After-Images

Biographical Backtracking in Mark’s Life Story

Toward the end of the Mangkayi Calling filming period of several months, Warwick arrived in Balgo. He, Mark, and I quickly settled into a daily rhythm at the art center volunteer house, located near the community store. Every morning at eight, Mark would come over for tea and toast and we would review film footage and make plans at a metal table on the large porch overlooking the center of Balgo. During one of these morning discussions, Warwick suggested that Mark tell his life story, specifically at the Old Balgo Mission where he had spent much of his childhood. For a long moment, Mark was quiet as he gazed at the overcast sky. Finally, he said, “Yuwai, that’s good. I’m going to start thinking about my life. I want people to know all of the things that I’ve done and what has happened to Aboriginal people. It’s time I told my story.” Over the next few days, Mark discussed and considered his life story with us and others as we went through the social process of purchasing a patched spare tire.

On a cloudless morning, we made the drive to the Old Balgo Mission—two hours west from the crossroads in front of Mark’s house. Months earlier, we had visited as part of Balgo’s golden jubilee celebration. At that time, Shorty and I filmed Mark amidst rocky remains, where he described the mission days and pointed out specific places, from the dormitories to the bread oven. However, on this trip he did not want to film in the mission but rather along the road leading out, with its structures faintly visible in the background. When Mark spoke about the mission it seemed all at once to represent history and nostalgia, tragedy and trauma, and rubble and ruin (Gordillo 2014). It was already hot when we began, and no words were required in the setup process.

Mark told the story of being hidden in spinifex grass as a baby when his parents witnessed their first airplane, though he did not begin there. He did not tell a linear story. It began in the present and slowly moved deeper into time, though not in reverse order either. Mirroring the process of finding his way through Country that he had not been to in years, I have come to think of this as biographical backtracking, as he narratively circled pastward in widening loops to move forward in his story.

The social life of Mangkayi Calling was embedded within multiple layers of after-images. That was never more apparent than in this shoot, as Mark sank into the depths of his life story just beyond the remnants of the mission he grew up in. Writing this section felt much like the process of film editing, as I intercut his life story and footage alongside personal and regional histories.6 In my first drafts I attempted to place events in chronological order, thinking that this would provide clarity, but it ultimately felt untrue. Here I aim to honor the discursive and relational way that Mark told the story of his life.

Mark’s life was as atypical as it was emblematic. From being born in the bush to growing up in a mission. From Balgo to Broome. From shell shucking to horse whispering. From starting Yagga Yagga to witnessing its decline. From becoming lost to guiding others home, on- and off-screen. It is the unusual and eclectic trajectory of his life that interconnects worlds that too often remain disconnected within national imaginaries of Aboriginal life. Mark’s story encapsulates a multitude of Kimberley Aboriginal experiences across time and space, and disrupts the narrow limitations that are often imposed upon Indigenous possibility.

The Rise and Decline of Yagga Yagga

Understanding the need for intros and transitions in a film edit, Mark began his life story by introducing himself and describing the larger purpose of the film, stating that “the reason why we’re making this film is going back to Country, returning to the desert, our Country. And this film’s name is Mangkayi Calling.” He started, as he often did, by focusing on Yagga Yagga. This particular shoot, however, was more temporally expansive than others. He centered his dreams, both literal and figurative, as a motivating force in his life:

Yagga Yagga was set up because of the story of my people. Old people told me story about the Country where they came from. They told me story when I was about that high [gestures the height of young boy]. I kept telling that story when I became a man, and I thought about my Country when I went away in the Kimberly where I was a stockman. I had dreams about my Country. It was calling me back. That’s how I started up Yagga, by story, it came true. I’m still telling stories about it. I want to go back to Yagga, to lead my people to a better life.

Throughout his life story, Mark connected the pieces that made Mangkayi’s calling so vital for him. He spoke in reference to previous films and the shoots we had completed with Larry over the previous months in their Country. In this moment, I thought back to our previous trip to Yagga Yagga and the words he spoke there.

As Zora Neale Hurston wrote, “There are years that ask questions and years that answer” ([1937] 1998, 21). The year 1979 answered, following a lengthy period of Aboriginal sovereign assertions. Amid a zenith of activism at Noonkanbah Station and the creation of the Kimberley Land Council (KLC), Mark wrote to the director of the Western Australia Aboriginal Lands Trust to apply for rights for Mangkayi—his Country—which extended from Lake Mackay up to Yagga Yagga (Cane 2016). Increasing activity in oil exploration brought in anthropologists Scott Cane and Sylvie Poirier, who both spent years at Yagga Yagga with Mark and Warwick. Desert homeland outstation settlements expanded from five in 1975 to five hundred by 1986 and to one thousand by the late 1990s (Myers and Peterson 2016, 13). As many noted about this era, they did not need governmental programs; all they needed were “diesel, water, and bullets.”

Having received the water well in 1984—which tapped into a high-quality and plentiful aquifer—Mark led the establishment of Yagga Yagga. Unlike most outstations, it was created with little governmental funding and involvement. It inspired and was inspired by other desert communities, such the Pintupi community of Yayayi (Myers 2016). Reflecting on his years there, Cane writes:

The name Yagga Yagga is taken from the Wati Kutjarra (“Two Men”) Tjukurrpa (Dreaming) and means “to be quiet” (in the context of the Two Men walking quietly across the plains to avoid waking a large sleeping snake). The name was applied to the small settlement and was indicative of the circumstances that gave rise to it: a place of intended peace and tranquility. Yagga Yagga was not, in this sense, a product of nostalgic desire for a return to the past, nor a confused attempt to mix the past with the present or amalgamate traditions with modernity. It was a local solution to the terrible social problems at Balgo. (2016, 260)

Many sought refuge in Yagga Yagga in the late 1980s from the troubles of Balgo life, which stemmed from the unprecedented number of people, mix of language groups, and lack of mobility—further exacerbated by counterproductive governmental policies.

