Fires, Tires, and Paper

Creative Fires

Marumpu Wangka—which translates as “hand talk” in English—was an unexpected outcome of several months of hanging out with women Elders at the Kapululangu women’s center following Tjawa Tjawa. Having known these Elders for years, we would regularly spend long afternoons sitting around joking and chatting, often discussing the complex system of hand signs. While I was learning basic Kukatja in my earlier trips, the women had often showed me signs as a learning device. Over time, this had developed into a lively gestural banter between us that expanded from dozens to eventually hundreds of signs, and included Zohl de Ishtar, the center’s executive director. While hand signs are used throughout the community, the women Elders seemed to have a special love for them. This was in part because, as some of the oldest community members, they fondly associated signs with their youth, before they came into the Old Balgo Mission (de Ishtar 2005). The Elders, I, and Zohl quickly arrived at the idea of trying to film some of the signs, and we began organizing and translating them.

Mark would often visit Kapululangu with me to spend time with his sister Payi Payi and the other women. When he learned that we might make a film about the hand signs, he immediately offered to help expand and refine the list. He was passionate about the project’s focus on language. As he told a group of youth in Balgo, “Language is very, very important. Language is culture, and nobody can change that. You’ve got to keep it. It’s part of your blood, part of your tribe. That’s why we put films in proper Kukatja.” Even though he likely had the most extensive knowledge of hand signs in Balgo, he insisted that he only assist in the background, reflecting that he had been in the spotlight too much with Tjawa Tjawa and that it was important that other people had a chance to make projects for a while. When I would periodically ask him if he was thinking about films, he would pause contemplatively and then respond, “Slowly, slowly. Other people have films they want to do too. That’s good.”

This seemingly unexpected flash of collective creativity typified Balgo film projects during these months. Over time, fires emerged as a useful way of trying to put this creative process into words, and we began using it as a term for discussing creativity. This drew explicitly on previous fire metaphors in Aboriginal media. In the earliest days of video production in Yuendumu, Francis Kelly and others described the need for Warlpiri people to combat outside media with their own through the metaphor of “fighting fire with fire.” As Neil Turner recalled:

I believe [the phrase] came from Warlpiri Media and possibly even Kurt Granites [Yuendumu Elder] has the intellectual property on that slogan, which was directly related to the imminent satellite invasion and the development of community television as a sort of patch burning analogy of creating your own small fire, if you like, to prevent yourself from being engulfed by the bigger fire that would come. (quoted in Guster 2011)

In Balgo, fires was both literal and metaphorical. An important aspect of bush shoots was literally lighting numerous fires on our trips as a part of proper land management—what is referred to broadly as “taking care of Country”—through the systematic burning of grasses.1 Such fires must happen at the right time and under the correct conditions. When lit, they burn brightly and travel quickly. When they are done, they are done. And it can be quite some time before a fire should be lit again in that place. These fires resonate with the brilliant flashes of creativity that regularly occurred in Balgo media projects. The time leading up to a creative fire was typified by a quiet buildup lasting days, weeks, or months. This culminated in an eruption of intense creative group energy, lasting from minutes to weeks, which could neither be fully planned nor delayed. Beyond describing collective media dynamics, fires also reframes discussions of creative labor away from individualist discourses around laziness and productivity that are often rendered irreconcilable in Aboriginal community life.2

Late one afternoon, Shorty and I were practicing different camera techniques just outside of the radio station and shop. After a few kids came up to us to see what we were doing, interest spread in a matter of minutes. Soon there were dozens of kids passing the camera around and trying it out. They quickly formed various ideas about what to shoot. Over the next two hours, we moved collectively to the playground and the store before driving in the PAKAM troopy all around Balgo. We filmed footy practice and the process of making a slingshot from a balloon and half of a large Coke bottle.3 We only stopped when the camera battery and its backup ran out. As with most creative fires, this specific blaze was unanticipated and never happened again in a similar way.

Such rhythms of collective Aboriginal action are not new, and often mirror the creative process of ceremonies, rites of passage, and corroborees (regional gatherings involving dancing and important ritual practices) (Berndt 1974). As with filmmaking, these are seasonal. In the Kimberley region from Broome to Balgo there is a stark difference between the wet/hot and dry/cool parts of the year. There is an intensive and busy dry season schedule of shoots from around April to October. During the wet season, people tend to travel and take part in important cultural events. Due to family obligations and practical weather conditions, the wet season tends to be when film projects focus more on video editing, planning, and downtime. It also provides a period for recovery after the back-to-back projects throughout the dry season.

Aboriginal media workers often have to miss work due to obligations, especially in the wet season. Work absence was understood by PAKAM differently than in non-Indigenous organizations. Taking time off to attend a funeral (lasting days or weeks) or to visit a relative was normalized. Neil regularly discussed these seasonal rhythms and social obligations, and the challenges of reconciling this with bureaucratic processes of hiring, employment requirements, and time sheets. Fires illustrates that such periodic absences are not just understandable but in fact necessary for the process of collective creativity within palya projects.

