Introduction
Ideas about ownership and collaboration are two axes in the process of making representations and negotiating the complexities of cultural property when working with Aboriginal people and their archives. Based on my previous work on images and cultural property in Western Desert Aboriginal communities and broader work on materiality (Myers 1988, 2004, 2014), I am particularly interested in how film and other indexical images work to establish relationships and other effects in the world. Concepts of property – as cultural or intellectual property – are, in this sense, efforts to articulate, specify, and determine some of these relationships and effects. If objects, in the widest sense, are promiscuous in the entanglements they can inhabit or produce, to follow Thomas (1989), I am interested here in the limitations of the attempts to contain these flows. In the discussion that follows, the particular material properties of film objects are crucial.
In this chapter, I present an account of the relationships established, evoked, negotiated, and abrogated in the course of a project of “repatriating”1 film footage to an Indigenous Australian community, a project that led to the making of an archive-based documentary that stitches together and brings into visibility several distinct but related trajectories and personal histories. I offer this essay as a case study, illuminating the vexed and unstable intersections of relationships and rights in the production of visual representations of an Indigenous Australian history. I will trace (1) the “making” of a filmic representation at a particular point in time, both in Australia and in the history of the role film plays, and (2) the repatriation or return of this material to source communities and the very distinct conditions that make this possible. My goal is to understand the motivations of different players at multiple locations along the cultural property spectrum and how they shape this project’s outcome.
There are two stories to be told here. One is the story of the production of what is now an archive of film footage shot in an Indigenous community in 1974, and what that means and continues to mean to the Pintupi people whose families were its subject. This includes their relationships to each other as well as to the filmmaker, Ian Dunlop, and to myself, an anthropologist who served as a translator and advisor during the filming and who has continued to work with these people since then. The other story concerns what is very evident in the film, namely the Australian governmental interventions into Indigenous life, meant to manage its Aboriginal populations. This “context” is what placed Dunlop in the position of producing the footage to begin with, but governmentality is a context that changes throughout the history of the footage, informing ongoing attempts to control the footage and its life as an object within an archive.2 Owing to space constraints, this chapter largely focuses on the first of these two stories.
Commonwealth film
My story begins, at least for our purposes, in the early 1970s in the remote Pintupi3 outstation of Yayayi, 180 miles west of Alice Springs, where I began my research as a PhD student in anthropology, at age 25, in July 1973. But the relationships shaping this project, which are also embedded in a history of filmmaking in Australia, go back to the 1950s and the career of Ian Dunlop, who was a director in Australia’s Commonwealth Film Unit.4 Part of a broader modernist project to document Australia and its progress to the Australian nation in 1957, Dunlop was sent to the Giles Weather Station in remote Western Australia to make “a film about the establishment of a remote weather station” (Deveson and Dunlop 2012). While his focus was Australia’s scientific establishment at work in this remote location (the film was eventually called Balloons and Spinifex),5 Dunlop was very taken with the surrounding environment and especially the evidence of independent-living foraging families out beyond the weather station. He could see the smoke from their fires off in the distance and resolved to return and make a film that he imagined as a “day in the life of a nomadic family” (Dunlop 1979:117; see also Deveson and Dunlop 2012). Eventually, he was able to persuade his superiors, and the Commonwealth Film Unit,6 to allow him to carry out this project. The resulting work, Desert People (1967) was an extraordinary, award-winning masterpiece. Dunlop shot numerous rolls of color slide film in documentation for the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies, which paid for the trip. Among those he met on that trip was Minyina (Yanyatjarri) Tjampitjinpa and ten years later Dunlop decided he wanted to follow up with these people, to make a film about what had happened in their lives since settlement at Papunya. In 1974, the Pintupi people, who had first come east to Papunya and Haasts Bluff, were living at the small community of Yayayi in the Northern Territory. This is where Dunlop came to talk to them about filming their lives.
Stage 1: Self-determination and rights in representation
Yayayi was a fairly remote place, with only a windmill and tank providing water for about 300 Pintupi-speaking people who had moved there as a breakaway “outstation” in order to escape the larger government-operated, multi-language group settlement of Papunya – which they experienced as overcrowded and riven by conflict, and in which they were considered and sometimes ridiculed as less civilized (see Myers 1986). Not the first such attempt on the part of these migrants from the west to form their own distinct community, this move from Papunya occurred under the favorable policies of the Labor Government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, putting into practice its emphasis on “Aboriginal self-determination.” Those known as “the Pintupi” had become visible to the Australian public earlier, through the much publicized patrols to contact them “in the bush” in the early 1960s (Long 1964a, 1964b) and some sensationalist accounts of their discovery by the famous anthropologist Donald Thomson (1962). Their move to Yayayi in May 1973 gained some national attention as Aboriginal activists pressured health officials to provide services at the new outstation (Myers 2016). By 1973, there was some support for the movement of small populations away from the large government-administered settlements that had been created as centers of assimilation and sedentarization. This was part of a new order for the Department of Aboriginal Affairs.
It was less than a year after this move to Yayayi that Ian Dunlop arrived in the community to discuss making a film about the Pintupi people he had met in 1964. As a young PhD student, I had been doing research at Yayayi for several months and was becoming reasonably fluent in Pintupi and familiar with the people there. Following his experience at making film with Yolngu at Yirrkala, where he collaborated with anthropologists Nancy Williams and Howard Morphy, Dunlop asked me to help with translation, and later consultation, about making the film. My experience at Yayayi had already made me wary of the responsibility of representation, of seeming to tell other people’s stories.7 And I had heard a number of angry criticisms from Aboriginal people of unsatisfactory or disappointing filmmaking projects (insufficient money, inappropriate nudity, transgression of ritual protocols). Moreoever, especially for many of the older people at Yayayi, there was a general reluctance about having one’s image taken. Nonetheless, I admired Dunlop’s earlier work and appreciated both his sincerity and the possible significance of what he proposed. I agreed to help, but I did so on behalf of the Yayayi Community Council, as it was known, and with their blessing. In this way, I thought, I was not to be directly a part of the film team. I imagined that the film enterprise (any film enterprise) had a potential for tensions and problems that I wanted to avoid.
I agreed to be an advisor, and in this role, I translated for Dunlop when he presented his proposal to the Yayayi Council. A number of the Pintupi at Yayayi remembered Dunlop from the 1964 meeting in the Pollock Hills of Western Australia, when he had been ascribed the subsection classification of Tjampitjinpa. Some of them knew the people with whom he had worked on Desert People. These associations eased his connection at Yayayi. With this background of trust, the community agreed to filming – with the commitment from Film Australia of $200 per week to the Yayayi Community Council. It was also agreed that there would be no filming of ritual activity. By 1974, despite early participation in a program of salvage ethnographic filming,8 the Pintupi, like most Western Desert people, had decided to refuse recording of men’s ritual life and had asked to withdraw earlier films from public circulation.9 What was proposed in 1974 was different – a documentary about community life – and the Council agreed to allow the filming. In this agreement, nowhere written down but in line with the emerging expectations of consultation associated with the policy of Aboriginal self-determination, there was a specific assertion of Pintupi rights – local community rights – over the filming activity, over what could and could not be filmed, and Ian made it clear he would not impose the camera on people who wished to be left out.
