Notes

1. A true story, or trustori in the regional Kriol language, is roughly translated as a “legend” that contains deeper truths. It describes a story in which human characters can be located in time, space, and memory. This is distinctive from Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) stories about supernatural beings (Roe and Muecke 1983, 11).

2. While the projects I collaborated on did not involve physical film, I use the terms film and video interchangeably (though mostly film) as this reflects how the medium was commonly discussed throughout my fieldwork.

3. “Dreaming” is an English shorthand for the diverse and complex interweavings of metaphysical, cosmological, and symbolic ancestral connections that Aboriginal people across Australia have to their Country. I refer to this as either Dreaming or the more direct Kukatja word, Tjukurrpa (Carty 2021, 53; Myers 1986, 47; Poirier [1996] 2005, 244). It was originally translated into English as the “dream-time” by Spencer and Gillen (1899). This naming implied a mythical distant past, which Alfred Radcliffe-Brown drew upon to develop the idea of the ethnographic present. Intervening in this temporal bias, William Stanner (1969) reframed the Dreamtime into the present tense of the Dreaming, set within the larger context of the “everywhen.” Jennifer Deger offers the alternative of the “Ancestral Always” to emphasize how the past permeates the present for Yolngu people (2006, 81). Like other such metaphysical terms, including Songlines and Country, the conceptualization of Dreaming is not its reality. As one community filmmaker told me, “I hate using the word Dreamtime. It makes it seem unreal. It’s not a dream. It’s our creation. You can’t tell me it’s not true, the way you try to shoot things to capture the spirits. It’s real to us.” Like the future, the Dreaming is not an ephemeral metaphor, and its totalizing English construction remains in tension with its expression in Aboriginal languages.

The concept of Songlines (Neale and Kelly 2020)—also described as Dreaming tracks, paths, or song cycles—was popularized through Bruce Chatwin’s controversial 1988 book The Songlines. Songlines are described by Jan Wositsky and Yidumduma Bill Harney as “epic creation songs passed to present generations by a line of singers continuous since the Dreamtime. These songs, or songcycles, have various names according to which language group they belong to, and tell the story of the creation of the land, provide maps for the country, and hand down law as decreed by the creation heroes of the dreamtime” (1999, 301). Songs and maps are embedded within both land and stars, and some Songlines span across the continent. For a nuanced engagement with Kukatja Songlines and Dreaming, see Sylvie Poirier’s ethnography, A World of Relationships ([1996] 2005).

4. Country, capitalized, refers to the matrix of complex meanings and beings that interconnect land with self, relations, tribal Law, Songlines, and Dreaming (Carty 2021; Gammage and Pascoe 2021). In Balgo and regional communities, this is described as Ngurra (Musharbash 2008a, 5; Myers 1986, 92). It is important to emphasize that Tjukurrpa (Dreaming), Ngurra (Country), and walytja (family) are themselves not isolated realms, and are interwoven through kanyininpa (holding), the Kukatja integration of each of these (McCoy 2008, 21).

5. Throughout this book I use the present tense within ethnographic vignettes. Inspired by ethnographers such as Melinda Hinkson (2021), this approach aims to add a sense of vitality and presence to these sections. Through present tense and a sans-serif font, I seek to provide clear signals for transitioning between narrative and analytical modes of writing. To mitigate the potential of conveying a detemporalized ethnographic present (Fabian 1983), these vignettes are not generalized, and are situated within the context of specific individuals and projects, including myself as an active and present subject.

6. As I have written elsewhere, “Despite its Christian connotations, the concept of apocalypse serves a critical role in theorizing Indigenous futurity, uniquely capturing the world-altering histories of colonial brutality” (Lempert 2018a, 202). Unlike a dystopia, a postapocalypse is not defined by resignation, but rather leaves future possibilities open amid a challenging backdrop.

7. For a detailed history of Yagga Yagga, see Cane (2016) and Poirier ([1996] 2005, 46, 86).

8. “Calling” is an Aboriginal expression describing the beckoning feeling from one’s Country to return home. It takes on a double meaning in Gapuwiyak Calling (2014), a Miyarrka Media film engaging the use of cell phone video in the Arnhem Land community of Gapuwiyak.