The early success at Yagga Yagga, which is located a few hours south of Balgo along an unpaved road, was due to its lack of governmental involvement. By 1986, Mark secured funding for significant infrastructure, including refrigerators, upgrades to roads and the airstrip, and a used four-wheel-drive vehicle. Approximately sixty community members lived there in corrugated iron shelters and had access to fresh water, which was pumped into a water tower that provided sufficient pressure for house plumbing and gardening. Over the following years the community prospered, bolstered by regular supply runs, nurse visits, and a part-time school. The acrylic painting movement that began in Balgo blossomed in Yagga Yagga, with most of the area artists living and painting in its relative peace (Tjama et al. 1997). By comparison, the primary change in Balgo during this period was the establishment of a police station to address increasing social tension.

As was often the case with outstations, the problems of Yagga Yagga began with a sharp influx of governmental money and, by extension, control. The community received a lump sum of $4.5 million in 1989 for infrastructure. Due to bureaucratic stipulations, the community had to use or lose $3.7 million of this funding during a four-month period in 1990. In this rush to spend money, Yagga Yagga community members established smaller outstations within a fifty-mile radius at Walkali, Lamanpanta, and Piparr. However, no meaningful funding followed in the years after this surge. This left those in the smaller communities little choice except to return to Yagga Yagga, which came to average around 150 residents. Despite such fluctuations, the government lauded Yagga Yagga as an exemplary community, with low levels of conflict and only two whitefella workers employed there. Order was largely maintained by consensus, kinship networks, and Law enforced by Elders.

Unfortunately, the ever-changing government bureaucracies did not leave well enough alone. In 1990 the newly minted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC) began exerting control over Yagga Yagga through their funding requirements, which became further complicated by their byzantine bureaucracy. ATSIC funded the community, adding significant infrastructure and machinery, though their perhaps well-meaning policies were shortsighted, extending the community beyond its ability to self-manage. Ultimately, Yagga Yagga became a victim of its own success, and by the mid-1990s it attracted agencies and people who sought to impose their ideas about the best way to run it. This was why Mark remained adamant that Yagga Yagga be redeveloped slowly: “We’ll start with a few, maybe ten or twenty people. It will build up like when you plant a tree. It grows. You look after that tree with water. Maybe it will grow big with a lot of roots. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the future.”

The 1990s were also an especially vibrant era for Yagga Yagga artists. However, the six-figure income of many top artists and their regular travels to Balgo further destabilized Yagga Yagga, in addition to the large sums of royalty money from mines coming in through family networks. The new whitefella staff and community members also became increasingly combative. Meanwhile, Mark was elected to the ATSIC Regional Council, leading him to travel around Australia to attend meetings, which resulted in a leadership vacuum. All of this contributed to the rise of general discontent.

By 2000 the population had fallen to under forty people, many of them children. The overextended infrastructure became unmanageable, with regular supply shortages and road maintenance issues, leading to a downward spiral. Mark would often recount—with great drama and a dash of humor—the story of when he led a group of men to the regional town of Kununurra to visit ATSIC. After politely asking its workers to leave the building, the men smashed their computers with clubs, since that was where they were told that the money and problems were located. While the magistrate was sympathetic—dismissing the charges and suggesting nonviolent protest—there was little recourse to save the community. Describing this event in his life story, Mark thanked the magistrate directly and described how it led to his awakening to the idea of protest, which they began to engage in from that point forward.

Yagga Yagga’s decline resulted from a national trend toward “streamlining” services away from outstations and toward larger community hubs such as Balgo. Governmental agencies also began taking a harder line on policy rules, citing technical breaches of contract to withhold funds and exert top-down changes. Yagga Yagga was abandoned by the very government agencies that had inflated it beyond its ability to sustain itself. The few who remained faced isolation in addition to a lack of services, leading many to refer to this as the sad period of moving to regional towns, including Halls Creek and Broome.

As Yagga Yagga declined, so too did Mark’s health. The combination of stresses in the community and his family took a toll. As Cane notes, Mark

began to suffer extreme anxiety and depression: he was, quite literally, being driven mad. His mental state was aggravated by the development of cataracts and increasing blindness, by the manslaughter of his daughter-in-law, and his wife’s cancer and subsequent death. Mark believed his wife had been “sung” and he told me he had “spirits in his head” after she died. He was so disturbed he went to the Balgo cemetery one night, where he was found by his family trying to retrieve her body and bring her back to life. Mark continued to live at Yagga Yagga and speak at meetings, pursuing his aspirations for native title commandeered by the KLC some 13 years previously. But he was a shadow of himself, under heavy medication and otherwise catatonic—and spent most of the day sitting alone in front of the Yagga store staring into space. (2016, 269)

The breaking point for Yagga Yagga was when a young man hung himself in the school playground. As Mark recounted, after that everyone walked out, leaving the community for Balgo. Shortly thereafter, the road to Yagga Yagga was gated and locked, and everything that could be sold was auctioned off in 2006. Around that time some of the buildings were burned down, possibly to dissuade whitefellas from living there (Cane 2016, 270).

Ultimately, even Mark was left with little choice but to move back to Balgo, which was embroiled in increased policing to deal with community disputes that had escalated over decades. After the closing of Yagga Yagga, Balgo’s suicide rates climbed to catastrophic levels. As Mark continued to struggle in Balgo, Peter Njamme—an influential Yagga Yagga community member—was found dead on a street in Broome in 2013. The fate of Yagga Yagga was mirrored in Aboriginal outstations across Australia. Recent threats to the remaining Aboriginal communities are an extension of these policies of abandonment spanning the past few decades.

