The First Film, The Last Generation

A Nameless Anthropologist

During one of my first days in Balgo, I was running errands with a few community members. While driving in Bushy, we chatted about the upcoming film. It came up that I was studying anthropology in graduate school, and one of them paused and remarked, “Ah, anthropology. I know what you want to hear about. There are a few people in the community that the anthropologists always talk to about the old days.” When I noted that I was looking forward to working on film projects with anyone in Balgo, they seemed to find that interesting and perhaps a little unusual. This early interaction stuck with me, and I would often think back to it. Sometimes I would consider it in relation to Vine Deloria Jr.’s (1969) incisive and darkly comedic commentary in “Anthropologists and Other Friends,” where he satirically expounds on the opportunism and single-mindedness of some anthropologists in Indigenous communities. There is much truth to be learned in comedy, which, as it turned out, even applied to navigating my own name.

Following William’s advice, I introduced myself in Balgo as “Kumanjayi,” which roughly translates to “nameless.” This signaled that my own name could not be spoken due to the recent passing of a local man with that name. The comedy of my own misunderstanding of context did not go unnoticed around this topic. This was made particularly apparent during a trip to the community store to purchase supplies the following day, when a man came up and introduced himself. After I began my response with, “Hi, I’m Kumanjayi,” he laughed and responded, “Yes, yes, Kumanjayi. There are lots of Kumanjayi, but who are you?” Trying to not speak this name, I thought about it and said, “I’m Tjangala,” which also provoked a chuckle as he said, “Yes, me too. Plenty of Tjangala, but what is your name?” I explained that it was the same as someone who passed away, and he noted, “Ah, I understand now. You know, that’s only important for some people, for others you can go by Willi, no worries. Hmm, but you might not know who the right families are. . . . What is your middle name?” This led me to go by David for a few days, until I found out that a man with that name had also recently passed away in a nearby community, with relatives living in Balgo. In one of my first conversations with Mark Moora before the trip, I asked him about this. He responded with “Let’s see, your Country is Colorado. That’s a good name, people like that place here, cowboy country.” After that, I generally went by Colorado during this trip, though there was an enduring comedy of confusion about what my name in fact was, with different people alternately calling me Kumanjayi, Tjangala, David, Colorado, Willi, and a variety of creative combinations. Even years later, people still sometimes jokingly call me by these names.

The next two days were an intensive crash course in bush trip preparation. Troopys and trailers were packed, repacked, and packed again to maximize efficiency and access for the upcoming week. Food, swags, and equipment were laid out in their entirety as various leaders and volunteers discussed and Tetrised them in. The vehicles themselves were inspected several times: hoods opened, batteries charged, and oil dipsticks checked, with as many spare tires as could be obtained tied down on top. During this trip, I got to know the other two members of our small film crew well, Anne and Anna. Anne was a PAKAM worker from Bidyadanga, a small community along the ocean coast south of Broome. Anna was a whitefella (non-Aboriginal person) with years of experience as a PAKAM trainer. Both had worked on many small community projects, and often as a team. They found my name debacle particularly amusing, calling me Colorado in jest. I did not know it at the time, but I was incredibly fortunate to learn from these two women, who provided as thoughtful of a model for collaborative community filmmaking as I would ever encounter.

On the day before the convoy left, there was a meeting at Kapululangu for everyone going. Zohl and the lead volunteers overviewed various cultural protocols for the visitors, including the importance of not taking photos without explicit permission. They explained how we were following a Seven Sisters Dreaming track that would take us to several key cultural sites south of Balgo past the community of Yagga Yagga. Toward the end, Mark Moora spoke briefly. This being a women’s trip, he was not the central storyteller, and he mostly emphasized the power of the women Elders’ knowledge, including his sister Payi Payi. Though clearly a strong speaker, he seemed somewhat weary and leery. That evening, the only thing left was to wrap the rental cars in cut-out sections of tarp to protect them and to get as much sleep as we could for our early departure.

