Awakenings

Dreamings and Awakenings

A turn creates a narrative fracture between its before and after. However, at the time, this moment seemed relatively ordinary within the frenetic realities of fieldwork. As when shooting a documentary, it is often only in hindsight that significant moments become apparent. The daily rhythms of life quickly filled my mind as this powerful statement faded for some time. Looking back at my field notes weeks later, I noticed that I had underlined three phrases in Mark’s statement: “Let’s make a film about going back to Country, about the future. Let’s make the real film.” Over the subsequent months and years, I have returned to this moment again and again. What did Mark mean by “going back,” “the future,” and “the real”? Why had his previous ambivalence to film been overtaken by a sense of great purpose and promise? At the time I did not understand this, and in some ways, perhaps I still do not.

What I do know is that this moment was an awakening for Mark. At its heart, this book aims to understand this and other awakenings that he conveyed as we made films together over several years. “Awakening” seems appropriate here in light of its dual meaning as both waking from sleep and a moment of sudden awareness. For Mark these were intertwined, as his awakenings tended to begin with the seed of an idea that gestated overnight into morning’s clarity. As he often described, these realizations were woven into his sleeping dreams and into the Dreaming, or Tjukurrpa. While awakenings manifest as sudden shifts, they are the culmination of longer processes that crystallize within a moment.

The relationship between dreams and films has long been discussed and yet remains in some ways ineffable. As Anand Pandian describes it, “From the very beginnings of cinema, films have felt like dreams. Bodies at rest in the darkness of some space, plunged into reverie by a fragmentary stream of images” (2015, 21). Every dream is followed by an awakening, whether it is formative, forgettable, frightening, or otherwise. Over the course of years I witnessed firsthand how the dynamic process of filmmaking could catalyze profound awakenings within its creators. Due to the legacy of terra nullius and the continued lack of treaties between Indigenous Australians and the settler state, the existential futures of Aboriginal communities also depend on awakenings in others—including politicians, policymakers, and the general public. Mark increasingly came to believe that this was possible through media-making. It was in relation to awakenings by Mark and other media makers that the central argument of this book emerged: the process of cinematic envisioning transforms how Aboriginal filmmakers imagine and actualize community futures during apocalyptic times.6

On the first night of this and future trips we camped in Yagga Yagga, an abandoned smaller community a few hours south of Balgo. Visiting was bittersweet for Mark, as this was the once-thriving outstation community he led before its decline several years before.7 It was a place of haunted pasts and promised futures that conjured both desolation and dreams. There in Yagga Yagga, near the sacred site of Mangkayi, Mark planned a renewed home for his family’s future.

In documentary film projects, the camera’s presence is often a distraction or a cause of self-conscious anxiety. With Mark, however, the opposite seemed to happen. The introduction of the camera focused his purpose, providing a portal for his messages to be heard across time and space, from Parliament in Canberra to his future great-grandchildren in Mangkayi. After years of practice on previous film projects, the process had already become second nature to him.

Irreconciliation

State frameworks for Indigenous relations carry profound implications for the limits and possibilities of sovereignty. “Reconciliation” has found global purchase in settler states in recent decades, becoming the overarching Australian state policy theme for engaging Indigenous people.11 While in other contexts the term is used to refer to restorative and healing relationships within and between communities, it is wielded by settler states to render “consistent Indigenous assertions of nationhood with the state’s unilateral assertion of sovereignty over Native peoples’ lands and populations,” which has the further effect of “undermining the realization of the previous two forms of reconciliation” (Coulthard 2014, 107). Glen Coulthard’s analysis of reconciliation in the Canadian context is further heightened in Australia by the absence of any treaties.

The reconciliation era was initiated by the 1991 Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act, passed in the wake of investigations into Aboriginal deaths in custody. The early 1990s was a watershed era for Aboriginal politics that included the 1992 case Mabo v. Queensland, which finally delegitimized terra nullius,12 as well as the 1993 passing of the Native Title Act, which began a process for limited land rights.13 Taken at face value, the reconciliation process aimed to acknowledge past injustices and the traditional ownership of Country, while attempting to reduce racism through broad education about Aboriginal people. However, Indigenous leaders have often challenged the deeper purpose of prioritizing reconciliation. For example, at a conference I attended through the National Centre for Indigenous Studies in Canberra, a prominent Aboriginal scholar rhetorically asked, “How can there be reconciliation when there has never been conciliation in the first place?”

