2
Laughing with the Camera
One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh.
—Vine Deloria Jr., Custer Died for Your Sins
Comedy is a realm of social life that encodes and compresses volumes (Apte 1983). As Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Lakota) argues in Custer Died for Your Sins,
One of the best ways to understand a people is to know what makes them laugh. Laughter encompasses the limits of the soul. In humor life is redefined and accepted. Irony and satire provide much keener insights into a group’s collective psyche and values than do years of research. It has always been a great disappointment to Indian people that the humorous side of Indian life has not been mentioned by professed experts on Indian Affairs. . . . People have little sympathy with stolid groups. (1969, 39)
As Deloria explains, understanding humor is particularly important in Indigenous-focused research, and its engagement—or lack thereof—has serious implications. In their overview of humor and laughter in anthropology, John Carty and Yasmine Musharbash echo this sentiment, describing how the ethnographic potential of comedy provides a largely untapped means for revealing the fault lines of power, particularly regarding “the fraught relationships between Indigenous people and ‘whitefellas’” (2008, 213). Despite its ubiquity, humor remains an uncommon ethnographic topic.1
Along with Aboriginal land, the broad and ongoing processes of settler colonialism have dispossessed popular perceptions of Indigenous humanity. This dehumanization includes the silencing of not only Aboriginal futures but also one of the most fundamental aspects of life: comedy. A humorless people are also a futureless one. As Lauren Berlant puts it, an imposed “humorlessness wedges an encounter in order to control it, creating a buttress of immobility and impasse . . . to produce the fear that protects power” (2018, 157). In a mass-media landscape of dystopian representations of Aboriginal communities, foregrounding humor and comedy can itself be a transformative political act, as these are “not only important dimensions of social life to be better understood, but important perspectives on the understandings we already take for granted” (Carty and Musharbash 2008, 209).
This dynamic of humorlessness is crucial in settler/Indigenous relations across the globe. In Native North America, comedy groups like the 1491s and breakthrough TV hits like Reservation Dogs draw upon comedy to push back against stereotypes of stoicism. Donna Goldstein (2003) illustrates how laughter that is seemingly “out of place” in Brazilian favelas and other marginalized places can provide insights into a community’s daily life, as well as how they come to be understood as humorless. Too often, humor in Aboriginal communities is perceived as out of place in the national imaginary, though this could not be further from the truth. As those who have lived in Aboriginal communities well know, in spite of and amid profound problems of ongoing colonialism, like most communities, they are filled with laughter.
Irreconciling Comedy
What is comedy, such that it lies at the heart of what Joe described as the “real” film? It is helpful to distinguish between laughter, joking, humor, and comedy (Apte 1988; Beeman 1999; Driessen 2015; Zijderveld 1983). For clarity, I will reference laughter as the embodied and sonic act, joking as communication intended to be funny, humor as a shared sensibility about what is funny, and comedy as situations that are perceived as funny whether intentional or not. Counterintuitively, while laughter may be associated with humor and comedy, this is rarely its cause (Provine 2001). Laughter most commonly arises when people experience heightened states of pressure, danger, and misunderstanding—qualities that are part and parcel of convoy trips.
Here, I focus on how irreconcilability animates the dynamics of comedy and laughter in shooting Tjawa Tjawa and other Balgo films. As Lawrence Gross (Anishinaabe) explains, there is a scholarly consensus that humor hinges on incongruity, which creates “a juxtaposition between two items that normally would not be associated with each other, the proximity of which causes surprise,” and often delight (2007, 69). While laughter regularly erupts as a catharsis after being confronted with incongruity, comedy and humor run deeper, infused with cultural expectations around respect and dignity. Comedy typically plays upon brief and passing incongruities. However, in an intercultural setting such as the Tjawa Tjawa shoot, it often emerges amid irreconcilabilities, exposing though not resolving them. In these moments, power dynamics are temporarily revealed and relieved.
I draw upon Michelle Raheja’s (Seneca) (2010) articulation of “laughing at the camera,” which analyzes how Nanook and other iconic ethnographic film subjects wielded humor to both acknowledge and critique the anthropological gaze. I extend Raheja’s work through what I describe as “laughing with the camera.” This expands her conceptualization in the context of Indigenous production teams holding cameras and narrative control. The shift from laughing at to laughing with repositions the filmmakers as the curators of irreconcilability and its fractures, with the camera serving as a proxy for audiences, who are welcomed in on the joke (Gross 2007, 69).
Tjawa Tjawa’s intensive film shoot represented its creative and social climax. Here, I follow Joe’s impromptu suggestion regarding the importance of comedy in understanding its process. I articulate power dynamics and irreconcilable differences that ruptured through comedy during this shoot, some of which made their way into the film itself. Centering comedy within the production process helps to reveal how the footage came into being via a variety of collaborators and stakeholders. In moments ranging from levity to mortal danger, I interrogate power dynamics in Aboriginal/whitefella relations through analyses of comedy and laughter on- and off-screen.