Toyota Dreaming

“No worries, we’re on the journey now,” Warwick said with a knowing smile as the troopy pulled out from Kapululangu. I had just asked him about whether we should try to finish tarping the side of one final car. His response came as we passed the precipice of Balgo’s paved roads transitioning to corrugated tracks near the water tower, as we rhythmically bounced upon the dusty troop carrier benches facing sideways toward sliding windows. Gone were the numerous lists and logistical concerns, replaced with a collective surrender to the trip. Each person seemed to have a unique strategy for sitting in the back of a troopy on a bush trip. Some locked their legs onto a packed object. Some stabilized themselves with arms and elbows. Others seemed to surf the vibrations, holding themselves lightly, absorbing and moving with the shifting forces. I would quickly come to realize that I was a leg locker, though over time I locked less and less. As we stopped for a bathroom break, I learned that the most important thing to understand about sitting in the back of an older troopy was how to open the second back door, which was invariably in some stage of worsening malfunction. This involved pushing one’s finger into the mechanism in such a way that it released. Opening the door quickly was crucial, as the PAKAM troopy left first and arrived last so that we could stop on the side of the road and film the convoy passing by.

A few hours into the trip, we arrived at Yagga Yagga for lunch and our first overnight stop. After a couple of failed attempts, I finally got the second back door to open. Hopping down, I looked around and realized just how big our convoy was—eleven troopys holding thirty-five women, a few men, and a film crew. Warwick and Mark often referred to such trips as “Toyota Dreaming,” which humorously paired the Japanese vehicles with what is normally understood to be the serious business of following a Dreaming story. It was both a joke and their ethnographic observation, since the faded white troopy has become a primary symbol for moving through Country. Furthermore, community members often personified old vehicles, especially those that had traveled widely in their lifetime, like Bushy. For example, in discussing one particularly old Toyota, Mark’s nephew Shorty remarked, “This fella has been to some good Country and is setting down to rest in Balgo. He’s an old fella now, poor thing.”

We set up camp at Yagga Yagga. Although I was technically on the film crew, during this first trip I helped out wherever I was most needed at the campsite. Besides, Anne and Anna were a complete and tight crew, and they had developed an intuitive rhythm from having worked together previously. When they asked for my assistance, it was more than anything a reflection of their inclusive kindness. Having only taken a few film production courses to provide foundational skills, my real training began during this trip, and would unfold over dozens of Kimberley projects in the coming years.

Kurrarlkatjanu was not really a film-oriented trip so much as a culture convoy with an attached film crew to document it, a fact that resonates with much Indigenous media around the globe, in which social relations and cultural activities are often more important than the media itself (Dowell 2013; Ginsburg 1994; Miyarrka Media 2019; Thorner 2010). This was apparent in meetings throughout the week. While during the future Tjawa Tjawa trip the cinema schedule was prioritized, in this journey it was usually acknowledged toward the end, with comments such as “Oh yes, and our trusty film crew will be around taking footage to document the trip!”

After waking up in Yagga Yagga and finishing the collective frenzy of preparing and cleaning up breakfast, we had our morning meeting. Here, it was announced that we would smoke a house, spend a little time in Yagga Yagga, and then head off to our next destination. While I understood the general reason for smoking a house—to spiritually cleanse it following a death—Warwick explained to me that this was a profound moment in other ways too, as Yagga Yagga had been deserted for years following a suicide. Our film crew captured the process, including a smoking ceremony for a baby to ensure its well-being.

Afterward we set up a quick film shoot for Payi Payi, her sister Linda, and her brother Mark. Here, they discussed the brief history of Yagga Yagga and the purpose of the smoking ceremony. It seemed in this moment that something had changed for Mark. After the smoking, his spirits appeared to be lifted. Smiling, he spoke briefly though proudly of Yagga Yagga and the importance of coming back to live here someday. I would come to find out that this moment was a crucial turning point for him after years of profound difficulties, including Yagga Yagga’s closure.

I began to understand a little bit about the significance of this trip from Mark a few nights later, when he and I were sitting around a fire with others, chatting in small groups. I listened carefully to him as he told me about the areas we were moving through. It was clear how impressive of a storyteller he was, effortlessly pacing drama, suspense, and humor. The more I listened, the more intensely he spoke. This went on for over an hour. Then, as if suddenly realizing that something was not quite right, he stopped and said, “Tell me a story about you. I’ve been telling you about my mob, so I should know about your family, where you come from.”