Leanne Simpson (Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg) describes how reconciliation processes tend to emerge out of a focus on suffering, enabling ways in which “Indigenous grief can be managed, exploited, and used by the state to placate Indigenous resistance.” Examining the track record of such state policies, she observes that “these mechanisms have never brought about accountability for Indigenous peoples because they are processes that are partly designed to uphold the structure of settler colonialism” (2017, 238). Simpson (2011) asserts that any meaningful reconciliation must be founded within a radical resurgence of Indigenous politics, language, and life. Reconciliation presumes that forgiveness is good and anger is bad, regardless of context (Coulthard 2014, 108). This dynamic is particularly stark in Australia, where reconciliation is promoted in the absence of treaties.

Reconciliation discourse simultaneously flattens and amplifies cultural difference. In her wide-ranging critique of “recognition”—a key focus of Australian policy that is subsumed within the reconciliation framework—Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) describes the cunning ways in which this language enables a liberal multiculturalism that collapses difference.14 The impulse to resolve differences within such dominant frameworks often results in destructive Aboriginal policies, including wide-scale programs that propose to “close the gap” between Aboriginal and Australian quantitative metrics of well-being. Under the guise of equality, reconciliation implicitly catalyzes the very assimilation that undermines sovereignty and Aboriginal community life.

At the same time, reconciliation fosters tropes of Aboriginal people as inconceivably different others and casts them within a mythological past or ever-suffering present. Journalists and other commentators often do not express surprise when gap-closing policies are deemed unsuccessful. An ongoing undercurrent message is something along the lines of “It would be great to make Aboriginal people equal, but it is unlikely because of how different they are.” In some ways, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal ways of understanding, being, and living are incommensurable (Povinelli 2001).15 However, emphasizing radical differences can quickly become objectifying and depoliticizing, rendering Indigenous people as intellectual fascinations or as beyond the scope of Western understanding.

In an attempt to avoid both under- and overstating difference, I frame discussions of Indigenous sovereignty through “irreconciliation,” which I approach as (1) a politics of refusing reconciliation policies, (2) a conceptualization for engaging difference, and (3) a critical reflection on the limitations of ethnographic understanding. I am inspired by Joseph Weiss’s (2025) articulation of irreconciliation as a productive framework for resisting settler desires for closure and for “push[ing] away from any such promises of closure, whether in the triumphant liberal or equally triumphant critical mode.” Crucially, Weiss emphasizes that “different forms of Indigenous anti-colonial work make colonial erasure impossible, both materially and symbolically, and that they are, thereby, inescapable for settler Canadians” (12). So, too, does the Australian state desire the impossible goal of concealing genocidal pasts and dispossessive presents.

I also build upon Nayanika Mookherjee’s articulation of irreconciliation as providing a “vigilance against impunity” that settler states often attempt through the performance of public redress (2022, 28), as well as Ronald Niezen’s work on irreconciliation within Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian residential schools. As Niezen describes, reconciliation implies collective guilt that paradoxically “cannot be forgiven and for which no punishment is possible,” whereas irreconciliation rejects that stalemate toward the purpose of “rebuilding the world anew” (2022, 89).

Indigenous reconciliation is confounding in the context of a history without conciliation. However, its prominence in Australian policy becomes more intelligible when reimagined through settler state desires to perform its own reconciliation: attempting to synthesize a proud national identity while the brutal colonial violence and dispossession has become increasingly visible (largely due to the work of Indigenous activists and media makers). This is a seemingly impossible task, though if the state can give the impression that it has reconciled with Indigenous people, it justifies settler colonialism in two crucial ways. First, it implies that justice has been achieved not only in the present but also in the past. It performs the magic trick of seeming to forgive the unforgivable through a rhetorical penance that alleviates national guilt. Second, it reimagines history so that meaningful sovereignty is no longer required, while allowing national origin stories that connect early settlers with Aboriginal people and Country to remain intact. Asserting irreconciliation provides a form of what Audra Simpson (Kahnawake Mohawk) (2014) describes as a “refusal” to accede to settler state frameworks that provide false choices. Irreconciliation refuses the whitewashing of colonization that subverts Indigenous sovereignty.

As with the legal language of divorce, where differences are often described as irreconcilable, I center this analytic because it emphasizes the relationship between differences, rather than their nature or scope, as well as the pragmatic steps for appropriate decoupling. While reconciliation makes little sense in a failed marriage, settler state reconciliation with Indigenous people is even less coherent, as it lacks the precursor of a consensual union. In this analogy, divorce entails Indigenous nationhood, while compelled reconciliation represents its denial. Irreconciliation gestures toward the framing of Indigenous sovereignty as being in the long-term interests of everyone involved, “moving the center” from the state’s assimilatory priorities to those of Aboriginal people and communities (Ngũgĩ 1993). It also provides settler states with a more forthright path to confronting colonial legacies. Avoiding these historical realities harms not only Indigenous people but also settler life, within which colonial hauntings lie just beneath the surface, in various states of sublimation and rupture (Franks 2023; Lepselter 2016, 55).