9. Law, capitalized, has a substantially different, though related, meaning from what is usually understood by the law (Langton and Corn 2023). It is used as a shorthand for the totality of the rules and mores of Aboriginal codes, including interpersonal social norms, rites of passage, kinship relations, and appropriate “payback” consequences in relation to Dreaming cosmologies (Poirier [1996] 2005, 56).

10. Hand sign meanings are highly contextual. Palya can mean “good one,” “that is correct,” or “proper process,” while wiya generally conveys that something cannot happen, depending on the question it responds to. The most used sign, nganaku, is a flexible signifier asking the question that the signer does not need to even ask due to the density of context. Its most common response is wiya, which roughly means “nothing” or “that can’t happen right now,” which is invaluable for indirect declining in contexts where saying no is inappropriate.

11. After being developed by Nelson Mandela and others in the 1990s aftermath of South African apartheid, reconciliation has become an increasingly common framework for Indigenous relations with settler state governments around the world. Beyond Australia, this has been most notable in Canada, where a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 2008 to address the layers of trauma caused by residential schooling policies. In ways that parallel its deployment in Australia, Joseph Weiss (2025) articulates the limits of reconciliation as a framework of meaningful justice for Canadian First Nations.

12. Terra nullius has its origin in Roman law and means “land deriving from no one.” Under colonial British law, it was illegal to annex occupied land. However, definitions of occupation were narrow and selective during the Australian colonial era, so much so that many farmers in England would build unnecessary structures simply to comply with occupation standards. Bruce Pascoe (2014) articulates how British colonizers misunderstood and mischaracterized Aboriginal land use in order to declare the continent as unoccupied and therefore claimable. The legal standing of terra nullius was not technically overturned in Australia until the 1992 Mabo case, though practically speaking, it endures through the sustained lack of Indigenous treaties.

13. The 1993 Native Title Act was passed following the 1992 Mabo case. Native Title provided a new legal foundation for Aboriginal land rights. This was challenged by pastoral lease holders who were concerned about its impact on their interests. The 1996 case Wik Peoples v. The State of Queensland settled this, declaring that Native Title could coexist with pastoral leases. The conservative Liberal government led by John Howard responded to this decision by passing the 1998 Native Title Amendment Act, which heavily curtailed the scope and power of Native Title and represented a significant setback for Aboriginal land rights (Bauman and Glick 2012; E. Vincent 2017).

14. Many anthropologists have analyzed the impacts of multiculturalism, an influential discourse in settler societies. This framework is an extension of neoliberal logic that—despite its inclusive rhetoric on diversity—serves to construct an elite rootless Anglo-European subject position that is implicitly superior to a variety of recognized but “tiered” (Silverstein 2003, 535) ethnic others (Turner 1993; Žižek 1997). Its discourse allows the dominant majority to claim a moral high ground without having to acknowledge or address persisting structural inequalities (Ramzan, Pinib, and Bryant 2009). Povinelli (1998) establishes Australia as the global bellwether for multiculturalism due to its particular combination of colonialism, xenophobia, and the early adoption of this rhetoric at a national level.

15. There is an extensive lineage of anthropologists engaged in understanding fundamental incommensurability between human societies (Povinelli 2001), including ontologically focused debates in recent decades (Bessire and Bond 2014; Descola 2013; de Castro 1998).

16. Alfred Gell (1992) provides a broader genealogy of anthropological understandings of time as culturally mediated.

17. In recent years, the confident archeological dates for the human occupation of Australia have been pushed back further to at least 65,000 years ago (Clarkson et al. 2017).

18. While the terms whitefella and kartiya are often used interchangeably, a key difference is that whitefella has a relatively neutral connotation, whereas kartiya has more negative implications, outside of joking exceptions.

19. Throughout this book, I italicize Kukatja words such as palya when I use them in a conceptual sense. I do this to emphasize the analytical aspects of Kukatja concepts.

20. While it is standard practice to list the director’s name along with the year in the in-text citation, I break from this convention as it does not align with the collaborative and nonhierarchical practices of the community film projects that I worked on.