Having grown up in the (relatively) nearby Tanami Downs Station, Kim Mahood has spent much of her life in communities near Balgo. She is a rare whitefella writer who has at least as much credibility and relevance within communities as she does outside of them. Community members, managers, and visitors alike regularly brought up her work in Balgo as a useful and funny way of understanding kartiya. Mahood articulates a vivid and nuanced social dynamic:
The hothouse environment of remote Aboriginal communities brings out the worst and the best in the kartiya who work in them. During my time in Balgo and Mulan, I’ve seen irrational hatreds, petty power struggles, physical and verbal assaults, incompetence, sabotage, and abuses of power. I’ve also seen people achieve remarkable outcomes under extraordinarily challenging conditions, and I’ve made lifelong friendships based on bonds forged under pressure, when the raw material of personality and character is exposed. (2016, 201)
While comedy does not seem to be a primary aim in her writing, the absurdity of these scenarios renders it inescapable in engaging these relations.
My goal is not to stoke flattened narratives of the “bad kartiya” but rather to unpack what is at stake in these power dynamics—the irreconcilabilities that comedy lays bare. These moments include unexpected laughter when the Tjawa Tjawa crew accidentally crashed a drone into sacred sites, disagreements on where people should sleep, and a debate on which colors Elders should use in their acrylic paintings. I unpack how comedic movements reveal frameworks of productivity versus “laziness,” and how they can become projected onto the filming process and community life more broadly. I highlight a single moment in the finished film that makes a wide variety of audiences laugh, yet for different reasons. Such moments of comedy coexist with the deadly serious, including the dangers of becoming literally and metaphorically “bogged,” and the value of collectively becoming unstuck. These close calls often dance with dignity, failure, and redemption in unexpected ways.
In considering Joe’s discussion of the “real” film, this chapter illustrates that for many crew members, the real film was the story of the shoot itself. Tjawa Tjawa was Mark’s directorial debut and the first time he was in charge of a film’s story, movement, and vision. His awakening in this process was in coming to understand cinema as a path toward reinvigorating his role as a community leader and storyteller.
You Had to Be There
It is uniquely difficult to engage humor after the fact. Indeed, many failed recountings of funny moments end with a half-hearted “You had to be there.” This challenge is exacerbated in academic writing, which tends to work in opposition to the improvisational and playful register of humor. However, because of its corporeal (MacDougall 2006) qualities, film is well suited to recording and presenting comedy. Funny books exist, yet funny films abound. In situations where you had to be there, the audience is present, at least in a basic audiovisual sense. While I emphasize the role of humor in the process of filmmaking, comedy also imprinted itself into the footage and finished films.
At a screening, laughter is the most explicit real-time audience feedback. Unlike more subtle emotional reactions, laughter is a lively, audible response that generates a moment of mutual recognition. It reveals that a viewer has likely understood at least some social context surrounding the humor. While micro-distinctions of understanding are crucial for how humor operates in everyday social interactions, when producing media for mass distribution a frequent goal is to foster shared understanding whenever possible. Broad audience comprehension was especially emphasized for projects slated for national broadcasting, such as Tjawa Tjawa.
There was one particular moment in the film that evoked similar amounts of laughter at each of the widely varying screenings I attended across Australia. In a short scene, Mark recounted the part of the Tjawa Tjawa Dreaming story in which women were deciding which men to sleep with, after traveling hundreds of miles from the coast into the desert in search of husbands. Mark acts out their bickering in the present-tense first person, exclaiming in subtitled Kukatja:
“That one’s for me!”
“This one’s mine!”
“I want him!”
“I’ll have this one!”
“Let’s all three share one man!”
It was not surprising that this evoked similar reactions in Balgo community screenings, or even at the 2015 National Remote Indigenous Media Festival in the nearby desert community of Lajamanu. Yet it also received a similar response at the Sydney Film Festival in a room of many urban white attendees. This scene was funny for diverse audiences because it drew on a broadly relatable social taboo around publicly discussing sex lives. The scene utilized editing techniques to amplify its humor, cutting quickly between different close-up framings of Mark as he embodied the characters in the story.
A moment in our short film Marumpu Wangka: Kukatja Hand Talk (2015)—featuring hand signs by Balgo women Elders, and discussed further in chapter 4—received similarly consistent laughter from various audiences. This film presented a short visual dictionary on Kukatja hand signs that received unexpected circulation and interest, largely due to moments of joviality. During a scene, Manaya, one of the women Elders, mimicked someone asking for money within the mimed experience of winning at cards. As with the moment in Tjawa Tjawa, this was funny because it drew on cross-cultural touchstones of charm and social boundaries.