As described, based upon my experiences over two years of attending the National Remote Indigenous Media Festival, PAKAM was by all accounts the most productive of all of the Remote Indigenous Media Organizations—contributing a plurality of content to ICTV and related streaming platforms at the time—while somehow also appearing to have the most fun.4 It seemed to me that PAKAM’s unusual combination of productivity and good spirits could be explained, at least partly, by their implicit collective embrace of the fires creative process, prioritizing it despite its irreconcilability with bureaucratic norms.

Tire Politics

Throughout all the various bush trips I was a part of, it was never once water, food, injury, or sickness that forced us to turn back, but always tires. Tires were essential. They prevented one from becoming stranded, and enabled travel within and beyond the community to go hunting or visit family members. Yasmine Musharbash (2008b) emphasizes the importance of mobility in Yuendumu, the nearest Aboriginal community of a size similar to Balgo. Describing it as “hithering and thithering,” she traces the flow of people within and between communities to demonstrate the complex relational logic of movement, structured within networks of obligation (127). Musharbash notes that the Western conception of a “household” is rendered meaningless in communities due to its boundedness, as people dynamically adjust their housing to their relations (60). In her work with Warlpiri communities in the same region, Melinda Hinkson illustrates that the process of leaving a camp, moving through Country, and returning is one of the most fundamental aspects of Warlpiri social sustenance and world-making (2021, 8).

Tires encompasses interrelated aspects of materiality and mobility in the production process. It includes all of the physical stuff, from film equipment to supplies to troopys. Most vitally, it includes literal tires and is less metaphorical than fires. In light of the significance of mobility in Balgo, there were ongoing politics around their possession, exchange, and patching. While vehicle repair was a common skill set, few had access to the tools and equipment needed to fix more than their own vehicles. In Balgo, one community mechanic had both the skill and infrastructural access to fix vehicles. With more requests than anyone could respond to, he had to strategically triage them. These priorities tended to be based on at least two factors. First, since he worked directly for the Balgo community office, he prioritized their official vehicles. Second, the other requests were to some extent ordered based on his own kinship and community relationships. These decisions had more to do with relational obligations than with favoritism.

Knowing that I was working with Mark and other Elders around the community, the mechanic often helped to keep the PAKAM troopys operable through a variety of repairs. His grandmother lived at the women’s center and was involved in many of PAKAM’s film projects over the years. The mechanic himself, along with his family, took part in the shoot of Kurrarlkatjanu in 2013. At various times he patched tires, fixed brakes, and rewired the PAKAM troopys. He specialized in troopys, the preferred Balgo vehicle, and was adept at finding replacement parts in the neatly organized set of broken-down vehicles located just outside of Balgo. While described as the “car dump” by some managers, it contained a plethora of spare parts for those who knew where and how to look. Similar retired car yards can be found along the edges of many Aboriginal communities.

Not all repairs were possible or practical, especially when stranded. For example, when one of the trailers broke an axle during the Tjawa Tjawa shoot, we moved its contents of mattresses for Elders onto the roofs of other vehicles. We left the trailer with the hope that it could be repaired and returned to Balgo in the future. However, in light of all of the vehicle work that needed to be done, attempting to weld an axle far away from Balgo was challenging to say the least. Depending on what rumor one believed at the time, the trailer was left as it was, burned, or—and this is perhaps most likely—put on blocks to salvage its most vital components: tires.

Tire politics saturated our film projects. For example, I once arrived in Balgo to discover that the old PAKAM troopy that had retired to the women’s center had become embroiled in a minor dispute. One of its tires was borrowed, and its return was overdue. Tires were especially difficult to come by during this period, and not even the mechanic knew of a spare, save for expensive new ones in the shop. Mark suggested that his son-in-law might know someone, who in turn directed me to one of his nephews just around the corner in Kylie Camp. When we went over, they spoke for a while in Kukatja, after which the younger man looked over at the troopy and said, “Oh yeah, it’s a Toyota so no worries.” Since we did not have a tire-mounting machine, he had to remove and install the new tire on the rim manually with a rubber mallet and crowbar. As he was finishing, the sound of the weekly mail plane buzzed overhead, forming an unlikely sonic symphony along with Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” playing from a vehicle next door. Hurrying through the final hits, he exclaimed, “My son is coming in! I’ll get a compressor and you should be ‘right.” Jumping into his Nissan, he made a few hand signs to someone across the street, who brought over a compressor and jack so that I could complete the job and return the tire in question.

