken presence of Aboriginal cultural connection, past and present.

Eternity, the protagonist, is both a character and a symbol. Her name reflects the enduring presence of Aboriginal culture as the oldest living culture on Earth, while the butterfly symbolises the cyclical nature of life, death, transformation, and rebirth. It becomes a totemic metaphor for how Aboriginal cultures survive, adapt, and thrive, not despite change but because of it.

Through meditation, breath, and deliberate movement, Eternity embodies physical, spiritual, and cultural continuity grounded in both resistance and transformation. Calling to the ancestors through personalised ritual practices, her soul-shaking call echoes through the natural world. Local birds respond, flocking to her in gathering flight: spirit messengers tied to land and sky. Their presence holds dual significance as sacred beings within Aboriginal cosmology and as a cinematic omen—unsettling and urgent—signalling the awakening of the ancestral realm.

Eternity constructs four monuments: vessels shaped by human hands to temporarily house ancestral spirits, allowing them to manifest and offer guidance. The fragility of these monuments reflects the instability of colonial systems, revealing a shared vulnerability that sharply contrasts with Eternity’s enduring presence and the resilient flow of her existence. Her relationship with the monuments—both as ancestral guides and as symbols of colonial oppression—captures a powerful duality.

Eternity the Butterfly invites viewers to reflect on the unseen labour of cultural endurance, the spiritual wounds caused by colonialism, and the transformative power of Aboriginal voice, breath, and being.

Commissioned by the University of Melbourne, supported by Creative Australia and Creative Victoria.