In both of these scenes, although each audience laughed, Balgo community members laughed for more complicated reasons. The Tjawa Tjawa scene evoked local laughter about sharing a man, because while polygyny is traditional, sex in such a public setting is certainly not. Manaya’s gestures were funny in Balgo because they reference the regular card game that moves around to different houses, referred to locally as “the casino,” and because a large pot would soon be returned to community members through continued playing, as well as sharing it afterward. Despite the more contextual understanding of these moments in Balgo, they worked well on film because their embodied comedy communicated quickly at multiple levels. Both clips invoked laughter to bridge the tension between serious and lighthearted topics to reach broader audiences: women teasing each other about sexual partners in relation to a Songline story that involved death and Law, and a grandmother acting out the movements of a card shark in the midst of a visual dictionary on revitalizing Kukatja language. In essence, community members laugh because of particularities, while outsiders laugh because of universalities. Despite such differences, both laughed with, rather than at.
A key element here was the deliberate ways that both Mark and Manaya laughed in these moments while looking directly into the camera. With control of the narrative and process, they laughed along with the camera, a proxy for and portal to the audience. This deceptively simple act of laughing along with the viewers communicates multitudes. It tells the audience that the moment is funny, provides a cue to laugh, and (for some) compels them to consider deeper reasons why the moment is comedic. And by being embedded—ostensibly out of place—within the serious topics of Dreaming stories and visual dictionaries, it also implicitly illustrates that humor is commonplace and valued in Aboriginal communities. By laughing with the camera in such moments, Mark and Manaya drew upon the disarming invitation of humor to enrapture audiences who might otherwise be put off due to prejudice or disinterest. This contrasts with dominant media narratives of Aboriginal communities as one-dimensional sites of suffering, rendering such depictions as irreconcilable for audiences. Humor on bush trips was often based on the sharp contrast between serious Aboriginal film themes—including traditional Law, Dreaming, and Songlines—and the absurdities of the convoy filmmaking process.
Such comedic scenes were neither scripted nor planned. They emerged from processes of filmmaking that went slowly, slowly and allowed for irreconcilable comedic moments to rupture and breathe. There were many that surprised our film crew, myself included. Our first major aerial shoot involved flying a drone past a hill named Yampart, which in the Songline story was a Tjakamarra (skin-name kinship category) who was chasing two women (smaller nearby hills). It was especially windy that day, and after several attempts the drone crashed near the top of the hill. After a bit of discussion, the crew decided that I should climb up and get it, since I was a “whitefella from far away” and was less likely to be negatively affected by this interaction with a sacred site. This in itself was joked about, though we were all concerned about what Mark would think. When we arrived back at camp later that afternoon we told Mark, and to our relief his immediate response was to give a long and hearty laugh, remarking that we “must have given that fella quite a shock, ha!” Throughout the rest of this windy trip, the drone crash-landed at other sites, which Mark found to be increasingly hilarious each time. Indeed, the “drone became a character as well as an allegory” during which the “ancient play of wind and water and sun still interferes” (Bessire 2017, 126). As Mark conveyed, these unexpected mishaps reiterated that these sacred sites are alive, interacting with Tjukurrpa beings and drones alike, commanding respectful intention rather than rigid doctrine.
Sometimes comedy translated into the footage and film. In one crucial scene, the crew was attempting to figure out how to shoot a moment when the women sat down to urinate, creating an important water hole. In the light of the evening sun, crew members joked around as we realized that what would work best cinematically was to film the shadows of squatting crew members, with water sounds to be added in postproduction. This involved what Tess Lea and Elizabeth Povinelli (2018) describe as “improvisational realism,” in which spontaneity is fostered to produce scenes with emotional resonance.
Although climbing sacred sites was usually forbidden, and depicting urination could be seen as inappropriate, context was paramount for understanding why and when. Essential to whether or not violating such rules was funny or offensive seemed to be largely determined by attitude and intent. Our crashing into sacred sites was funny precisely because we were trying so hard not to, all the while working on a film about the Songline that was directed by Mark. However, not all social rule breaking was comedic, and not everything that was funny was downstream of well-intentioned plans gone awry. A contrasting genre of humor on these trips derived from tension within power relationships between whitefellas and community members.
Black Comedy and White Labor out Bush
In this section I illustrate black comedy, encompassing both literal and figurative meanings. This dark humor about and with kartiya speaks to layers of Balgo power relations in and beyond the social lives of media. As Aileen Moreton-Robinson (2015) argues through her conception of “the white possessive,” this dynamic points to an insidious process in which kartiya are often attempting (consciously or not) to claim possession and control over Aboriginal life, politics, and representation.
“Kartiya Are Like Toyotas” is perhaps the best-known academic article within Balgo and Aboriginal communities more broadly. Penned by Mahood (2012) and based on her extensive experience, it takes seriously the comedy of how outsider whitefellas cycle through managerial positions in communities until they break down, much like Toyotas. Discussions of her article occurred frequently in Balgo, including the following example:
“Have you read Kim Mahood’s kartiya article? If not, you just have to.”
“Oh yes. I just love it. She really gets it. And it’s funny!”
“Right, it’s funny because it’s true.”
“Exactly.”