Tire politics were important, though not because they signaled material possession; it was rather because they enabled the mobility required to move through Country and fulfill relational obligations, in addition to running crucial errands like collecting firewood. Beyond tires, this is true in a broader sense regarding material ownership in communities. While fires reframes productivity discussions in Balgo, tires upends regular outsider claims about the “irresponsibility” of community members. Such judgments focused on a perceived recklessness with objects and was based on misunderstanding. For material objects such as vehicles, in which safety is a matter of life or death, community members exhibited great care and expertise in their handling. However, there was little sense in trying to retain a new or shiny surface appearance in dusty conditions. Highly skilled bush mechanics often asked me to push-start their car by literally nudging it forward with the troopy’s front bumper, or “roo [kangaroo] bar.” Dents or bends in the exterior were not relevant to a vehicle’s performance, and this method was both effective and efficient.

Irreconcilable sensibilities about material objects existed in ongoing conflict with some whitefella managers. For example, every few years the community purchased a new set of musical instruments for the local bands. As with the vehicles, they operated well, though invariably appeared superficially battered, with chipped paint and wear from sun, dust, and rain. Despite ingenious bush mechanics employed to refashion everything from drum pedals to guitar bridges, the treatment of instruments was a commonly cited example of material irresponsibility. There is also a long regional tradition of using, fixing, and eventually discarding musical instruments rather than immortalizing or guarding them. For example, in the Northern Territory, yidaki (didgeridoos) traditionally were rarely kept, but rather made from termite-hollowed wood, played, and then thrown into the fire. This minimalist logic, so essential to nomadic life, has become distorted through the imposition of Western values around capital accumulation, wage labor, and stationary settlement.

Materialist misunderstandings by whitefellas were perhaps most pronounced in relation to housing. Visiting service providers in Balgo regularly uttered harsh judgments, such as “They don’t have any pride in their homes” or “How can they live like that? Those houses should be condemned. People sleep on the floor. There is blood from meat on the wall. Nothing is cared for.” Yet, with appropriate context this usage is rendered both logical and responsible. Houses are used in the same way that nomadic camps have been lived in for millennia, and not on the basis of Western conceptions regarding a nuclear family home. As Mary Douglas put it, dirt is matter that is deemed to be out of place based upon “a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” ([1966] 2003, 44). Unlike a house, it makes little sense to describe a camp as either dirty or crowded. It was not choice, but the colonial dispossession of land that led to the unprecedented concentration of Aboriginal people into relatively large and sedentary communities, resulting in the very housing concentration and usage that is so often critiqued.

Whitefella perceptions had a profound impact on material access, as most large purchases and allocations of funds were ultimately at the discretion of whitefella managers. Field mates would often comment on the amount of control that whitefellas exerted over items and resources in Balgo. This was epitomized by the “compound,” an area near the center of Balgo inhabited by whitefella workers and guarded by large gates that protected various locked-up community assets, including a trove of spare tires.

Issues of material control were often a primary factor in the inaccessibility of community media programs and resources. For example, when I arrived in Balgo the art center’s extensive media facilities had lain dormant for years. This included a professional recording studio with high-quality instruments and a video production media center with a gamut of equipment, sitting behind sealed doors. This locked-away phenomenon was common in many communities I worked in. Part of the issue had to do with increasingly dire funding opportunities for remote community art centers. This seemed to be a result of the structure of how such programs were set up in the first place, requiring a dedicated outsider facilitator to manage the space and make sure that the equipment did not leave or get damaged.

Several art center managers in the region noted that it would be challenging for community members to run a music studio because they would be unable to say no to their relatives. Managers often noted that the structure of Aboriginal communities necessitated outside, if not whitefella, managers whose job it was to say no. As one manager phrased it, “The role of whitefellas in communities is to absorb all of the blame. It’s important, but it gets tiring.” Such comments were frequently made by various managers of Indigenous organizations in communities, and they regularly advised me to blame them in relevant discussions through comments such as “Just tell them I said no” and “Just blame it on me,” though not all managers agreed with this.5 These dynamics seemed typified by managers trying to do their best under duress, aiming to continue programs that began before their tenure, with dwindling staff and funding.

More troubling were the many examples in which denial of access was compounded by community CEOs. In one instance I was sent by PAKAM on a crew to assist in getting a community media station up and running again, and upon arrival we were told that the entrance door had been previously pried open and the equipment inside trashed. The door had since been bolted shut by the CEO. When we asked him about it, he said, “Mate, it’s effed. You know how they are with this stuff. It’s trashed. They didn’t look after it. I reckon you oughta just scrap it and start over.” When we gained access to the studio we found that in all actuality, it was fine. All that was missing were the headphones, microphones, and cables, which a local band had requisitioned since they were not being used. We located most of these items easily within days, and the studio was soon operational.

In another community, we arrived only to find that the door had been sealed by the CEO with specialized countersunk bolts that were difficult to remove. He had found what he called “illegal paraphernalia” in the radio station, and his response was meant to serve as a punishment, framed through the language of laziness and irresponsibility. He had enacted other penalties as well, including disconnecting the lights at the basketball court for several weeks. When we finally entered the radio station, we saw that the iMac computer was gone. The CEO remarked that someone had stolen it and that we would never see it again. After asking just a few people, we found it twenty minutes later at a house where its residents were using it to watch movies. When we mentioned that we were trying to find the PAKAM computer, the man at the door responded, “No worries, mate. We’ve been looking after it and using it. I’ll go get it now.” Such misunderstandings and accusations regarding “theft” were commonplace by CEOs, though most organization managers held more nuanced views.