As Ian Bryson (2002) has recorded, ethnographic film practice in Australia was changing at this time. Dunlop had himself begun to work in a collaborative manner10 with Yolngu people in what became the Yirrkala Film Project, incorporating – for example – their ideas of what he should film (see Deveson and Dunlop 2012).11 Dunlop was sensitive to the rights of the local community to allow or refuse permission to film, in line with the emerging policies of the federal Department of Aborginal Affairs embracing Aboriginal “self-determination” and local control of who could even visit communities. I do not remember there being any discussion at the time about rights to the material or of the necessity of any consultations in subsequent editing or production of the film. The presumption was that the footage would belong to Film Australia, although as “author,” Dunlop always insisted that his assent would be necessary for any usage. He adamantly resisted the usage of his material as “stock” footage without his agreement.
Dunlop arrived back at Yayayi in early June 1974, with a crew of two men and two 4-wheel-drive vehicles.12 The crew camped with tents and trunks at Yayayi for nearly a month and shot some 26 reels of 16mm color sync footage. Dunlop was fortunate to record a number of distinctive events at one of the first independent outstations in the context of self-determination. These included the visit to Yayayi of the Executive Officer of the relatively new Aboriginal Arts Board, transactions over the sale of acrylic paintings with the manager of the Papunya Tula Artists company, and meetings of the elected Village Council. The crew moved pretty freely and comfortably around the community, focusing on those people and families who were accepting of their presence and avoiding those who were reluctant.
Subsequently, in May of 1975, I travelled to Sydney with two Pintupi men (Freddy West Tjakamarra and George Yapa Tjangala) as translators and commentators to document the many hours of footage with Dunlop at his house. This was audio recorded and eventually transcribed. The resulting documentation added something like fifteen double-sided audiocassettes of 90 minutes each to the material recorded at Yayayi and constituted an emerging archive.
In the end, however, nothing happened. Dunlop never made a film from the material. This was the first time he had shot his own footage, and he was dissatisfied with his camera work. Further, he was unable to find what he thought was a satisfactory organizing principle for the film.13 The footage and documentation remained with him at Film Australia until his retirement in 1987, at which time it was lodged (along with other Film Australia material) at the Australian National Archives.
Retake: Engaging in repatriaton
As no edited version was made, we never had the opportunity to show this material back to Pintupi people, who by 1981 had moved back to their own country, at the communities of Kintore, Northern Territory, and later Kiwirrkura, Western Australia. The footage was available as a 16mm workprint, and had only been developed after shooting at Yayayi had finished and the crew had returned. Later, it was too costly to transfer the material to another medium in order to take it back.
As the changing technology of video recording had made sync sound and small cameras possible, so did the rapidly changing technology of the digital age offer new possibilities. In 2005, the National Archives of Australia transferred the footage to VHS tape, old technology by this time but thought perhaps to be the best medium for returning footage to an Aboriginal community. Aboriginal people in Central Australia were quite familiar with tape and more experienced about film material generally; they had been watching videos and even making informal recordings with portable video cameras since the late 1980s. Ian and I had remained in contact as friends as we had the idea to “repatriate” the film by bringing it back to show it and to see what people thought of it. By 2006, and with the blessing of the Australian Archive – which was committed to such “repatriation” – I brought a digitized version of the footage back and showed it to the community at Kiwirrkura.14
Showing such “old” footage brought up the issue of Indigenous cultural protocol that needed to be addressed. The footage – now over 30 years old – contained images of people who were deceased. In earlier years, and certainly in 1974, extending to film and photography, the traditional taboo on the names and images of the deceased would have meant showing such footage was unacceptable. By 2006, the local protocol on images of the deceased was no longer as important to a younger generation who were leaders in the community, and in many desert communities, people actively wanted to see their relatives and themselves on film.15 They had no photographic record of their own of that crucial period. But ideas about cultural knowledge and secrecy are complex and unstable. I knew many people wanted to see this footage, and they had invited me to come show it to them, but they hadn’t actually seen it. What if there was something offensive or problematic that we hadn’t foreseen?
To be certain the footage was acceptable for screening to the Pintupi public at Kiwirrkura, I arranged to show all of it first to the resident head Councillor, Jimmy Brown Tjampitjinpa (himself a former resident of Yayayi, although not there during the filming in 1974). Jimmy asserted his authority as the person who should make this determination. He clearly enjoyed watching it, and told us it was suitable for the public viewing we planned. Indeed, he helped arrange for us to have the “town hall” in which to show it.16 As a consultation, the answer was clear. Not only was it okay to show images of the deceased, but also there was nothing of a ritual or esoteric nature that could not be seen by everyone.
However, a screening is not simply a formal occasion of agreement or refusal and it could not be only a consultation with Jimmy Brown. This was my first trip to Kiwirrkura since 1988, and I had many old friends and acquaintances, some of my very closest friends from the 1970s, to see and explain why I was there. The screening was for me an engagement with old friends, and their reactions, their knowledge of why we were there, were important. In order to find out something about the “community” response, this screening could not take place without some preparation and conversation, some renewed connection with my friends from the past. It was with them that I wanted to share this experience. When I arrived, the day was filled with conversations that connected me to the situation of the present, who had passed away, who had had children, and where my friends were. Nonetheless, during the two nights of public screening at Kiwirrkura, I was worried. In a world of shifting protocols and introduced media forms, as well as the distributed nature of rights over images, unanimity or consensus is unpredictable: some elders might be disturbed by an image or disagree on principle that they had not (yet) been personally consulted (see also Myers 2004, 2014). However, to my relief, the reception was joyous and positive, with obvious pleasure expressed at the sight and sound of beloved family members who had passed away. The conversations on the following days reinforced this sense, with requests for copies of the video and images I might have of themselves and relatives. One young woman said the film made her feel proud, seeing her relatives happy and healthy. At nearby Kintore, when I returned from Kiwirrkura, I was unable to have a public screening, but a small-scale viewing with Marlene Nampitjinpa Spencer (who had been a teenager in the film footage and would later be the narrator of our film) and her family gathered around my laptop computer was even more encouraging about the local desire to have this material. Again, there were requests for copies.
With the agreement of the National Archives, which was supportive of our project,17 I left copies of the material with the clinic at Kiwirrkura, where the nurse (the beloved, now deceased, Annie Dixon) agreed to hold it for the community so it would not be lost, and the images would not become available to unauthorized persons. Not long afterwards, Sister Annie (as nurses are called in Australia) called and spoke to Lisa Stefanoff, an Australian anthropologist and former student who had assisted me on the trip to Kiwirrkura:
She [Annie Dixon] wanted to send us images of people watching the film in the past weeks. Bobby [West] left soon after we did and gave the tapes18 to Annie for safekeeping. The clinic has apparently become an all-day, all-evening cinema ever since. I could hear it playing as we talked – amazing to feel connected back to that place through this sonic relay. People are apparently watching the tapes over and over and over with hardly a quiet moment between, wanting to borrow them for home viewing too. Annie’s being strict and not letting the tapes leave her care. I told her that Ian has started the process with Film Australia to get permission for multiple copies to be available to families. She’s not 100% sure but she thinks that one of the men is doing a thank you painting for Ian at the moment.
(Lisa Stefanoff, email June 27, 2006)
Not only did Annie report that people were watching it constantly, but she was very impressed that they were noticeably commenting on the healthy status of those they saw in the film.