Mahood’s article is funny, and not at the expense of serious content. She describes the dysfunctional structure of the continuous cycling through of kartiya “mercenaries, missionaries, and misfits” in Aboriginal community positions (2012, 2).2 Much of its humor comes from describing secular missionaries who arrive wanting to fix things. Community members often noted that such kartiya “think they know everything and can save us.” An older man in Balgo jokingly distilled his experiences with new whitefella managers: “It’s the same damn horse, just a different rider.” After a long day of conflict between volunteers, one whitefella filmmaker noted in exasperation that “Every visitor is on their own journey in Balgo, which is rarely about Balgo.”
In addition to kartiya workers living in community, Mahood describes the many non-Indigenous organizations that briefly pass through and engage Balgo for their projects, initiating an often comedic dance around negotiating access, resource and knowledge sharing, and who will accompany trips. Emblematic of this dynamic was the search for the ostensibly extinct night parrot, which in recent years had been spotted in the Great Sandy Desert. Mahood’s tale was referenced and expanded upon in late-night chats in Balgo, and it was jokingly noted that the ideal outcome of a night parrot trip was to hear it though not see it, which would require another bush trip back to Country.
However, quests for endangered animals were not always animated by levity. On one of my last trips to Balgo, Mark noted that he had too much back pain for more film trips. Just after sunrise a few days before I left, I heard a beckoning honk at the gate of the volunteer quarters where I was staying. Opening the screen door to see who it was, Mark was already standing in front of a packed-up troopy with an improbable number of new, brightly colored swags tied to its roof. Mark explained, “I just wanted to say goodbye before you go. They are looking for bilbies [small marsupials], so I’m going with them.” After I asked about his back, he sighed, responding, “Yuwai, but it’s my Country. I have to go.”
Of Labor and Laughter
As the debacle of the stuck trailer illustrates, black comedy regularly emerged in situations where whitefellas were frantically attempting to solve problems that community members would seem to be obviously more experienced at solving. There was often a perplexed amusement by community members about the choices and comments of some whitefellas. For example, during one of the first nights on the Tjawa Tjawa trip, Mark had just settled into his camp. He had unrolled his blankets around a fire along with a few family members and was starting to cook lamb chops on a wire mesh over some hot coals, while also boiling water with a small “billy” pot consisting of an empty powdered milk container that he moved with an orange-peel handle. While preparing his tea, a whitefella came up and exclaimed, “Mark! You can’t sleep here near your mother-in-law. It’s not proper Aboriginal way!” Slowly shaking his head, Mark seemed to think about explaining this before stopping himself, laughing as he responded, “Ha, I think I know the proper Aboriginal way!” This seemed to end the discussion, with Mark avoiding the need to describe complex kinship nuances, or engage in an unpleasant disagreement, while also not validating the comment.
Throughout the trip, Payi Payi and other women Elders were painting a large canvas meant to collectively document the journey through a different creative form. Near the middle of the week, I was sitting with them in early evening’s fading heat, retrieving paint and occasionally mixing colors as directed. After staring at a flower she had just outlined, Payi Payi asked me, “Can you get me the blue paint?” I went to the art supplies and found the small container, at which point an art center volunteer realized her plan to use blue paint, quickly responding, “Oh no, they can’t use blue, only natural colors.” I went back to Payi Payi to make sure that I had heard her right. She affirmed, “Yep, the blue one, for the flowers.” When I relayed this to the volunteer, an increasingly improbable debate ensued. Essentially, the volunteer argued that Payi Payi had already decided that the artists would only use natural colors such as orange, red, and brown. At first, Payi Payi’s opinion in the matter did not seem to carry much weight in the moment, even after another volunteer pointed out that none of the acrylic paints were “natural” anyways. This led to a half-hour discussion between some of the whitefellas about whether Payi Payi truly wanted to use blue paint, while she patiently waited. After the discussion reached an irreconcilable impasse, Payi Payi simply chuckled and stated, “I’ll paint ’em blue.” There was no arguing with that. I still do not fully understand why there was pushback against the blue paint, though it presumably related to the painting’s value on the art market (it had been pre-sold) in relation to perceptions of ochre-associated tones. In the grand scheme of things, this was only a passing moment in a multiday collaborative painting that the women described as a deeply meaningful creative process in Country.
Figure 11. Women painting during the Tjawa Tjawa shoot.
Humor does not always suffice as an effective diplomatic strategy. This was especially apparent in perceptions of labor equity. A small though vocal minority of trip volunteers complained that they were doing a disproportionate amount of work as “white slaves.” This contingent made comments such as “Well, the problem is that Aboriginal people have been given sit-down money for so many years that they have come to expect whitefellas to do everything.”3 Sit-down money—a derisive inversion of sitting on Country—referenced the fortnightly payments that many in communities receive from Centrelink, a governmental welfare services agency. Yet, from the point of view of many community members on the trip, it was the whitefellas’ insistence on working at irrational times in illogical ways that was challenging to reconcile.