Many influential whitefellas also held parallel misunderstandings about a perceived lack of technological interest and ability by community members. Yet, throughout the dozens of projects I worked on in communities, I found the opposite to be the case. Whether training to learn radio or video, there tended to be intense interest and quick understanding. Although tasks that required an individual to work alone—like the initial video editing process—rarely elicited excitement, technical processes that were also highly social invited long hours of active engagement.

For example, many in Balgo were particularly savvy in the use of USB drives, which provided a social object and medium for data exchange. Unlike most Western-derived technology, USB sticks align with local material sensibilities. They are durable, portable, inexpensive, and universally operable. They can be tossed, caught, and left baking in the sun or soaking in the mud without breaking. USBs were regularly exchanged in social settings, with people trading music and movies, including locally produced media. Young people made sure to acquire car stereos that had a direct USB plug, providing an easy way of playing music in the moment and on the go. Before each of my return trips to Balgo from Broome, I brought several USBs that contained all of the Balgo-produced media. Not only was this an effective way of ensuring that films remained accessible, but it also provided an object that people would continue to find useful. At media festivals and other events, USBs were the most common and popular items to give, receive, and exchange.

In his chapter “The Aboriginal Laptop,” Daniel Miller (2008) argues that a computer could be understood as a metaphorical and literal home for Malcolm, an Aboriginal man who spent much of his life in London. As Miller illustrates, Malcolm used this technology in specifically Aboriginal ways. While remaining cautious about the limits of such a metaphor, USB sticks resonate with the materiality and purpose of message sticks, which are small pieces of wood with etched and painted symbols used to transmit messages over long distances between language groups throughout Australia. Like message sticks, USBs imbue information from the original sender, as well as those who have subsequently passed it along.

Ultimately, community members, while generally excelling with the physical stuff of media-making, are not often in a position to acquire cameras, vehicles, and supplies. By contrast, outsiders often have access to these yet are possessive of their use, largely due to byzantine bureaucratic systems based on power ascribed through paper.

Pernicious Paper

Paper is the least metaphorical of these three tropes and includes all pieces of paper or its screen simulations. While fires distills Aboriginal rhythms of creative production, and tires engages material accessibility to enable creativity through mobility, paper denaturalizes bureaucratic processes in communities. It aims toward the anthropological truism of “making the familiar strange.” Ostensibly banal, paperwork is in practice a primary mechanism by which settler-colonial dispossession continues to operate in Aboriginal communities. Paper is often referred to as “milli milli” in Aboriginal English, and its utterance is usually accompanied by frustration. Of course, not all marked wood pulp sheets carry negative connotations in communities. Many objects, such as artwork, books in Aboriginal languages, and playing cards, are useful and beloved. However, here paper refers to the dominant forms of bureaucratic violence that control and limit possibility in Aboriginal communities.

Paper was often as harmful as it was slow, especially when it came to money. Its painfully sluggish pace was especially apparent in Centrelink payments. This system of welfare, available to all low-income Australians, was made especially arduous in remote communities, often requiring recipients to spend many hours sitting in the Balgo office waiting to correct various technical issues with their account. As Musharbash (2007) argues, the recently introduced coalescence of perpetual waiting, settler conceptions of time, and the category of “joblessness” has produced boredom. This is a Western phenomenon that likely did not exist before contact, at least not in the way that it is commonly imagined, as weariness born from a lack of interest. In these ways and more, physical and virtual paper has come to influence nearly every aspect of social life (Hull 2012).

“You see, money is nothing to us, just paper. It is nothing.” Shorty’s comment sticks with me in the following weeks, and speaks to the paradoxes of money in communities. For example, on the first film project I worked on in Balgo, Kurrarlkatjanu, Payi Payi’s painting sold for five figures. Receiving the money when we returned from the shoot, she noted that by the end of the day the money was “all gone”—and gestured both hands as empty—in that it was distributed throughout her extended family. She described this without resentment, and with a sense of joy in being able to fulfill her relational obligations.

Money, like other resources, is generally shared within family groups. This has worked well for tens of thousands of years, in which tucker (hunted and gathered food) was distributed in prescribed ways throughout small groups. Payi Payi—who like her brother Mark grew up in their Country and came into the Old Balgo Mission as a child—seemed to feel relatively little conflict about money. However, decades of dispossession have fostered increasingly complicated and difficult problems for younger people, many of whom are deeply affected by Stolen Generation policies. At least 100,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents and put into boarding schools from the 1930s until as late as the 1970s. This policy coincided with the forcing of Aboriginal people into stationary communities in order to claim and develop their land. These were systematic processes that the state used to assimilate Aboriginal people and dispossess their Country. One of their many legacies has been the continual pressure toward individualism, including various incentives to leave communities for towns in order to earn more money.