How to mobilize an archive
This initial interest left us with several problems: how to make the film material available and useful to the Pintupi communities. At the simplest level, how could we assure local people continued access to this archival material, and in what form? Moreover, what did they want to do with it? And who had rights to it?19
This last question was not necessarily a question that a filmmaker would have raised in 1974, despite the emergence of Aboriginal self-determination. But with this archival material, the uncertain future of the footage as an object in the National Archive, and the national questions about Indigenous intellectual and cultural property that had become prominent, it seemed the relevant question to ask.20
In 2008, partly because of the experiences of screenings in Kintore and Kiwirrkura, a collaboration between Ian Dunlop, Peter Thorley (a curator at the National Museum of Australia who had been a school teacher-linguist at Kintore in 1988),21 Pip Deveson (Dunlop’s editor and research assistant, now at the ANU), and myself at NYU began. Our first step was to secure a small grant to digitize and color correct the original 16mm footage. However, the intent was never simply to make a film or to restore it, but it was linked to an idea of sustaining the footage as Pintupi “heritage” and assuring Pintupi access to that heritage – through a partnership with an institution of some stability, namely the NMA. The hope was to build a partnership with an ongoing institution that would be committed to sustaining Pintupi heritage, so they could know where it was and have it reproduced if necessary.22
Practically, the next step was to get the footage in shape. Travelling to Sydney, Dunlop and Deveson oversaw the digitization and color correction of the material, representing – as we understood it – Dunlop’s continued authorial ownership of the footage he had shot and his continued interest in making a film with it. We received a further research grant to document, with contemporary Pintupi descendants of those in the footage, retrospective understandings of the film and the early outstation at Yayayi itself.23
Is there a film?
Over the next three years, we conducted interviews and consultations with both Pintupi and whites who were present at Yayayi in 1974. The most extensive consultations took place with two sets of Pintupi interlocutors – in Canberra the following year, with two elder women leaders, Irene Nangala and Monica Robinson Nangala,24 and at Kiwirrkura after that, with two men, Bobby West Tjupurrula and Jimmy Brown Tjampitjinpa. These were the “Pintupi Dialogues” we had mainly intended in titling our research grant that way. In these consultations, all recorded as we watched and discussed footage, the Pintupi consultants consistently identified four themes: (1) the significance of relatives, (2) the health of the people, (3) the strong leadership indicated by meetings in the community as how the elders “spoke strong” and “looked after” people, and (4) sharing or exchange. “People will want to see the kangaroo hunts [that were filmed],” Irene said, “to see their family.” On the busy activity of making artifacts, of much interest to Dunlop, Irene remembered, “They used to make artifacts every day. [Referring to that time at Yayayi as well as during the filming.] So many!” Watching the exchanges and conversations of their elders, Irene and Monica remarked more than once, “Those were happy men!” And their pleasure at the familiar foibles of their relatives was always near the surface of their responses: at the image of one of the young men, sitting on a flour drum and holding himself in a careful posture, they laughed, jokingly, at his apparent self-regard: “Handsome man!” Hearing the figure of $5 mentioned, they commented on the different understandings of money from the perspective of the present: “They think this is a lot of money.” They saw in the footage a better time than their present, in some ways, as closer to the ideals of their culture, and as an example of the self-direction – “doing things for themselves” – through which Pintupi had been able to return to their homelands in the Western Desert. Significantly, some of the consultants drew specific attention to their own current roles as leaders in the community as being modelled on the actions of their senior relatives in the film.
These interviews were largely for research purposes, for documentation, and it was not clear until nearly the end of this process that a film might come out of it. This only transpired in 2013, when Deveson and I finally recorded an interview with Marlene Nampitjinpa Spencer, a senior community leader who had been a lively young teenager at the time of Dunlop’s original filming. Her interview was extraordinary – drawing out and reiterating in dramatic and captivating fashion what we had learned from other consultants. We had discovered a pretty consistent set of frameworks that accounted for what people saw in the footage. At this point, the question was what we might do with this.
We thought the film footage was very strong and many people who viewed it – Indigenous Australian and otherwise – also felt it had direct value. Of course, many Pintupi people were most interested in seeing themselves and their relatives in it. For them, any editing that might remove any of these images would be less than desirable.25 But others – Indigenous and others for whom this isn’t precisely their own history, and more general viewers – also saw something important in the footage in the ways that people carried themselves, the authority of their bearing, their humor, and so on. For myself, I was convinced that the film material, because of its long takes and sync sound, could invite viewers into the intimate world of daily life in a remote community and in that, allow for a more realistic comprehension of self-determination as a “life project” (Blaser 2004), illuminating the pace and forms of self-organization and conversation among people. These themes resonated, I believe, with those articulated by the Pintupi consultants.
In reflecting on the process in 2012, in Canberra, I formulated my thoughts as we recorded ourselves in the documentation project. For me, the presence and availability of this footage was quite amazing because it has many kinds of significance for the kinds of stories that we could tell about Pintupi and Aboriginal life from it. One part of its significance is as a record of what I call a kind of “Indigenous sociality,” of the style of everyday life, of how people actually communicate and engage with each other in intimate and other ways, how they express their “relatedness” as walytja (see Myers 1986). Another significance is its value in the context of the political present, corresponding to the Northern Territory Intervention and broader shifts in Australian federal policies, where there has been so much questioning of the policies of “self-determination” and various kinds of Aboriginal policy (“self-management,” etc.).26 Because this was one of the very first outstations that were supported by the newly elected, transformative Labor government of Gough Whitlam and its new policies of Aboriginal self-determination, the Yayayi footage is an extraordinary record of this early history – of something of how life was lived there. Many people are confident they know everything there is to know about what these small remote communities were like. Actually, however, few people really know much of life in this early period. And the footage is, to a considerable extent, an independent record. It is a recording that one can unpack and discuss what was happening. One can see government officials visiting, from the Aboriginal Arts Board or bringing pay packets to the community; one can see the conversations that take place, the misunderstandings, the understandings, the communications that are occurring. The footage is valuable to open up conversations about what people wanted, what they thought was happening with “self-determination” there. This is what Blaser (2004) meant by the concept of “life project,” as opposed to some simple cultural essentialism: the mixed and entangled relationship between an indigenous community as it pursues its own ends within the constraints and opportunities that surround it. This is all happening in the film material. Finally, it is an incredible record for Papunya Tula Artists – the Aboriginal-owned cooperative in which the acrylic painting movement began (see Bardon and Bardon 2004; Johnson 2010; Myers 2002). In the Yayayi footage, one can see senior men painting in the isolated painting camp beside the creek; you can see and hear the men talking, discussing things with each other; one can see the documentation of a painting, and a visit from the Aboriginal Arts Board. These are early moments of the articulation between Aboriginal painting and the government institutions that were supporting it, nurturing it through grants and marketing. It is possible to see a great deal about the history of Aboriginal people in these small communities as they are engaging with the government, as they are developing their own futures in whatever ways possible.
These are reasons why I wanted to make this available for the descendants of the people who had lived at Yayayi, people living at Kintore and Kiwirrkura now, to talk about their past and their history and maybe to evoke memory that we could then record. What did they think about what was happening at that time? This was a way to elicit their memories and possibly archive a range of responses from people who were there that they could draw on themselves in thinking about where they had been and where they were going.