For example, on a sweltering afternoon during the Tjawa Tjawa shoot, I was sitting in the sandy shade of the food trailer next to Payi Payi. She was watching two whitefella volunteers on the crew disputing where the fire should be started for dinner. Laughing quietly, she leaned over to me and observed, “Whitefellas growling in the sun. Too hot!”4 The whitefella labor rhythm of working nine to five in one of the most scorching and UV-intensive places on Earth was antithetical to thousands of years of Aboriginal experience in living in this region. Mark would often reference this in relation to his years of working on cattle stations with Aboriginal crews. Despite many efforts by managers to convince them to move the cattle during the day, they preferred to travel under starlight, as Mark and his family regularly did in his youth. As Elizabeth Povinelli (1993) argues in Labor’s Lot, there is an inherent conflict between Aboriginal and whitefella work scheduling, and with rare exceptions, whitefella labor structures have dominated not only during bush trips but also in community employment opportunities through the imposition of “settler time” (Rifkin 2017).
Balgo community members often discussed such conflict. During bush trips there was an undercurrent of commentary about what was going on, whispered and gestured by community members and crew in convoy group meetings. This included murmurs such as “Whitefella talk too much” and “It’s already ten, the morning is over, we might as well sleep until it cools down.” In larger projects such as Tjawa Tjawa with dozens of people, this dynamic resembled Vicki Mayer’s (2011) description of the solidarity of film crew positioned “below the line” of lead film roles. In Indigenous shoots, however, the cultural dimensions of hierarchies exacerbated power dynamics, through which comedy provided both critique and catharsis.
Dignity
Ultimately, whether laughter is funny or degrading comes down to its relationship with dignity. Like humor, dignity is essential and ever-present in understanding the dynamics of labor relations in Aboriginal film shoots. Defined as “the state or quality of being worthy of honor or respect,” it is perhaps unsurprising that the primary example provided in the New Oxford American Dictionary is “the dignity of labor.” Dignity is not respect itself, but rather its precursor and context. Therefore, irreconcilabilities around dignity tended to be humorless and unspoken due to its relationship with respect (or its lack thereof).5 This is often as profound as it is subtle. For example, it is generally considered impolite or worse to directly respond “no” to a request in Balgo, though the extent of this pressure varies depending on kinship relations. This is navigated by shared understandings of how to shape language and behavior to avoid placing others in awkward positions of public refusal. To behave otherwise would be undignified.
This dynamic led to various misunderstandings that informed labor perceptions. For example, volunteers often asked community members if they could complete a specific task later that afternoon or the following day. The response was usually “Palya, no worries.” If the community member did not show up, this bolstered a preconceived narrative about Aboriginal unreliability. The volunteer in this case was committing a basic social error, placing someone in a position in which they could not decline the request with dignity. For example, the question could have been phrased along the lines of “Are you busy at such and such a time tomorrow?,” which gives the responder the opportunity to respond affirmatively or ambiguously. There were fundamental misunderstandings of acquiescent responses. Palya was not simply an agreement, but pointed (figuratively and literally through its gestural expression) to an affirmation of the good and proper way, which did not necessarily mean “yes.” Furthermore, in Balgo, casual agreements about future meetings tend to be understood as tentative, and it is considered baffling for someone to be upset if another person does not show up (Kendon 1988). Interpreting this as a personal slight is considered foolish, as it is normally assumed that something more important presented itself.
When I was tasked with facilitating a few projects toward the end of my fieldwork, our crew drew upon months of guidance by Mark and other Elders to immediately stop a project if anyone even slightly implied that they might not be happy about the process, especially if someone stated “Nyamu” (No more). Responding with the question of whether the shoot could continue later is a standard media practice in such moments, yet this would have placed that person in the undignified position of having to directly refuse. In each case, after we stopped and began packing up, that individual decided that they wanted to continue, which we then did. While it surprised me every time, it seems to me now that Balgo community members were used to being pressured by outsiders and were thoughtfully testing the boundaries of their own ability to control situations. Community members seemed to invoke the principle that projects that are difficult to stop probably should stop, while projects that are easy to stop should probably continue. In following the social life of media for dozens of films, I was in the unusual position of being able to see how they unfolded. It is important to reiterate that my perspective, approach, and positionality were based upon a substantial amount of privilege as a white foreigner with research funding. I was burdened with few short- and medium-term pressures to deliver productions or other outcomes. In other words, I had the great privilege of conducting ethnography.
With the benefit of hindsight, it seems that I and other whitefellas were regularly, and quite rightly, tested. While collaborating with PAKAM and Goolarri in Broome, there were several times—especially early on—in which people seemed to want to find out through daily pranking and joking if I was “too stuffy.” Most of the people I worked with had the stated impression that Americans tend to take themselves too seriously. This was distilled in their impression of responding “HOW DARE YOU!” in a comedic American accent. People tested this stereotype by seeing if I would be offended by various antics, often making jokes like “Careful, he’s American. They will sue you, hah!”