The shifting dynamics around money have led to what is known in Balgo and other Aboriginal communities as “humbug.” This involves requesting money from relatives, usually directed from younger people to their Elders. Humbug is particularly complex. Deriving from long-held traditions of sharing and communal distribution, it has shifted toward an unbalanced generational dynamic. Inverting the structure of providing meat to Elders after a successful hunt, older people tend to have more money from art sales and resource royalties. As Mark often noted, “It used to be that the young fellas would take care of us old fellas. But now everything is backwards, and they humbug us to take care of them. Should be the other way.” Humbug was especially apparent during the weekly “money morning” distribution of payments at the art center. On this day, relatives of the women Elders at Kapululangu would sometimes come by to humbug. These visits were seemingly about money, though were much more than that. Sharing has endured as a core social value that creates the context for enacting and reaffirming kinship relationships. Just as there are social taboos against saying “no” to a request, so too is there a lack of the phrase “thank you” in Kukatja. Exchange is not framed in terms of appreciation and indebtedness but through networks of relational obligation. It is money’s substance, source, and meaning that render it so irreconcilable with community life.

Money is imagined differently in community media projects than in the acrylic art painting process. Filmmaking and painting share key qualities, including the visual expressions of Country, community, and self through durable mediums. They are also often linked in their funding. Media production was central for the massive culture center expansion built onto Warlayirti (de Ishtar 2005). However, while funding is important at the project and media organization levels in films, there tends to be little (and often zero) income for community participants. This has rarely been the case with painting, which is primarily (though not solely) done to earn money to distribute to relations.6 As John Carty describes it, this in turn becomes a way of expressing obligation fulfillment throughout kinship networks (2011, 96).

What is it about video production that seems to provide value beyond money in ways that painting does not? One possible answer is media’s mobility. Even more so than painting, video production tends to center extended family trips to Country, including access to tires. And while painting is at times collaborative, video production tends to be more social, including distributed authorship and roles. There is also a key distinction around imagined audience. Unlike acrylic art, which is usually painted for exhibitions, collectors, and tourists, most community video projects are produced for broader family and friend networks in and beyond Balgo. When filming, participants and collaborators regularly asked, “When will this be on ICTV?” and “Can we get a USB of the footage today?” Even in big-budget projects like Tjawa Tjawa, community members themselves are an important audience, along with broader publics. Many show up to community film festivals, though few spend time perusing the art gallery.

Furthermore, the labor of community media-making has not been commodified to the extent that it has in art. This is partly because media cannot be singularly possessed or provide long-term income in the way that art can. While painting did not begin with a profit motive in the 1980s in Balgo, it increasingly shifted that way over decades. The close association of art with humbug and money morning has rendered painting as less of a labor of love over time. I am not suggesting that painting is not a deeply meaningful act, that it is a problem that painting provides income, or that it is a good thing that video production tends not to. Rather, this contrast points to the cascading effects of commodifying creative processes in Aboriginal communities, and the insidious legacies of paper. Painting and cinema are not simply representational; they are manifestations of Country, and their processes are conduits for the transmission of generational knowledge (Carty 2021, 1). Thinking of them in relation to one another reveals the counterintuitive and paradoxical impacts of payment and its absence.

Time sheets were one of the most dreaded forms of paper. Due by fax once every fortnight (two weeks), these regularly provoked anxiety, as individuals tried to precisely recall the different days and hours that they had worked. These were especially difficult to navigate in situations where distinctions between time spent “on” and “off” the job were ambiguous. For example, should spending time at the women’s center hanging out in the week leading up to a shoot be considered media labor? While this may not have involved much time discussing the project, it was necessary for the film to happen and for it to unfold through a palya process. Since PAKAM community workers were part-time and could not exceed twenty hours per week, the calculus of carrying over extra time from a previous busy pay period was confusing. Time sheets also provoked frustration at a material level throughout the process of printing, filling out, and then faxing them in. Workers often felt uncomfortable having to gain access to the fax machine in the busy community office. At the PAKAM headquarters in Broome, the time sheet due date was anticipated and bustling, involving a rush to make everything add up correctly and appropriately.

While much of the paper in Balgo was emailed and printed through various offices, it also physically flew in and out on the weekly mail plane. Every Wednesday between the late morning and early afternoon, this plane looped around the community to announce its arrival before landing at the strip at the edge of Balgo. The mail plane provided a consistent unofficial meeting for whitefellas in the community, often including the CEO and most of the managers of various organizations. While waiting under the small area of shade, they sometimes discussed big-picture changes that they expected or hoped for, usually in relation to funding and policies. As a volunteer for the art center, I was occasionally sent to drop off or pick up their large canvas sack of letters and packages. Although it was generally a whitefella ritual, community members sometimes attended, usually to catch a ride on the plane to and from Halls Creek or Kununurra. Such air travel often followed time spent in a hospital recovering from a health issue.

