Twilights

Dawn

In some cases, not arriving seemed most meaningful, as it offered the immediate promise of return. On several Mangkayi Calling trips with Mark and Larry we unsuccessfully attempted to make it to Mindirr, an important site near Mark’s birthplace. Each time, we got closer, though while Mark knew how to walk there, he had never driven. Running low on tires, we would invariably have to turn back. As we did, he provided assuring declarations such as “Next time we’ll make it to Mindirr! I know a better track.” As within the social life of cinema, the process of locating specific sites was often more motivating than actually finding them, partly because it fostered purpose for another imminent bush trip. Country, Dreaming, and Songlines themselves are not destinations, but exist as living paths that people move within and through. While driving back after one attempt to reach Mindirr, Mark smiled and said, “When you go back to a place where you’ve never been for a long time, it brings back good memories. Mangkayi, yeah, she’s calling alright.”

While the social life of Tjawa Tjawa lasted years, Mangkayi Calling represents a process that has spanned Mark’s lifetime, as he has worked again and again to return to his Country with his family. It included the film, but it was most simply and deeply a calling to go home. The social life of Mangkayi Calling parallels the vacillating history of victories and setbacks in remote Aboriginal Australia more broadly, from initial land dispossession to the successful development, tragic closure, and potential resurrection of outstations like Yagga Yagga. This project serves as a microcosm for the precarity of movements back to Country, where nightmares of the past, dreams for the future, and perpetual desires for one more bush trip coalesce into a film whose completion seems as urgent as its resolution is unimaginable.

Mark’s active engagement with his family’s future was not only reflected in large projects but was also embedded within his daily activities. In one characteristic example, I called him from Broome to say hi. When he answered, I could barely hear him over the roar of machinery. “Hey, mate!” he shouted through the noise; “I’m just on a grader now.” “You mean those giant road-flattening construction trucks?” I ask loudly. “Yeah. I think if the young fellas see this old fella doing it, they might think ‘I should do more too,’ hah. Well, gotta run. Anyways, just practicing for grading the road to Yagga. See you.”

I returned to Balgo in 2019 to deliver my PhD dissertation to the organizations and individuals in this project. As usual, when I arrived in Balgo I went to Mark’s house at sunset after the long day’s drive. He greeted me with an enthusiasm that seemed to paper over weariness. Unfortunately, his health had declined and he could no longer drive on bumpy roads without pain. “No more bush trips for me, mate,” he sighed as he sat down in a chair on the porch the next morning. As the sun continued to rise in silence, his eyes brightened and he gently proclaimed, “Let’s sit down at the airport and do one more film trip.” That afternoon we drove the short and smooth drive to the shade of a bright green shipping container next to the airport. It was a familiar place to both of us. Only a few years earlier it had served as a vivid backdrop for a visual dictionary of hundreds of hand signs that he demonstrated in a three-camera shoot.

As the camera’s red light lit up, so too did Mark, and his previously fatigued demeanor vanished. He began the way he often did, discussing Mangkayi Calling, kids, Balgo, the future. He spoke directly to Balgo youth about his late stage in life. “Going here and there in the desert. I can’t do that. I’m getting old now. I’d like to go back, back to visiting that Country. Yeah, but now I’m on tablets. I want to relax my mind. I’m not getting younger, and so you’re the one that’s gotta take over my job.” As he talked, he provided introductions and conclusions that he knew would work in the film edit. He described a new song he had received, and how he wanted to record it with his band when they came back through.

After a few minutes, he slowed down, paused, and thought for a long moment. Then he shifted his gaze from the camera lens to me and said, “You’ve been filming and going bush here for years. What have you learned? What do you think about it?” As in our first discussion six years earlier during the Tjawa Tjawa shoot, I was momentarily speechless. While we regularly shared lengthy chats—often on the concrete square at the foot of his front door—my own views had never been captured in a shoot, nor had it crossed my mind to include them. His question was a doorway that opened to others. He asked about my book and the film, and described how he hoped that they would reach the right people. We talked until the camera battery died and the red light dimmed along with the fading early evening. As we packed up the troopy to leave, and with an air of finality he said, “Time for me to retire, I’ll spend time with my grandkids now that I’m an old man. Time to finish that film and fix ’em up.”

Dusk

The last time I spoke with Mark was in May 2020. For some time, Warwick had been updating me about Mark’s health, which was quickly declining. Doctors suggested that he now might only have weeks, or perhaps even days. Mark did not have a phone at the time, though I was eventually able to get a hold of him through his daughters, whom he was staying with. While he sounded weak, his spirits were high. Mark made jokes, and we asked about each other’s family. We both seemed to sense that this would be the last time we would speak. I told him that I hoped to see him again next visit. He responded with a thoughtful “Yuwai, palya,” and after a pause added, “I might not see you again, mate, but I’ll be here alright.”