As time went on and we got to know each other, I became included in multiple “goof reels,” which were montages of favorite bloopers and pranks from throughout the year to be shown at the annual Goolarri and PAKAM Christmas pool party. These gags included hidden camera footage of people surprising each other, made all the more entertaining after security cameras were installed. Perhaps the most memorable goof reel clip involved a parody that everyone participated in through the style of Goolarri’s Kimberley Girl, a series of workshops around personal development for young Aboriginal women. Re-creating the finale catwalk event with everyone in makeup and comically fitting dresses, we shot a runway scene with cameras that slowed down every single micro-movement of our exaggerated catwalking. This gag drew explicitly on British-inflected Australian comedic TV traditions.
Because I am a fairly introverted person, this pushed the limits of my comfort zone. The fact that I felt (and must have seemed) hesitant about participating in a public spectacle, yet did it anyway, perhaps only made the event funnier, as my scenes received extra screen time and laughs during the goof reel. Making oneself vulnerable at times is essential in an emotionally equitable ethnographic process. While Ruth Behar (1996) notes that vulnerability in fieldwork can break your heart, vulnerability applies as much to comedy as it does to tragedy. Since I was an ethnographer asking others to be vulnerable, stretching my own comfort zone, within reason, seemed like the least I could do.
Deadly Humor and Bush Mechanics
Comedy has an intimate relationship with risk, especially in Australia, where maintaining a sense of humor in the face of mortal danger is basically a national pastime. Rural Australians are well known for comedically blasé attitudes toward the variety of lethal creatures that saturate the continent. Referencing this genre of humor was common in each of our trips, with crew members regularly quoting Paul Hogan’s “That’s not a knife! Now that’s a knife!” from Crocodile Dundee (1986) or Steve Irwin’s many antics (though only during my first trip in 2006, before his tragic death later that year). It was routine to joke about the prospect of dying through comments such as “That salty [saltwater crocodile] just wants a bit of a snack, just a leg I reckon, barely a scratch!” One morning when I was picking up the art center’s mail at the Balgo air strip, I noticed a small snake with red marks on it. When I asked a community member next to me, “Is that a death adder?” he responded, “Yeah, mate, hah, I wouldn’t wake her up unless you are bored with living.” In Balgo, comedy was frequently a deadly serious affair. “Deadly” is itself an Aboriginal English slang term that roughly translates to “great,” with edgy and comedic undertones. Laughter is not necessarily oppositional to suffering; sometimes it depends upon a looming threat.
In Balgo, laughter can just as easily stem from joking as from close calls with disaster. As humorist Erma Bombeck put it, “There is a thin line that separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt” (2013). Comedy in the midst of danger operates partly through what Anthony Redmond describes as “short circuits,” innovative metaphors that transfer “meaning across domains, which, while holding onto the original referent of a symbol, simultaneously creates a new relation that extends the original meaning” (2008, 255). This was especially common during larger and extended bush trips, which positioned the film crew as a cohesive social group.
There is also black comedy around fighting. The first time I saw kids watching fights on their phones and laughing, I was confused about what exactly was funny. When physical fights occurred in Balgo, they were no laughing matter. However, fights are imagined differently when they are elsewhere and elsewhen. This is partly explained through the system of “payback.” Often mistranslated along the lines of violent “revenge,” payback is more accurately described as a process of expeditious peace making. The system of payback has been essential for people in the region around Balgo for millennia; as there is little room for error in an unforgiving environment, desire for revenge could have catastrophic consequences for entire groups. Payback fosters the resolving of disputes without lingering negative feelings. Before the imposition of whitefella law, a person might be speared during payback, though this was a precisely inflicted injury, after which the wounded individual would be cared for by their spearer, toward the goal of total resolution. Misunderstandings about payback have led to its criminalization, replaced by whitefella laws that lock people in jail away from their Country, a practice widely considered by community members to be torturous by comparison to the immediate physicality of payback (Finnane 2001).
This context helps to explain laughter when watching videos of physical fights in Balgo. While fights are serious in the moment, there was traditionally little resentment afterward, altering the narrative of fighting from the initiation of a long-term feud to its resolution. The systemic disruption of the payback system has, like many other consequences of settler colonialism, fomented much unnecessary contention within communities. Accordingly, fights that foster feuds seem to become differently funny through a “perilous laughter,” which Yasmine Musharbash (2008b) describes in her fieldwork in Yuendumu. She cautions against the tendency to wholly accept Freudian-lineage theories that laughter simply relieves anxiety or cloaks aggression, and provides examples in which it weakens and wounds. There has recently been an increase in mainstream understandings of the importance of payback justice, with some modest attempts at integrating it within the Australian legal system.6
Bogged
Despite the desert’s many deadly creatures, becoming stranded was by far its greatest mortal danger. The only factor that ever compelled us to turn back on our dozens of bush shoots was the threat of running out of tires. There was a persistent background fear of getting stranded, or as community members put it, bogged.7 This was certainly the case in Tjawa Tjawa. Toward the end of the weeklong shoot, most of the vehicles and participants had returned home, leaving only two troopys carrying Mark, Neil, Larry Gundora, and the film crew as we continued on to Lake Mackay to film the final crucial shots. Driving parallel to a ridge, we searched for the lake. Two hours and three tires later, our situation quickly turned dire. Our water and fuel were running low, and we had far to go. Furthermore, we knew only roughly where we were due to a tall ridge we were driving alongside.