It was in the aftermath of Yagga Yagga’s decline that I first met Mark in 2013. And yet, the man I got to know over several years was quick to laugh, a captivating storyteller, and a gifted leader. I came to understand that in the wake of Yagga Yagga’s closing and a series of deaths, including his wife’s, he had felt profoundly lost in Balgo and in himself. As he told me once, “I’ve done a lot of hard things in my life, but the hardest is going back to Country.” Over the years I have met several people who lived in Balgo during the early 2000s, and each described Mark as Cane does above, in a state of profound anguish. As one field mate described it, “His heart was broken. He would grind his teeth and sit next to the store, so I never got to know him, though his legend loomed large.” If the depth of one’s grief is the measure of one’s love, Mark’s love for what he and his family had lost was immeasurable.

This could have been the end of Mark’s story. That would have been more than understandable, and enough for most people to give up. Yet it was not the end. His late-life enthusiasm for making films about going back to Country was made all the more powerful because it involved him climbing out of an abyss. As much a doer as a dreamer, Mark was not an unshakable optimist. He knew what it was to experience devastating loss, to endure that for as long as it took, and to try again. In this way, his story speaks to more than the power of strength and leadership. It also speaks to those for whom hope seems all but lost.

Kimberley Walkabout

While Mark only alluded to the exact reasons why he left Balgo to travel throughout the Kimberley as a young man, he once described this time away as an unconventional sort of walkabout.7 First working in cattle stations near Balgo, Mark eventually made his way across the Kimberley, working from station to station. After heading north to the town of Halls Creek, he drifted west, working in the Fitzroy Valley and eventually making his way toward the Indian Ocean and Broome, before being called by a dream and his promised wife back to his Country.

Mark had ridden horses since he was a child in the Old Balgo Mission, and by the time he was a young adult he was a first-rate stockman, renowned for his ability to drove cattle and to calm the wildest of stallions. It was this skill set that provided his initial means for working beyond Balgo. As we traveled around the region, Mark often recalled stories of his treatment at different stations. Once, while on a back road near the meteor site of Wolf Creek, we passed an old house that evoked a story about a boss there who used to threaten him with the six-shooter displayed prominently in his holster. Such experiences of rough station managers inevitably ended with Mark leaving to find a better situation. He preferred to drove cattle under moonlight, often recalling childhood memories of walking with his family through Country at night. He emphasized that this was the only sensible time to travel during the hot season.

The role of the stockman is crucial in Kimberley Aboriginal history. Like the deep-sea pearl-diving “saltwater cowboys” in Broome, stockmen commanded respect for their bold mastery of a dangerous profession. For decades, station life served as a way for Aboriginal people to live in relative peace with whitefellas while remaining on or near their Country and without relying on inconsistent governmental funding. In a cruel irony, many from that era point out the unintended consequences of laws guaranteeing fair and equal wages in late 1968 as leading to the end of that lifestyle (Jebb 2002; Skyring 2012). As former Kimberley Land Council executive director Peter Yu argues, this policy allowed little time for adjustment and in one fell swoop “broke the back of the feudal relationship between station managers and Aboriginal families. Pastoralists began to force Aboriginal people to leave the stations, which precipitated a refugee crisis of enormous proportions” (1994, 19). While skilled stockmen like Mark could still find work, it was increasingly difficult and initiated the migratory dynamic that exists up to the present, with many Aboriginal people from communities moving to the fringes of regional towns like Broome, where they are often treated as second-class citizens. Even Mark found it difficult to find a station job with a reasonable manager and eventually ended up in Broome. Elders sometimes describe Aboriginal history as having three distinct eras: the killing time, the pastoral time, and the welfare time. If the beginning of the stockman era marked the end of the time of mass violence, its end marked the start of the era of forced dependence.

Walking past the oval in downtown Broome with Mark and Warwick on a sunny afternoon, we sat down in the shade of the “Balgo tree,” which oriented toward Balgo from the center of the oval—much like how camps in Balgo spatially gesture toward the Country of their inhabitants. After signing and saying hi to friends and family, Mark described his first day in Broome as though it were yesterday. He reminisced that initially he knew no one and sat down in this very area, quickly realizing that it was a meeting place for Aboriginal people throughout the Kimberley. The Balgo tree was a beacon that immediately oriented him and placed him in relation to others. Noticing pathways, Mark had walked the short distance to Kennedy Hill—a small neighborhood community in downtown Broome near culturally significant places overlooking Roebuck Bay’s mudflats—looking for a place to rest on his blanket. Just then, an older Aboriginal woman called out to him, asking if he wanted to stay with her family. Happy to see a welcoming face, he agreed and had a meal with them. As Mark described, in the following weeks it became clear that he had entered into a relationship with this family, and he was determined to find a job so that he could contribute to their funds.

Like many young Aboriginal men of this era, he quickly found employment within the world’s premiere pearling town, shucking (cleaning) raw pearl shells as they were brought into the port. Having worked hard his whole life for little money, he recalled being overwhelmed by the amount he was earning. It allowed him to buy whatever he wanted, including an occasional carton of beer to share. Rather than saving his income, he insisted on contributing all of his money to the family he stayed with. He spoke with pride about being able to help support the household and how the woman of the house gave him just the right amount of money back for him to spend so that he wouldn’t have to worry about food or shelter.

This continued for some time. He enjoyed life in Broome, but it was difficult to sustain. While he had a relational network, it was not his family or Country. Ultimately, he yearned to return to a quieter life and escape the daily realities of racial strife in Broome. He noted that leaving ultimately boiled down to the fact that “I’m not a saltwater blackfella. I’m a freshwater blackfella from the desert. That’s my Country.” For a time, Mark returned to the life of a stockman in nearby communities including Beagle Bay, north of Broome along the coast. He met and came to know Dunba Nunju (whose film he watched with great nostalgia). This was also where he received word that his promised wife (arranged marriage based on skin-name kinship relations) was waiting for him in Balgo. This prompted him to slowly make his way back home, working station to station along the way. Just before this journey home, Mark experienced a crucial moment just after waking one morning, “I had a dream. Mangkayi was calling me back, and I knew straight away I better go back to my people. From that dream, we built the community.”