The irregular and patchwork reality of fieldwork is itself difficult to reconcile. While some aspects of fieldwork become clearer over time, others that once seemed clear can become translucent, or even opaque. My goal is to remain transparent about the things that, although important, remain irreconcilable for me. Over time, I have come to understand some of the moments that I initially viewed as fieldworker failings rather as inescapable aspects of delving into the messy realities of human life, where irreconcilabilities abound.

Sitting with Irreconcilable Differences

Upon our return, Mark was filled with excitement and possibility as rough desert tracks gave way to the silence of Balgo’s smooth streets. However, this sentiment was quickly extinguished when a family member explained to Mark that his truck had been in an accident. While no one was injured, its bent frame was unrepairable, and it sat now as a monument to immobility in front of Mark’s house. There had been an abrupt shift in the community in the three days since we had left. For months there had been rumors of the state government defunding Aboriginal communities. Now, however, a Western Australia document known as “the list” had been leaked, shared in Balgo as five printed pages folded into quarters. It implied plans to defund—and in effect, close—most Aboriginal communities in Australia’s largest state, encompassing a third of the continent. With a lack of treaties, these hundreds of communities were built in a way that made them dependent on fossil fuels and constant infrastructural maintenance. In other words, a sudden lack of state funding would render many of them as practically uninhabitable in the close future. This list ranked communities into three categories, with Balgo slotted into the middle one, which suggested that it would probably stay funded. However, even if it did, under this plan Balgo would likely become a refuge community for the region, since many nearby smaller communities were in the bottom tier, which was implicitly slated for defunding. And just like that, dreams of filmmaking were overcast by the dire urgency of the moment.

This list presented an existential and apocalyptic future for Aboriginal communities in Western Australia, though it was hardly without precedent. It was only the most recent of a long list of state actions going back centuries, including the previous defunding of outstation communities such as Yagga Yagga. For Mark, the planned closing of small communities was heartbreakingly familiar. After his momentary shock, the list seemed to imbue more vitality into his burgeoning interest in filmmaking. He noted that this policy plan only affirmed his vision—that building communities independent of governmental funding was the most viable long-term path forward, not only for Yagga Yagga but across Indigenous Australia. Later that day we watched the trip footage at the computer in the community radio station, which faced the Balgo store. Mark reviewed it with care and at the end smiled, declaring, “Ah, I know where we will go next time, my birthplace in Emily Springs. Yuwai [Yes].”

This juxtaposition of inspiration and dejection was not unusual in Balgo, but rather represented a typical feature of daily life. To varying extents, all of the media projects I collaborated on were characterized by levity amid a backdrop of peril. In light of such stark contrasts, I often wondered if anyone, myself included, could communicate this in a meaningful and dignified way. Is it possible to make comprehensible the incommensurable? Irreconcilable contrasts permeate Aboriginal representations across multiple realms. Policies are animated by broadly shared national imaginings of Aboriginal communities. These are amplified through popular films and books depicting either a dreamy mythological past or a dreary suffering present. In anthropology this has manifested through vacillations between what Michel-Rolph Trouillot (1995) describes as the “savage slot” and what Joel Robbins (2013) mirrors as the “suffering slot.” This tension has more recently manifested through disciplinary discussions on ethnographies focused on darkness versus desire. As Sherry Ortner (2016) argues, “dark anthropology” highlights tragedy and can inadvertently reinforce negative portrayals of the already marginalized, while “desire-oriented” (Tuck 2009) research emphasizing the “anthropology of the good” (Robbins 2013) runs the risk of promoting optimism while understating crucial challenges. Undergirding this tension is a historical pattern of Indigenous people being cast as pawns within broader social debates, going back at least as far as Hobbes’s and Rousseau’s classically opposing brutish versus noble states of nature, two sides of the same dehumanizing coin.

This pervasive polarity in Aboriginal representation across time and space seems to be exacerbated by an impulse toward assuredness—the desire to arrive at something solid, rather than the shifting tensions between aspiration and desperation, joy and anguish, light and dark. As ethnographers well know, it is within the unstable places between that people live, and where we are most likely to stumble upon the irreconcilable, and something like the truth. I do not pretend to have in any way transcended these challenges, nor do I intend to downplay the many ethnographies and other works that powerfully portray Aboriginal life in its vivid complexity. I simply wish to highlight the danger of certainty and the certainty of danger in a project such as this.