In that moment, I realized that I was perhaps overly concerned with not interjecting myself during fieldwork. I implicitly imagined this as decentering myself, but in the context of relationships it invited an imbalance amid the generous sharing by others. This only became obvious to me in hindsight. While I was focused on listening and contributing labor, as Mark pointed out, I had revealed little about myself. So, when he asked me to tell him something about my family, I was momentarily at a loss for words. The stories he shared with me were vulnerable, and while they had humor, each was tinged with historical tragedy. After a long moment, I told him about my grandmother’s teenage experiences of being one of very few in her family to escape Nazi Germany and to finally arrive in New York City, where she met my grandfather and namesake Willi. He listened closely, and at the end sat quietly, before gravely noting, “Yuwai [Yeah], that’s a hard, hard time.” This shared moment was the beginning of our many-years-long relationship, in which I listened more than I spoke, but increasingly I also shared. This is the approach I also take in this book, resisting my own inclination to remove myself from the story. This ethnography is through me but not about me, and I have aimed to keep the narrative spotlight off of myself whenever possible.

Throughout the weeklong shoot for Kurrarlkatjanu, we visited several important sites that we would return to in future films, including Tjawa Tjawa and Mangkayi Calling. Our crew knew that this trip was meant to result in a tightly edited thirteen-minute film for NITV, though it went almost without saying at PAKAM that it would also be edited into a longer format for community use and broadcast on Indigenous Community Television (ICTV). Therefore, we shot liberally to capture not just the core story and scenes but also a multitude of everyday moments. Each night, as Anne and Anna logged and reviewed footage, it was clear that they were mentally preparing for the edit, which would have to be done quickly upon our return to Balgo.

In many of the films I collaborated on, there was a deliberate slowness in the postproduction process. For logistical reasons, this was not the case for Kurrarlkatjanu. Anne and Anna had only a few days to complete the final film edit before leaving for their next project. While they could have taken it with them, they were committed to editing it in Balgo where they could get ongoing feedback, regardless of schedule constraints. Astoundingly, they completed a rough cut in just over a day, which benefited from their preparation discussions over the previous days. They edited on a folding table in one of the small bedrooms in Kapululangu, near where they slept. Because of their proximity to the women Elders, they were able to receive regular feedback and guidance throughout this intensive process.

Meanwhile, I was tasked with organizing local musicians to record the film’s soundtrack in the art center’s music studio. In the coming years we would collectively reorganize this impressive studio that had fallen into disuse. However, in this tight timeline musicians simply gathered around a handheld Zoom audio recorder with attached microphones, recording songs while one person played an acoustic guitar. I spent much of these days driving people to and from Kapululangu to share their thoughts on the evolving film edit, as well as visiting families to confirm permissions and name spellings for the long list of credits. Late in the evening before our departure back to Broome, we showed the completed thirteen-minute film over dinner in the central space of Kapululangu. Mark watched intently, leaning forward and seemingly lost in thought. The next morning, the three of us left at dawn, chasing the rising sun back toward the Indian Ocean.

Kimberley Media Circuits

My fieldwork was based in the coastal pearling town of Broome, as well as remote communities (especially Balgo) in the Kimberley region, referred to locally as the Kimberley. As a hub of Aboriginal political action and creative innovation since the 1970s, the Kimberley is an especially rich place to understand the lineage and expansion of the Indigenous Australian mediascape.

The home of seventeen thousand out of the region’s thirty-seven thousand people, Broome is small by most standards, though is three times the population of Kununurra, the second-largest Kimberley town. Broome is the primary visual touchstone of the Kimberley, featuring dramatic views and contrasting hues—brilliant cerulean skies that sun-soak verdant vegetation on blood-red cliffs amidst pastel beaches that feature some of the biggest tides on Earth. It is the most cinematic place I have ever seen, so it is perhaps no accident that it became the nexus for media in the region.

