6
The Visibility Paradox
Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality.
—Philip Gourevitch, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
It was on a late March evening in 2015 that I found myself stranded while house-sitting during an unseasonably late Broome wet season storm. I spent much of the afternoon flipping between the four Indigenous TV channels, when an NITV news segment caught my attention. The announcer began, “It’s been dubbed the Indigenous Annihilation Strategy, as communities across Australia feel the full impact of the massive funding cuts. Communities . . . are asking, where is the advancement?” “Indigenous Annihilation Strategy” was an ominous nickname given to the recently implemented Indigenous Advancement Strategy (IAS), which had cut roughly 40 percent of the national funding for Indigenous organizations. Yet the Indigenous media sector was spared virtually any funding cuts, and in some cases its funding was even increased.
The story went on to describe how Tennant Creek—a remote town of three thousand in the Northern Territory, composed of approximately 50 percent Aboriginal people—just had twenty-six employees cut from its already limited after-school programs as a result of the IAS. Community members described the negative effects that would result from this, including increases in youth suicide, substance abuse, and financial precarity. The piece intercut positive images of the sports and creative arts activities with community members personalizing what would be lost for them and their families. The significance of this segment being presented nationally by an Indigenous broadcaster was demonstrated in such visuals, and centered Aboriginal viewpoints within mainstream news production values. As the announcer declared, “The artistic heart of the community is now struggling to beat. With what many are calling a fatal cut to the public service system, the mob is asking, ‘Where do we go from here?’” He even positioned himself empathetically in the first person, closing the segment, “Danny Teece-Johnson, feeling the pain, for NITV news.”
This segment, in which the peak national broadcasting network in a burgeoning Indigenous mediascape covered this story about widespread funding cuts to Aboriginal organizations, cuts to the heart of this chapter. NITV helped to publicize this issue, which contributed to the subsequent reinstatement of Tennant Creek funding. Meanwhile, virtually all other cuts were maintained. Here, I unpack the stark contrast between two seemingly contradictory funding realities that I have come to think of as a “visibility paradox”: the unprecedented support of Indigenous Australian media and the devastating defunding of Aboriginal organizations and communities more broadly. The process of trying to unravel this enigma reveals some of the broader dynamics around funding and state relations for Indigenous Australians, as well as the myriad impacts of media-making. After unpacking various forms of bureaucratic paper violence and policies of cultural annihilation, I describe the ways in which sovereign envisionings hold transformative political potential.
The Visibility Paradox in a Golden Age of Aboriginal Media
In February 2015, Indigenous Community Television (ICTV) began broadcasting in Broome. Due to an unusual set of circumstances, Goolarri held the rights to three TV channels in this market. They used the first two for their own content, leaving an additional channel to broadcast ICTV. This was particularly exciting as it made Broome one of only a handful of towns in Australia—not classified as “remote communities”—to receive it. As Neil Turner said shortly after it came online in Broome, “I’m in media heaven.” The addition of ICTV meant that anyone with basic TV in town could now watch four Indigenous channels: two Goolarri (GTV) channels, ICTV, and NITV. This was in addition to hours of weekly Indigenous-focused content on the national flagship Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) channels. Radio was also rich with Indigenous content, including Goolarri Radio in Broome, analogous stations in other regional towns, and the PAKAM network in Kimberley Aboriginal communities. There was an even deeper well of content online, with NITV, ICTV, and virtually every Indigenous radio station streaming content, often on demand. Meanwhile, the peak regional and national film-funding bodies were making unprecedented investments through programs such as Songlines on Screen, which funded Tjawa Tjawa. Furthermore, there was an increasing amount of Indigenous Australian content at major film festivals within and beyond the continent, including the establishment of the Winda Film Festival, an Australian offshoot of the Canadian imagineNATIVE Film + Media Arts Festival (imagineNATIVE).
Viewed from outside of the larger political context, this period through the present represents a golden age of Indigenous media in Australia, relatively speaking.1 The United States, by comparison, has a loose network of Indigenous film festivals and radio stations, yet there is comparatively little integration, infrastructure, or consistent institutional funding for these endeavors.2 Canada has a dynamic Indigenous mediascape, including the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (Roth 2005) and imagineNATIVE. New Zealand features two vibrant Indigenous television networks, Māori TV and Te Reo. In this settler state global media context, Australia has relatively strong funding and support infrastructure for a diversity of Indigenous media forms and content—a lineage that can be traced back to the birth of the moving image.3
The ascension of Indigenous Australian media began to gain momentum in the 1980s. The launch of satellite television in 1985 provoked concerns that mainstream media would destroy Aboriginal culture, though Eric Michaels (1986) provided compelling and nuanced evidence to the contrary. In the decades since, Aboriginal activists and advocates have voiced concerns about programming that violated cultural protocols, especially regarding taboos around viewing the deceased (Michaels 1994, 73). In parallel with the influx of outside media to Aboriginal communities in the 1980s, several Aboriginal communities, including Yuendumu and Ernabella, began realizing the potential of producing alternate media to amplify their voices within and beyond their communities. This sentiment was part of a larger global phenomenon, with the concurrent and subsequent rise of Indigenous video production including the Video in the Villages project in Brazil (Aufderheide 1995), Zapatista media in Mexico (Halkin 2008), and Igloolik Isuma in the Arctic (Huhndorf 2003).
The Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) started on a shoestring budget in 1980 as the “world’s first Aboriginal radio station” and the first to broadcast in Aboriginal languages (Molnar 1990, 156). The station lacked its own radio license until 1985, when they won an unexpectedly successful bid for what became Imparja Television in 1987. By 1988 they featured thirty Aboriginal-themed community radio programs, aided by a network of audiotape mailings (154). CAAMA experienced resounding success in their Aboriginal-run radio station, though Imparja faced challenges due to the general lack of training in television and the medium’s associated high costs (Bell 2008).