While the act of sitting tends to be portrayed as a lethargic absence of action, this belies its reality in Aboriginal relationships with their Country. Often self-described as “sitting on Country,” this is an active assertion of being with and of a place, which has been practiced since time immemorial. In the context of Aboriginal political movements, it has taken on an additional resonance. From sitting in town center ovals, to the ongoing Aboriginal Tent Embassies at “The Block” in Redfern and across from the Old Parliament House in Canberra, sitting on Country in conspicuous places has become a potent form of refusal—in this case regarding legacies of terra nullius that continue to paper over a lack of treaties. Sitting on Country asserts existence despite all efforts of annihilation and inverts “homelessness” as a dominant framework for understanding Aboriginal people in their own Country. Similarly, when engaging questions of irreconcilability and paradox, instead of aiming to solve them, it is worth considering the value of simply sitting with them. While such enigmas may lack resolution, they do not defy understandings that live within and between tensions.

The Visibility Paradox

During my fieldwork a specific form of irreconcilability increasingly emerged, which I have come to think of as a broader “visibility paradox” of Aboriginal representation. On the one hand, the recent era has bolstered an unprecedented expansion of the Australian Indigenous media sphere. This has occurred in both remote and mainstream media, including the rise of multiple national TV networks, numerous regional video and radio hubs, online streaming services, and Aboriginal content within major studio systems, such as the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Screen Australia. The films I collaborated on were supported by this proliferation. On the other hand, this same period has been characterized by a resurgence in policies of cultural destruction. This included a renewed wave of drastic funding cuts for Aboriginal communities and organizations across the continent, of which the planned closing of most Western Australia communities was only one component.

What is the relationship between the flourishing of Aboriginal media and state policies of annihilation? Is the funding of these media a smoke screen for furthering colonial dispossession? Do Indigenous media serve as a revolutionary refusal, bolstering public support to prevent what would otherwise result in even more devastating state actions? Are these simply coincident, or related in another way altogether? As I would come to find out, the answers to these and related questions lay not on firm ground but in the unsteady spaces between steps. As Eric Michaels wrote, media in Aboriginal communities is “both a blessing and a curse . . . the instrument of salvation or of destruction” (1994, 121). As Donna Haraway (2016) suggests, in such murky waters, perhaps “staying with the trouble” is enough—holding on tightly as a weathered troopy bounces over rocky terrain with a single spare, keeping trust in the vehicle and its guide. In this book, Mark is your guide as well as my own, and these pages are a conduit, as best as I could manage: the vehicle that hopefully holds together enough to make the journey and return home with a story worth telling.

Envisioning Aboriginal Futures

In the eight hours of his spoken footage for Mangkayi Calling, Mark uttered “future” well over a hundred times. The future also emerged as a central theme in several other media projects in Balgo. This was surprising, since “the future” lacks a close translation or conceptualization in Kukatja, due to distinctions regarding how time itself is understood.16 It is not the case that the Kukatja language lacks a sense of temporality, but rather that it encapsulates an ontological framework that is “not concerned with the representation of time, as such, but rather with principles of transformation that are intrinsically linked to Tjukurrpa,” which has always been, always will be, and is also present within the here and now (Poirier [1996] 2005, 57).

Many in Balgo suggested to me that the use of the term “the future” seemed relatively new and that as recently as a decade before it would have rarely been used. What seems to have changed in this period is an unlikely convergence of the bureaucratically banal and the politically imaginative. In previous years there had been various Closing the Gap government-funded programs that began to explicitly reference the future, with the aim of equalizing Aboriginal versus national statistical measurements of health, education, and employment. Although these government programs may have introduced the concept of the future into the Balgo lexicon, futurity has a distinctive lineage in Aboriginal Australian media scholarship (Ginsburg and Myers 2006). This book builds in particular upon the work of Michaels, who worked closely with the Warlpiri Media Association in the 1980s. He emphasized the importance of “cultural futures” that retain specificity and allow for shifting negotiations of contradiction, all while privileging “processes of reproduction over their products” (1994, 121).

The future that was engaged within Balgo films resonated less with bureaucratic programs and more with the recent rise of futurity as a central theme in Indigenous intellectual and political movements across the globe (Estes 2019; Medak-Saltzman 2017; Weiss 2018) and to an increasing extent within anthropology (Valentine and Hassoun 2019). Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) articulates the intentionally plural conception of “Indigenous futurisms” as a way for Indigenous people to attempt to further understand and discard the impacts of colonization, recovering ancestral traditions within a world that is already postapocalyptic for many Native people (2012, 10). Indigenous futurisms assert what Mark Rifkin (2017) has described as “temporal sovereignty” through resisting the imposition of “settler time.” Temporal displacement has fostered dispossession throughout the history of colonization (Donaldson 1996; Musharbash 2007), as well as within the formation of anthropological notions of difference itself (Fabian 1983). Rather than focusing on incommensurable aspects of temporality, I emphasize how conceptions of “the future” have emerged in Balgo through the corporeality of media that communicate within and beyond the limits of language (MacDougall 2006).