1. In many desert Aboriginal societies there is a strong prohibition against speaking the name of the recently deceased, which also applies to viewing their image. As described in chapter 5, attitudes around this issue are changing.

2. The broader Western Desert kinship system is Dravidian and includes sixteen social categories called “skin names,” through which every individual in a community is connected. These apply not only to blood relations but also extend to other people in the community. It is critical for anyone who is going to stay in community for the long term to have a skin name so that they will have clearly defined roles of relationality and general behavior with everyone else. This is succinctly summarized by Laurent Dousset (2011) and has been the subject of many early anthropological studies of Aboriginal Australian people. There is also a great deal of variation in the perceived meaning of whitefellas receiving a skin name. On the one hand, outsiders are often ecstatic to have been “accepted” into an Aboriginal family, while some describe this “fictive kinship” as a cynical attempt by community members to “claim” outsiders to gain access to their resources. In my experience, the receiving of a skin name is simply as meaningful (or not) as the relationship is in practice. On balance, the significance of outsider skin names seems to be more often overstated than understated.

3. I capitalize Elders throughout as this was widely seen as a sign of respect in Balgo, especially at Kapululangu.

4. The Seven Sisters Dreaming is explained in thoughtful depth by Sylvie Poirier ([1996] 2005), who lived for years in Balgo and Yagga Yagga.

5. PAKAM has since become more independent from Goolarri. It is also important to note here that in recent years PAKAM has moved into another area on the same property, out of the large shed and into a house-style building with a large central room surrounded by offices. Here, I describe PAKAM as it was structured and located during my primary fieldwork.

1. Keith Basso (1979) provides an exception, with his in-depth analysis of Western Apache comedy about “The Whiteman.”

2. The truism about “missionaries, mercenaries, and misfits” became part of the title for 8MMM (Curtis 2015), an ABC series that engaged many of the white/black dynamics discussed throughout this chapter, with more than a little bit of comedy and satire. One of its key collaborators, Anna Cadden, was the director of Kurrarlkatjanu (2013) and a whitefella collaborative filmmaker who served as a model for my own collaborative relationships.

3. This dynamic and stereotype can be partly traced back to the laws around fair wages that were passed in 1968, which led to most Aboriginal workers being fired from cattle stations and forced to move to the outskirts of regional towns. Alongside such welfare programs, various individual payment schemes are often described as “sit-down money” by community members.

4. “Growling” is a local slang term for arguing, which is often used ironically in relation to partner disputes and carries a similar register to “grumpy.” Growling is closely connected with dogs barking at each other, with the hand sign for barking consisting of miming an angry dog. However, it does not carry connotations of comparing someone to a dog in a pejorative way.

5. Also see Zajdman (1995) on “saving face,” which is closely related to dignity, though more defined by what to do in the case of something potentially undignified happening, as opposed to appropriate behavior in general.

6. This change was furthered by the former magistrate Antoine Bloemen, who was one of the first judges to try to integrate Aboriginal systems of justice into the Australian system. He supported the inclusion of Elder input in traveling circuit courts to help the magistrate understand the local context, including previous payback and what would happen to a broader family if someone went to prison. This is described in Bloemen’s (2014) book on the subject—containing several stories in Balgo—which I discussed with him at the Broome weekend markets where he sold them. His story was an inspiration for the ABC series The Circuit (2007), which dramatized this period within the Kimberley circuit court.

7. While getting bogged specifically referred to sinking down into mud or sand, it was often used to described people getting stranded for a variety of reasons.

8. Part of the purpose of one trip was to leave the old PAKAM troopy permanently in Balgo. The bottom was severely rusted and it would not last many more coastal wet seasons, through could endure for years in the dry desert. It would no longer need to be registered or pass an emissions test, as it would never again return to a highway or town.

9. Troopys run on diesel, which is less prone to catching on fire than petrol (gasoline). Thus, we could safely drive through even large fires for short periods if required.

10. Grinding stones were, and are, used to grind bush flour into damper bread. Because of their weight, their importance, and the immense amount of time they take to create, they are often left in one particular place.