Making the film: Collaboration in principle and practice
We had imagined initially that editing a shorter film out of the archival material would be directly collaborative, expecting or hoping for participation in an actual editing process. The research consultations and interviews also included extensive interviews recorded with all the non-Indigenous people who appear in the footage. We didn’t have a script or structure for a film from the footage, a film that would incorporate the multiple perspectives and themes articulated by the Pintupi consultants and the others we interviewed. In fact, none of the Pintupi consultants seemed to imagine this sort of version, in conceiving a film that would communicate their perspectives along with those of outsiders, to a broader audience. This is a difference, perhaps, in working with people who do not have an idiom or practice of talking about old photos and other images. Early on, for example, I showed a scene of Yayayi in which my friend Bobby West’s mother was sitting in the family camp with his younger brother. Both mother and brother are now deceased, and I was concerned how this might affect Bobby, what he would say. His mother had died at the hands of his father, in an unfortunate act of violence at night when Bobby was a young man, and his brother had died from petrol sniffing. His response was unexpectedly in reference to something else entirely: “That’s my dog, there. Really strong one!” Whatever his feelings, they were not expressed at that moment.
Nonetheless, it became clear that scenes in the film could evoke memories and stories. When the Aboriginal Arts Board visits Yayayi, at the very beginning of Dunlop’s stay and an important scene in the final film, the Pintupi painting men have a rather tense discussion with Peter Fannin, the Papunya Tula Arts advisor then, about the prospects of their getting a vehicle. Fannin has to tell them that the larger community of Papunya will get a vehicle first, but that later they will put in a grant for another, which Bob Edwards supports. As we screened this scene in 2011, at Kiwirrkura, Bobby West was not particularly interested in the politics and competitions of that earlier moment. Rather, he remembered Peter Fannin as his teacher at Papunya and that he used to take the kids swimming at Yalkipi, a waterhole not far from the large settlement. And he commented on the vehicle that Papunya Tula subsequently obtained for Yayayi and how it took Bobby to Balgo Hills Mission later that year, where he met some of his long-separated family (see below). As in this example, the film footage was most commonly linked to very specific personal memories and relationships. Bobby – like Irene and Monica – was impressed with the meetings that were recorded in which the men engaged with the problems facing the community. There is a scene in which the head councillor, Shorty Bruno, admonishes a gathering of men at a meeting after a bout of drunkenness and violence, “Don’t bring grog into the community. If you do, drink it in your own camp; don’t give it to anybody.” His comment relates very directly to the circumstances of self-determination that we wanted to document. He recognizes their serious efforts to address the problems, and that is what drew Bobby’s attention: “At least they talked about things and sorted them out” (Bobby West, at Kiwirrkura, Oct. 23, 2010).
By 2014, when we consulted with Bobby further, this time about the completed film (entitled Remembering Yayayi) with Marlene as the narrator, his comments brought these themes even more directly into focus. I will discuss them further below. Here, I simply want to point out how much this film is understood in light of the Pintupi pursuit of autonomy, self-direction – “doing things for themselves.”
What we had from all these interviews and responses, at this point, were themes, discussions. The consultants were interested in the footage, but they had no suggestions of any further steps we might take. They wanted the film to be available, copies for themselves or somehow in the community. But the non-Indigenous participants in this – especially Pip, Ian, and I – were trying to figure out how to make these dialogues, these understandings of the socialities of self-determination, available to those who did not speak Pintupi, did not know everyone in the footage, and who were not likely to wade through 10 hours of footage.
What could collaboration be if we didn’t have an editing partner? From the perspective of the present, I think we had a poor understanding of what collaboration or partnership could be. There wasn’t a Pintupi editor with whom to work. In fact, it seems that they were content with having us make a version, following their insights, and for them to approve or disapprove.27 We didn’t have the kind of interviews and film material that could hold the footage together. None of our consultants had taken on the task of explaining or narrating. It wasn’t until Deveson and I were able to film with Marlene Nampitjinpa Spencer that we had the prospect of a film, rather than an archival compilation.
I had first shown Marlene the footage on my initial trip to Kintore in 2006, in a laptop screening with her family. Her animated response at the time was part of what made it seem worth pursuing the project. But Marlene was and is a busy person, a leader in her community and spokesperson for health organizations (at first for the Pintupi Homelands Health Service and more recently for the Western Desert Dialysis Project). We weren’t able to film with her until 2013. Coordinating Marlene’s time in Alice Springs with mine and Deveson’s was necessary for the interview, and by this point, we began to think of the Dialysis Project, known more colloquially as “the Purple House” (because of the color of the house in which the project was housed), as another partner in the film project. It is an institution that embodies Pintupi, and Aboriginal, political concerns and self-direction.28
Source: Photo Fred Myers.
Marlene’s commentary was recorded in a hotel room in one day. It brought out an inner life of the film, gave concrete form to the relationships on the screen, maintained a perspective on the film events as a past that she treasured, and illuminated the value of these rare visual archives for contemporary populations who have little access to their own history. As with Bobby West, the images provoked memories: her little brother, Jacky (who died young from petrol sniffing), she remembered laughingly: “He always used to follow me like that.” The old ladies near her mother’s camp, she laughed, are “all inside the tent, hiding from the camera. At night they sleep there, might be a thousand people, this way and that.”
Marlene wanted the recording to succeed. She faced the camera, and Pip behind it, with confidence and was comfortable allowing the discussion to follow the footage, opening up to the discussion of her own life. She spoke in both Pintupi and English, turning from me (in Pintupi, largely) to Deveson (partly translating or repeating what she said). Remarkably, in retrospect, reflecting on the footage and that time led her to focus on the importance of her father’s example, of working for (the) people, of leadership. Bobby had similarly, in conversation with me while we were discussing the film, made connections between the example of his father (Freddy West) and other senior men who had taught him and his responsibilities for leadership and caring for his people. The past, or more specifically this past, a memory of it stimulated by the footage, was bringing these current leaders in their communities to find the model for active political agency in that earlier period. Was this a legacy of Pintupi self-determination?
The next day, Marlene had arranged for me to visit the Purple House. Shortly after I got there, a bus arrived with some of the patients and visitors who were in town. Marlene pointed to a large woman who knew me from Yayayi days but whom I did not immediately recognize as Kayu Napangarti. Napangarti threw her arms around me in a greeting of pleasure, and that morning, I began to recognize how many of my old friends and acqaintances had come to make the Purple House part of their existence. The path from the bush to settlement, from the Western Desert, to Yayayi, to Kintore was ending up in renal failure and dialysis for many. It became clearer what Pintupi saw in the healthy bodies of the footage from 1974, and also that the footage should be linked in some way to this project.