Indigenous futurisms confront implications of primarily framing Aboriginal Australians as the “world’s oldest living societies,” dating back to at least 65,000 years ago.17 Fred Myers articulates this temporal issue at the heart of settler imaginings of Aboriginal people:

With a view to the imposing, apparently unchanging landscape, the nostalgic may reflect sadly on the intervention of history in a timeless world. But these reactions would be mistaken. For all its trappings of worldliness and hard knowledge of history’s inexorable laws, such a dichotomous “before and after” view reflects a rather shallow grasp of society as human action. Focusing on outward form alone makes it impossible to see the past in the present. Hunting-and-gathering bands, it is true, no longer exist for observation. Yet their substance, if not their material form, remains here: as part of the structure with which the present encounters the future. (1986, 11-12)

The temporal terminal narrative of colonial contact renders annihilation as inevitable, with tangible impacts on the terms and limits of sovereignty.

While Native Title land rights depend on demonstrating “uninterrupted” traditional cultural practices, Indigenous/state relations also hinge on the ability of Aboriginal people to imagine and amplify diverse future visions. In this book I follow the envisioning process of media productions by those most associated with distant pasts. The very media tools used to temporally trap Indigenous Australians within stereotyped representations are now being inverted and wielded to reimagine what Aboriginal people, publics, and policymakers believe is possible, desirable, and inevitable for communities such as Balgo and Yagga Yagga. Through media-making, Mark and others in communities are simultaneously envisioning and enacting their futures within postapocalyptic present realities.

When lost in the scorching heat and sands of an unknown desert, kartiya (strangers) often become susceptible to mirages: optical illusions of water in the distance caused by heat-bent light and exacerbated by desperation.18 Yet Mark’s vision was no mirage. A key distinction between vision and mirage lays in whether or not someone understands where they are. Mark could detail by moonlight what lies along the horizon throughout his Country. When he did get lost, he quickly reoriented himself. As improbable as his plans for Yagga Yagga might appear, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as fantasy. As a younger man, Mark successfully led the unlikely establishment of Yagga Yagga before there was even a graded road to it. He guided its ascension, witnessed its demise, and developed a practical theory for what to do differently next time. Mangkayi’s calling was more than the aching pain of nostalgia. What he lacked in youth he made up for through hard-won lessons from heartbreaking setbacks that both scarred and emboldened him.

The future that Mark discussed was specific and placed—where his current and yet-to-be family could live beyond the reach of governmental intervention in Yagga Yagga. Sometimes he mused more amorphously about the future. In film shoots, when Mark used the phrase “in the future,” it usually began or concluded a thought, and was accompanied by a pregnant pause as he seemed to focus inwardly and then toward Mangkayi along the horizon. Adriana Petryna’s (2022) development of “horizon work” is illuminating here, as it captures the importance of navigating shifting expectations and frameworks of possibility while avoiding the paralysis of doomism. She translates this term into the verb horizoning as a way to conceptualize “thinking about and responding to complex futures” (5). Such imaginative processes are as powerful as they are fragile. Mark’s horizoning work lived within zones and economies of abandonment, as he attempted to gaze beyond such constraints so that other future paths for his family might become possible (Biehl 2013; Povinelli 2011). His dreams were as temporal as they were spatial, southward toward Yagga Yagga and Mangkayi.

Although Mark and others often drew upon the language of futurity during film shoots, the future within daily Balgo life was usually engaged through metaphors of movement. Mark’s nephew David “Shorty” Young would often describe the future as “down the track,” capturing the extent to which future-making was an act of temporal place-making, collective travel toward homelands and horizons. While moving down the track implies moving forward, it resists notions of linear progress and points toward cyclical aspects of time. Tracks are not flattened highways or asphalt, but parallel grooves connecting communities, families, and Country. While rough on vehicles, they are gentle on walkers, who can travel side by side along their twin lines. Like Songlines, such tracks are defined not by completions or arrivals but by traveling along them—recurring returns that are renewed through engaging relations and places.