11. Basically Black (1973) was a pilot episode put on by the revolutionary National Black Theatre, led by Bob Maza, which was inspired directly by the Black Panther Party and their theater work in the United States. Its pilot episode was produced in 1973, and its larger context and history are chronicled in The Redfern Story (2014), a documentary by Darlene Johnson.

1. I focus on film projects, not only because they were the media I was most deeply involved with but also because their long, complex, and social processes match the process-oriented method of tracing the social life of media. However, radio was ever-present throughout my fieldwork. Radio hubs were central and formative for PAKAM and Goolarri in Broome, in addition to the remote radio stations at each of the PAKAM network remote communities I spent time in, including Balgo. For decades, radio has formed the bedrock of Aboriginal media organizations, both in terms of funding and labor (Bessire and Fisher 2013; Hinkson 2012; Morrison 2000). Unlike video, radio can be taught quickly, and it served as the point of first contact for most people joining these organizations.

2. A similar situation occurred while filming Jimmy Tchooga: Painting Two Snakes. Like Dunba, Jimmy was a strong storyteller, though somewhat soft-spoken in front of the camera. When we reviewed the footage, it seemed that it might not be quite clear enough for non-subtitled broadcasting standards. When we explained the issue, he agreed that we should make sure to avoid the need for subtitles. The next day we sat down in the Balgo art center to record a narration of the documentary in a quiet space with a high-quality microphone. Despite the troopy getting stuck during this shoot and having arrived home only the previous night, our collective effort to avoid using subtitles seemed to provoke a renewed energy in the project. As a PAKAM worker in Balgo explained, our concern for upholding Jimmy’s dignity in the film was noted by him as prioritizing palya production values.

3. “Singing” someone refers to that person being the target of an act of sorcery, which is often subtle, deadly, and done from a distance (McKnight 1981). This is one of many ways in which songs and the act of singing are demonstrated to be powerful forces in Aboriginal life, with the capability for healing and injuring as well as navigating and relating with Country.

4. While this might seem to contradict the relative success in Indigenous media funding, the differences here are that the media center was housed within an art center, which was not set up to prioritize media production, and that there was no long-term organizational infrastructure set up to support these centers. Rather, they were extensions of the art center and dependent on its ability to fund them through intermittent grants.

5. The peak body later transitioned from IRCA to First Nations Media Australia.

6. Neil did not seem motivated by prestigious festival awards or winning large grants. For example, he discussed the challenges of participating in the Songlines on Screen program, which diverted significant resources from smaller community projects. He described being ultimately pleased for PAKAM to participate because of the potential positive implications of such a public program on the sector more broadly. What seemed to make Neil most excited were community-focused goals, such as when a remote radio station went back online, when community workers completed training workshops in Broome, and when ICTV was launched in Broome so that more people could watch community Aboriginal media.

7. For relevant scholarship on film stock and skin tone see Winston (1985, 1996) and Roth (2009).

8. Such restricted recordings occurred frequently in Balgo with Mark and the women Elders, who received copies of this footage. Password-protected files were also archived in the Balgo culture center.

1. For many thousands of years, Aboriginal people across much of Australia have strategically lit bush fires throughout the year. Researchers have often described this as “fire-stick farming” (Jones [1969] 2012), done for a variety of reasons including facilitating ease of travel and encouraging new growth to attract game animals (Garde 2009). Bill Gammage and Bruce Pascoe (2021) make the case that these fires are part of deeper understandings around environmental balance, cultivating seedlings that require small-scale fires to germinate but are killed by the high heat of destructive mass-scale fires. As they detail, ever since the profound colonial disruption of Aboriginal life, there have been increasingly devastating fires, starting only years after major land dispossession, and continuing through to Australia’s deadliest fire in the “Black Summer” of 2019–20. There are currently a variety of programs integrating Aboriginal fire practices to not only reduce deadly fires but also to curb their globally significant carbon emissions (Russell-Smith et al. 2013). One of the most sought-after job programs in Balgo is the Bush Ranger program, with Aboriginal Rangers working on fire projects as part of the process of taking care of Country.