While wages for PAKAM media workers was standard and regular, payment for community film participants sometimes posed irreconcilable problems. This was often more complex than simply paying individuals for their hours of work, as it could seem inappropriate to pay an Elder who shared important knowledge less than a younger person who worked more hours. How does one monetarily value cultural knowledge gained over a lifetime, and which does not belong to a single individual?

Furthermore, there were a variety of bureaucratic barriers regarding payments. For example, anyone receiving more than two hundred dollars for a media project had to complete an increased amount of paperwork. However, the biggest problem with paying people was that—with the rare exception of big-budget productions like Tjawa Tjawa—there was relatively little funding in film budgets, generally speaking. While Indigenous media organizations remained relatively well funded, this was only in relation to other Aboriginal sectors that were being rapidly defunded. For example, NITV had comparatively scarce funds to acquire programs, often paying less than industry standards out of budgetary necessity. When paying community members, it was noted by many that given the tight funding constraints, it was sometimes more dignified to be unpaid than severely underpaid. This was especially the case for Elders contributing cultural knowledge, where small payments could feel disrespectful (Woods 2014). On the other hand, it follows that participants should be compensated for their time with available funds.

Neil’s skills in navigating such bureaucratic realities were finely honed, as he translated irreconcilabilities to render them as more sensible within both communities and bureaucracies. This deft dance occurred at a variety of levels, from complex A–Z budgets to interpersonal meeting dynamics. He remained self-conscious of the various embodied habitus adjustments required from moment to moment to move between the social realms of fires, tires, and paper (Bourdieu 1977). Neil on occasion related such moments to my own research in our discussions. For example, once when walking from the PAKAM shed to visit with the accountant in the upstairs Goolarri offices, he quipped, “Alright, gotta go put some shoes on to walk over to Goolarri. Hey, that’s a good anecdote for your study!” Seasoned hands like Neil developed an intuitive sense for navigating bureaucracy, though he provides an exception that proves the rule of how complex and challenging it is to collaborate on Aboriginal film projects as a whitefella. There were community projects that I heard about or witnessed firsthand in which paper drowned them before they could even get started. Broadly speaking, bureaucratic navigation was, at best, characterized by imperfect compromises.

Extinguishing and Sparking

Although fires, tires, and paper sometimes aligned to foster palya projects, they tended to be at odds, since they involved competing pressures. Often an increase in material tires and paper funding reduced or even extinguished fires, and vice versa. Throughout my fieldwork there were many moments of creative fires that provided an abundance of excitement yet did not lead to a palya project. In 2013, for example, I volunteered in Yungngora for five weeks during which we had virtually no tires or paper. We lacked proper cameras, vehicles, or money. During this time there were several creative fires, and we made iPhone videos walking around and on the back of pickup trucks but were unable to complete any projects due to these constraints. I also worked on projects that had plentiful tires and paper but in which the creative fire was extinguished through the process. For example, when a local artist was unable to attend Desert Mob—a major Indigenous arts festival—the art center manager asked Shorty and me if we could make a video sharing her background as an artist and her work. With only a couple of days to complete it, the process was unavoidably rushed. That said, not every project is or needs to be palya. That video, for example, was meant to serve a specific purpose, and ultimately the artist and the art center seemed pleased to have the chance to at least send something through which she could transmit her own words and presence.

In Tjawa Tjawa there was more than enough paper and tires. We literally lit many fires and had moments of inspired creativity, alongside constraints around time frame, budget, and broad audience appeal. Inevitably, these realities of being on a large and logistically complex convoy trip muted creative excitement in some moments. However, what stands out to me is how fires, tires, and paper generally remained aligned despite these pressures. Only an Indigenous media organization like PAKAM would have been able to negotiate the tires and paper for such a complicated film process in ways that held enough space for creative fires. It certainly achieved palya status, cited as a resounding success not only by NITV and film festivals around the world but also, more importantly, by community members in Balgo.

For whitefellas such as myself, patience and relationship-building were essential for slowly cultivating projects that might become palya. However, there were some who could ignite creative flash fires and foster palya media in an instant. This ability was exemplified by Mary Geddarrdyu. More commonly known as Mary G, this character was played by Mark Bin Bakar, a multitalented Broome entertainer who was also the original creative director of Goolarri in its early days. Mary G continues to serve as the host of a popular weekly radio show and was previously the star of a Goolarri TV show. Mark Bin Bakar is a respected Indigenous media veteran and prolific songwriter who often speaks at large events. For example, he gave the keynote talk at the 2015 National Remote Indigenous Media Festival in Lajamanu. In parallel, Mary G is an Elvis-status celebrity in remote communities. In the course of only a few days’ visit during the post–Tjawa Tjawa period, Mary G lit several creative fires in Balgo, including an interactive singing event at the community school. Mary G also hosted a live radio show in the art center that garnered a long line out the door, including local guests and kids singing along to the host’s catchy musical hits, which have become standards in Broome and the Kimberley.