From the moment we recorded this interview, Deveson and I thought we had a thread on which we could draw the Yayayi footage together. The organizing framework would be the themes that all the consultants had identified, but Marlene’s emotional responses to different scenes, her identification of people and interpretation of what was being done and spoken would allow an audience to share in her memories. Moreover, the arc of the interview, which gradually led to her contemplation of the deaths of her senior relatives, brought her to consideration of what had passed, of her own memories and loss.29 We asked her to start by telling us the story of how she got to Yayayi, to Papunya, when she was a little girl. We wanted her to situate her response to the footage in her own knowledge of living at Yayayi in 1974. She responded by identifying herself as follows, “My name is Marlene Nampitjinpa, and I was born in Western Australia, at Kiwirrkura, in 1959. I’m going to try and tell this story, about history. Old days story.” She told the camera that when the original footage was being shot, people weren’t really familiar with cameras, that they didn’t have images of themselves. She discussed how her family had lived when she was a small child, and how they had come to Papunya and subsequently why Pintupi had moved to Yayayi.30
Marlene’s interview ended very emotionally, with her acknowledgement of the deaths of her relatives, her sense of them as being alive in the images but all gone. “Parara,” she recalled, “my favorite cousin. All gone.” Why have they died, too early, she asks? “Should be there, all these men. Why they gone too early?” She ponders the health issues, familiar to her from her career as a health worker and spokesperson. With tears streaming, she draws herself together and faces the camera to say, “This is my story. Because it really touched me this video. I knew all the men, all the women, the people when I was a young girl in Yayayi.” From her joy and pleasure at seeing the living images of herself and her family to her grief at their loss, the film shows something of the value such archival materials have for Indigenous people as well as illuminating the lives of people in a remote community in the early period of self-determination. Seeing the footage, she told us, “make me happy. It touches my heart. Kurrunparni pungu [struck my spirit].” She remembered seeing the footage for the first time, when I showed it to her at Kintore in 2006, and she commented, “We didn’t have pictures of our own people, their voices.” We believed we could make the film.
It fell to Deveson, the camera person and editor, to pull the footage and the interview into a film over the following five months. We had rough translations from my 1975 work in Sydney with Freddy West and George Yapa, and also the commentary of the four consultants in 2010 and 2011. This was a huge task, with 10 hours of Yayayi footage alone, besides the other material and interview with Marlene. But as her editing began to identify particular scenes, Deveson and I, and sometimes with Thorley’s help, coordinated in producing accurate and careful translations of the Pintupi speech in each scene. This was particularly significant to me; I saw the flow of everyday life around the exchange of banter, teasing, food, and oratory as a vital contribution of the original footage – essential to understanding the familiar sociality of Pintupi people that has generally been inaccessible to outsiders. This editing work took place in Canberra, with Ian participating at times with Deveson, occasional visits by Thorley, and with communication by email and skype between Canberra and New York. Eventually, we had a rough cut, which Deveson sent to me, and for which I provided further translations and clarifications.
One more stage of preparation remained. The unedited original footage had been screening regularly, if not continuously, in Kintore and Kiwirrkura as well as Alice Springs (in the dialysis treatment rooms at the Purple House). Because of this acceptance and constant exposure, and after consultation along the way, we were somewhat assured that the film material was acceptable. Marlene saw the actual edited film version when she visited Canberra in 2013 for health meetings, and was shown the film by Deveson. She announced herself happy with it.
We felt we still needed to be sure that we had final approval from community leaders, especially from men because of the inclusion of what is a public moment in the Tingarri ceremonies at Yayayi. In this scene, young men who have been secluded for later stages of ritual instruction in ceremonies known as Tingarri are brought out into the community behind a barrier of leaves and branches held by senior men to obscure their being seen. Dunlop had been permitted to film this public event, and it had been screening regularly in community viewings, but we wanted to be certain about it.
I was still unable to travel for a consultation in the communities, which in the best of circumstances I would have preferred to undertake myself, personally and in Pintupi. However, we were able to send a copy of the DVD to Alice Springs for a consultation that would draw on the support of our partner institution, Papunya Tula Artists. A friend and colleague, Luke Scholes, who had formerly worked closely with senior Pintupi men at Papunya Tula Artists, was working at the Purple House (where the footage was watched, in any case).31 We asked Luke, who knew Bobby West well, to show him the film edit and see if it was acceptable.32 Given the difficulties of finding time with Bobby, a much travelled and serially involved leader at Kiwirrkura and Papunya Tula Artists, this took a while. Eventually he was able to see it.
Luke Scholes reported carefully on his consultation with Bobby:
First and foremost, Bobby loved the film. I have the feeling that he was genuinely affected by the film also; he echoed a lot of what Marlene had to say throughout. He thought it was a wonderful record of that time and that he was very happy that the footage exists.
The only thing Bobby raised as a small concern was Marlene’s comments about the section of the film that shows the boys coming out of the bush. Bobby commented that it was “Tingarri Business, not Tjilkatja.” “Like University,” he said. “Learning how to sing the Tingarri.” “She didn’t know, so she shouldn’t say, should be quiet.” I then asked if anything needed to be done about this section of the film and he said, yes, it should be taken out. I got the feeling that [for] Bobby … this was to protect Marlene in a way.
The rest of the film he thoroughly enjoyed.
(Luke Scholes email, Feb. 25, 2014a)33
We followed up on this concern. What changes does he want us to make? In return email, Luke wrote as follows:
I can’t recall exactly Marlene’s comment regarding that part. I think it was something very innocuous like: “All the young men, coming back from business” and Bobby thinks she is suggesting that she was privy to some aspect of the type of ceremonies being performed. I think Bobby thinks it is unwise for Marlene to appear to have knowledge on [this], which Bobby thinks her comment implies. Therefore he believes that [the] small comment that Marlene makes should be removed. Again, Bobby didn’t make a big deal of it, maybe just distancing Marlene from the male domain. He did suggest she should not say anything “because she doesn’t know” (the exact nature of the business being performed) and therefore Tjapanangka [i.e. Myers] should take that bit out.
(Luke Scholes email 2, Feb. 25, 2014b).
What is at issue here is a familiar concern in Indigenous Australia, namely the gender segregation of ritual/esoteric knowledge.34 Bobby was asking that some small edits be made in the film to make certain that it was clear that Marlene was not speaking inappropriately about “men’s business” when she narrated the scene in which we show the movement of Tingarri novices into the camp. The offending portion, we realized, was a comment Marlene had made about “when they grab the boys and take them to the bush.” Now omitted from her commentary, this could seem to be a reference to male initiation proper (Tjilkatja), and not the more publicly open Tingarri ceremonies and performances – which Bobby likens to “University” (see Myers 1986, on different categories of ritual and performance). There is an important parallel here in the distinction between Tingarri and more focused male initiation: when Papunya painters were criticized for revealing restricted material in their paintings in 1971–1972, they decided to restrict themselves to the public portions of Tingarri stories, a category of Ancestral activity that they determined to be acceptable for limited revelation.35 It would be inappropriate, even transgressive, for a woman to speak of or even to imply knowledge of men’s initiatory rituals. Thus, the narration of the film had to avoid such implication.36
There was diplomacy of other sorts involved in this consultation as well. Bobby had been an immense support in every stage of supporting the project, and perhaps my own closest friend in the Pintupi community. Ideally, he might have been the narrator, but what we had on camera militated for other choices. Therefore, we had wanted to explain to him how it was that the film came to be edited around the narrative and figure of Marlene, and none of the other consultants. The edits became even more important, however, as it was necessary to avoid a violation of rights Pintupi men shared with others in these ceremonies.
