She lived in Central Australia working on a TV documentary series called Nganampa Anwernekenhe[3] which means "ours" in the Pitjantjatjara and Arrernte languages The series started in 1987 and comprised 187 half-hour episodes.[4] which was shot in the bush communities and broadcast on Imparja Television.[3]
In 1997, she was supported by Screen Australia's Indigenous unit to act as both writer and director of a short drama film, My Colour Your Kind, about an albino Aboriginal teenager attending a convent boarding school in Alice Springs.[2] The film was selected for showing at several international film festivals, and nominated for several awards.[3][5]Steven McGregor was producer on the film.[6]
She left CAAMA in 1999, becoming a freelance writer and director.[3]
In 2001 she wrote and directed For Who I am – Bonita Mabo, a documentary about Bonita Mabo.[3]
She wrote and directed Queen of Hearts, a drama, released in 2004.[3]
MacLean wrote and directed Blown Away, released in 2014, an hour-long documentary about Cyclone Tracy which caused extensive damage to Darwin in 1974. The film shows previously unrecorded responses by Indigenous Darwinians to the disaster. The film features Aunty Kathy Mills, Dr Ella Stack, General Alan Stretton, Mayor Tiger Brennan, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam,[7][8] publisher and writer Sophie Cunningham, and politician (later NT Human Rights Commissioner) Dawn Lawrie.[9]
She wrote episode 5 of the second series of Mystery Road,[2] which went to air in 2020.[10]
Collaborations
MacLean collaborates frequently with Steven McGregor, and has also worked with Warwick Thornton, her cousin Beck Cole, Trisha Morton-Thomas and sound recordist David Tranter.[2][7] She directed one of the segments of the anthology film We Are Still Here, which premiered as the opening film of the 2022 Sydney Film Festival.[11] McLean also wrote for the Australian TV drama mini-series, True Colours, which was produced for SBS Television and NITV and aired in 2022.[12]