The rising dominance of the left-leaning Labor Party in the 1980s provided a largely unexpected turn toward more support for Aboriginal media licenses and funding (Bell 2008; Morrison 2000, 140). Some Indigenous organizations, including Goolarri, began receiving semi-commercial licenses (Forde, Foxwell, and Meadows 2009, 63), which allowed them to engage relatively freely in media markets. A watershed event occurred in 1989 with the formation of the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS). It was later renamed the Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Service (RIBS), though I generally use BRACS, since it is the more commonly used term in practice. This continues to provide a national structure for Indigenous remote community media, which has expanded across the continent. In 1992 the program was moved to the Indigenous-operated National Indigenous Media Association of Australia. While radio continues to receive steady funding, there has been relatively less financial stability for Indigenous television programming (Deger 2006, 170).4 In the 1990s, in tandem with the Wik and Mabo court victories, Aboriginal media expanded. In 1996 the National Indigenous Radio Service (NIRS) was launched with the goal of providing Aboriginal radio and video content throughout Australia. Many BRACS units continue to produce content for the NIRS network and are able to broadcast over satellite, in addition to local radio towers.
This golden age positions Indigenous media as a powerful force, potentially able to communicate with Australian general audiences who often have few meaningful experiences with Aboriginal people. Media representations—hopeful, dystopian, or otherwise—largely construct the ideological and rhetorical frameworks through which politicians and bureaucrats navigate key policy decisions, including the recent mass defunding of Indigenous communities and organizations.5 Bleak portrayals also contribute to negative self-perceptions that lead to diseases and acts of desperation, especially for Aboriginal youth. As Philip Gourevitch wrote in relation to the Rwandan genocide, “Power largely consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality” (1998, 48). In the increasingly ominous times regarding Aboriginal sovereignty, these media are on the front lines of representational battles for national future imaginaries that will affect the fate of their communities.
Irreconcilable Mediations
At the heart of the visibility paradox in Australia is the tension between this burgeoning mediascape and the lack of any Aboriginal treaties.6 Unlike other major settler states such as New Zealand, Canada, and the United States, Australia was claimed not through treaty making and breaking but through the logic of terra nullius. In the absence of treaties, the fight for land rights over the past few decades has provided a double-edged sword. Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) articulates “the cunning of recognition,” in which to gain Native Title land rights, Aboriginal people are required to demonstrate—to the very government that has spent centuries attempting to assimilate and erase them—an unbroken and unchanged precontact relationship with their Country. This cunning asserts a false reconciliation that relies on imagining both colonization and Aboriginal people as fundamentally of the past: faint and fading echoes of inevitable, if regrettable, Australian history.
It is challenging to break out of this cunning dynamic in land rights, due to its embeddedness within legal structures. Indigenous media have a more enigmatic relationship with recognition frameworks that depend on tropes of Aboriginal purity. Media provide a landscape where irreconcilable realities can be, and often are, confronted. The vast majority of the media projects I worked on did so, often implicitly and sometimes explicitly. Still, the mediascape is not free of the forces that emphasize a pure and past Aboriginality. The Songlines on Screens program itself—the first Aboriginal community documentary funding program of its scope—focused on precontact conceptions of culture. At the same time, beyond the delivered films, the program provided ample and thoughtful flexibility for community-defined process and outcomes.
Part of the reason why Aboriginal media have managed to maintain relative success and creative freedom is because they are seemingly not perceived as a threat to state governments. Broadcasting Aboriginal media through NITV to potentially millions of people throughout the country might at first appear to be a watershed moment of distribution. However, although virtually all households receive NITV, its viewership is relatively low—and ICTV is only available in Aboriginal communities and select small towns. In the context of the decades of dominant misrepresentation, their programs represent a small percentage of overall Indigenous representations. Therefore, a cynic might be inclined to dismiss the political potential of these media as naive.
This would be a mistake. Australia is the settler state in which Indigenous media have perhaps the greatest potential for meaningful policy impacts. While Aboriginal Australians in many ways have the most tenuous Indigenous land rights when compared to other major settler states—due to their lack of treaties—they are also among the most visible. Aboriginal people are the subject of regular front-page news articles and lead TV stories. Left-wing groups publicly defend them. Hate groups decry them. The civil rights politics of the 1960s and 1970s centered them. While their mainstream representations are highly distorted, they loom large in the national conversation. As I will illustrate, it is because of the depth of Aboriginal tropes and their lack of treaties that the state underestimates these media despite the political potential for “cultural activism” (Ginsburg 1997). While most Australians may not regularly watch Aboriginal media, many Aboriginal people and a significant minority of the general public do. In crucial political moments, these media and the political coalitions they foster continue to make crucial differences when it matters most.
Dystopian Depictions
One evening, after a long day of filming in Balgo, a few community members and I turned on a much-anticipated episode of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s flagship current affairs documentary series Four Corners (2015), which that night featured Aboriginal communities in the region. This broadcast aired at the height of a nationally polarizing debate about Western Australia’s plans to defund approximately half of the 274 Aboriginal communities in the state. While we watched the episode titled “Remote Hope” (2015), the atmosphere in the room sank from curiosity to despondency. The program quickly revealed that it was not about hope in Aboriginal communities but rather about hope itself being remote in communities. An opening line declared, “These dysfunctional communities have the most depressing living conditions imaginable. They are a disgrace to Australia and all those who have a prosperous way of life.”
While the episode presented itself as a balanced debate on “the future of Australia’s remote and Indigenous communities,” even the supposedly neutral narrator described them broadly as “blighted by grinding poverty, with few job opportunities, chronic alcohol and drug abuse, and in some cases, endemic sexual and physical violence, including against children.” Accompanied by ominous soundscapes, these morose narratives continued throughout its forty-four minutes. The joyless program framed itself through derisive, unsupported, and often disproved accusations made by governmental representatives. While the fault for alleged community failures was debated, the overall message was unambiguous: remote Aboriginal communities were miserable and futureless.7
There are indeed instances of despair in communities. Many, including Balgo, have some of the highest rates of suicide in the world (Campbell et al. 2016). However, the deeper deception is enacted through the glaring and one-sided omission of everything except for suffering, as well as the colonial causes of these problems. The deficit discourses that dominate such popular representations and corresponding policy rhetoric are not representative of the sanguine register that often characterizes everyday community life. The dystopian vision of Aboriginal communities that “Remote Hope” depicted was unrecognizable to community members I spoke with, and it ran counter to my own experiences.
This episode was emblematic of the broader representations and discourses around Aboriginal communities seen in nightly news stories and journalism. A particularly egregious example was a cartoon by prominent Australian cartoonist Bill Leak, which depicted an Aboriginal policeman returning an Aboriginal child to his father. Holding the youth by his shirt, he says, “You’ll have to sit down and talk to your son about personal responsibility,” to which the father replies, “Yeah, righto, what’s his name then?” It was printed in The Australian—the most widely circulated national daily newspaper—which vehemently defended it as “confronting and insightful” (Whittaker 2016).