When those edits were done, we sent the final version back out to Alice Springs to seek approval not only from Bobby again, but also from the Indigenous governing board of the Western Desert Dialysis Project, mainly made up of senior Pintupi women. The group included Marlene, but also Irene Nangala who had been one of the initial consultants and supporters of the project. The governing board approved it, and were confident to allow its being shown at Kintore as part of the public celebration of the Purple House’s Tenth Anniversary, on September 25, 2014. The only objection was that people in the film were sometimes heard swearing, which a few thought indecorous, but they were swept aside, apparently, by Marlene’s enthusiasm. The women supported the screening. It screened at Kintore without any difficulty, making the first public screening in the community itself.
Circulation: Authors and other owners
More or less at the same time, we submitted the film to the Margaret Mead Film and Video Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, one of the premier ethnographic film venues. Moving beyond a community screening, for which the terms of our use were clear, we needed to get permission to do so from the National Film and Sound Archives (NFSA). Since Dunlop was one of the directors and the footage under consideration had been shot by him while working at Film Australia, we had assumed we would have the rights to use it in a film.
To Dunlop’s consternation and our surprise, however, this was not the view of the NFSA. Formally and officially, they held copyright to the footage that had been shot by Dunlop, as it was a product of Film Australia (which later became Screen Australia) and Dunlop had been an employee. Thus, these materials became the property of this government archive. Therefore, if we were to proceed with a film, we would have to pay licensing fees (fees per second used) for use of the footage. There were approximately 40 minutes used. While they were willing to discount the fee, in light of the fact that this was educational work and even further because we had contributed over $10,000 to digitize and color correct the footage, we were left with the prospect of paying more than $10,000 further.
Subsequently, Dunlop remembered that he had a memorandum of understanding developed upon his retirement in 1987 that gave him permission to continue working on his film projects. While the Yayayi project had not been specifically named in this document, in the first meeting with the NFSA he had neglected to mention this agreement.37 Through a letter of protest (really, indignation) that Dunlop sent to the head of the NFSA, our concerns reached the highest level, but at this time, we could make no further progress. This still left a considerable sum to be paid for the rights to show the film at film festivals world-wide. At standard rates, the rights for licensing the material for a DVD for distribution, even by an educational institution, would be around $50,000.38 Pressed for time, and against Dunlop’s wishes, we used funds from our research grant to pay the discounted license fees we had been offered for film festival screenings alone ($12,960) so the film could be shown at the Margaret Mead Film Festival – and subsequently at other festivals.
As the footage moved from the documentation project and community participation to a new stage of being, a new use, the NFSA added an additional condition – they required proof of “the community’s” agreement to have the footage used in our film.39 While this followed the laudable protocol of many government organizations to recognize Indigenous cultural property rights in their images, since we had been working closely with Pintupi consultants, and with the agreements of our own Human Subjects protocols (through the Australian National University) and with an Indigenous organization (Papunya Tula Artists), we had a layering of consent for the project. While the NFSA required some form of “community” approval, it was really unclear what this “consent agreement” would look like. We were somewhat taken aback when the NFSA put forward a rather different model of consultation developed in a recent history project with the historian Professor Ann McGrath.40 It set a consent process that was impossible for us to meet as we could hardly backtrack to develop our project retroactively to follow the new model set forth. We felt that from the first, our project had been done in consultation. What was needed, now, and from the largely institutional and bureaucratic side of things, was for a “community” council to sign off literally, and on paper. Unfortunately, by 2014, these councils did not exist – casualties both of the controversial NTER and also of the reorganization of communities into larger entities, the “shires.” However, the staff at the NFSA were agreeable to accepting a letter from Bobby West, who wrote his approval as a senior man and representative of Kiwirrkura:
My name is Bobby West Tjupurrula. My father and many other of my family appear in the film “Remembering Yayayi.” I was a consultant on the project, when I was chairperson of the Kiwirrkura Community and gave comments and advice on much of it, I have approved the final version with one small change that I requested.
We have been working with Fred Myers and Pip Deveson on the video from 1974 since 2006, and we are all so happy to see our mothers and fathers again and to show them to our kids.
Sincerely,
Bobby West Tjupurrula
(Letter to National Film and Sound Archives, June 2, 2014)
It was reassuring to me that, in sending his letter of approval Bobby said that “he thought it was important that we can all see this film” (Luke Scholes email, June 2, 2014c).41
The NFSA also required the permission of Papunya Tula Artists as they were listed as the contact for permissions for Yayayi footage.42
However, the problems of licensing fees and negotiations around them were not over. There remained some surprises for us in the response of the National Film and Sound Archives and their sense of proprietary ownership over the footage itself.
In 2014, the NFSA quoted license fees of over $100,000 for rights to use the archival footage in television. We had imagined that the relatively new National Indigenous Television channel (NITV)43 might be interested in screening this film, as it spoke to many Indigenous concerns about “Aboriginal self-determination” and the continued pressure for “assimilation,” but also it represented a situation – of relatively traditional people, speaking their own language – in an Aboriginal history that many Indigenous people might imagine their ancestors to have lived. If this seemed a plausible and productive outcome, the proposed fees foreclosed it. The NFSA approach at that time treated Remembering Yayayi as simply a usage of their archival property. They respected that the footage was a form of cultural property of the Pintupi communities, registered by the requirement of their agreement to usages. That is, no one could use this footage without such agreement. However, the NFSA claimed ultimate copyright as represented by licensing fees for various usages. Despite Dunlop’s insistence that his understanding with Film Australia, which had preceded the existence of the footage in NFSA vaults, allowed him to continue to work on and make films from his prior work, the NFSA view was that this understanding referred only to the specifically named projects in his retirement agreement. Informal knowledge suggests that the advent of significant licensing fees in projects of an educational (vs commercial) value was relatively recent and probably a consequence of the governmental restructuring of the archives and reduction of support.44
The conversations between members of our project and representatives of the archive were not productive, and at times seemed very much at cross-purposes. By 2015, however, the Australian National University legal counsel took up the case. We realized that, as the host of our research grant and by its agreement in setting up that relationship, the ANU (itself a government institution) was at least one of the “owners” of the work we were producing. Deputy University Counsel Rachel Vance made the argument, successfully it seems, for “a solution that allows the wider release of the film which has only been possible to create as a result of the significant and considerable contributions to the Work (and the derivative works) by Ian Dunlop, FA (NFSA), Pip Deveson, ANU, NMA, Papunya Tula Artists and the ARC” (letter of June 17, 2015 to Adam Flynn at NFSA). Vance’s letter draws attention to the multiple parties who have been involved in producing the film, contributing in various ways (financial and otherwise), and a history of connection to it. Dunlop’s initial “authorial” rights have an important place in this discussion. Indeed, as Jane Anderson (2013:230) has pointed out crucially in regard to the formation of archives themselves more generally, “authorship is an integral component for understanding how archives are constituted, how they distribute certain kinds of authority, and how they circulate meaning.” “Authorship” has cultural significance in the organization of this archive. Thus, the legal counsel points out that “Ian Dunlop remained and continues to be the expert on this material [the footage] and to this day when the FA Collection Film Library has a request to use some of Ian’s ethnographic footage they nearly always refer it to him for his opinion and advice (fee-free)” (Anderson 2013). But, in recognition of what have emerged as further conditions of archival rights, so also she argues for the significance of the consent of Papunya Tula Artists and the elders of the Pintupi communities to use the footage and their encouragement of its being accessible to them and to the public. On the other hand, NFSA has not contributed to what she calls “the Work.”