Sitting near the Old Balgo Mission telling his life story, Mark seemed to have become transfixed in time while discussing this period. He was suddenly aware of this as he turned to the camera and smiled, now back in the present moment. With his characteristic levity following a serious topic, Mark finalized his thoughts: “But anyway, a real good life in the Kimberley, and I met a lot of good people, good tribal people.”

Mark often recounted with humor how he was a stranger when he first returned to Balgo after many years away. While he knew everyone right away, Mark had changed so much in appearance and demeanor that at first no one recognized him. It was only after introducing himself that he was warmly welcomed home. Previously he had wanted to see the larger world, but now he wanted nothing more than to be near his family. Furthermore, his travels had reignited in him a desire and plan to return home—not simply to Balgo, but to the Country that he walked with his family in the moonlight of his youth. This dream was deepened by his wedding and the three children that followed. Mark had changed during his absence, and so had Balgo. Indigenous activism across the continent had resulted in national policy shifts toward increasing Aboriginal control of communities.

In 1984 the Old Balgo Mission was formally transferred to community members as an independent body. It was renamed the Wirrimanu Aboriginal Corporation, based on the Luurnpa (Kingfisher) Dreaming embedded within its location, though it is still generally known as Balgo (Carty 2021, 47). However, as with the implementation of fair wages on cattle stations, this was part of a policy shift that included unintended consequences due to its rushed execution by the government. There was not enough training or preparation for what this transition would entail, leading to years of increased tension between different language group camps who were not accustomed to the unprecedented reality of living permanently in a shared community. Although Kukatja people held the majority population and influence—and their language was the local lingua franca—Balgo’s new location placed it squarely in Jaru Country. By Law, Kukatja people were therefore guests who should have deferred to Jaru Elders. As Mark put it, “We were living in the wrong land because people came and built Wirrimanu. Kukatja people are not from that Country. How can you fix that problem? No one can fix that. Nobody. That’s why I want to move back here [Yagga Yagga] with my people. So they could have a better future.” Mark described bureaucrats who wanted to fix Balgo as being similar to a non-mechanic trying to fix a motor, liable simply to further damage it.

Meanwhile, the political changes in the 1980s coincided with the rise of a local painting cooperative initiated by Warwick, which was quickly followed by missionary involvement (Carty 2011; Healy 2014). Unfortunately, such whitefellas carefully engaging in Balgo life were few and far between. While the control of the church declined, missionaries were often replaced by increasingly less scrupulous kartiya and an influx of mercenaries and misfits led to unchecked alcohol smuggling (Mahood 2012, 27). As Mark often distilled it, “big community, big problems.” Such structurally induced dysfunctions were sometimes referred to as “the troubles” (Hinkson 2021, 12). These problems were exacerbated by the dramatic dismissal of Father Ray Hevern in 1984, leading to rising discontent in Balgo that continued throughout the decade. During that fateful year, ever watchful for something more, Mark and his family were able to acquire a water point (well) established by Mobil Oil in his Country that would become the foundation for Yagga Yagga.

Of Beginnings and Balgos

Toward the end of his life story shoot, Mark was winding down to his final comments, noting, “I was born in Emily Springs, and I was a baby in the bush and in a coolamon [elongated wooden container]. I was brought in with my parents, and my family walked into the mission.” He suddenly stopped and said:

Oh, sorry. I forgot about something. About a place called Mindirr. One day I’ll get there and get a film about that Country. It’s got a water hole. One day there, my family hears this sound coming. WOOOH, looong way and they look and ask, “Where is this sound?” It is coming from the south, low like a bush fire. They chuck me in the spinifex and run for their lives. Yeah, and that’s the first time they saw an apple and orange. They didn’t eat it, and when they came here into the mission, they knew that food. They didn’t know that was kartiya food, whitefella food. All they knew was blackfella food.

Mark was born around 1945 near Kiyarr in the Great Sandy Desert to the south of Balgo. He was born into the Kukatja people as a Tjapangarti within the desert Dravidian skin-name kinship system. He often recounted this story of being hidden as a baby when aircraft first flew overhead. He spent his early years with his family in Mangkayi, not imagining himself as either “Aboriginal” or as part of one of the “world’s oldest continuous societies.”

Mark and his family lived their lives through what anthropologists have long described as a nomadic hunter/gatherer lifestyle, following Songlines in accordance with Law and in relation to Tjukurrpa, or Dreaming. Despite occasional interruptions and the increasing knowledge of whitefellas in their Country, life continued. However, a combination of pressures—including leprosy epidemics and the intrusion of water-seeking cattle drovers along the Canning Stock Route (Carty 2010)—led many to walk into local missions, what is often described as “coming out of the desert.”

In the early 1950s, when Mark was a child, he and his family walked into what was then called the Balgo Hills Mission. Now known simply as the Old Balgo Mission, it was established in 1942 by Pallottine missionaries after years of searching for suitable sites following the failure of missions to the north. This site was important, as it had previously been used for initiation ceremonies and corroborees. The mission’s name, like many in this era, was based on a misunderstanding. On one of our visits there, Mark joked about how the missionaries pointed to the nearby hills to try to understand the area’s name, asking, “What is that called?” A Kukatja man responded that they contained a grass called palkurr-palkurr, which sounds roughly similar to “Balgo Balgo.” Mark laughed and nodded his head when he told this story, continuing, “It’s a bush tucker where you grind ’em in the rock, cook it, and make a damper out of it. Yeah, I grew up on that anyway.”

