Lights, Camera, Carceral Logic: Songs of Survival, Stories of Silence
- Tabitha Lean
- Jun 13
- 7 min read
I remember the day clearly.
It was hot and I was fed up and sad and really missing my kids. My long, limp hair that was permanently draped in front of my face, was sticking to my sweaty forehead. I was sitting on my bed in the Living Skills Unit, wrapped in a misery bubble of loneliness and grief, drawing a picture to send home for my daughter. A crackle came over the PA calling all prisoners to the new “yarning circle” for a “Reconciliation” activity. I scoffed and thought to myself, “fuck you and your gammin yarning circle,” and continued sketching my picture. Next minute, one of my cousins came bounding into my cell, jumped on my bed and said, “come on Tabs, Nancy is here, and there’s a BBQ.” I shrugged, put my pencils down and followed them up the hill.
When I got there, I saw Nancy. She was sitting with her guitar in the circle, surrounded by all the women. She was laughing, nah, cackling in that cheeky, infectious way that she does, and when she saw us stragglers coming, she motioned us to join the circle. For the next twenty minutes she sang. She strummed her guitar. She spun a hundred yarns. It was like a portal had opened up before me and for the next little while, I somehow forgot I was hot and bothered, that my heart was broken, that I was missing home and that I was a prisoner.
This is who Nancy Bates is. She is a light bringer. She is not just a Barkindji music maker, songwriter and a songstress – she is someone who walks into places of darkness and brings all of her light and all of her love and gives it freely, without expectation, or exception. She gives it without judgement, without anything but pure love and devotion to justice and freedom.
And on that day, Nancy brought a little bit of freedom into a place where we had absolutely none.
Nancy is also a woman of principle and integrity. She is trusted, and therefore the projects that she is involved with benefit from her decades of hard-earned credibility. And it is for that reason—because I know the depth of her integrity, because I have seen the power of her truth-telling, because I have witnessed her hold both the system and the people within it to account with courage and clarity—that I feel compelled to speak.
The Songs Inside project is a compelling feature-length documentary that chronicles the transformative journey of a small group of women from the Adelaide Women’s Prison. Over six months, they discovered the healing power of music alongside Nancy. As the creative process unfolds, it unearths profound struggles with trauma, grief, drug use and loss—showing that even in the confines of a violent system, our humanity cannot be extinguished. The film culminates in a historic performance—the largest concert ever staged inside an Australian prison—featuring the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra and an audience of more than 200 prisoners and invited guests.
The film has been met with critical acclaim. I saw it myself, and I enjoyed it. But several things have transpired since that first screening—events that have left me deeply concerned, not least of which is a recently published interview with the film’s director, Shalom Almond, ahead of its showing at the Sydney Film Festival.
I attended opening night at the invitation of Nancy. I sat in the theatre, held by the beauty of the music and the rawness of the stories. And as an abolitionist, of course I had reservations. There were subtle reformist undertones in the Q&A—messaging that suggested prison could turn a woman’s life around. But then Nancy took the stage. She grabbed the mic, spoke boldly and clearly, and reminded everyone that the prison system is inherently harmful and must be dismantled. In that moment, she reclaimed the space. She spoke to power, from power, and with deep truth.
Since then, I’ve seen the film shown in community spaces where it has been profoundly misunderstood. A staff member at a local woman’s homelessness service in SA posted on social media that “prison gave the women a sense of community, three meals a day, a bed, a chance to learn new skills.” I was outraged. I challenged it and was told, “Well, that’s what the women said in the film.” And that’s the problem. The film is being read in ways that reproduce deeply harmful narratives. Prison is not a wellness retreat. It is not a vocational training centre. It is not a place to find healing. It is a place of state violence and deprivation, where Aboriginal women in particular are surveilled, criminalised, abused, and all too often, killed.
When I spoke with Nancy about this, she was devastated. The very film she had poured herself into—a project where she had carried so much of the emotional, creative, and ethical weight—was being used to reinforce carceral logic and justify the imprisonment of our people. This was not the intention. And yet, intention does not undo harm.
The interview with Shalom Almond only deepened my concern. When asked by Irresistible Magazine whether she would be able to survive prison herself, Almond responded by describing the women inside as a volatile, hierarchical, conflict-ridden group—painting a picture of prison as a place where chaos and violence are just under the surface, and suggesting that she, as an outsider, could navigate this space smoothly because she “knew how to stay under the radar.”