Broome is also the cosmopolitan locus of the Kimberley and one of the most ethnically diverse towns in Australia, promoted to tourists as a bastion of harmonious multiculturalism. The high levels of “mixed relations” (Ganter 2006) between Aboriginal, Asian, and European people are a result of exemptions from strict “White Australia” immigration policies. These exceptions were motivated by commercial concerns, as this immigration bolstered the town’s pearl shell industry, which was so lucrative that it produced the vast majority of the world’s supply in the early twentieth century (Bach 1962). This regional head start on ethnic diversity positioned it as a bellwether in Australia for understanding both the limits and potential future trends in Aboriginal/state relations. However, despite local land claim victories and relatively less segregation, this region—like the rest of Australia—remains marred by violent histories of intermarriage prohibition, stolen children, racial riots, and economic exploitation (Attwood 2005). These colonial legacies continue to manifest through governmental and corporate pressures to gain natural resource rights in and around Broome, which have been opposed, often successfully, by a coalition led by local Aboriginal groups.

My fieldwork included seven research trips to Australia since 2006 in the Kimberley, where I collaborated on dozens of media projects within the production teams of Pilbara and Kimberley Aboriginal Media Association (PAKAM) and Goolarri Media Enterprises (Goolarri). Both are Indigenous-owned and -run multimedia organizations that focus on Kimberley Indigenous video, radio, and music production, though PAKAM is more oriented toward remote communities, while Goolarri’s mission focuses on the coastal area around Broome. As described on their website, Goolarri also includes “non-Indigenous communications” and an emphasis on public events. Various aspects of their bureaucratic organization, such as bookkeeping, are interwoven.5 They are bound together not only organizationally but also through shared space and proximity. Both are located within the three massive and connected corrugated warehouse sheds originally built to house the collections of Lord Alistair McAlpine, a man who was centrally responsible for turning the town into a tourist destination over the past several decades. Beyond their many areas of overlap, there are some differences between them. PAKAM’s relatively egalitarian horizontal organization contrasts with Goolarri’s more hierarchical and vertical structure, which is apparent in their offices, policies, and media.

In a general sense, PAKAM and Goolarri provide a local microcosm of broader differences between the two national Indigenous TV networks: ICTV, located in Alice Springs, and the Sydney-based NITV. PAKAM generally mirrors ICTV’s emphasis on grassroots media in Aboriginal languages produced by and for remote communities, whereas Goolarri, like NITV, specializes in more broadly appealing videos with more mainstream production values. PAKAM is more flexibly organized than Goolarri, operating in a warehouse setting of less formalized meetings and with more frequent trips to communities. It serves as the organizational rebroadcasting hub for twelve community stations and eight town stations. Organized into departments with cubicles and state-of-the-art equipment, Goolarri specializes in documentaries on local history, public service/health programs, and shows about local Aboriginal knowledge, such as their popular Catch and Cook (2005) series on hunting and cooking. They feature a market-leading FM radio station along with two TV channels. They serve as a gateway for supplemental national Indigenous media content, as Goolarri radio is often picked up by the National Indigenous Radio Service. They also broadcast ICTV on their third local channel. In total, Broome has four free-to-air Indigenous channels. The roles and overall visibility of NITV and ICTV have resonances with Māori Television’s two national channels. To paint with a broad brush and to put it into the framework of Barry Barclay (Ngāti Apa), the primary Māori TV channel, like NITV, “talks out” to broader audiences, and Te Reo, like ICTV, focuses on media in language and “talks in” to Indigenous audiences (Strickland 2013, 157).

There is bound to be occasional tension between two different media organizations in neighboring buildings. That said, my experience there continually reinforced the notion that PAKAM and Goolarri benefited overall from their complementary capabilities, networks, and infrastructures—including their differing perspectives on process and purpose. It was often this synergy and generative friction that helped to bring films such as Tjawa Tjawa to fruition.

Beginnings

Throughout my primary fieldwork I documented media practices through daily participation within production teams, observed meetings, interviewed media workers and community leaders, and followed films to national festivals to contextualize their broader circulation and reception. I participated in three extended remote media projects, including two convoy trips into the Great Sandy Desert with film crews and dozens of Elders. I followed these films to the Sydney Film Festival and two National Remote Indigenous Media Festivals, where I assisted with film programming and festival setup, and spent time volunteering with NITV and ICTV. To receive regular feedback—mirroring the mid-process screenings in the films I worked on—I presented my ideas regularly in Australia through radio interviews, public talks, and professional conference papers. Talks often took place just across the street from PAKAM and Goolarri, at the Nulungu Research Institute at the Broome campus of the University of Notre Dame Australia (Nulungu).