2. My initial impetus for reframing creative production was in response to disparaging comments toward Balgo community members, such as “Well, you know how blackfellas are. They are lazy. They show up late or not at all. I’m not trying to judge them. They make beautiful paintings. They just aren’t cut out for real jobs.” I overheard this comment by a visiting bureaucrat who was walking through the art center, though similar remarks were commonplace by whitefellas. Without an alternative framework, the refutation of laziness runs into the problem of accepting and reinforcing the capitalist premises built into “lazy,” which, in addition to negating collective creative rhythms, also ignores the myriad social obligations that are simply more important than a work shift.

3. Australian rules football is a popular sport in Western Australia. Described in communities as “footy” and nationally through the acronym AFL (Australian Football League), this sport is often contrasted with rugby, which is relatively more popular on the east coast of Australia. In recent years, increasing evidence suggests that the sport’s origins are intertwined with the Mukjarrawaint ball game of Marngrook (Hocking and Reidy 2016).

4. This included IndigiTube, whose video streaming would later largely migrate to ICTV Play.

5. As a counterpoint, another manager noted that while this was a common sentiment, they disagreed that it should be. She viewed the “air filter” metaphor of accepting all of the blame as paternalistic and lacking proper boundaries.

6. While many love to paint, community members tend to stop if they begin receiving other income streams, such as mining royalties (Carty 2011, 88).

7. CDEP is an acronym for Community Development Employment Projects, a complex governmental system that focused on skill building and employment in Aboriginal communities. Mary G alludes here to programs that provide relatively small amounts of money while exerting intensive bureaucratic surveillance.

8. Linda Tuhuwai Smith’s (Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou, Māori) Decolonizing Methodologies (1999) and Leanne Simpson’s (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) Dancing on Our Turtle’s Back (2011) are foundational texts in such frameworks and practices. Simpson—similarly to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1993)—argues for the importance of centering Nishnaabeg language itself within analyses of Indigenous sovereignty.

9. One of these two films, the Hand Talk Trilogy (2016), featured shorts showing signs being used to describe cultural objects, the relationship between gestures and animal tracks, and a comedy skit satirizing money morning through subtitled hand signs. Bush Hunt Hand Talk (2016) featured women Elders as they hunted for food while communicating with one another primarily through hand signs, subtitled into English. Over the course of a long day, the women planned and carried out the trip in their trusty troopy, then returned to eat bush food and kangaroo tails in the evening. The full story of this process could fill another book. Here, it is sufficient to say that this trinity was useful within, and refined through, practicing it throughout the social lives of these projects.

1. For an in-depth engagement with the changing protocols regarding images of the deceased in Aboriginal Australian communities, see Deger (2006).

2. Like “sorry business,” saying sorry is not meant apologetically, but rather as a way of expressing condolences around a recent death to the close family members.

3. A parallel situation happened with the documentary Gurrumul (2017), about the acclaimed blind Yolngu singer by the same name. He passed away just three days after approving the final cut, and the Elders in his Yolngu community of Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island decided to allow the film to be released.

4. As part of First Nations Media’s Our Archives, Our Stories program, PAKAM began adding to a high-quality digital repository for their media. Depending on cultural protocols, some media are available to the general public and some are password protected for individuals or communities.

5. As Benjamin Smith notes, the circulation of meaningful photographs leads to unexpected outcomes. This often includes interest in contributing to an archive, involving dynamic storytelling about the people being remembered (2003, 18).

6. While contemporary narrative history following individual characters has become commonplace (e.g., Wilkerson 2010), the inclusion of biography within history is the result of decades of long disciplinary debates, largely led by feminist historians (Banner 2009; Jackson 2004; Salvatore 2004; Wolpert 2010). There is also a rich tradition of life history in anthropology (Langness and Frank 1981; Mintz 1960; Myerhoff 1974; Nash 1992; Neihardt 1932). Given the relatively succinct nature of this section, it is more accurate to categorize this short life story of Mark Moora as biographical rather than biography—akin to the distinction between ethnographic and ethnography. Contextually, it does not approach the depth of several extensive histories of Balgo and Yagga Yagga communities (e.g., Cane 2016; de Ishtar 2005; McCoy 2008; Poirier [1996] 2005). Rather, I provide historical scaffolding to engage the primary events in Mark’s life and the ways in which his own story interweaves these regional histories.