Even celebrated big-budget films such as Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002) and Samson and Delilah (2009) are not free from this representational context. While these are powerful and moving films, it is worth considering why stories emphasizing tragedy, drug use, and abuse have received a disproportionate amount of funding, distribution, and critical acclaim. Samson and Delilah is an example of what Faye Ginsburg (2012) describes as the “Indigenous New Wave,” including talented filmmakers such as Warwick Thornton, Beck Cole, and Ivan Sen.8 Their films are often “concerned with how young Indigenous Australians might carve out culture futures for themselves. Their protagonists not only suffer but also survive and take on the task of imagining possible lives despite the clear challenges that lie before them” (4).
In contrast to the subtle shades of hope in such somber films, Rachel Perkins’s Brand New Day (2010) stands out within popular film representations of Aboriginal Australians. Based upon Jimmy Chi’s Broome-based musical hit Bran Nue Dae, it speaks to a broader Kimberley cinema aesthetic of jovial realism. As Audra Simpson argues, such Indigenous projects subvert expectations by the Australian settler public “to see ‘difference’ in ways that are comfortable, to know, to consume a difference of diminishing and soon-to-be-disappearing culture” (2018, 64). The seeming paradox of joy amidst hardship in Aboriginal communities remains difficult for most Australians to imagine, let alone see. Complex representations of Aboriginal life have primarily arisen via Indigenous media makers, often within networks centered beyond Australia’s largest cities.
Closing the Gap and the Politics of Suffering
During one of the post–Tjawa Tjawa trips to Balgo in 2015, our PAKAM crew was tasked with making a short video encouraging increased school attendance for a government agency. The shoot seemed initially to have the potential makings of a palya project that integrated fires, tires, and paper. Titled Yarra Ninytirri Kuurlta (2015), it starred David Young, who was the actual local school attendance officer, as he gathered students to go to school in the morning. In the video, he found the boys and girls playing footy and basketball, respectively. He explained to them the importance of education before driving them to school in the school troopy. It was an organic and playful process that developed smoothly in a single day. The edit furthered the humorous tone by contrasting upbeat music when the kids were playing with exuberant metal guitar music from David’s point of view as he looked for the kids. This contrast received a laugh every time we screened it in Balgo, not because David was viewed as a frightening disciplinarian but because of the absurdity that such police-style enforcement would be necessary. As in his actual daily job, all he had to do was ask, and most of the time kids would happily go with him to school.
This seemingly palya video went well and was engaged positively in Balgo, so I was surprised when the video was rejected upon submission. As a project directly funded under a Closing the Gap program focused on “Children and Schooling,” it seemed to me to be an ideal fit with a resonating message communicated with a bit of humor. However, it was judged that the children were too happy to be in the community outside of school. After a few re-edit attempts, it was clear that there was no practical way to address this feedback. The kids were happy to be playing with each other in the community, and they were also happy to go to school if encouraged by their Elders.
To receive this grant, PAKAM had to quickly produce the alternative video Staying at School in Bidyadanga, which showed footage of kids deeply struggling in school and mentors trying to help them. In contrast with Yarra Ninytirri Kuurlta, it featured somber music and muted color grading. Watching these videos consecutively provided me with a stark reminder of the affective impact of current funding policies that emphasize deficit frameworks. While such explicit impacts on film projects were rare, when they did happen they were directly tied to such governmental programs. Because of PAKAM’s relative independence and core funding, although Yarra Ninytirri Kuurlta did not receive that grant, it was still broadcast and streamed through Indigenous media networks.
The broader stakes of retaining such independence are particularly high in the current political moment. The last decade has seen a resurgence of neoliberal policies that have sought to dismantle decades of slow but meaningful progress around Indigenous rights in Australia. The recent emphasis on the politics of Aboriginal suffering (Sutton 2009) is the result of an insidious rhetorical reframing of Aboriginal communities since the 1970s. Deficit-oriented mass-media representations carry grave policy implications for communities. This is also the case in some ethnographic representations.9
A consequential example of the impact of dystopian policy assumptions was the Northern Territory National Emergency Response Act of 2007, commonly referred to as “the intervention.” This was a governmental program enacted to address allegations of child abuse in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. A variety of experts have dismissed the alleged high rates of sexual assault as misinformation in the years following these policies (Dodson 2007). The intervention exacerbated negative moralizing narratives about Aboriginal people while also giving rise to a new Stolen Generation of children who were taken, ostensibly to protect them from abuse. It even suspended protections afforded by the Racial Discrimination Act, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act, and the Native Title Act. High-level rights commissioners have decried the intervention as violating human rights, noting that the metrics they were meant to address have generally stayed the same or gotten worse.10
These policy moves have been couched through Closing the Gap, a broad constellation of umbrella policies that were formally established in 2007. This initiative has flooded Australians with dismal images and statistics (such as “Remote Hope”) regarding well-being in remote communities. The metaphor of the “gap” provides an ideological euphemism for assimilation by the governmental bodies and policymakers that passed it. Framed through relative deficit, Closing the Gap does not—as it would at first appear—refer to the mutual bridging of two social worlds toward a shared middle ground. Rather, it single-mindedly aims to reduce the relative disparities of Aboriginal people, as defined mathematically through the lens of settler values.
As with the intervention—or symbolic “wars” on drugs and poverty waged by nation-states—Closing the Gap is framed within a deficit model that narrowly engages symptoms without considering the larger causal forces of ongoing settler colonialism. Through this logic, defunding anything that gets in the way of aligning Aboriginal statistics with the Australian mean is warranted. This not only justifies myriad policies of assimilation and urbanization but cloaks them within virtues of multicultural equality that fundamentally undermine sovereignty, to be carried out by well-meaning bureaucrats (Kowal 2015; Lea 2008). It was within this policy framework that the Indigenous Advancement Strategy was proposed and deployed during my fieldwork.
