The Karrabing Film Collective, based in a remote community on the northwest Australian coast, intervenes in perceptions of indigeneity through an artistic practice that intertwines fiction, humour and social analysis. ‘Karrabing’ means ‘tide out’ in the Emiyengal Australian Aboriginal language. 'The Mermaids, or Aiden in Wonderland' presents a bare futurescape in which non-Indigenous populations struggle to survive in an outdoor environment that has become poisonous as result of resource extraction and industrial toxicity. However, Indigenous people seem to have an antidote. Aiden, an Indigenous man abducted as a child to be part of a scientific experiment to save the ‘white race’, is freed reluctantly into the world for the first time. While traveling with his family in a land he is unfamiliar with, he unravels multiple threads interlacing Indigenous traditions, speculation and environmental knowledge. Karrabing’s psychedelic narration on the centrality of the land and the aftermath of colonial extraction mixes scripted and spontaneous scenes, exemplifying what the collective has defined as ‘improvisational realism’.