Some of the most pivotal experiences occurred before my primary fieldwork began, through the seedlings of the trips leading up to it. The Yiddish phrase “The way it begins is the way it ends” captures a fundamental dynamic in and beyond the fieldwork process. When things do not end well in relationships, generally speaking, those involved can look back and realize that there were many forewarnings from the beginning that were ignored. Relationships and projects that go well are also unsurprising when retrospectively reflecting upon early interactions.

A telling quality for relationships that do not end well relates to the amount of control that each side attempts to exert. The formalization and constraints of ethnographic research can pose challenges to releasing control. There are various pressures to develop a topic of disciplinary interest, find a fieldsite to engage it, and then hit the ground running as soon as feasibly possible. My experience in fieldwork took a circuitous route, on paths I could not have predicted. Largely through good fortune, I had mentors and advisers who guided me toward a research process with the aim of exerting as little control as possible, while developing projects in partnership.

I did not originally intend to engage in a project on remote community media, but rather with PAKAM and Goolarri in the uniquely heterogeneous town of Broome. In 2006, I was studying for a semester in Australia and had become a fan of several songwriters that I came to realize were all from this small town in the Kimberley. I first contacted Goolarri in 2006 to ask if I could work on a student project with them. My email to the Goolarri COO, Kira, was met with a concise, single-sentence response, suggesting simply that I come in to talk about it and that we would see. Draining my bank account, I flew from the east coast of Australia and met with Kira. In our first discussion, I started to realize just how important having aligned interests was, as well as the benefits of a foundational media skill set. Kira asked what I wanted to do and I responded that while I was interested in local bands, I would be happy to do whatever was most useful. They had a need for more radio shows on their station and recorded interviews with musicians to fulfill grant obligations, and having had previous radio experience, that is what I did. While there, I was saturated with the vibrant multimedia world that PAKAM and Goolarri fostered from their collective sheds. The project felt more like volunteer work than fieldwork, which in effect it was.

When initiating my PhD research years later through the University of Colorado Boulder, I was guided by my PhD adviser, Jennifer Shannon, and her ethnography of the National Museum of the American Indian titled Our Lives, whose multi-sited and project-based collaborative process I mirrored. I visited Broome in June 2012 after emailing PAKAM and Goolarri to ask if they might be interested in working on a larger collaboration together. Again, I received a short, cryptic, and positive response suggesting I visit to talk about it in person. And again, I arrived with interest and few concrete research questions. In 2006 this had been unwitting, the result of an excess of enthusiasm and a lack of experience. In 2012, arriving without a specific research agenda was an intentional practice for initiating an appropriate relationship. My goal for this six-week trip was to answer three questions, in the following order:

1. Would you like to work on a project together in the first place?
2. If so, what would be the most productive things for me to do?
3. How can this form the foundation for a relevant ethnographic project?

While most ethnographic research asks these questions, I came to realize that it is their order that is most crucial to a meaningfully collaborative practice, and by having the third question follow the second, a project can more closely align practical daily utility with the heart of the research itself. Projects can become superficially collaborative when the second question follows the third. In that sequence, it is more likely that priorities will remain in tension.

After emphasizing that there was absolutely no need for us to do a project at all unless there was specific interest, I received the response, more quickly than expected, of “Let’s do it, assuming we all agree on it.” I spent the next six weeks attempting to answer the second question by talking with a variety of stakeholders within and beyond these organizations. Over time, it became clear that for Goolarri this would involve working on media projects in and around Broome, and for PAKAM it would consist of spending my time supporting media workers in remote communities. This foundational pilot trip was crucial in setting the stage for a mutually beneficial project.