The “Indigenous Annihilation Strategy”
“We all knew it was buggered,” she said about the IAS, shaking her head. Sitting in her office in Balgo, the manager leans her back against the wall and sighs, adding, “Even with two helpers, I didn’t have time to apply. We are taking care of the Elders. And anyways, it would have been a waste of time. The application was as confusing as it gets. Just more Closing the Gap nonsense.” Later that week, an art center manager put it similarly:
The IAS is a disaster. How could it not be when putting 150 programs into one without any real consultation or planning? Case in point, not only did we not get funded, but no art center in the country did. I’ve written successful grants for years, and even to me it was incredibly confusing. There was no time to develop it. They told us to write and submit our wildest dreams, and then they went and cut nearly half of all the funding. Look at all of the medical and youth services they cut. Barkly Arts got refunded after the NITV story, but most don’t have resources to do that. They are vulnerable.11
Unfortunately, this drastic funding shift remains a familiar dynamic for Aboriginal art centers. For example, Warlayirti Artists in Balgo had to close their newly built culture center just three weeks after it opened in 2001 due to the sudden cut of more than 50 percent of funding for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.
Even successful recipients of IAS funding were quick to note that this system was deeply flawed, since its application process was in conflict with that of organizations in Aboriginal communities. Such resignation was typical of virtually every conversation I had in communities about the IAS, with some echoing NITV’s description of the program as the “Indigenous Annihilation Strategy.” While “annihilation” may at first seem like an overstatement, it aligns with both patterns of policy and public statements by the most powerful people in the Australian state. Instituted by the newly elected coalition headed by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and the Liberal Party, the IAS demonstrated policies of cultural annihilation, implicitly and at times even explicitly. In an ABC Radio interview in March 2015, Abbott infamously proclaimed that “What we can’t do is endlessly subsidize lifestyle choices if those lifestyle choices are not conducive to the kind of full participation in Australian society that everyone should have.” In addition to this statement’s deceptive framework, it is worth noting that he was referencing a tiny sliver of one of the biggest per capita budgets in the world. At a broader level, this relatively small amount was to fund basic services for the peoples whose dispossession has provided the entire basis for Australian territory and wealth.
Abbott’s comments speak to state attitudes toward Aboriginal communities that have resulted in real-world impacts. Framed as a way of reducing bureaucratic waste, the IAS proved to be one more form of whitefella pernicious paper and coalesced almost all of the funding for Indigenous organizations from various programs into a single application system. When all was said and done, it reduced the total funding for Aboriginal organizations and services by approximately 40 percent. Through this program, no Aboriginal organization, no matter how crucial or long-standing, was guaranteed any funding. All had to competitively apply for funding. To describe the IAS as rushed would be an understatement, as applicants only had six weeks for the entire process of preparation and submission. Furthermore, dozens of applicants I talked with described it as overly convoluted in its questions while at the same time limited in its scope (Scott 2015).
In the end, the IAS resulted in a substantial reduction of funding for the vast majority of Indigenous sectors.12 In this way, it fulfilled its reputation as the “Indigenous Annihilation Strategy.” Yet, Indigenous media generally met or exceeded previous funding. Why would this be the case? There are multiple reasons for this. PAKAM and Goolarri, like most such Indigenous media outlets, were left with about the same amount of funding through the IAS.13 A key factor is that these media organizations had seasoned and experienced grant writers, as media makers are routinely proposing projects to a variety of funding agencies.
However, the process was not easy or simple for them either. For example, several executives at Goolarri stayed up late into the night working to refine their application as the deadline approached. As Goolarri CEO Jodie Bell describes:
The whole application process was hard. Compared to others we didn’t struggle as much, but it was very time consuming and I have a lot of sympathy for those organizations that don’t have three experienced grant writers to spend a full week doing it ten hours a day. If you think about a community organization that doesn’t know how to polish this for the government, they’ve got almost no chance. That’s what I think is the biggest danger of the IAS. If this kind of thing continues, they are not going to get funded. That may not be this year, but eventually.
As with all Closing the Gap programs, IAS applicants had to appeal to one or (ideally) more of the following five categories: (1) Jobs, Land and Economy, (2) Children and Schooling, (3) Safety and Wellbeing, (4) Culture and Capability, and (5) Remote Australia Strategies. However, years of experience in Closing the Gap funding made it clear to Aboriginal community organization applicants in Balgo that these categories were not as they first appeared. For example, many noted that as described through the IAS, “Culture and Capability” did not seem to apply to their organizations even though they were explicitly oriented toward cultural activities. This funding tended to be awarded to non-Indigenous organizations that had professional grant writers proposing quantitative outcomes that were perceived as more objective through the language of “assessment tools.”
In conversations on the IAS there was a consensus that funding success often related to who could “check the most boxes” rather than supporting Indigenous organizations with long-term relationships and experience in communities. In other words, in the framework of Closing the Gap and the IAS, culture was rendered fundable through the dominant logic of bureaucratic paper, not creative fires—and without this paper funding, there would be little to no material tires to keep such organizations afloat.
Another reason why Indigenous media organizations fared relatively well under the IAS relates to the innate flexibility of content inclusion within video and radio. In effect, media can address virtually any topic, including these five categories. Media exist fundamentally as form, with malleable content. While media have been adaptive to changing funding frameworks, the increasing focus on “checking boxes” nonetheless had concrete impacts on content, as with the rejection and reshooting of Yarra Ninytirri Kuurlta.14 Overall, such examples were exceptions that proved the rule of relative topical freedom in media, as such censoring was relatively rare. However, media makers were often aware of these constraints in grants, and they had a subtle impact on which projects were prioritized and how they were framed.
It became clearer over time that there was also a deeper reason beyond funding experience and content flexibility for why the Indigenous media sector retained its governmental support. The 2014 National Remote Indigenous Media Festival opened with a keynote by John, a consultant who had worked for years at the highest levels of government. He foresaw the coming IAS cuts, as well as the potential for media to nevertheless succeed. He opened his address with a warning:
I look around, and I’m worried that you’re not worried. There is a new wave of grant changes that could leave you penniless, but that doesn’t need to happen, and if you play your cards right you can get even more. No one punches above their weight more than you all. No one can do what you do better, if at all. Tell your story effectively, and you will be in a great position. But, if you don’t, it can go very badly. Do not be passive. They will defund you if you don’t do it properly.