Just weeks later, in the early morning, Mark’s daughter Sophie called to tell me that he had passed. Even though this was anticipated, I turned cold when I received the call. It overwhelmed me for days. For lack of a better word, it was heartbreaking. Because we were in the throes of a global pandemic, it was impossible for me to attend Mark’s funeral period later that year, or in the foreseeable future. And this was not the only heartbreak. Sadly, many other Elders I had worked closely with also passed during this period, including Larry, Payi Payi, Linda, Bob, and, most tragically, Clint Dixon, a talented PAKAM filmmaker my own age whom I had the fortunate chance to work with on several projects.

Reflecting on her own fieldwork, Ruth Behar (1996) suggests that anthropology worth doing can and does break your heart. As with methodology, heartbreak is usually hidden in ethnography, and for understandable reasons. It runs the danger of diverting too much attention to the author or overstating fieldwork relationships. These are real risks, though so too are those of dispassionate detachment. I include it in an attempt to convey the weight of Mark’s passing for so many.

Throughout this book, I have aimed for Mark to remain as alive for you throughout the social lives of his films as he was while they were unfolding. To illustrate that his passing is not simply an end, but part of a process of continued beginnings that carry his many after-images down the track. That he remains alive within his films, family, and Country.

Unfinished. This is a seemingly counterintuitive concept to include in a book’s conclusion. Yet, even as you hold this paper, its own social life continues. To be unfinished “is both [a] precondition and [a] product of becoming” (Biehl and Locke 2017). In other words, a palya process, like a family, endures. Mangkayi is still calling, as are Mark’s plans, and as is the future itself. Within these unfinished processes are the whispers of tomorrow. Of more movements of tires, and of fires to be lit anew. Communities, individuals, films, and books precede and outlive themselves through rich and interconnected social lives. They reverberate beyond their own release—complete, yet ever unfinished.

For a long time following Mark’s death, unfinished is how I imagined that this book and the Mangkayi Calling film might indefinitely remain. It was nearly two years until I could bring myself to revisit them. During that time, I questioned much about them—my role, the purpose of ethnography, the trust that Mark seemed to have put in me. I wondered, was this misplaced? Had I failed? I sat uneasily with the irreconcilabilities of these projects. I sit with them still.

It was in the first few days of 2022 that this abruptly shifted. While backing up and reorganizing my laptop, I unintentionally double-clicked a footage file for Mangkayi Calling. Sitting in front of tall columns of smoke rising from the fires he had lit that morning, and with kangaroo tails cooking underground nearby, Mark spoke from his Country with clarity and with an assuredness that Mangkayi’s calling would be answered. That his family would return home. This accident led to my watching another clip, and then another, and then another. Between that day and the next, I watched all sixteen hours of footage, as well as Mark’s other films. Through cinema, I was transported across time and space back to Mark and Mangkayi. To our trips dense with movement: fastening mics, lighting fires, changing tires. Throughout this footage he spoke again to Balgo, kids, his family, politicians, and future community members—of a resurrected Yagga Yagga yet to be, down the track.

Through fragmented footage, Mark reminded me of things I thought I had come to know, though had already begun to forget. He reminded me to go slowly, slowly. That part of the process is having to stop and reorient. That sometimes moving down the track means backtracking too. That cinema is a time machine, a portal that carries its makers and viewers to its moments of creation and back again. That after-images contain afterlives, like an acrylic painting that never dries. More than anything, watching these reminded me of all of the time and energy Mark had devoted to these projects.

As I sat for months with how to write about the dreams of someone who had passed, the sitting with it changed it. The greater risk, it seemed to me, was in not conveying his story as best as I could. During one of my last mornings in Balgo with Mark, an anthropologist and mate of his, John Carty, was visiting the community and joined us for breakfast. Walking into the kitchen, Mark posed a rhetorical question to him, “Do you know why I’m making films?” After a pregnant pause, he continued, standing tall with his right hand characteristically holding his left arm behind his back, “It’s to keep the story alive.”

After years of pandemic restrictions, I was finally able to return to Balgo in 2023. In light of the many deaths since my last visit, I anticipated that this would be a trip defined by mourning. I was surprised when it was animated more by sunrise than sunset. I spent time with Mark’s three children—Eric, Andrea, and Sophie—and their extended family. They spoke about his final days. My remaining doubts about completing these projects were cast away when each of them responded to the topic with comments such as “You should finish them up. That was the whole point. That’s why he spent so much time on them with you.”