The Pallottine missionaries, joined by St. John of God sisters, were tough taskmasters by all accounts. Isolated during World War II, the mission had to be virtually self-sustaining. Aboriginal men worked long hours in construction and as stockmen, while women tended gardens and made clothing. Mark and others who grew up here emphasized the impractical and uncomfortable life of being locked inside mud-and-brick dormitories at night, which were freezing in the winter and sweltering in the summer. It was here that he was given his English biblical first name the last name of “Moora,” inspired by the way he was known to be aspirational, regularly asking for “more.” He often noted how he wished he could have learned to write, but he was deemed too old for this when he came into the mission: “I only went to school in Old Balgo for five years. I was going to be a young man, so they told me no more.” While at the mission, Mark continued through his now-disrupted process of Law. Due to negative attitudes toward these practices, they were often carried out in secret and he was not able to complete all of the initiation rites. He emphasized that he nonetheless listened carefully to the old people in his youth, whose stories guide him still.

I grew up with the old people. I was a good listener. I used to listen to old people’s story about a lot of things around the campfire and they used to camp in Old Balgo. Yeah, that’s what I did. I was a good listener to the old people who passed away a long time, a long time ago. They were always sitting down and telling story. It was the good old days. Yeah, good old days. I still think about them.

Mark looked over his shoulder toward the mission, and then ran his hand through the pindan, before continuing directly into the lens,

Wisdom and knowledge come from old people, not from young people. You’ve got to learn to talk to the old people and get to know them. Because they’re the ones who will give you good knowledge. Yeah. The ones who can tell stories. They can give you something good in your heart and your mind. Law was very strong when people lived in Mangkayi. I had that story about that place when I was a kid growing up. I used to ask a lot of questions to old people. They told me this area is yours. Your tribe’s Country. It’s the right one.

When the Old Balgo Mission came up over the years, Mark spoke of both the good of that era and its tragedies. At other times he would make then break a long silence to say that he preferred to not even think about it, stating, “Those days are hard to talk about. Those times left scars on my heart.”

For Balgo’s 2015 golden jubilee, a series of small paintings were completed for visitors to buy. One of the most discussed depicted Aboriginal people carrying wheelbarrows full of rocks around the Old Balgo Mission. It was stared at, picked up, and pondered over, yet it was also one of the very few that did not sell that week. It was as if the artist had violated an unspoken code about concealing the stark realities of mission life to tourists. Tellingly, its companion painting sold quickly. Made by the same artist in the same style, it depicted community members praying in white clothing. When visitors romanticized mission life, Mark was quick to note how hard it had been, shaking his head slowly and bemoaning that “it was a hard life. Hard work.”

Over the decades, Old Balgo Mission grew to more than two hundred people. In response to the insufficient water supply, Father John McGuire sought to establish a new mission in 1965. The vast majority of this labor was done by Aboriginal people, including Mark. Consisting of three thousand acres of freehold land twenty miles east of the Old Balgo Mission, the newly reestablished Balgo quickly doubled to nearly four hundred Aboriginal residents and thirty whitefellas by 1969, when McGuire took ill and was replaced by Father Ray Hevern and Father Anthony Peile. That same year, Balgo became an incorporated Aboriginal entity, granting at least theoretical decision-making power to community members under the national leadership of the progressive prime minister Gough Whitlam, who shifted control of Aboriginal affairs from states to the federal government (which would become a critically relevant detail in the recent community funding crisis).

Community members in the 1970s lived in single-room stone houses and small scrap metal shacks known as “humpys,” while constructing a variety of buildings in the community to house a clinic, a school, and a stone oven producing one hundred loaves of bread per day. They also established larger ventures like the airstrip and an accompanying plane service. Balgo supported a population of up to seven hundred with huge gardens; over a thousand head of cattle, in addition to other animals; and heavy machinery to construct roads, dams, and water bores. These early days of this newly formed Balgo community are celebrated by many in the church. However, as with Old Balgo Mission, they are not glamorized by most community members, who were paid meager amounts of sugar, tea, flour, and tobacco, along with occasional one-dollar payments for hard labor.

While the Old Balgo Mission had a predominance of Kukatja people, this new mission included higher proportions of four other primary language groups: Ngarti, Jaru, Warlpiri, and Pintupi (as well as a smaller number of Walmajarri, Wangkajunga, and Ngaatjatjara people). This regionally unprecedented mix of tribal groups led inevitably to increased tensions. After Mark had helped to build Balgo, the combination of low wages, social division, and increasing conflict led him to search for a life beyond Balgo throughout the Kimberley.

Mark’s story is in many ways the story of the Kimberley. He has lived a life full of remarkably varied experiences that integrate regional distinctions and historical shifts over the past seven decades. Although I first met Mark in the aftermath of Yagga Yagga’s decline, this difficult period was not the end of his story. It was only the beginning of his cinematic renaissance, becoming a film director and broadly asserting messages born from hard-earned experiences.

In the final words of his life story shoot, Mark mused on the broader arc of his experiences. After seeming to reflect on whether he had covered everything he wanted to, he smiled to himself and looked directly into the camera. “That’s my life. I’ve been around in the Kimberley and Australia. I worked very hard in my time just for a little bit of money or tucker. But no worries. I enjoyed it. It was a good life. I hope you like my story. Yuwai, that’s a true story about my life. Nyamu.”

Slipstream Media Portals

Mark’s engagement with futurity resonates with its recent ascendancy as a central theme in Indigenous intellectual and political movements across the globe (Estes 2019; Medak-Saltzman 2017; D. H. Taylor 2021; Weiss 2018). In Walking the Clouds, Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) establishes Indigenous futurisms and defines slipstream as a subgenre of Native science fiction, with “pasts, presents, and futures that flow together like currents in a navigable stream” (2012, 3). Such temporal currents open rich avenues for co-creative cinematic envisioning. This is the case not only in Balgo but also within the broader international Indigenous mediascape where futurist parallels abound, including and extending beyond science fiction genres (Ginsburg 2018; Lempert 2014, 2018b; Medak-Saltzman 2017).