For such veterans of governmental programs, it was clear early in the IAS process that, even amid massive cuts, the media sector could thrive. This was partly due to media’s advantage of national integration via savvy umbrella organizations that efficiently disseminated and translated funding strategies, including this keynote. While most Indigenous community organizations were on their own to submit IAS proposals, IRCA provided a support network for even the smallest organizations to understand and receive guidance on how to navigate the process.
Indigenous media had another advantage in retaining funding; it was relatively inexpensive compared to viable alternatives. A staff member at IRCA put it this way: “Remote media is a great bargain compared to other options, and there would have been a huge backlash if it was defunded. It’s visible and inexpensive in the grand scheme of things.” The two most common phrases I heard used by policymakers I interviewed about why Indigenous media would remain funded were that it “punched above its weight” but cost “pennies on the dollar” in comparison to non-Indigenous media organizations. For other sectors, such as medicine and education, Indigenous community organizations had to compete with large organizations that leveraged economies of scale and were well practiced at making the case on paper that they presented a better value.
However, mainstream TV networks cannot pragmatically compete with Indigenous media organizations that run on comparatively tiny budgets with mostly part-time workers. In addition to their established community trust and track record of producing and circulating a large amount of content, their developed infrastructure and social network allows them to flexibly adjust to ever-changing scenarios. Some directors and managers of Indigenous media national organizations I interviewed made the case that it was this ability of media to adapt that enabled its continued funding. Its nimble qualities around training, products, and relative low cost resulted in media being better able to adapt to the IAS model than other Indigenous sectors. Through media-making it could be clearly documented that workers received training toward objectives that improved their earning potential. Media projects are also able to be quantified in terms of their productivity as measured by project output and job creation. Since Indigenous media is widespread through multiple national networks while remaining comparatively inexpensive, it translates well into grant productivity models of capital efficiency.
After speaking with various policymakers, I have come to better understand this paradox through the banal and bureaucratic logic of the state. As Goolarri COO Kira Fong described it, “Media does better than the other Indigenous sectors in the current funding situation largely because it has a commercial component.” In relation to the rise of the Bollywood industry, Tejaswini Ganti (2012) illustrates how media production sometimes happens to work well within neoliberal parameters of defining success through specific outputs. For a relatively small investment, Indigenous media has “paid off” through a disproportionate amount of national prestige via the circulation of award-winning films and programs at prestigious events around the world, in addition to the global streaming of media highlighting Australia. In this way, there is a certain logic of calculated national utility, which tends to be carried out by politically indifferent mid-level bureaucrats who view the cost/benefit accomplishments of media as sufficiently efficient. Tragically, this same logic also underwrites the IAS’s severe reduction in funding for the vast majority of most other Indigenous organizations, programs, and services.
Here lies the question at the heart of the visibility paradox: What dynamics enable the thriving of Indigenous media within broader policies of defunding Aboriginal organizations and communities? At first glance, one might arrive at a pessimistic conclusion regarding the funding of inexpensive Indigenous media. It could even be suggested that this highly visible sector stands in for deeper policies of justice—including land rights and substantial spending on community infrastructure and health—that would cost the government millions if not billions of dollars. However, this misses the ways in which these media emerge and disseminate meaningful content. Indigenous media are certainly not complicit in governmental plans to undermine Aboriginal life. Rather, their programs are often the only ones presenting nuanced and futured representations in a representational sea of dystopian images. To better understand the dynamics of this visibility paradox, I unpack other policies of annihilation that unfolded during the IAS’s implementation—namely, the aggressive and wide-scale governmental attempt to effectively close most Western Australian Aboriginal communities in 2014 and 2015.
Closing Communities and Perpetual Precarity
While managers in Balgo and elsewhere bemoaned the futility of applying for the IAS, this was far from their primary concern at the time. Looming larger in Aboriginal politics across the state was a profound uncertainty about the very existence of their communities into even the near future. This fear was provoked months earlier. In November 2014 the premier of Western Australia, Colin Barnett, announced without warning or consultation, that the majority of the over 270 Aboriginal communities in Western Australia would be defunded, with their members being relocated to larger regional communities or towns. Balgo was one of the communities possibly designated to become a larger regional community, with expanded housing, services, and even a swimming pool. At a bureaucratic level this was the result of a budgetary game of hot potato between the national government and the state of Western Australia. The former handed over remote community funding responsibilities to the latter, while including a onetime budget of ninety million dollars—enough for only three years of funding.
Shortly after this announcement, a leaked 2010 government document was widely circulated by Aboriginal activists which demonstrated that the state government had long been preparing for such an action. Titled “Priority Investment Communities—WA,” it categorized 192 communities as “unsustainable,” 160 of which were located in the Kimberley. In what quickly become known simply as “the list,” this file was quickly disseminated through Balgo by community members through USB drives, phone Bluetooth sharing, and folded pieces of printed paper. Balgo was listed in the ambiguous Category B, which was identified as neither sustainable (Class A) nor unsustainable (Class C). The ambiguity of this classification only intensified anxieties. After reading the list of Class C communities slated for potential closure, people would often voice concerns such as “My cousin lives there. He can’t leave his Country. Where would he go?” This was far from the first time that federal and state governments had initiated large-scale plans to defund Aboriginal communities. The decline of Yagga Yagga itself was part of a broad policy to close outstations in the early 2000s (Peterson and Myers 2016). Having experienced the community closure of Yagga Yagga firsthand, Mark Moora was disappointed by the list yet unsurprised. He emphasized that this is how it goes when the government is involved, and it only increased his confidence in the long-term imperative to develop communities that were not reliant on governmental support.
One might reasonably ask how exactly the government can close long-standing Indigenous communities, especially at this scale. The answer begins with understanding how Aboriginal communities were initially established by the government. In the expansive deserts that make up much of the continent, Aboriginal people lived a largely nomadic lifestyle before colonization. They tended to travel for most of the year in small family groups, meeting in larger numbers for cultural events such as corroborees. Most currently existing communities were established during the twentieth century as either missions or pastoral stations (cattle ranches). The process of colonization made living in these communities nearly unavoidable through the forced movement of people and by the destruction and gating of water sources by pastoralists.