I came to know Mark late in his life, during only one of the many chapters he lived across decades. It was not until years after meeting him that I would begin to understand the heights of his triumphs and the depths of his grief. His lowest point occurred not long before I met him, though I did not know any of this yet. If I did, I would have understood that this was not just a story of catalyzing Yagga Yagga’s rebirth, but also of a longing for a past that might have been, and a future for his family that still might be. Not hope exactly, but something adjacent to it, or perhaps, as I have discussed elsewhere, a sort of generative hope in the postapocalyptic present (Lempert 2018a), a reassembling of something fractured though unbroken, along the edges of a dawning horizon.

I center Mark’s narrative for multiple reasons. His extensive experiences draw from and speak to a range of Aboriginal relations with the settler state that normally remain disconnected. He was born before his family made settler contact, went through Law, walked into and grew up in a Pallottine mission, lived through the rise of Aboriginal communities like Balgo, shucked pearl shells along the Indian Ocean in Broome, worked on regional cattle stations, returned to Balgo to be married, traveled across the continent to fight for land rights, led the opening of Yagga Yagga and witnessed its decline, and became a nationally recognized film director working to return with his family to their Country.

Mark’s expansive life was coalesced within and translated through these films, and working with him over the years represents the longest, deepest, and most creatively engaged relationship during my fieldwork. His journey of cinematic awakenings confronts the paradoxical ways that media-making can seem all at once futile and gilded, while at the same time revolutionary and transformative. In this book, I trace Mark’s life and films across time and space to reveal the ethnographic textures of Aboriginal cinema, from intimate moments of creativity to national festivals at the nexus of global Indigenous mediascapes and political movements. Last but not least, I share his story because he asked me to.

Mark often alluded to the idea that the time span for Mangkayi’s calling might be considerable, and was for the benefit of future generations—that more than anything he was making films “to keep the story alive.” As much as Mangkayi was his ancestral homeland, it was also his “children’s Country,” a notion that seemed to provide a wellspring of energy (Muecke and Roe 2020). I often kept this in mind when considering what Mark meant exactly by the future, by returning, and by the real. As he would make clearer over the years I knew him, returning to live in Country down the track could be realized regardless of when it happened or who in his family ultimately arrived.

In his home and surrounded by family, Mark passed away on June 9, 2020. There is more to say about this than can be contained within words. Stating this here at the book’s beginning runs the danger of giving the false impression that Mark’s dreams and awakenings have failed to come to fruition. This is not the case. The horizon that he envisioned remains, and his family continues to gaze upon it and to move toward it and within it. They continue to go back, and Mark still guides them home through memory, spirit, and cinema. From here up until the conclusion, I aim for him to remain as alive in the story as he was while it unfolded—as alive as he still remains within his films, and within his Country.

Slowly, Slowly

Shortly before we left his porch to drive back to the volunteer housing on the other side of Balgo, Mark took a slow drag and gestured the filter toward his mouth, reflecting, “Most people talk from here.” Placing his left index finger next to his temple and then his heart, he continued, “I talk from here and here. I think from those places, and it comes out of my mouth. That’s why we need to keep going, making more films, and that’s why we need to take our time. We need to go slowly. Yeah, that’s right, slowly, slowly.” This phrase, “slowly, slowly”—translated as “purrka, purrka” in Kukatja—was commonly used in Balgo, especially while driving through Country. It was not about going slow, but rather, not rushing, so as to remain present.

While “slowly, slowly” was often a commentary on the frantic pace that typifies many outsider projects, high praise for a film was distilled within the word palya. Usually translated simply as “good,” palya is not about something turning out well so much as things having been done the right way.19 It was more often signed than spoken, with an index finger raised upward, tracing the sky from just behind to just in front of one’s head. There is a vast spectrum of meanings for palya, expressed in the micro-details of gestural expression, from a tepid pointing up then fading forward, to an enthusiastic sharp index twist in concert with a slight lowering of the signer’s head with a subtle smile. The meaning of palya points to more than a focus on process; it speaks to a broader approach about appropriate engagement through collective creation.

Due to its quick pace and the mass distribution of its products, filmmaking tends to focus on final outcomes and the efficient capturing of as much relevant footage as possible during compressed production schedules. This intensity informed Mark’s initial impression of cinema in 2013. However, over the course of subsequent films and years his view shifted markedly. With each project came more time to allow it to unfold, to go slowly, slowly, to follow a palya process.

Rather than film, video, or media, I chose cinema to feature in the title and framing of this book. This might seem counterintuitive, since unlike film, cinema is not a word often used in Aboriginal community media. Yet the multiple meanings of cinema as product, process, and place speak to the concurrent qualities of these creative projects. Furthermore, I draw upon the rarified association of cinema with “high” Western production values as a way of challenging implicit assumptions of community Aboriginal media as somehow lesser. Rather than “lower” production values, these media hold a different set of values, which emphasize process and relationality.