While I was attending the imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival in 2018—only three years after it screened Tjawa Tjawa—there was a buzz in Toronto surrounding two innovative Indigenous futurist media premiering at the festival, each bearing the title Biidaaban. Biidaaban (The Dawn Comes) was a short film by Amanda Strong (Métis/Cree), whose characteristic stop-motion artistry and soundscape brought to life writings by Leanne Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg). As within Strong’s previous shorts, such as Four Faces of the Moon, in Biidaaban “a piece of media technology becomes the portal or mechanism through which these Native currents of time flow and out of which an empowered Indigenous cultural future emerges”—in this case, a round organic tablet (Dowell 2018, 191).

As this premiered, the other Biidaaban was playing downstairs in the experimental media area, which included games, virtual reality (VR), and even cookies being laser-etched with festival logos in real time. Featured within this space was Biidaaban: First Light, an immersive VR experience created by Lisa Jackson (Anishinaabe) through which the viewer explored a high-fidelity re-creation of a future Toronto reclaimed by plant life and First Nations people and languages (Monani et al. 2021). Both of these media developed out of organizations engaging at the intersection of futurity and Indigenous media in Canada, including imagineNATIVE, the Initiative for Indigenous Futures at Concordia University, and the National Film Board. While Toronto was half the world away from the Kimberley, imagineNATIVE was unanimously considered to be the favorite festival by the Aboriginal filmmakers I worked with, and great excitement was expressed for the 2016 launch of its sister event, the Winda Film Festival in Sydney.

As defined within Biidaaban: First Light, “Biidaaban is an Anishinaabe word. It refers to the past and the future collapsing in on the present. It is the moment of first light before dawn.” By highlighting the simultaneous expansiveness and collapse of time within the present moment, Indigenous slipstream media provide a powerful framework through which such narrative and form emerge through a collective process. Rather than simply describing futures, these projects unfold through a constitutive process.

Phone & Spear centers collaborative process as the foundation for analytical insight, highlighting the participatory aspects of poiesis, a concept developed by ancient Greek philosophers. Heidegger rendered this as “a bringing-forth . . . the arising of something from out of itself . . . the bursting of a blossom into bloom,” which, when embodied by artists, carries the potential to burst not only into itself but also into its creators and audiences (1977, 10–11). It is therefore fitting that poetry is derived from poiesis. Poiesis collapses boundaries not only between people, processes, and products of creation but also between the past and future within a present presence—where “the old and the new are made co-constitutive: the new renews the old; the old is manifest as the source of the new” (Miyarrka Media 2019, 11). It provides a temporal portal across time and space through which the creative process brings itself into being. This is especially the case for Aboriginal connections with their Country, which animate and inhabit virtually every aspect of life. As Zora Neale Hurston put it, “A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it” ([1938] 1991, 245). Plato imagined that such poiesis exists along thresholds of emergence, such as the gathering of nighttime and the moments before sunrise—where it is neither light nor dark, day nor night—at the merging of something into another along a horizon.

“I didn’t know I would say that, but we did it right, palya,” Mark said after we finished watching the previous trip’s footage at the Balgo radio station. Mark often responded this way and was sometimes even surprised at what he said. In the Mangkayi Calling shoots, it was not simply that Mark was collecting his thoughts or summarizing his ideas. Rather, he was considering how to best summon the right words in Country. Depending on where we were going, he would have us pick up specific people to come along before we drove hours out of Balgo toward that particular place. When we arrived at the right location, he would stop and say, “Here, now, this is what we need to film and this is where we need to talk.” After a quick setup, Mark and the rest of us would have a conversation on film. He was moved to speak when we were in the right place, in the right way, at the right time, and for the right reason. On the other hand, Mark described his frustration at speaking at meetings across Australia, noting that “When I’m in a city, I think differently. Too much traffic, too loud. I’m rushing and I think like a whitefella. When I’m out here in the desert, I think like a blackfella.” As in Strong’s films, cinema itself provided a portal which transported Mark’s messages across time and space from his Country, where he could see the personal and political horizons with clarity and purpose.

Constitutive Cinema

Creative acts have long been understood to be constitutive of their own process. As novelist Edward Morgan Forster once put it, “How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?” (1927, 152). Mark implicitly reimagined this question as “How can I tell what I think until I’m in my Country?” The issue, then, is not simply what community members such as Mark think, but also the extent to which they are able to be in the proper places to properly do so. Sylvie Poirier, an anthropologist who lived with Warwick and Mark in Yagga Yagga, writes that “places and the sentient land can offer messages and novel information to those willing to listen, information that may influence important decisions, trigger processes of negotiation of varying scope, change the course of events, or be called upon in the interpretation of events” ([1996] 2005, 243). In Balgo, speaking and thinking are not precursors to action, but are rather the outcome of being in the right place in the right way. This involves both sitting on and moving through Country.

Aboriginal/anthropologist collaborations have often provided generative partnerships in communicating such embodied and placed knowledge, especially in relation to varying forms of displacement. Melinda Hinkson’s See How We Roll (2021) provides a model for sensitively navigating such a partnership. Drawing upon a long-term relationship with Nungarrayi, a Warlpiri woman, Hinkson describes Nungarrayi’s exile from her community not far from Balgo. While Mark is displaced from his Country among his family, Nungarrayi’s urban exile paints an intimate portrait of complex and shifting settler state relations.