Communities have been set up in unsustainable ways that necessitate constant governmental funding. While many are located in some of the best places in the world for solar panels, nearly all remain powered by expensive fossil fuels. Electricity is precarious not only because of its means of generation, but also because it has to be continually recredited through “power cards” in each house or it simply shuts off. The vast majority of the houses and other buildings are not owned by community members and are technically governmental properties. Compounding this is the expense associated with mobility. Travel between communities requires four-wheel-drive vehicles as well as intensive and irregular road maintenance. Community members often joke about how the government cares deeply about road maintenance for every community that is on the way to a lucrative mine.
Since the IAS and threat of mass community closures were instigated under the Liberal coalition led by Prime Minister Abbott, it is tempting to view these policies as the result of right-wing politicalideologiesHowevermanyofthepoliciesthatledtotheclosingofYagga Yagga and other outstations occurred under Labor governments. The “intervention” and Closing the Gap policies were enacted by the Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, who even publicly apologized for the Stolen Generation on behalf of the Australian government. In a cynical deployment of futurity, the 2012 Labor government, headed by Prime Minister Julia Gillard, passed the Stronger Futures in the Northern Territory Act, which extended many of the disastrous intervention policies through 2022. Particularly harmful are the “child protection” policies, which often result in the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and communities by the government—a continuation of “stolen generation” policies. Unfortunately, outside of occasional left-wing political allies, such destructive policies have largely been a bipartisan affair since the 1970s.
I am not arguing that there is a mass governmental conspiracy to cause Aboriginal communities to fail. While some officials may (and likely do) orchestrate their failure, such intent is not necessary. Similarly to Bruno Latour’s (1996) description of the Parisian Aramis transportation system’s demise, all that is required is sustained neglect paired with a disinterest in understanding and implementing long-term strategies. As Teresa Montoya (2016) asserts, such neglect inflicts violence upon the land itself. The explicit and implicit forces of financial interests in the extraction of natural resources further encourage this systemic disinterest.
As Patrick Wolfe (2006) has established, colonization consists most fundamentally of structures rather than individual events. Povinelli (2011) describes these structures of neglect as “economies of abandonment” in which Aboriginal people are sacrificed for the greater national good because they are not viewed as producing in the way “good” citizens should. This is used as a justification for allowing the slow-motion violence of abandonment to become normalized and made to seem inevitable. Ironically, the same productivity-oriented forces that are causing such abandonment are also sustaining the very Aboriginal media that has been instrumental in resisting community closures.
This most recent push to close communities has not yet succeeded, though not because of any official legal protection. Rather, closures have been prevented by the mass public response of many urban whitefellas—led and bolstered by Indigenous media and activists—which at its zenith resulted in large protests in every major city across the continent as well as in regional towns (see photos of Neil Turner and other PAKAM members marching in a protest in Broome). However, while the state has momentarily backed away from these plans, Aboriginal people in communities like Balgo remain at the mercy of bureaucrats. Seemingly aware of their PR misstep of saying the quiet part out loud, the state government reframed their language on the issue just a few years later. Their updated approach avoids the framing of “closure” and rebrands their plans in the positive sense on the building up of larger remote community centers, such as Balgo. The new language is careful to note that people would be allowed to remain in their communities if their “services are reduced,” even though that is nearly impossible in practice due to infrastructural realities. While public opinion has prevented the state government’s attempt to defund communities for the time being, subtler policy decisions are in the pipeline and suggest that defunding may be pushed through by other means.
A vocal minority of media producers, politicians, and bureaucrats have been active advocates for Aboriginal rights. However, it is not enough that some have generally opposed policies of annihilation. Internal government audits of the intervention, Closing the Gap, and the IAS have concluded that each one lacked meaningful consultation in their implementation and failed to reach their own self-defined metrics of success. These audits have been highly publicized by major news organizations and the political advocates of Aboriginal rights who pushed for the audits to take place. However, attempts to demonstrate the failure of these policies have not prevented further iterations. For many journalists on the right, the dysfunction of these programs provides tautological evidence that the real problem is having any Indigenous funding in the first place.
Figure 35. Signs at the Broome protest against closing communities.
Figure 36. PAKAM flag at the Broome protest against closing communities.
The paradox between the golden age of Aboriginal media and mass defunding also resonates with a deeper existential crisis regarding Australian culture and whiteness. Australia has only been a nation since the beginning of the twentieth century, and throughout most of this short period White Australia policies were enforced to keep out immigrants deemed to lie beyond contemporaneous conceptions of whiteness. And yet, unlike the heroic origin mythos of the American independence movement—as tenuous as that narrative is—white Australians are often at odds with their own history as a penal colony of criminals forced from their homelands.15 Although Australia is often deemed “the lucky country” because of its low population and vast resources, many white Australians I spoke with bemoaned its lack of cultural roots. This was somewhat less the case in Broome, with its long-standing exceptions to White Australia immigration policies.
Within this broader settler-colonial context, Aboriginal Australians simultaneously represent both a fundamental problem and its solution. On the one hand, their status as the oldest continuing societies quenches the nationalist thirst of the young nation for a meaningful temporal and spatial connection to place. On the other hand, the existence of Aboriginal people and the unjust dispossession of their Country simultaneously undermines the legal legitimacy of the nation itself. This is made all the more salient by the increasingly acknowledged illegitimacy of terra nullius and continued lack of treaties. Therefore, it remains important for the national imaginary that Aboriginal people are symbolically engaged and narratively absorbed, while at the same time it is paramount that they be removed from their Country and assimilated so as to legitimize Australia’s very existence. This speaks to a profound settler ambivalence toward Aboriginality that animates irreconcilable motivations for fostering Indigenous presence and absence.
It is in the context of the visibility paradox of irreconcilable national tensions that Indigenous media remain too often underestimated. At a superficial level it aligns with settler logics and desires as a relatively inexpensive, productive, and visible sector. And yet, these qualities do not corrupt it, but rather provide a Trojan horse for disrupting and reimagining the representational forces of dispossession at the heart of Aboriginal survivance. While not a panacea, Aboriginal media challenges the dominant images of dystopian communities falling into inevitable dysfunction, painting vivid portraits of complex lives that have endured unspeakable tragedies with dignity. Just as importantly, Aboriginal cinema provides a constitutive process by which media makers come to articulate the immemorial and unfolding aspects of what it means to be Indigenous, what their social world is like, and what they aspire for in the future.