7. While often misunderstood as an Aboriginal impulse to wander aimlessly, the walkabout is a rite of passage in which a young person goes off to live by themselves in Country for an extended period of time, after which they return transformed.

8. Jean Rouch (1974) developed the idea of anthropologie partagée, or “shared anthropology,” a prescient precursor to anthropological reflexivity. This collaborative orientation was interwoven with his development of the documentary style of cinema vérité. Rather than attempting to make the camera and filmmaker invisible—as practiced in observational and direct documentary—Rouch appeared on-screen and was heavily involved in shaping creative narratives (Henley 2010). This approach led him to pioneer ethnofiction, in which he encouraged his co-creators to self-consciously act and create narratives. Rouch considered filmmaking to be a provocation, which often led to moments of ciné-trance that transformed subject and object toward the ends of revealing deeper truths (Rouch 2003).

1. I use the term “golden age” in a very relative sense. While Indigenous Australian media funding, infrastructure, and circulation are expansive in comparison with the past and to most other nations, it remains paltry in comparison with non-Indigenous media sectors. Furthermore, I compare Australia with the United States, Canada, and New Zealand, as they provide the closest analogs in light of their current first-world status as well as their relatively similar scale and historical dynamics in relation to European settler colonialism and Indigenous people. While I could certainly understand some pushing back on the utopian and potentially overstated connotations of “golden age,” I use it to emphasize its marked contrast with other Aboriginal funding policy trends during this era.

2. To the dismay of many Indigenous filmmakers, the Native American Film + Video Festival at the National Museum of the American Indian Festival (1995–2011) in New York City was discontinued primarily due to a lack of funding, and its archives were secured only through an accessioning program assisted by Faye Ginsburg and New York University. This is part of a broader dearth of public funding for Indigenous (or other) media within the United States, where there is no equivalent organization to Screen Australia or the Indigenous Screen Office in Canada. Rather, there is a patchwork of funding from Native nations including the Cherokee Nation Film Office, OsiyoTV, and Chickasaw TV; private organizations such as the Sundance Indigenous Institute; and VisionMaker Media, which was founded in 1976 and previously known as Native American Public Telecommunications.

3. Australia has a long disciplinary history of cutting-edge mediation including Aboriginal people. Less than two decades after the first ever film was made—Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion (1878)—Félix-Louis Regnault took footage of Wolof women in Africa making pots as part of the first cross-cultural visual study of movement (Hockings 2003, 15). Just a few years later, on April 4, 1901, Baldwin Spencer became the first anthropologist to attempt either photography or filmmaking in the field, shooting ceremonial Aboriginal dances in Northern Australia, though his film aspirations never came to full fruition due to technical setbacks (17). In Spencer’s work with Gillen (1899) they argued that photography helped to capture performative acts such as ceremonial dance that could not be fully understood through words alone, though Nicolas Peterson (2006) argues that this photographic reliance was also due to their lack of language mastery. Interestingly—and supporting Mead’s argument for the objectivity of photographic evidence—many of their conclusions were contradicted by their own photographs, illuminating the difficulty for anthropologists at this time to engage different worldviews (Hockings 2003, 20). Furthermore, Jane Lydon (2006) articulates how Aboriginal people have used photography to convey their own messages since the 1860s. As she argues, rather than being victims of this colonial technology, Aboriginal people in communities in places such as Coranderrk Station actively presented strategically advantageous representations, acutely aware of how these images would be framed within the Western world. Eric Michaels’s (1986) work on self-expression in Aboriginal television of Central Australia was a watershed moment in the study of Indigenous media and self-representation. Working contemporaneously with him, Neil Turner often discussed Michaels’s importance in the early days of Aboriginal video production.

4. See Stefanoff (2009) for an in-depth history and ethnographic engagement with CAAMA and how it fits within the Indigenous Australian mediascape.