This book itself is not distinct from the media projects I collaborated on. It too is woven into the social fabrics of these films. Mark often impressed this fact upon me. While sitting with our mutual friend Warwick Nieass, Mark once turned to me and asked, “Are you still planning to turn this into a book?” I nodded, then after a pause added, “Yes, unless maybe you feel differently about it now.” He gestured his index finger to express palya and said, “No, it’s important to have videos and books. Some people want to watch it on TV. Some people need to see the words. Especially the politicians.”

Mirroring the film process, this book is animated by a life cycle that has progressed through similar steps, from initial idea, to the finished version, to this very moment of your reading. Like a completed film, it has been heavily edited before being finally rendered immutable within material and electronic circulatory systems. It similarly had constraints around time and funding, as well as expectations regarding production values and imagined audiences. As with film footage, ethnographic field notes consist of a sea of small moments whose meanings emerge most often in retrospect and through interrelationship. Working on dozens of films throughout this fieldwork process, I have been made acutely aware of the contrast between the final cut and the seemingly endless choices that would have resulted in different films, or in this case, different books. As authors and filmmakers do, I made innumerable decisions in editing and arrangement, with narrative cuts, montages, and time slippages between key connecting moments throughout.

In other words, this book is structured much like a film. This fact should cast no more doubt on an ethnography than the filmmaking process should on a documentary. I highlight this to be transparent about the choices that structure this book, and why I made them—to reduce, even if modestly, the distance between the film processes I describe and the creation of this text. If (and it is a real if) this book is ultimately held as palya, it will be because of its kinship with people and projects, as child and relation to those with the time and space to think from the head and the heart, to do things the proper way, to go slowly, slowly.

Overview

Dreaming Down the Track is based on thirty-one months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2006 and 2023, including twenty months of continuous primary fieldwork between 2014 and 2016. Throughout, I was embedded within Indigenous production teams and collaborated on thirty-two films with two Indigenous-owned, Indigenous-run media organizations: Pilbara and Kimberley Aboriginal Media (PAKAM) and Goolarri Media Enterprises (Goolarri). These two outlets employ contrasting media models while being located within the same building complex in the broader creative hub of Broome, a notably multi-ethnic town along the Kimberley coast. Each film project presented insights into the creative process of media-making amid various challenges. In this book, I follow a subset of these projects in and around Balgo.

Through a series of awakenings, Mark moved from cinematic ambivalence to advocacy, coming to view filmmaking as a powerful process for actualizing sovereign community futures on Country. His media journey paints a portrait of the exciting possibilities and sobering limitations of Indigenous envisioning within settler states, while demystifying paradoxes of Aboriginal visibility in the midst of ongoing policies of annihilation. His awakenings over this period were expansive, weaving together memories of Yagga Yagga, analyses of Balgo, and Mangkayi’s continued calling. This book is structured through the arc of Mark’s filmmaking journey and each chapter is anchored in an awakening grounded within specific films.

Chapter 1 introduces key people and places through the cinematic social life of the first film project in Balgo for both Mark and me. Although titled Kurrarlkatjanu: The Last Generation (2013), this was neither the first film nor about the last generation.20 Described as “throwing me in the deep end” by Kurrarlkatjanu’s producer, PAKAM manager Neil Turner, I recount my first impressions of arriving in Balgo in an old troopy, working on a community film, and meeting Mark. I situate key ethnographic scenes that structure my fieldwork process. Such moments establish the gradual shift of my initial positionality as a kartiya to other relationships. Through the relatively short film process of a few weeks, this chapter introduces my relationship with Mark, the social life cycles of Balgo filmmaking, and the power dynamics on bush shoots. While initially tentative toward film, this project catalyzed Mark’s first cinematic awakening as a literal and metaphorical vehicle to visit Country with his family.

Chapter 2 returns to Balgo one year later for the film shoot of Tjawa Tjawa (2014), part of the well-funded and high-profile Songlines on Screen film series. This weeklong bush trip represents the creative and social climax of the three-year life cycle of this project, as a convoy of vehicles travel through Mark’s Country south of Balgo. Tjawa Tjawa is Mark’s directorial debut, and for the first time he is in charge of a film’s story, movement, and vision. I describe his awakening to cinema as a path toward reinvigorating his role as a community leader and storyteller. I trace irreconcilable differences that are revealed and relieved through comedy throughout this film shoot, some of which make their way into the film itself. Building upon the work of Michelle Raheja, I articulate the process of “laughing with the camera” as a way of navigating various tensions through “Black comedy.” I discuss the dangers of becoming literally and metaphorically “bogged,” and the value of becoming collectively unstuck. I describe how capitalist frameworks of productivity versus “laziness” can become projected onto the filming process, distorting lived rhythms of labor and creativity. Throughout, I integrate discussions of dignity, failure, and redemption through key moments in other film shoots in and around Balgo.