Sovereign Envisionings
Sovereignty is a crucial concept that has been engaged deeply in critical Native studies and anthropology (Cattelino and Simpson 2022). Unlike other marginalized groups, Indigenous communities often prioritize sovereignty from, rather than equality within, multiculturalist settler states. To this end, it is difficult to overstate the significance of treaty relationships. As much as treaties in the United States, Canada, and New Zealand have been violated, they have nevertheless provided at least a benchmark for long-term land claims and self-government. In contrast with Australia, it would be difficult for the governments of these three countries to compel Indigenous people out of most of their communities in a short period of time.
Discussions of sovereignty quickly lose significance if they are not grounded within relationships to Country. From this foundation, sovereignty integrates into other realms of Aboriginal life, including kinship, language, and Dreaming. Through the lens of “sovereign envisionings,” here I discuss the assertion of visual and temporal sovereignties. I illustrate how they are embedded within Mark’s cinematic awakenings and in the renewed movement for developing treaty relationships across Australia.
“Visual sovereignty” (Raheja 2010; Rickard 2011) articulates how the rise of Indigenous filmmaking has been instrumental in challenging and refusing dominant stereotypical representations, while also asserting increased control over representation. In light of their continued slotting into primordial pasts, for Aboriginal people, visual sovereignty is inextricably tied to the temporal. “Temporal sovereignty” resists the ways that settler conceptions of time have become imposed (Rifkin 2017). Futures, like land, have been structurally dispossessed, and offer a parallel framework for thinking through the dispossession of temporal territory. Theresa McCarthy articulates how Haudenosaunee regularly draw “upon frames of reference derived from intellectual traditions oriented toward [their] futurity. Since land, political difference, and ‘knowing’ are the moving targets in settler colonial efforts to eliminate and replace Indigenous peoples on their territories” (2016, 277). Temporal sovereignty provides an analytic for enacting such Indigenous futures within and beyond Australia.
This ethnography has converged at the nexus of these two aspects of sovereignty, through what I have come to think of as sovereign envisionings. It encapsulates the integration of visual and temporal sovereignty while also emphasizing active processes of doing rather than being. I draw on Grace Dillon’s (2012) intentionally plural conception of Indigenous futurisms and Joseph Weiss’s (2018) articulation of active “future-making.” Sovereign envisionings exist as a multiplicity within and between people and communities. They are characterized not by singularity or solidity but by the continuous adaptation to shifting landscapes of power toward the collective imaginings of returning to Country in new ways. These envisionings are not only of sovereign futures, but the acts themselves are sovereign assertions. They are as much promise as plan, and their success is based on their ability to spark and cultivate the dreams of younger generations.
Like cinema itself, sovereign envisionings integrate product, process, and place. Among the most envisioned of mainstream media, films embody the social lives through which these come into being and move through the world. Sovereign envisionings engage the ways in which media can reimagine not only how Aboriginal people are imagined and represented but also when and where. They unsettle futures and naturalized relationships through which Aboriginality is rendered temporally and spatially “remote” through the projection of a mythic past.
On one of our many three-person film shoots with Larry, Mark Moora proclaimed:
Media is good. It can go out and tell all the mob what is going on. People in Canberra and everywhere might think bad things about us blackfellas. They don’t know the truth, so I have to tell them what is true. In my Country, in the bush, I think about my people and the future. If I go to Sydney or another Country I think differently and get mixed up. I want to talk to Canberra and tell them what I think about politics. If they argue that’s alright, but they should come to my Country to argue.
As Mark implies, sovereign envisionings are not simply messages about the future to be communicated. They are constitutive, not only between people but in relation to Country. Unlike other forms of media, cinema provides a process to communicate envisionings from Country. It does not simply assert, but transports and connects. The medium is more than the message—a portal of potentiality that honors Country as an active presence and precursor to meaningful communication.
The importance of decolonizing temporal mediation is embedded within Audra Lorde’s (1984) solemn declaration that dispossessed people “were never meant to survive.” As is often asserted in protector movements such as Standing Rock, Indigenous existence is resistance. Anishinaabe cultural theorist Gerald Vizenor reimagines the notion of Indigenous survival through his articulation of survivance, which he defines as “an active sense of presence over absence, deracination, and oblivion; survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction. . . . [Survivance stories] are renunciations of dominance, detractions, obtrusions, the unbearable sentiments of tragedy, and the legacy of victimry” (2008, 1). Far from being guaranteed, Indigenous survivance has been largely the result of steadfast activism by Aboriginal people, in addition to the meaningful though perhaps overstated role of non-Indigenous allies (Horner and Langton 1987).
Geoffrey Stokes (1997) reaffirms the fact that Aboriginal people have not been passive victims of settler-colonial domination. Since colonial contact they have demanded change. Notably, this included the formation of the U.S.-inspired Black Panther Party of Australia in the late 1960s, a story chronicled in Darlene Johnson’s (2014) documentary, The Redfern Story. Aboriginal celebrities—such as the musician Jimmy Little and world champion tennis star Evonne Goolagong—have further shifted white Australians’ views of Aboriginal people within popular culture.
In the 1970s, counterculture movements motivated waves of hippies to live in Aboriginal communities. Despite their attempts to support Aboriginal rights, cultural miscommunication often rendered such efforts ineffective or even counterproductive (Henry 2012). Furthermore, it took decades of losing battles over land rights, such as the 1980 dispute over gas mining in sacred sites near Noonkanbah Station in the Kimberley (P. Vincent 1983), for enough momentum to build for the legislative watershed of the 1990s, with victories in Mabo v. Queensland in 1992 (overturning terra nullius), the Native Title Act in 1993, and Wik Peoples v. The State of Queensland in 1996 (Cosgrove and Kliger 1997).16
After many years of grassroots pressure and federal committee meetings, Aboriginal sovereignty has returned to the national spotlight. Between 2015 and 2017 there was a strong push to hold a referendum vote to amend the Australian constitution to formally recognize Aboriginal people as the first to live in Australia. The last such major referendum, in 1967, passed overwhelmingly and changed policies in which many Aboriginal people were still legally classified as fauna. The recent proposed referendum was highly controversial. Ironically, most right-wing politicians and Indigenous activists generally opposed it, though for markedly different reasons. While many on the right saw it as a slippery slope toward Indigenous land reclamation, most Aboriginal activists I spoke with viewed it as representing a tacit acceptance of British colonization as well as providing a publicized gesture without concrete policy gains. Instead, they preferred and advocated for treaty making.