With only one spare tire between the two troopys, we needed to adjust course quickly and get over the ridge to gain perspective and find a less treacherous path. Making a right turn perpendicular to the forty-foot-tall incline, we drove directly up, only to find that we did not nearly make it. Backing up, we made several more attempts, getting closer though falling short of the summit. We decided that loud music would help. Cranking up our favorite song by the Australian band Sheppard, we backed up even further and gunned it, barely and dramatically reaching the top. Over the next day, our precarious situation led us to a variety of memorable moments, including camping next to a small lake as a male camel in heat howled at us from the edge of camp, and driving into the community of Kiwirrkurra on a bare wheel rim, where we bought supplies and two patched tires to get to Lake Mackay. While such moments were anxiety-ridden at the time, we collectively remembered them fondly as funny. Over the next several months, the PAKAM crew and I joked about these many close calls on a daily basis, which led to inside jokes that became regular staples of banter.
The ever-present danger of getting stranded in the desert has inspired an entire subgenre of Aboriginal video production. This was made most famous in the landmark series Bush Mechanics (1998), directed by David Batty through Warlpiri Media, located in the community of Yuendumu. It highlighted the creative techniques that people use to keep from becoming bogged, such as placing a dead battery next to a fire to give it an extra charge, and cutting a car roof off with a hatchet to create a makeshift trailer. We regularly employed such techniques in our trips, once, for example, making jumper cables out of instrument cords by scraping away the rubberized exterior to reveal the copper core. In another instance, after a variety of local fixes to Browny—an old PAKAM troopy that was left in Balgo to “retire”8—we had to start it by physically rubbing two frayed wires together in lieu of keys, essentially hot-wiring it each time. However, for every near disaster or close call, there were other instances in which things did not work out smoothly, and we actually did become bogged. I came to learn that such failure, like danger, had unexpected relationships with both humor and dignity.
Redemptive Failure
As in the trip with Mark and Larry, I felt acute responsibility for this failure, and again, I was surprised that Jimmy invited me into his house for the first time on the morning after our return. There, he showed me photos of his late father’s artwork. Jimmy shifted from fairly interested to exuberant about the film, excitedly sharing ideas about his vision for it. At the time, I was perplexed by these moments. From my point of view, I had made mistakes that had potentially put people in danger. Yet such situations proved to be some of the most important in my relationships during fieldwork, and in retrospect some of the funniest. I still cannot fully reconcile aspects of these moments, which remain enigmatic to me.
In reflecting upon these failures over time, I think that their redeeming qualities had something to do with the way they revealed priorities. In these instances of failure, the film we were working on became instantly deprioritized. Perhaps seeing me so concerned, yet relatively helpless, dispelled the implicit power relationship of myself as a whitefella. After these situations, people would often joke with me, saying “Hah, you were so worried about us, I think you thought it was our last day! As I told you, people are looking out for us, mate.”
As perilous as it seemed in the moment to me, it was not dangerous from Mark’s or Jimmy’s perspectives. Contingencies were already planned for, with their sons’ eyes scanning the horizon for any trace of a signal fire. What seemed to me like disaster was for them a minor glitch that simply provided time to cook and relax. These situations felt embarrassing as I mulled over what I could have done to prevent them. Yet sharing them is crucial here, as they opened doors into relationships and helped me to comprehend just how little I understood.
Failure, of course, is not always constructive or redemptive, even when things turn out okay in the end. To take one stark example, in the middle of the Tjawa Tjawa shoot the crew realized that we did not have enough water in the trailer to complete the trip. We were running out of the most important substance in a desert. This concern was dramatically foregrounded by a series of bush fires that had been lit surrounding our camp, contrasting dramatically with the sunset. At that moment, Neil approached me with his experienced and buoyant optimism and asked, “Say, how would you like to go on a bit of a water adventure?” As with his previous year’s question about being thrown in the deep end, I heartily agreed without understanding, as PhD fieldworkers do. After hearing the details, I climbed into the driver’s seat of the troopy with water trailer in tow, sitting next to Eric with one of his cousins in the back.
In hindsight, redemptive failures tended to occur more often during small, intimate shoots, in contrast to convoy trips like Tjawa Tjawa. During small shoots with a single troopy a crew is especially vulnerable, as there are no backup vehicles. This precarity amplifies the emotional vulnerability of everyone involved. It becomes essential that all can rely on one another, not only for the film to go well but also for the group’s safety, and even their survival.