Mark Moora especially enjoyed being interviewed on this radio show, as they joked back and forth about him marrying the character. In addition to Mary G’s jovial and charming persona, the popularity of the character was based upon carefully crafted songs that conveyed serious colonial critique while drawing upon the power of comedy. In these lyrics from “Poorbala Poorbala Me” (2003), Mary G reveals and critiques whitefella paper in relation to well-known government program acronyms:

They give us social security

ATSIC gives us CDEP7

Government say “he good now”

They trick us with their money

While the pressures of tires and paper make achieving a palya film project challenging, the less expensive and technologically complex medium of radio was especially suited to quickly sparking creative fires. As an often-improvisational art form, radio programs such as Mary G’s illustrated the power of unencumbered creativity (Bessire and Fisher 2013). In between our Balgo video projects, regular moments of creative fires occurred during radio programs and in prerecording segments such as station IDs with portable audio recorders.

Music recording provided another mode of capturing fires. As a volunteer with the art center, I was asked to assist in revitalizing the music recording studio, which had not been regularly used in years. After a couple of weeks of reconnecting the electronics and becoming familiar with its workings, we let local bands know that the studio was open and ready to record. More than a month later—after attending a weekend footy trip with most of the musicians to the town of Kununurra—I was approached at the store one morning by Quinton Milner, a musician and band leader. “We’ll record this afternoon?” he asked. I nodded, and added, “Sounds good, I’ll be there.” That day we recorded from 3 p.m. to 3 a.m., and this was followed by several long days of recording that went late into the night. The next week we had completed an entire album of nine songs, mostly in Kukatja, with Quinton’s band Cliffside Reggae, as well as other recordings by various community members. Rather than going track by track, we set up to capture the whole band at once, adding only some vocals and guitar solos afterward.

In contrast to past music recording that I had been involved with in the United States, band members regularly switched instruments between and even during songs. Younger kids watched the older musicians closely, taking photos and video of the sessions, while practicing on the instruments during breaks. Mark would sometimes come by in the late afternoon to see how the recording sessions were going, and seemed especially pleased that so many young people were involved. Months before, he had mentioned a song he wanted to record. I asked him once if he wanted to do that soon. With a knowing smile, he said “Yuwai, sometime soon, after this mob records and when my band comes through Balgo.”

During this period we also recorded over an hour of Dreaming songs by the Elders at the women’s center. These recordings were carefully guarded so that only two CDs of their content exist, both of which are at the women’s center. The music studio’s creative fires burned fast and bright, culminating in a concert just outside of the studio, on a stage overlooking the sandy performance area behind the art center. Within a fortnight it ran its course, and as other creative projects emerged we only rarely used the studio in the weeks that followed.

The musicians and I looked into trying to copyright the songs, burn CDs, and distribute or sell them in cases, though barriers of paper and tires presented themselves through legal and funding issues. However, through the local network of USB drives, the songs were shared across Balgo within days and could be regularly heard in cars and other stereos over the coming months. I still heard these tracks regularly played in 2023. Aware of the long-term patterns of inaccessibility regarding such spaces, Quinton and I recorded extended how-to videos and stored them on the studio computer and in the art center’s database. These consisted of conversations between us as we described exactly how the music recording studio worked for the imagined audience of someone who would reignite the studio in future bursts of creative musical fires.

Moving the Center

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993) suggests that “moving the center” can be more effective at decolonizing than arguing against dominant frameworks. As an example, he notes that engaging the first and third world model, even to dispute it, naturalizes its logic. It reinforces what is assumed and who is imagined at the margins. Fires, tires, and paper is one of many possible models that aim to move the center from settler logics and assumptions toward those of Balgo and other Aboriginal communities.8

The interrelationship between another trinity at the heart of this book—irreconcilability, envisioning, and cinematic social lives—is crucial here. What is it that is irreconcilable between Aboriginal and settler lives? Settler logics, deeply enmeshed through centuries of colonial policies and representations, form a structure that explicitly and implicitly dispossess through Indigenous elimination (Wolfe 2006). It does so in myriad ways, many of them subtle and subconscious. In addition to eliminating people, these foundational logics degrade their movement through Country, their ability to live a dignified life, and the transmission of knowledge across generations. Settlement ultimately aims to dispossess Aboriginal future possibility itself, both for community members and within the popular Australian imaginary.

The extent to which the settler-colonial imagination has become infused within daily life in Aboriginal communities renders it difficult to disentangle and decenter. However, also embedded within the social lives of palya media projects are “glimpses” into refigured centers, which cast imperial imaginaries toward the margin (Bessire 2017). Fires, tires, and paper aim to further move the center regarding dominant discourses in remote Aboriginal communities.