The debate came to a head in May 2017 in the community of Mutitjulu near the iconic Aboriginal site of Uluru (Ayers Rock), five hundred kilometers south of Alice Springs. Over four days, more than 250 Indigenous Australian leaders from across the continent met for the First Nations National Constitutional Convention to discuss the merits and future of the constitutional referendum. By the end of these meetings, they rejected it and released what has come to be known as the “Uluru Statement from the Heart.” It argues for inherent Aboriginal sovereignty as described in the following passage:
Our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander tribes were the first sovereign Nations of the Australian continent and its adjacent islands, and possessed it under our own laws and customs. This our ancestors did, according to the reckoning of our culture, from the Creation, according to the common law from “time immemorial,” and according to science more than 60,000 years ago.
This sovereignty is a spiritual notion: the ancestral tie between the land, or “mother nature,” and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who were born therefrom, remain attached thereto, and must one day return thither to be united with our ancestors. This link is the basis of the ownership of the soil, or better, of sovereignty. It has never been ceded or extinguished, and co-exists with the sovereignty of the Crown.
As Audra Simpson (2014) argues regarding Mohawk relations with the state, when presented with an either/or choice, Aboriginal leaders refused the premise. They demanded an altogether different option that was consistent with historical fact beyond the imperial imagination of settler-colonial inevitability. They demanded treaties and to be treated as equals through international law. Implicit in this statement was not simply the point that sovereignty has never been ceded but that sovereignty itself is not something that can be given or taken. It is a relationship with Country. While this seemed overly idealistic to some, for these Aboriginal leaders it was a pragmatic move necessary for survivance amidst escalating policies of annihilation. This statement by leadership from remote communities resonated deeply in urban protest camps I spent time in, including the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra. Situated directly in front of the Old Parliament House, this constellation of tents and a central fire has endured continuously since 1972.
Figure 37. The Aboriginal Tent Embassy and the Old Parliament House in Canberra.
Figure 38. The Redfern Aboriginal Tent Embassy protest camp in the Sydney suburb of Redfern.
Assertions of sovereignty in Aboriginal media projects often gesture toward issues beyond Australia. While the pitfalls of leveraging Indigenous wisdom as a path toward settler healing are notable, global issues of justice and environmental degradation are also vitally relevant to Aboriginal futures. They are the result of colonial processes, and Aboriginal Australians have sophisticated analyses that draw upon thousands of years of knowledge (Liboiron 2021; Yunkaporta 2019).
Many politicians expressed shock over the “Uluru Statement from the Heart,” which in no uncertain terms rejected symbolic constitutional acknowledgment. After centuries of sustained dispossession and a lack of any treaties, mass-scale Aboriginal disenchantment would be more than understandable, as would a general desire for a framework of non-sovereign futures that abandons land rights for tactical economic benefits (Bonilla 2015). However, this statement was representative of broadly held community commitments to sovereignty despite historical precedent. It reframed the issue as one of an illegitimate constitution imposed through invasion. While initially decried by the mainstream press as a pipe dream, in the months after the statement was released serious treaty negotiations began progressing in every single Australian state and territory. There remains an unprecedented political momentum for treaty agreements to be reached, with the most progress having been made in Victoria, led by the First Peoples’ Assembly. Negotiations with this state began in November of 2024 and are currently in process as of early 2025.
Figure 39. Poster in the center at the protest near Town Beach. Photograph by Martin Pritchard; courtesy of Environs Kimberley.
Throughout 2023 a revised referendum was debated which proposed the inclusion of a new body for Aboriginal representation in Parliament. Indigenous media played a meaningful role in engaging community members in this process, even if it was overshadowed by mainstream media that often bolstered the opposition. In September of that year, the national peak organizational body, First Nations Media Australia, released a mass email communication that highlighted
the significance of the ongoing discussions surrounding a referendum to recognise First Nations independently in the nation’s constitution and to establish a Voice to Parliament representing First Nations peoples . . . [and seeks] to contribute to the national conversation by providing accurate information, context, and relevant insights on the potential impacts of constitutional recognition and the Voice to Parliament. . . . Above all, First Nations Media Australia remains steadfast in our mission to empower First Nations voices through media and to ensure recognition of their significance in the ongoing national conversation.
Ultimately, after being placed on the ballot that October, the referendum was decisively voted down. This felt like—and in ways was—a profound failure for many people deeply engaged in Aboriginal rights. At the same time, few of my field mates seemed surprised or discouraged by the outcome. Some even suggested that demands were not high enough, and that regardless, the process represented a refusal to endorse empty platitudes, to demonstrate that the Emperor’s reconciliation wore no clothes. It forced Australians and the state to explicitly acknowledge or deny fundamental Aboriginal history and political representation on the global stage. It shone a spotlight upon the realities of ongoing irreconciliation. This way of thinking resists what Chloe Ahmann (2019) describes as a tranquilizing “subjunctive politics” that narrowly winnow and foreclose future possibilities. It refuses any reconciliation that lacks meaningful truth and justice (A. Simpson 2014; Weiss 2025).
Aboriginal communities continue to be underestimated by government agencies and officials. After generations of dispossession and dystopian portrayals of these communities in popular media, most politicians, bureaucrats, and citizens display hubris regarding the totality of settler-colonial victory, even as the legitimacy of Australian territorial possession is increasingly cast into doubt. Paradoxically, it is the very discounting of Indigenous media’s political potential that facilitates its transformational possibilities. Even though—and perhaps because—it is a cost-effective sector that assuages settler guilt through its seemingly innocuous visibility, the Aboriginal mediascape serves as a crucial platform for envisioning and enacting sovereign futures.
I sometimes return in my mind to the end of a long red carpet at the Sydney Film Festival, where Mark introduced Tjawa Tjawa and the Songlines on Screen series to industry titans and film aficionados. Mark was featured, made visible, celebrated even. And yet I cannot help but wonder whether, in that moment and at the rarified after-party where he passed out his single-page summary for going back to Yagga Yagga, if he was being seen, being heard. I got the sense that Mark wondered about this too, though it did not seem to overly concern him. He pragmatically made the most of this visibility. As the party wound down, we sat in an oddly textured couch at the center of the bustling space. Turning to me, he said, “All we need is a bit of money,” and then, after a long and considered look around the room, continued, “You never know.”