5. For more on how Aboriginal media articulate with the Australian imaginary, see Ginsburg (1993).

6. There is a constellation of reasons why Aboriginal Australians do not have treaties. One has to do with their low population density in much of the continent and their social structure at the time of contact, which made it impractical to organize the large-scale armed resistance that occurred in New Zealand and North America. That said, there were a variety of regional resistance movements.

7. The first two minutes of “Remote Hope” are particularly revealing and may be found in various places online.

8. Along similar lines, Māori filmmaker Barry Barclay developed the idea of “Fourth Cinema,” that exists beyond the nation-state orientation of first, second, and third cinemas. The “Fourth Eye” (Hokowhitu and Devadas 2013) further theorizes this line of thinking by centering the productive, rather than the resistant, potential of Indigenous media.

9. As with the much-debated “suffering slot” (Robbins 2013) in anthropology, such depictions can unintentionally serve to dispossess Indigenous futures through what Sherry Ortner describes as “dark anthropology” (2016). Framing this in the positive sense, Robbins argues for the importance of instead critically engaging an “anthropology of the good.”

10. In 2017 the “Statement of Eminent Australians” was released, signed by two hundred prominent Australians. This included many Aboriginal Elders and university professors such as Jon Altman and Gillian Triggs, who was the Australian Human Rights Commissioner at the time. This statement not only summarizes the negative impact of the intervention but also calls for the repeal of ongoing related measures. For more on anthropological engagements with Aboriginal politics see Altman and Hinkson (2010).

11. The IAS amalgamated 150 programs and cut a total of $534 million (approximately 40 percent) from the overall budget for Indigenous services. Ultimately only 41 percent of the applications were successful, less than half of which (45 percent) were Indigenous organizations.

12. While the Indigenous media sector was funded relatively well through the IAS, it did receive some cuts under the banner of reducing bureaucracy at the level of larger organizations. For example, the urban-focused Australian Indigenous Communications Association was defunded and absorbed by the remote media peak body, the Indigenous Remote Communications Association (IRCA). In addition, around this time NITV’s funding was cut significantly, making it more difficult for them to fund their own in-house content beyond the news.

13. For Goolarri, this funding shift was more complex in practice. While their baseline funding continued at about the same levels, the restructuring represented by the IAS also reduced the amount of funding sources that they were able to apply for throughout the year. Goolarri has in recent years been increasingly pressured to supplement government funding with private money. The only consistent funding that they receive is $280,000 annually that is specifically for radio, which has not increased in over a decade. For example, when expected government funds for the 2015 Pilbara and Kimberley Girl competitions were unexpectedly cut, they made up the difference with funding from multiple mining companies with interests in the region. Receiving support from such sources was a controversial decision. As Kira Fong noted about the situation, “these are not easy decisions, and sometimes you almost feel like you have to sell your soul to keep an important program alive.” Such “Faustian contracts” (Ginsburg 1991) around funding were common. For example, Noonkanbah Station, just outside of Yungngora, had their first major rodeo since the 1980s in 2014, which Trevor Ishiguchi and I recorded for PAKAM. However, it was funded through a deal with Buru Energy to frack the lands in the region. This was especially painful for many in this area in light of the important protests at Noonkanbah Station in 1978 to prevent the AMAX company from drilling near sacred sites.

14. Managers and directors of Aboriginal organizations commonly used the phrase “checking boxes” to express bureaucratic frustration at having to fulfill long lists of requirements that were perceived as unimportant.

15. This history makes up and underlies much of the explicit and implicit textures of Australian national identity. Much early settlement was founded upon the British dispossession of Irish land and the loss of Georgia as a colony to send convicts to. Many of the Irish people who were forcibly deported as criminals to Australia had been evicted from their land and then convicted of minor offenses, including stealing food during times of famine.

16. As described in the introduction, despite its early promise to deliver meaningful land rights, the efficaciousness of Native Title claims was significantly watered down over the years and the process was enacted in ways that often created more problems than they solved (Bauman and Glick 2012; E. Vincent 2017).