I spent the following year integrating what I learned in question two to answer question three, as I attempted to formulate a relevant ethnographic project. I returned in 2013 to discuss my proposal with them. I distributed it throughout PAKAM and Goolarri, and we revised it together until there was agreement that it was the right project and process. I then spent several weeks working on a PAKAM community film, Kurrarlkatjanu, to understand how to further design a project that integrated well within the realities of their media work. Before returning home, I engaged Aboriginal scholars at Nulungu in Broome and the Australian National University in Canberra to get their impression of the project within the scope of Indigenous studies in Australia. I specifically sought out scholars who were known for being skeptical of white anthropologists, and of American researchers, so that I could receive critical feedback about my project.

As fruitful as it turned out to be, it was not academic interest that led me to follow the social life of cinema. This was the emergent outcome of building this project upon the foundation of what was useful for the organizations, which ultimately led me to follow film projects as they unfolded. I returned for twenty months spanning 2014–16 and collaborated on dozens of films with PAKAM and Goolarri. My involvement was based upon my ability to contribute to particular projects depending on the shifting needs of the organizations.

With the process firmly in place, I began to draw upon the long-standing interest of anthropologists in following the social lives of objects, issues, stories, and people across time and space (Cruikshank 1998; Marcus 1995). This framework integrates scholarship on material culture, which traces the social life of objects through their life cycles of creation, circulation, and use (Appadurai 1986; Drazin and Küchler 2015). I was inspired by the idea that following the social life of things makes “salient what might otherwise remain obscure” (Kopytoff 1986, 67). Webb Keane (2003) builds upon the biographical model, paying attention not only to human perspectives but also to the materiality constituting and surrounding media (Larkin 2008). While it might at first seem unexpected to apply a materiality framework to media, William Mazzarella (2004, 359) argues that media are ethnographically “powerful because they do not have to rely primarily on speculative abstraction” in that they produce a tangible process and product. Furthermore, he emphasizes the importance of “mediation” itself as a foundational quality of social life, “where value is often produced and contested, more or less self-consciously, in the name of culture,” facilitating local theorizing on global phenomena (345).

Much as a biography illuminates each aspect of a person’s life, tracing the social life of cinema deepens understandings of who, what, and why these media represent. Rather than highlighting the exciting moments of production or analyzing its final cut, this process imagines these as components of a project’s larger life cycle. Just as important are the seemingly banal bureaucratic activities in preproduction and the various editing sessions in postproduction; these less-charismatic stages often reveal crucial insights. This holistic approach also informs how I include myself in the narrative.

The extent to which anthropologists should write themselves into ethnographies has been thoughtfully debated for decades. At the extremes, erasing oneself can give the false impression of authorial omnipotence, while centering oneself can descend into navel-gazing. Adding further dimensions of complexity are questions on how anthropologists include themselves. To what extent should they focus on their activities and involvement, or their subject position and self-reflexivity? There are of course no simple or singular answers to these questions. One can become lost as easily in objectivity as in the mirror.

Relationship-oriented approaches reframe questions and implications of how to include oneself. A powerful model is provided in Miyarrka Media’s Phone & Spear: A Yuṯa Anthropology (2019), in which a collective of seven writers, including Yolngu Elder Paul Gurrumuruwuy and anthropologist Jennifer Deger, reimagines the ethnographic text with a common creative goal. This requires not only understanding and observation but also mutual sharing and reciprocity. As Ruth Behar suggests, worthwhile ethnographies require vulnerability and openness (1996, 177). There is no formula for a relationship or how to integrate oneself into an ethnography. And yet, the quality of a relationship quickly becomes apparent to those within and near it.

While many ethnographers thoughtfully use the terms interlocutors, participants, and research subjects, none of these rang quite true during my fieldwork, as they seemed overly distanced and technical. Hortense Powdermaker’s (1966) juxtaposition of stranger with friend is incisive, as all friendships begin with a meeting of strangers. Collaborators and friends more accurately capture how I came to understand many of the relationships I had in the field. Notably, in Balgo the category describing outsiders and most whitefellas is kartiya, which is itself translated as “stranger.” I was referred to as a kartiya for my initial months in Balgo, while I was getting to know people. However, as much as collaborator and friend describe elements of these relationships, they also do not seem quite right. Anthropologists engage with a focus rarely found in most other relationships of similar duration. Therefore, these connections tend to have an unusual mix of more- and less-distanced qualities, all at once the friendly stranger and strange friend.

