This doctoral study comprises two parts. 75 per cent of the total weight of the submission consists of the creative component, the writing, directing and producing of a moving-image documentary in an online environment (supplementary material includes the script). Cutting edge technology (QTVR 'movies' and Live Stage Professional software) was used to create an immersive cinematic experience on the net. The Wrong Crowd can be viewed either online at www.abc.net.au/wrongcrowd or offline via a CD Rom (the latter includes the radio play 'Death of a Prostitute' which was excised from the version published via ABC Online because of legal concerns on the part of the ABC lawyers). The second part of the doctorate is the analytical contextualisation, comprising 25 per cent of the submission. This part examines the critical literature on the nature of the documentary form, documentary as history, cultural memory and the autobiography as history. Documentary exists as a truth-claim. History also embraces the search for evidence. The history documentary has a television form from which the online version is derived. The nature of the internet as a delivery platform for the moving image is discussed with reference to he truth claim as founded in the visible evidence - the news coverage - the 'this really happened'. The evidence however is open to interpretation for the historical record and is retold to suit the present power relations (the funding bodies, the commissioning editors, etc). In a CD Rom and more so online, this tendency towards individual interpretation is amplified to the point where the viewer can participate in the construction of the argument via a navigable database. Visually, the change from the temporal montage of the linear television documentary to spatial montage of the windows interface has led us to reconnect with computer-based moving images as a form of animated painting. Conventional screen theories of engagement and reception are invoked to aid in the discussion of modified cinematic conventions of editing and framing within the online form. The case-study of one of the inaugural Australian Film Commission funded online documentaries, The Wrong Crowd: Inside the Family Outside the Law, is a personal history narrative that intersects with Queensland police history from the 1950s to the late 1970s at the moments of inquiries into issues of police brutality and corruption.

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