That week, I visited a field mate living in the house where Mark, Warwick, and I used to spend early mornings sitting on the porch. Instead of housing volunteers, the art center was now renting it to a newer organization, the Ngururrpa Rangers. At the very table where Mark pondered how to convey his life story, I learned that some of his dreams had already come into being. After years of efforts led by Mark, the Ngururrpa Indigenous Protected Area was now established, serving as an extension of past successful land rights in this Country. It included this ranger program, which created high-quality jobs for people from a large area of Country that encompassed Mangkayi. I learned that Mark passed away after it was publicly announced, though just two days before its signing ceremony in Balgo. I learned that his son, Eric, had signed in his absence, and that he and his sisters had been deeply involved in the ranger program since, regularly moving through Yagga Yagga and Mangkayi. Burning, taking care of, and being on Country.

While Mark was usually the first person I visited with in Balgo, I waited until my last day to visit his grave, which was just a short walk from the art center on the way to the airstrip. It was my first time there. His children had described exactly where he was buried, yet I was surprised by my own shock when I arrived finally at his gravesite. It was different from those nearby. It was sort of hidden, and with a smooth, unpebbled surface that had become a bustling pathway for ants. A small bed of fading roses lay under a single vertical plant that seemed too tall for its age. Visiting Payi Payi’s grave as well, I was reminded that his sister passed away only two months before him—that Mark died in the wake of both heartache and hope, with his children positioned at the dawn of a new chapter in answering Mangkayi’s call.

There have been several doubles in this project, each with their own irreconcilabilities: cinema, the photorealistic portal of life captured and reordered, though for all of its fidelity, never life itself; the visibility paradox, an ascendant Indigenous mediascape amid an era of annihilative policies; Mark and my relationship, bound by a sense of shared purpose and process, intimate yet infused with distance—or as Hortense Powdermaker (1966) put it, left as both “stranger and friend.”

However, one thing no longer seems irreconcilable. Returning to the beginning here at the conclusion, his enigmatic statement becomes clearer. “Let’s make a film about going back to Country, about the future. Let’s make the real film.” Mark’s declaration was born of one night’s sleep and a lifetime of heartbreak and renewal. It was in revisiting Mark’s footage and spending time with his family that I got a glimpse of why keeping the story alive beyond his own life was what “real” meant to him. It was only at the end of this process that I began to understand that making these films was more than an arc of awakenings and envisionings for Mark. It was also one of redemption following a series of profound losses. In my last visit with him in Balgo, he increasingly alluded to his future passing. He would often half-jokingly say, “I’m an old man now. I’m getting cranky and it’s time for me to settle down. It’s up to young fellas to decide.” In such moments, I thought back to his response to the option of traveling to New York and Toronto for film festival screenings of Tjawa Tjawa. With definitive clarity he had stated, “I want to die in my own Country.”

Throughout his filmmaking, Mark was not interested in conceptual futures, but in the process of returning to Country with his family. Each envisioning was specific, of people in places. Mangkayi called Mark and his family back home to a place that has protected and continues to protect them. While living there was important to Mark, he often emphasized that so too was the calling itself. Mangkayi was not only calling Mark to be there; it was also calling for him to move through it, to engage with it, and to be of it. As he once told me, “Dreaming is about the future. It’s about going back to Country and waking it up.” Kurrarlkatjanu, Tjawa Tjawa, Mangkayi Calling, and the other films Mark worked on represent an envisioned place-making that asserts to Australians, Mark’s relations, and himself that even though his family lives in Balgo, they are not bound by it. That their Country continues to be visited, thought about, and cared for. That it is still calling.

Twilights

Twilight serves as a cinematic mirror that is unlike sunrise and sunset. As opposed to dawn and dusk, which imply rising and setting, twilight is ambiguous. Defined as “the soft glowing light from the sky when the sun is below the horizon,” it provides a luminous metaphor for Mark’s many envisionings. Often associated with nighttime’s preamble, it applies equally to its coda. While it would be more than understandable to become disheartened about the future amid widespread policies of cultural annihilation, Mark envisaged otherwise. Rather than the end, he imagined beginnings, bolstered by the portal of cinema and the expansiveness of its process.

After a lifetime of setbacks, Mark was not immune to despair. The first recording of “Ngurra Yulparirra” was steeped in it. Yet upon listening to it again, the tone did not ring true to him. It did not match what he saw and heard along the horizon, in the future, in the real, in his Country. This was no mirage, but a vision born of struggle and renewal. He insisted on Larry weeping, not to mourn the death of their connection to Country, but because sorrow was part of the process of returning.

Unlike sunrise and sunset, twilight is difficult to convey through cinema. It eludes the moving image, though it may be delicately captured through still photography with a wide aperture and slow shutter speed. It requires imagination, but more than that, patience—the care to look slowly, slowly. Twilights, while dim and potentially gloomy, are spaces between, illuminated with possibility for those who know how to see. Reflecting on his childhood memories from before the Old Balgo Mission, Mark often said, “That’s how we would walk through Country, under stars.” Navigating by the faintest of light, as he did in the numerous nights of his youth, Mark beheld the current twilight not as dusk, but as a new dawn.