These are arguments for waiving the license fees, based on the agreement FA granted in 1987 and 1988. However, they also represent a case for the changing and complex relationships that are justly embodied in the film, especially as “Neither Ian Dunlop nor ANU intend to commercially exploit the film but want it to be accessible to a wider audience than can be reached through film festivals or non-commercial screening” (Vance 2015; Anderson 2013)
Screenings
Our initial licensing agreement with NFSA allowed us to show Remembering Yayayi in film festivals worldwide. The first such screening was the Margaret Mead Film Festival at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. By this point, we had decided that the film – as a projection of Pintupi history – should not be used simply as a representation, but rather that it should and could be used to put forward Pintupi contemporary aspirations – as an intimation of their aspirations for self-determination and to help bring attention and support for the Dialysis Project, with which Marlene and Irene were closely associated. Since that project has made its goal the support of people’s relationship to place as a basis for a cultural future, it seemed the proper location of the film screening. For the screening, our research grant budget allowed us to bring Marlene to represent the film and also to make the connection to the Dialysis Project.
The screening in New York was a great success. On October 24, 2014, Marlene sat in the front of the theater, beside Pip and me. As the screen lit up with her image at the start, she began to talk back to the film – just as she had when I showed her the footage on my laptop in 2006. Her laughter at herself speaking, her commentary in English and Pintupi, freed the New York audience to enjoy the humor and pathos in the film. When it was over, we handed the microphone to her for the short question and answer period, and she spoke – in English – about the health issues of people in Central Australia. As she said then, she had this role because she could overcome her shyness.
The next screening was the official launch of the film in Australia, at the National Museum of Australia, April 10, 2015. The NMA was a partner in the project, so this was the logical place to show the film, and Thorley arranged for the film to be shown there with the explicit goal of linking it to the museum’s acquisition of a “dialysis chair” for its collection as an important component of a planned exhibition about Aboriginal health. This was an attempt to mobilize the film to benefit the Pintupi communities – giving them visibility for their health cause as well as their concerns about their security in homeland communities. We hoped that they would be able to use the opportunity to recruit support for the Dialysis Project, drawing both on the audience for the film and the proximity of government agencies they could meet on their visit.
The response to the film was moving, again mobilized by Marlene’s extrafilmic commentary. In the Q&A that followed, both Marlene and Monica spoke about the film and the situation of health in the desert communities. However, the most crucial moment was the commentary by the CEO of the Dialysis Project, Sarah Brown, as she linked the film to the current situation. By April 2015, with remote communities directly under attack from the Federal Government her comments pointed to the importance of some kind of self-determination for health, and she reminded the audience that the Dialysis Project was a Pintupi initiative. They had lobbied government for help, wanting to have treatment centers in their remote homeland communities so the older people could remain on their country and close to their kin; such proximity is important to their health, and also important to the transmission of cultural knowledge to the next generations. The Dialysis Project, she told the audience, is not a government project; Pintupi people did it themselves.45 Just as they had moved to Kintore through their own initiative (and really to Yayayi), so the Dialysis Project was a part of that history of doing things for themselves.
That the film could be a platform for these discussions, and materially so by providing an occasion on which the situation of Indigenous people in remote communities was made visible, seemed appropriate. The question one expects to hear about making a film for which the audience is outsiders is “what value does it have for the local people themselves?” From the initial response of viewers at Kiwirrkura about the health of their relatives back then, to their recognition of the leadership of their elders in the film, to the current threat to remote communities, the existence and form of the film had significance for them.
Subsequently, the film has been accepted to three major ethnographic film festivals,46 but these screenings will not have the presence of Marlene or other Pintupi interlocutors. The distances are great and the costs too high.
Memories
Continued and repeated dialogues at all stages of the development of this film have been a productive means of consultation. Over time, we have learned more about the effect of the film for Pintupi viewers, its connections to their memories of that time and the ways they look back to that time from the present. This excerpt from an email from Luke Scholes detailing more extensive and very important commentary from Bobby West, shows, in significant ways, how this footage is and has been processed. His comments lead him to a broad reflection on the costs and tensions of leadership:
I thought I would just record everything Bobby spoke about for your interest. . . . Bobby asked how old Ian was and if Ian had a son? [He] Commented that Jeff Stead47 is now living in Melbourne.
During the section of the film where a second car is to be purchased for Yayayi, Bobby remembered that the second car was a yellow Landrover which was driven to Balgo for business. He thought that at this time there were no Pintupi who could drive, so Snowy Tjampitjinpa and Linda Syddick’s husband drove them. He also commented that George Maxwell Tjampitjinpa, Donald Tjapaltjarri, Riley Rowe and Ronnie Tjampitjinpa were the first Pintupi to learn to drive.
Bobby had a lot to say about the old man sitting in the humpy, Kulitu, Joe Young’s father, who I am sure you recognized. He was a cripple who could only walk sometimes due to a badly wounded leg. John Bennett had speared him in a dispute regarding the unfair distribution of meat. Bobby was amazed to hear his voice during the arrival of the business mob shouting instructions with his typically prominent voice.
Bobby commented on the practice of young initiates bringing back “toy” weapons for the younger children that they had fashioned during their time in the bush. He mentioned that Malpa Jackson, Ray James and one of the Bruno boys were a part of that group of boys going through business. He commented that Ray not long after this was taken to Yuendumu to attend more business but ran away and set off for Yayayi again only to be tracked down by the old men. Bobby said he was still a boy at this stage and so stayed away from this business while it was on. He stayed with Ginger Tjakamarra and Wintjiya, Long Jack also.
Bobby made special mention of Shorty Bruno, saying he thought Shorty was a tremendous leader of the Yayayi community. He said other people were jealous of Yayayi and how well it was run. He said Ronnie was also one of the bosses there but was not well respected or trusted due to his “me, me” attitude and his like for a drink.
He told the story of the group of jealous men from Haasts Bluff and Papunya who travelled to Yayayi and offered to take Shorty hunting. They all went hunting together and shot many kangaroo, but then the men shot and killed Shorty. Using magic they brought him back to life and sent him back to the community where he quickly became sick and died.
Toward the end of the film, Bobby lamented the greed that has engulfed [names a community]. This was partly in response to the wonderful images of the families sharing the marlu [kangaroo] which Bobby audibly responded to. He said that back in those days everyone shared the spoils of the hunt and everything else they had. He named almost every prominent member of the [community], and said he thought they were not like the old people sharing their money, food and cars. They only thought of themselves. . . .
(Luke Scholes email, Feb. 25, 2014a)
Scholes notes that Bobby’s comments were made at a time in which new arrangements for mining royalties were being signed which excluded many people who had thought of themselves as relatives.
Bobby’s reflections are exactly what we had hoped to hear during the earlier primary consultations, at Kiwirrkura and Canberra, but memories and reactions emerged more piecemeal. Talking to Luke, in conversations subsequent to those he had with me, Bobby reiterated and extended the story forward from the footage of the painters’ request for a vehicle to his own memories of the yellow Landrover they later obtained and used to visit Balgo and recreate ties among disparate Western Desert relatives. On a darker note, possibly, Bobby was prompted to talk about the Yayayi leader Shorty Bruno’s death by my question to Marlene about her father’s death. He went beyond his earlier, somewhat truncated praise for Yayayi’s leadership in sorting things out in meetings. While Marlene had dropped her head to the table at my question about where he died, Bobby thought back to suspicions Pintupi had about the death of a leader, the result of jealousy at his standing and at Yayayi’s success. I had heard this story, whispered from time to time, from my own history and visits. I was surprised to hear it surface like this, but it shares with much of the commentary we heard – about the strength of the older people, their leadership in establishing an independent Pintupi community and the model of responsibility they created for the next generation – for people like Bobby and Marlene.