Chapter 3 chronicles the postproduction stages of Tjawa Tjawa. The chapter travels with film drafts between Balgo, the regional remote media hub of Broome, and festivals across Australia. While film editing is usually a technical process largely hidden behind closed doors, I describe the many lively “fix ’em up” collective editing and mid-process screenings that shape Tjawa Tjawa and other films. These events do not simply provide feedback for the editor to consider; they also depict a deeper and distributed social film editing process that includes Mark and other key community members. Instead of the typical distinction between postproduction and circulation, I illustrate how the shift from social editing to festival screenings is more accurately understood as a gradual expansion of the film’s sphere of relations, in which the memories and discussions it sparks are at least as important as the media itself. The postproduction process represents an awakening for Mark that reveals cinema itself as a powerful tool for spreading messages widely. Such projects provide a context for him to not only travel home but also to festivals across Australia, speaking alongside and beyond the film toward his broader goals of returning to Country with his family.

Chapter 4 traces the creative explosion of envisioning-focused filmmaking in Balgo in the wake of Tjawa Tjawa’s completion. During this period, Mark intentionally steps back from the limelight and establishes himself as a supportive guide for other projects. These films proceed through the logic and sequence of kinship relations in Balgo, with the projects forming what I describe as a broader film family. I analyze how projects enact palya production values through the interrelated and locally resonant conceptions of creative fires, material tires, and bureaucratic paper. I describe how communities are structured by the government to fail, in ways that can be understood through the tensions between these three elements. This flourishing of Balgo filmmaking represents an awakening for Mark, as he comes to consider cinema not only as a process enabling movement through Country and the communicating of ideas, but also as a means for collective envisioning in and beyond Balgo.

In chapter 5, I consider what endures beyond the life cycle of a film, which I discuss through the concept of after-images, drawing metaphorically on this sensory phenomenon. I explore multiple after-images, from finished films that echo into emerging projects, to shifting views on showing images of the deceased, to the broader role of cinema in transforming Aboriginal community futures. Having now completed several films in his Country—and with the threat of community closures hanging in the air—Mark’s political and media awakenings converge through the social life of the film Mangkayi Calling. This project integrates Mark’s life history and plans for moving back to Yagga Yagga. It also carries explicit and implicit messages that he conveys to Balgo youth and Australian politicians. Following the emergent process of this project, I illustrate the ways in which cinematic envisionings are as constitutive as they are representational, with imagined futures coming into being through media practices of collective creation. Mark’s awakening in this period is in coming to view cinema as a portal to conjure and transmit his messages from Country across time and space. He is possessed by clarity and purpose throughout this intensive period, culminating in our recording of his life history amidst the remains of the Old Balgo Mission where he spent his youth.

The social life of Mangkayi Calling illuminates the irreconcilabilities of envisioning a future on Country within and beyond the constraints of settler state relations. Chapter 6 expands insights from this and other films to demystify what I describe as a broader “visibility paradox.” This highlights the ostensibly irreconcilable contrast between the flourishing sphere of Indigenous Australian media and concurrent escalating policies of Aboriginal annihilation. As the only major settler colonial nation without treaty relations, I emphasize the critical importance of Australian general public sentiment regarding Indigenous issues, and the role of Aboriginal media in shaping this. The visibility paradox is further grounded within responses in Balgo to “the list” of communities to close, as well as to the implementation of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy that deeply cut funding for Aboriginal community organizations during my fieldwork. For Mark, this onslaught seems to awaken within him the vision of cinema as a tool of political intervention at the highest levels, as he shifts from speaking primarily to Aboriginal youth to including direct messages to the Prime Minister and other politicians. I contextualize Mangkayi Calling within national Aboriginal political movements through my discussions with longtime activists at the Aboriginal Tent Embassies in Canberra and Redfern.

Drawing upon the visual metaphor of twilights, the conclusion brings together the intersecting processes of Mangkayi’s calling, Mark’s awakenings, and dreams of going back to Country along uneven tracks reaching toward shifting horizons. As Mark’s health declines, he increasingly alludes to the idea that going back to Country may not include himself. He awakens to a clarity that “real” films are those that keep such stories alive for future generations. Dreaming down the track for Mark is now to envision the world of his grandchildren and the legacy that he can leave them. Here, I reflect upon sunrise and sunset as cinematic mirrors. It is only at the end that I come to understand that making these films was not only an arc of envisioning, but also one of redemption following a series of profound losses.