Dressing Eshay
Eshays are often the butt of the joke in Australian media. This lighthearted documentary seeks to tell a different, more nuanced story about this quintessentially Australian identity. Building on vox pops – including with a self-identified eshay and two older men who were sharpies in the 1970s – director/presenter Niamh tries to get a grip on what this subculture is and where it came from.
Weaving together personal, historical and social threads, Dressing Eshay culminates in Niamh’s own sartorial transformation – an experiment to see whether ‘dressing eshay’ will change her own demeanour. In the process, she explores themes of class, disadvantage and ‘coolness’, and how clothing can function as armour to both protect the wearer and signal their identity to the world.
Director bio:
Niamh Mackey is a Melbourne-based creative who makes films about the overlap of class and culture in modern Australia. She believes it’s important to document people who are outsiders and places that are forgotten because these ‘unfashionable’ parts of Australia make for the most compelling stories. Niamh approaches documentary like collage: using mixed media such as analog and digital video, animation, and music to build a layered story. Her work includes The Boronia Mall (2023), a playful documentary about a forgotten shopping centre that opened in 1973, and Unsaid (2021), an interview with her father that shows that their understanding of and love for one another is as complicated as it is enduring.Bachelor of Fine Arts (Film and Television) (Honours)