Over many years, Stephen Muecke recorded and co-wrote Elder Patty Roe’s stories about Law and culture in the Country north of Broome. In their work, the displacement was of knowledge itself, as they navigated the contested politics of kinship and cultural lineage. Their partnership is particularly relevant, as it laid the groundwork for the Lurujarri Heritage Trail—a nine-day, fifty-mile walk from Broome north along the coast that is run and led by Goolarabooloo people, including the Roe family. Muecke notes that as they considered writing a follow-up to their first book (Roe and Muecke 1983), Roe had an idea that was “much better than a book” (Muecke and Roe 2020, xxiii). This idea was the trail itself, which Muecke frames as functioning through collective attention to subtleties while walking through Country (xxiv). As Muecke put it to me on a different walk in Broome, this way of thinking takes seriously the reality that “intelligence is beyond the brain. That it is in the body and in Country.” Therefore, moving one’s body through Country is not simply a rejuvenating experience; it is paramount for thinking, understanding, and communicating.

Goolarri’s film Naji (2014)—part of the same Songlines on Screen series as Tjawa Tjawa—became an integral part of this trail. On one of the last evenings on the trip, after days of buildup by our Goolarabooloo guide and one of the film’s stars, Terry Hunter, we watched Naji projected onto the side of a white supply truck. Terry emphasized media’s role in understanding the meaning of Country, noting that “to fully understand it, you need to walk this Country, hear the story, and then see this film.” He believed the film to have value not only in being able to see Country and hear the story from traditional owners, but also as an imaginative production that was uniquely capable of further communicating the power of the story of the trail. As John Carty illustrates in relation to Balgo acrylic art, serious creative practice on Country is not simply representational: “It means everything. Literally, everything. It is not a retelling of a Dreamtime story. It is not a picture of a place, or a representation of it. It is Country” (2021, 1). So too are films such as Naji and Tjawa Tjawa for their creators and communities.

Anthropologists working in creative collectives also demonstrate the power of collaborative co-creativity. Miyarrka Media is emblematic of this. Kayleen Djingadjingawuy—a coauthor of Phone & Spear—asserts that the “Yolngu way of life is to make it real. Not talk-talk. Action has to happen. To make it alive” (2019, 134). As Taussig describes it, “In this world, the glimpse, like the . . . after-image, is where the action is” (1993, 249). Another prominent and inspiring group is the grassroots film collective Karrabing (which translates as “low tide turning”), consisting of dozens of Aboriginal filmmakers and anthropologist Elizabeth Povinelli. They use “film to analyze contemporary settler colonialism and, through these depictions, challenge its grip” (Lea and Povinelli 2018, 37). Collectives such as Miyarrka Media and Karrabing do not rely on formalized institutional structure as much as they do on “a mode of copresence that would otherwise not exist but for the deliberate intention of working together. . . . Like the tides, [they] come together and move apart as different functions of their lives converge and dissipate, neither as a once-off nor as a constant steady state, but as a continuation of relational practices” (41). Their work embodies the reality of Aboriginal/state irreconciliation and the inseparability of art and life in the process of experimental creation “under occupation” (Biddle 2016). One of Neil Turner’s most noteworthy skills has been navigating institutional bureaucracies in ways that allow PAKAM to function as much as possible as such a collective.

Co-creation is not only relevant for creative projects. At a broad level, culture—that elusive and complex anthropological whole—is itself an ongoing series of co-creative actions that foster continual renewal within established systems. Scholars have alluded to this in various ways over time. In The Anthropology of Poiesis, Mihai Popa (2022) argues that creativity and culture operate between the immanent and the transcendent. After-images reveal such concurrent layers as “two conterminous levels of immediacy—the latent and the manifest” (Sheehi 2012, 406). Culture solidifies and ruptures in unpredictable rhythms, what Gregory Bateson described as schizmogenesis, “a process of differentiation in the norms of individual behaviour resulting from cumulative interaction between individuals” ([1936] 1958, 175). Heidegger argued that being and becoming are themselves inseparable—two sides of the same coin of human existence through which being becomes, and vice versa.

The imposition of stasis onto people inflicts profound representational, material, and spiritual violence. Yet this is the settler-colonial pretext for the treatment of Indigenous communities within and beyond Australia. It seeks to symbolically exorcise the very act of becoming, leaving only a narrowly defined state of being. From Native Title land rights to the Stolen Generation to defunding communities to popular film representations, Aboriginal people are popularly imagined as static windows into the past—and by extension, presently brittle and futureless. This is why the role of Indigenous media is so crucial. It is not simply a matter of pushing back against negative stereotypes, but also of asserting the most fundamental of life’s qualities: change. Indigenous media are especially meaningful for the creators themselves, who through collective poiesis are changing and becoming throughout the process.

A crucial distinction here concerns whether a medium engages culture as representational or constitutive. At their conceptual extremes, a representational model frames people as their preexisting qualities of being, while a constitutive model understands people as only their present moment of becoming. While human life invariably exists between being and becoming, the process of writing tends toward ossified representations. As Marshall McLuhan asserted, “The medium is the message,” that is, the qualities of a medium shape its content and perceived meaning. There is something about the finality of symbolic marks etched into stone, inked on paper, or pixelated in screens that implies permanence—what Lucien Taylor (1996) notes is partly due to an anthropological “iconophobia” driven by fears that the ambivalent qualities of images may undermine ethnographic authority.

Cinema, on the other hand, lends itself to the process of dynamic becoming. As ethnographic filmmaker David MacDougall argues, video communicates in ways that writing does not, particularly in relation to corporeal subjects that open up questions, rather than the tendency of writing to focus on answers (2006). Engaging classical anthropologists including Claude Lévi-Strauss and Marcel Mauss, Derrida ([1967] 1993) wrestles with the dangers of irreconcilable dead ends or unbounded complexities in the process of trying to escape the limits of language through language. This is similar to the chamber of mirrors of after-images that Taussig alludes to (1993, 249). Derrida suggests that the way beyond this is neither nihilism nor obfuscation, but “freeplay”—the active disruption of and alternative to the already known. In other words, the embracing of poiesis.