Imagine saying that. Imagine claiming you could survive a system that is killing Aboriginal women. Imagine thinking you could outsmart the guards, the trauma, the deprivation, the despair. Imagine thinking it is us, the women, who are the danger. Not the screws. Not the cages. Not the forced strip searches, the solitary confinement, the substandard health care, the separation from our babies, the deaths in custody. Imagine saying all that—and then crediting yourself for surviving it in theory.
And it doesn’t stop there. In the same interview, Almond talks about the women having experienced homelessness - “sleeping in the parklands”—and then celebrates the film’s “impressive social impact budget.” But who is benefitting from that budget? Who is being paid? Who is being centred in this so-called “impact”? Not the women in the parklands. Not the women whose stories have been consumed by audiences and repackaged into social capital for others to trade in.
We also need to talk about the way these kinds of films roll out criminalised women as poster girls—as the human face of redemption, healing, recovery—until those women no longer conform to the standards placed upon them. These standards almost always include sobriety and desistance. So long as a woman can be presented as a “success story”—as someone who has moved beyond her pain and trauma, who is no longer using drugs, consuming alcohol, no longer breaking the law, no longer angry—then she can be elevated, celebrated, platformed. But if she stumbles? If she relapses? If she doesn’t perform the tidy, inspirational arc that the filmmakers expect? She is erased. Silenced. Branded too messy, too complex, too risky for their carefully curated version of ‘impact’.
And what happens to the poster girls when the lights go down and the cameras pack up? What happens when the standing ovations stop, and the social media buzz dies out?
Let’s be honest: one of the ‘poster girls’ from Prisoners and Pups—another prison documentary—is no longer with us. She’s dead. That fact alone should force all of us to stop and ask some serious questions about the ethics of these projects. Because if your “liberatory” project leads to accolades and awards for the filmmakers but leaves the subjects retraumatised, unsupported, and abandoned, then what are you really doing? That’s not liberation. That’s exploitation.
What we are witnessing is a form of social justice clout chasing. It is almost predatory. Filmmakers, artists, and institutions hunting for the next gritty story, the next human rights violation they can centre themselves in, the next prison, the next trauma, the next Aboriginal woman they can film crying, singing, healing—until she’s not. And when she’s not, she is dropped. Forgotten. Or worse, blamed.
This isn’t the work of community. This isn’t the work of liberation. This is platform-building. Career-making. And it’s not okay.
True liberatory practice means walking alongside people through the whole story. Not just the parts that look good in a press kit. It means asking hard questions about who is benefitting from a project, and who is paying the price. It means holding space for women not just when they’re singing on a stage with an orchestra—but when they’re sleeping rough, when they’re using again, when they’re angry, when they’re grieving, when they’re still inside.
If your project can’t hold that complexity—if it only wants redemption without the rage, healing without the harm, hope without the hard truth—then it’s not about community. It’s about you.
And if you are more invested in being seen as a social justice warrior than in the safety, wellbeing, and freedom of the women you film—then you’re not dismantling carceral logic. You’re replicating it.
And then there’s the line that still turns my stomach. Almond describes Nancy—this fierce, brilliant, abolitionist Barkindji woman—as if she were a side act: “When she started to go into prisons independently, it was actually to teach stand-up comedy… she is also hilarious.” As though Nancy is some kind of court jester. As though her value lies in her ability to make prison more palatable, more tolerable. To make us laugh through the pain.
No. Nancy is not comic relief. She is not a trauma translator. She is not a feel-good ending to a film about state violence. She is a freedom fighter. A truth-teller. A light-bringer. And none of us—especially not her—should be used to prop up narratives that soften the brutality of prison.
It is for all these reasons that I believe Shalom Almond and the Songs Inside team must call for that interview to be removed. To give credit to the prison, to cast the women as unstable and dangerous, to trivialise the trauma of incarceration while building a reputation on its aesthetics—that is unacceptable. The women of Songs Inside are not dangerous. The system is dangerous. And the fact that this film was able to be made is not a credit to the prison—it is a credit to the women. Their stories, their strength, their spirit. In spite of the violence around them. Not because of it.