Fires is symbolized not through Western connotations of destruction and hell but rather as a fundamental mode of productive group action, as it represents the literal means for taking care of Country. It decenters pervasive deficit discourses regarding Aboriginal communities, which moralize individual work ethics through the capitalist framework of productivity. Fires speaks to the ways in which even arguing against this can implicitly reinforce the very logic it opposes through its centering of European conceptions of labor, rather than community understandings of collective cultural production. Tires encapsulates aspects of infrastructure, materiality, mobility, and kinship. However, it troubles the artificial separation between these realms in Aboriginal community life. It centers local expertise and points toward the critical issue of outsider control over resources. Paper includes bureaucracy, institutions, and governmentality. Yet, it unsettles the idea that these are reasonable, and instead decenters them as alien and irrational systems—mind-boggling wastes of time that are inherently disruptive and colonial.

Ultimately, these three analytics emerged from the attempt to understand how palya projects come into being. Each aims to move the analytical center by reframing language in ways that illustrate the positive space of what Indigenous collective creative production is, rather than through the negative space of what it is not. In addition to understanding palya film processes, I have also come to think of this trinity as a framework for considering how outsiders can most appropriately contribute to Aboriginal community media.

To our great surprise, Marumpu Wangka won the NITV Spirit Award at the 2015 NRIMF in Lajamanu, which included funding to extend the project into multiple short films totaling a half hour for broadcast on NITV. In light of my direct experience in Marumpu Wangka, I was asked by PAKAM to be the director of these films. I was initially reluctant to serve as a whitefella director for these NITV productions, though I eventually agreed when it seemed that there was not an available alternative for this very niche and time-specific project. Collaborating with crew members I had worked closely with over years on many projects, I drew upon this trinity as a guiding framework throughout many decisions in the social life of these films. While this was a larger project, we were grounded in the knowledge that Marumpu Wangka resonated largely because the creative fire that represented a normal day in Balgo was spontaneously recorded and not extinguished through the process. We aimed to facilitate paper and make tires as available as possible, while remaining patient and ready to catch unexpected fires in real time as they lit.9

Film Families

To visualize the metaphor of family relations in these film projects, I often imagine a kinship chart with Tjawa Tjawa as the ego. The represented kinship relations are—like fires, tires, and paper—both metaphorical and literal. One way of understanding the cinematic kinship of Tjawa Tjawa is to imagine its parent as the 2013 film Kurrarlkatjanu, which served as its direct precursor, itself a child of the other films produced in partnership with the women’s center in prior years. In many ways, Marumpu Wangka became a sister project to Tjawa Tjawa. In a literal sense, it starred Mark’s sister Payi Payi and his half sister Linda. Marumpu Wangka was specifically made possible through Mark’s support following Tjawa Tjawa, and it subsequently gave birth to two nieces of Tjawa Tjawa—Hand Talk Trilogy and Bush Hunt Hand Talk (2016)—as well as a dictionary of more than three hundred signs that Mark and I recorded throughout the hand sign projects in front of a bright green container near the airstrip.

For several weeks, Mark’s nephew Shorty and Shorty’s wife, Allison, were ready to shoot For Young Futures, a child of Tjawa Tjawa. However, it became apparent that we should first shoot Jimmy Tchooga: Painting Two Snakes, as Jimmy was their Elder (this was the film from chapter 2 when we got bogged and Jimmy’s son rescued us after seeing our signal fire). When Bob Dingle unexpectedly decided he wanted to film, Shorty and Allison again delayed their project, seemingly without a second thought. In other words, we were appropriately obliged to prioritize filming projects based upon respect for Elder relationality in Balgo. Mangkayi Calling was the longest wait of all, unique in that it was both grandfather and grandson to Tjawa Tjawa. This mirrors the multigenerational repetition of kinship skin-name categories. For example, because Mark is a Tjapangarti (by skin name), his grandsons are also Tjapangarti. While there are limits to this kinship analogy, it conveys how the social lives of palya Aboriginal films extend to other projects and relatives.

It is through this cinematic kinship relationship that I came to better understand the roll of Tjawa Tjawa as both fire starter and family member to other films. The Songlines on Screen program required tight constraints around both time and topic, centering documented precontact cultural knowledge. However, beyond the primary short film, NITV encouraged communities to use the associated equipment and expertise to produce whatever was locally valued. They also reiterated that all footage and films should ultimately be archived within communities. In addition to stoking local fires, this institutional openness also contributed tires, providing long-term project equipment that enhanced the Balgo PAKAM projects following Tjawa Tjawa. The Songlines on Screen films were meant to serve as inspirational and material catalysts for community media productions moving forward. The program’s status and funding facilitated community members like Mark to travel with their films—in his case to Broome, Lajamanu, and Sydney—where he made an impassioned case that was explicitly political, integrating his own plans to return to Country. Tjawa Tjawa and the films in its wake fostered the creative collaborative process that transformed Mark’s understanding of cinema from one more way to visit his Country to a powerful mode of radical political transformation for returning to his Country. It was toward the end of this creative post–Tjawa Tjawa period that he and I would have a short yet transformative conversation near the community store.