For all of its resonance, friend carries some troubling implications in fieldwork. It is associated with nonprofessional relationships that usually lack significant power imbalances. As a national term with more flexibility around familiarity and power, the ubiquitous Australian colloquialism of mate is perhaps more appropriate. It has no analog in the United States, as it can be used to describe nearly any generally positive relationship. It is equally at home between business people closing deals, surfers sharing stories, children playing together, and family members spanning generations. Unlike friend, mate regularly traverses relationships that have multifaceted power dynamics even as it resists being interpreted as condescending. While mate was historically gendered male, as with the Aboriginal English term bella (fella), it is now often used as a gender-neutral term. To me, what seems most faithful, or least problematic, is to consider those I worked with as “field mates,” grounding mate within the context of fieldwork.

Another set of dynamics—student and teacher—exerted a gravity within my research. Before fieldwork I had taken a couple of film production courses with the aim of not being a weak link on projects. I would have taken more if I could have. In retrospect, however, there were some upsides to not having extensive media expertise. Vulnerability is essential in the research process for leveling power dynamics. While I was sometimes positioned by PAKAM and Goolarri into a teacher role when working with community members who were making films for the first time, I was just as often situated as a student to media professionals. My modest amount of previous media training had the inadvertent effect of providing spaces for my teachers to share the unspoken common sense around how media should be made in this context. Such knowledge is often only explained to beginners.

On a slow afternoon in the stormy wet season, I was chatting with Neil Turner as we watched torrential waves of rain splatter through the open shed door at PAKAM. While discussing the role of ethical representation in community media, I commented that it seemed that the process of filmmaking increased clarity about what could and could not be shared, and that transparency was less fraught in those projects. Neil sat quietly for moment, thinking, then suddenly he laughed, responding, “Yeah, sure, but don’t worry, it’s still plenty fraught.” He was right, of course, though perhaps these processes are at least more transparently fraught. I have no illusions that this ethnography somehow escapes the many dangers of representation that are bound up in the doubles and mirrors within cinema and fieldwork, as well as my embodied positionality and privileges as an American Jewish man from Ohio. My commitment to you is to be as transparent in every way I can, to frankly describe what I do not understand, and to appropriately frame any insights as gained through the generosity of field mates.

This research is modeled upon recent compelling ethnographies that are based on close collaborations with Indigenous Australian media projects. In addition to Miyarrka Media’s Phone & Spear (2019), I am inspired by Jennifer Deger’s Shimmering Screens (2006), Melinda Hinkson’s See How We Roll (2021), Daniel Fisher’s The Voice and Its Doubles (2016), and Jennifer Biddle’s Remote Avant-Garde (2016), as well as scholarship from North and South America (Aufderheide 1995; Bessire 2017; Dowell 2013; Ginsburg 2011; Halkin 2008; Hennessy 2009; Shannon 2014; Wortham 2013). I have found guidance not only within their scholarly works but also though various personal interactions over the years. Their magnanimous collegiality is inspiring, and yet perhaps unsurprising in light of the qualities required to meaningfully engage in such collaborations.

Throughout my fieldwork, the “project” was the structuring form of interaction and the unit of analysis. This described most of the things that people creatively collaborated on. This book itself is a project about projects. Though there were other activities, such as radio shows and training sessions, films were nearly always referred to as projects with stages. Through projects, we worked together toward common goals. While I regularly reminded field mates about my ethnographic research, after the first few months it seemed that they viewed me as a media volunteer who was additionally, and less significantly, writing about the experience. While I took notes every evening and sometimes during the day, there were moments when I forgot that I was an ethnographer. Rarely did my ethnographic project feel like the central or most important thing I was doing.

Although I worked with the organizations of PAKAM and Goolarri, my presence was only made meaningful in relation to specific projects with specific people. And while roles at the outlets were relatively fluid in transitions between projects, they tended to remain set and stable during them. Unlike most film projects, roles here seldom seemed to confer social status outside of that particular project. Rather than confronting glass ceilings, crew were generally encouraged to rise into more-senior roles based on their interests. Roles were framed as contributions to a project rather than signals of broader status. There was no one who was above stacking chairs, or more than one good idea away from becoming a director.