Awakening and Arriving
On the Kurrarlkatjanu trip, Mark was a storyteller and navigator. However, he was not deeply involved in the film process, and the shoot traveled to familiar places with established pathways that Kapululangu regularly visited. In contrast, Tjawa Tjawa positioned Mark as the film’s director and leader, requiring him to travel to places that he had not been to in many years. It was during the moments of becoming temporarily disoriented that Mark seemed to find his footing for filmmaking. While few would describe Mark as a comedian, he had a keen sense of humor that he employed with ease to relax the anxious and disarm the strident.
During Tjawa Tjawa, the crew’s most common joke was about taking shortcuts. Leading the convoy of Toyotas, Mark would often say, “Actually, I reckon we can take a shortcut that way, no worries at all.” Invariably, none of these shortcuts went exactly as planned. “We’ll just take a shortcut the Dreamtime, ha ha,” an Aboriginal crew member joked, filling the troopy with laughter once again, as Mark’s lead vehicle came to a near stop and began slowly turning off into a new direction. With each setback, Mark, unfazed, pointed again to the horizon and declared, “Not far now, not far,” which in Kukatja meant that we were going the right way, not that we were necessarily getting close. That information was embedded in the corresponding hand sign of pointing in that direction toward the ground three times. By saying “Not far now,” Mark was simultaneously using this phrase to precisely express the situation to the Aboriginal crew, while remaining acutely aware that the shortcut had taken on a comedic tone for whitefellas who were just coming to understand that this did not mean what they had assumed. In one instance he publicly proclaimed, “Not far now, maybe one, two, or six hours away, hah.”
Such moments did not represent getting “lost” or going the “wrong way,” but rather were integral to the process of remembering Country by moving through it. Although trips often took longer than anticipated in our schedule, with each debate about where to go next, Mark, Larry, Payi Payi, and others from this Country connected with their childhood memories along with Dreaming stories. The women regularly broke out into spatially embedded songs as the convoy made its way. The choice of vehicle to lead each trip was crucial, as was where each individual sat. Driving or sitting in the front of the first troopy not only represented a dignified way of demonstrating Mark’s status as director but also provided minimal interference in his rediscovery process. Often, when beginning an alternative route, Mark’s and Larry’s memories would be triggered by a place, leading us to, for example, a centuries-old grinding stone.10 At the same time, there was significant and explicit pressure on Mark to know which way he was going, which he later told me motivated him to act confident even in situations where he was still figuring out the best way to go. As Mark explained, he was sure about the right way to walk; the issue was that this did not always translate into passable tracks for vehicles.
Through this process, Tjawa Tjawa became for Mark more than just a trip to Country with his family. This shoot seemed to awaken in him an interest in the film process itself and what it could offer on multiple levels. His position as director renewed the central leadership role that he had occupied before Yagga Yagga closed. The role positioned Mark as visionary and storyteller along a Songline that he was re-remembering by moving through it. In doing so, this also reinvigorated the calling of his Country of Mangkayi to explore, share, and return to.
Revisiting Deloria’s observation that “people have little sympathy with stolid groups” (1969, 39), the political importance of being humanized through comedy is difficult to overstate. While it should be obvious that Aboriginal communities, like all others, are replete with laughter and humor, the humorlessness of national Aboriginal imaginaries has meaningful policy consequences.
To conclude on an appropriately comedic note, during my fieldwork a landmark Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s sketch comedy series was released, titled Black Comedy (2014). With a cast including some of the most prominent Aboriginal comedians performing Saturday Night Live–style skits, this was a rare mainstream and well-funded show centering Aboriginal humor. Many of the jokes were made at the expense of white Australians and the history of colonization and missionization. It satirically inverted the dominant stereotypes used to depict Aboriginal people. Tracing its lineage from the Basically Black (1973) series11—a revolutionary sketch show with incisive and provocative skits including Aboriginal people in whiteface—Black Comedy was not afraid to tackle politically charged topics. These included Indigenous sexual identity, white appropriation of Aboriginal culture, and even an anticolonial parody of Star Trek titled Star Blaks.
Unsurprisingly, the show was controversial with general audiences. In the mainstream Australian mediascape, Black Comedy represented a radical departure through its amplification of Aboriginal humor. Echoing its comedic lineage, it confronted irreconcilabilities of Indigenous life within the Australian settler state through caricatures that illuminated these realities. However, at PAKAM and Goolarri it was a hit, and punch lines from favorite sketches entered into daily banter, interwoven with reenacted close calls from Tjawa Tjawa and other bush trips past. It provided one more set of jokes to add to a rich comedic repertoire.
The ubiquity of humor within the social lives of these projects provided creative inertia and emotional sustenance throughout their filming. The following chapter focuses on postproduction, and video editing in particular. Typically, this film stage contrasts with the exuberance of shoots, shifting from social crews to isolated editing. Yet for Tjawa Tjawa and other Balgo films entering postproduction, the social process had only just begun.