Another way of engaging the enigma of emergence is through Miyarrka Media’s deceptively simple question, “Can a book hum?” It builds upon Taussig’s description of humming as “central to language . . . being neither conscious or unconscious, neither singing nor saying, but rather the sound where the moving mind meets the moving body” (2015, 41). Deger describes how this question attempts to get at the difficulty of “animat[ing] the gaps between words and images, digital and analogue, English language and Yolŋu concepts, between past and present, past and future, us and them, here and there. . . . How to set up a field of resonance between worlds coming ever more into relation, and yet still, distinctly, far apart?” (2006, 32). While writing’s linear inscription lies in tension with freeplay, cinema tends toward embracing it. Since filmmaking is a social and relational process, creative differences continually reinforce an unavoidable fact: there are innumerable ways that any film could have turned out. Jean Rouch embraced such ideas within anthropology decades before others, largely because he leaned into the constitutive freeplay embedded within co-creative filmmaking.8

Cinema, like the ethnographic process—if not always its products—unfolds itself through its own unfolding. Bessire describes emergent glimpses through the unpredictable process of experimental film workshops, which he worried would fail:

To my surprise, something else started to happen. By the second week of the workshop, a peculiar momentum had started to build. No one could articulate it, but everyone felt it like a shift in pressure. . . . Within two weeks, people began inhabiting this set and acting out collective visions and dreams for the camera. This raises questions: What did the process of collaborative video production open up? What characters—and what ethnography—did its openings refuse, summon, or create? (2017, 120)

These questions emerge from the process itself and could not have been formulated beforehand. They lead to different types of understandings, opening inquiries that co-creative cinema facilitates—releasing control of the process and the search for definitive conclusions.

My own co-creative experiences led down unexpected pathways through collective processes that would have been extinguished through attempts to control them. Creative fires of collective poiesis were emergent within their own process. Dancing flames shape one another, becoming transformed as they change the landscapes they move through, leaving behind the promise of renewal—as individual as they are collective, as tangible as they are immaterial, and as inevitable as they are unpredictable. As Heraclitus is said to have uttered, “The meaning of the river flowing is not that all things are changing so that we cannot encounter them twice, but that some things stay the same only by changing” (Kirk 1962, 369). While this continuity through change emphasized water, it is perhaps telling that he viewed fire as the essential uniting element, believing that the nature of the universe was animated by “ever-living fire kindling in measures and going out in measures” (326).

In this project, ethnographic knowledge was most meaningfully generated by working together in the service of collective projects, rather than in its direct pursuit. Co-creative filmmaking conveys, and engages in, collective action within social worlds, though I do not mean to suggest that cinema somehow escapes the many traps of representation. Quite the opposite. As Bill Nichols notes, documentary realism itself can at times engage in a sort of “epistephilia,” or pleasure in understanding the sensory world (1991, 178). However, an open co-creative approach to filmmaking demands movement and confronts the inescapable limits of the knowable, collapsing time and space into a present where after-images may provide glimpses.

Water and Fire

Mark seemed reinvigorated in the days following his life story shoot. While he was previously ambivalent about going on upcoming trips, he insisted that we drive around Balgo and talk to people who knew about the location of a water hole near the Yagga Yagga airstrip. The next week, we traveled there with a few of his family members. We lit fires across the area and sat down for packed lamb-chop sandwiches and tea upwind from the flames.

Most consequentially, we stopped by the Yagga Yagga water tank, only to find that the crucial power converter box connecting the solar panels with the well pump had been stolen. This was a shocking and troubling revelation. It was a life-and-death problem, as people relied on this tank. There had even been a few recent deaths in the region due to a lack of water after becoming stranded. We reflected on what would have happened if the tank had been empty during the Tjawa Tjawa shoot when we had to make the emergency water run. Mark made sure that we took extensive photos of the damage and components, as well as images of him and others sitting in front of the tank as he gazed into the lens, back at the tank, then down in sadness. Mark choreographed these photo details to serve as supplementary materials for a letter he dictated to me the next day. Before sending it to the relevant bureaucrats in Perth, he had me carefully read it back several times to make sure that it was just right and that we were including the most evocative photos.

The water tank issue seemed to serve as a moment of redemptive failure. Mark and his extended family engaged in various discussions about it that extended far beyond the tank itself, leading to renewed plans for ensuring that someone was regularly camped in Yagga Yagga. There was a suggestion by some that the tank could be sold back to the government so that they could make sure it was always running. Providing a bigger-picture analysis, Mark responded:

We don’t want to think the government way. We need to think about what’s going to happen in the long haul. If we sell the water tanks to the government, they will take it over. Then the government will say “We are the boss,” and then it’s all over. We need to be down there so that the government can understand that we will be strong there in the future. If the government sees that it’s an empty place, they will think “We can do what we like.” If we live here in Balgo too long, people won’t worry about going back. They will forget. But anyway, in the future we’ll be back here, so we can run our own community and find jobs and everything. I hope so. I hope we will.

The future imaginary that he described in such moments was based on his long and hard-earned experiences at Yagga Yagga, and demonstrated his ability to articulate a vision of his family back on Country that also anticipated state responses.

It was often said by those who had known Mark over the years that the films had catalyzed a deep change within him. His attitude about filmmaking shifted from viewing projects as a way to get back to Country, to reestablishing himself as a community leader, to a means for broadly communicating Aboriginal life, to a platform for creating future imaginaries for his family. Mark’s transformation in the wake of these trips reiterates the importance of traveling to Country and the self-reflexive qualities of the filmmaking process itself. It also highlights both the durability and the fragility of hope. Its simultaneous resilience and vulnerability. Its wellspring and leaky cracks. How quickly it can light, cool to embers, and rekindle. How the winds of change are just as able to blow it out as they are to set it ablaze.