Tjawa Tjawa

In the year following Kurrarlkatjanu, PAKAM was one of ten organizations to receive funding for the inaugural Songlines on Screen program funded by NITV and Screen Australia, the nation’s peak film body. This included an unprecedented investment of over one million dollars into remote Aboriginal-produced films, which are usually made on far more modest budgets. Each project received approximately $130,000. As an example of the disproportionate importance of Broome on the national Indigenous mediascape, three of the ten Songlines on Screen grants were received by media outlets based there, including PAKAM, Goolarri, and Wawili Pitjas, a small, independent Aboriginal film company.

Tjawa Tjawa traced a Dreaming story following women from Ieramagudu—the area near the present-day coastal town of Roebourne—as they traveled underground to and from Tjawa Tjawa and other areas south of what is now Balgo. It was a natural follow-up project to the Songline film Kurrarlkatjanu, and in some ways served as its doubling. Tjawa Tjawa was about a trip with a similar number of people and vehicles traveling to an overlapping area of Country south of Balgo. The convoy trip lasted roughly the same amount of time and traveled during a similar season one year later. Yet, unlike Kurrarlkatjanu, it was not an add-on to another trip but a full-fledged and film-focused desert convoy. Previously, Mark was included but remained tentative. Now he held the mantle of director and central storyteller.

As an NITV-branded landmark series, there was a sense in this and other Songlines on Screen films that their success would be pivotal in determining future major investments into the Aboriginal mediascape. Therefore, great care and oversight was involved throughout the process. In contrast to the effective and beloved “run and gun” process of Kurrarlkatjanu and many other PAKAM films, as part of the Songlines on Screen grant to PAKAM, Tjawa Tjawa’s preproduction was highly structured and involved various meetings at PAKAM and between stakeholder organizations.

Rather than the in-house budget process, such larger and externally funded projects were bound up within the ever-dreaded “A to Zed” (A–Z) budget, a byzantine Excel-based form that could confuse even the most experienced managers. There seemed to be a relatively binary grant distinction, according to which small projects operated under a relatively informal budgetary model, while larger projects—above the threshold of roughly $10,000—required A–Z budgets. This was especially true for NITV, which was constrained by the bureaucratic procedures of SBS, its parent company. Unlike the lean crews of one to three that typified most PAKAM films, Tjawa Tjawa had a relatively large crew with specialized roles, including Mark as director and Neil as producer. It also included a director of photography, sound recordist, camera operators, media mentor, and cook, as well as production assistants such as me. Neil was able to negotiate the bureaucratic morass of paperwork required to make such projects possible, fine-tuning the balance between satisfying technical requirements and fostering as much flexibility as the process allowed. Although smaller films demonstrate the intimacies of Aboriginal community media processes, such an extensive project provides the time and space to illustrate the various interwoven stages within its social life.

Tjawa Tjawa was the most expansive film project I participated on. With a life cycle spanning three years, this short documentary circulated widely throughout the Indigenous Australian mediascape. Between 2014 and 2016, I traced the cinematic life of Tjawa Tjawa, including film treatments, budgets, and bureaucratic negotiations between Balgo, PAKAM, NITV, and Screen Australia, as well as the logistics leading up to the shoot around food, crew, and drivers, as well as which locations could or could not be filmed. I assisted in a variety of roles throughout the production, and in postproduction I was involved in editing and transcribing, making the twelve-hour drive back to Balgo five times throughout the film’s translation, mid-process feedback, and screenings.

I also accompanied Tjawa Tjawa to the ICTV film screenings at the National Remote Indigenous Media Festival in Lajamanu—an Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory—and to the 2015 Sydney Film Festival. It would go on to screen at a variety of international festivals, including the imagineNATIVE Film & Media Arts Festival in Toronto and the Margaret Mead Film Festival in New York City. While the social life of Tjawa Tjawa began before its conception, it has also outlived its own production, sparking a variety of other projects.