Still, for a film that presents the early moments of Aboriginal self-determination, a political project engaged with the Australian state and a colonial heritage, it is disconcerting to have the story told in local parlance – jealousy, sorcery, death.
Conclusion
Unless there is a feeling of ownership on the part of the [Australian Indigenous] people you are working with, the effort simply cannot be sustained, because it is a huge effort in ways that are quite unnatural for them culturally. Filmmaking is almost the opposite of anything that can work in their culture. It is completely hierarchical generally, and they work entirely by consensus. It’s also rigidly scheduled and that’s not how they work at all.
(Rolf de Heer, Myers Interview about Charlie’s Country, recorded New York City, June 6, 2015).
In discussing the complexities of filmmaking with an Aboriginal community, in the quotation with which I head this conclusion, the noted Australian filmmaker Rolf de Heer drew attention most directly to the contradiction between the hierarchical organization of commercial filmmaking and the emphasis on consensus in Indigenous practice. Indeed, I began this chapter with this sense of the obstacles or challenges that lie in wait for those who might want to engage ethically and properly with people who have very different relationships to film material and to develop a project of “returning” to them material that is of historical and personal interest. The object of my consideration has been a body of material that is itself embedded in a history of distinctive moments, practices, and institutions (governmental, local). The rights and duties it reflects and within which it exists have been changing, not only as Indigenous rights to their own images have become more forcefully articulated and recognized by (in this case) Australian governmental archives and protocols, but also as technology has made these objects available to viewing and possession in new ways. These circumstances require renewed attention to the properties of archival material and archival material as a form of property. The existence of the footage is critical, but the question is much more than who owns the footage, and while that becomes important later, the process shows a real shift in thinking about ownership of the visual image.
I have followed the processes in which a body of film footage is produced in 1974, becomes an archival object, is brought back to the community, becomes an object of reflection, and eventually becomes the basis from which a film is made – as a movement through various regimes of property. I explain the initial reasoning behind the production of the film footage by Ian Dunlop, the happenstance reasons why it never really came to anything in terms of a final production when Dunlop made it, and the way in which the material has continued to be remembered and desired because of what it contains and what kind of place Yayayi (the community of filming) was. Finally, I try to show how it came into life as a whole because of the collaboration and investment of many parties. The time for making that “whole” had to emerge temporally and socially, an important dimension of collaboration and the lives that something we might call “cultural property” has.
The process I am describing here is framed by the conundrum of the very idea of “cultural property” itself, a concept derived from forms of Western law that suggest a stable concrete object whose provenance can be determined conclusively. Despite its attractiveness and value in defending or asserting Indigenous rights to their own cultural knowledge, it is difficult to use such a concept to describe the fluid, relational and constantly changing ways in which Aboriginal ideas of protocol and custodianship continue to be negotiated in ongoing activity. This is the problem, in my view, with efforts to establish an acceptable framework of guidelines such as the various, laudable “ICIP” – Indigenous Cultural Intellectual Property – protocols. They are premised on a very limited idea of what can happen in circumstances of cultural flow. One might simply consider the way in which the taboo on images of the deceased has changed over the generation of the film’s existence.
Current protocols that attempt to specify cultural property in Indigenous representation (such as Janke 2002) suffer from imagining these forms in terms that ignore, restrict, or deny the complexity of the entanglements inhabited by the materialities of culture. Protocols may, for example, impose a stability that imagines an endpoint of negotiation. In the case of intercultural film projects such as the one I have discussed, this includes everything from retrieving archival material to the temporalities of production and the negotiations of circulation. In the discussion of the complexities of filmmaking with an Aboriginal community which I use to start this section, Rolf de Heer draws attention most directly to the contradiction between the hierarchical organization of commercial filmmaking and the emphasis on consensus in Indigenous practice.
The issues are not restricted to Indigenous protocols. I remember that my own access – right to research with – the Yayayi archive through the National Archive depended on being an authorized researcher via support from Dunlop – acknowledging his rights as the “author” of the material. Indeed, if one recognizes the collective nature of filmmaking as Howard Becker (1982) does in his famous Artworlds, one sees the articulation or delineation of rights and identities in a “film” reflected in contracts and credits, sometimes disputed, but clearly an attempt to determine accountabilities, authorship, and so on – the relationships objectified – in a product.
“Collaboration” and “consultation” are both terms now commonly extended to discussions of culture-making that involves multiple parties and especially parties that have different rights, different forms of power, and different technological or skill capacities in representing the stories and lives of human beings (see also Anderson and Montenegro in this volume). Both terms are ethically charged, but perhaps inadequate to characterize the complexities of the relationships to which they guide us. There are two central points I want to make. The first is that the processes in which these practices are carried out are neither seamless nor effortlessly consensual. The second is that film, as a distinctive form of cultural property, is not something that is simply “owned.” Rather, this “property” is a foundation for social relationships. The processes of collaboration and consultation make it a platform on which a variety of relationships are established and produced.
In a very generative essay on property, the anthropologist Marilyn Strathern has written insightfully about the way in which property may specify a particular moment for objects in relational flow: “Ownership gathers things momentarily to a point by locating them in the owner, halting endless dissemination, effecting an identity” (1999:177). Strathern directs us away from overly stable conceptions of “property.” Whatever usage they have come to have in the emerging protocols of “cultural property,” it seems that the practice of property in Western law does not simply fall back on such stabilities. In the final argument put forward by the ANU legal counsel, it was impressive to see that every form of relationship was drawn into the attempt to articulate what is at stake in this new hybrid object, Remembering Yayayi. This dispute, if we can call it that in formal terms, will, in the end, produce a final outcome, a determination – namely, the waiver of license fees that allows us to screen the film and distribute it non-commercially on DVD and free-to air TV. But what we see is not a simple, straightforward application of rules, but a negotiated recognition of identities and relationships, responsibilities, around the object. Presumably also settled by such a determination might be accountability for effects of the film – for example, if there are objections to portions of it being screened. Emotional harm?
Finally, I must speak to what I see as the most fundamental dimension of the mobilization of this film material in collaboration. The question that was hanging over the project was what value it might have for those identified with the film subjects. For whom does the question of Pintupi autonomy and health in 1974 matter and in what ways? In that sense, the context for this project lies in the governmental threats of closing remote Indigenous communities, a threat that actually includes the Pintupi community of Kiwirrkura since the funding in Western Australia is most directly threatened. But this specific threat exists as part of a growing push toward forms of assimilation and away from support for cultural futures that the previous Prime Minister Tony Abbott called “lifestyle choices.” Remote dialysis, the immediate mission of the Western Desert Dialysis project, understands Indigenous health in Central Australia, contrastingly, as linked to being “on country,” to sustaining the transmission of culture between generations by having the elderly renal patients close to their families and country. To mobilize the film in this context, for example, by screening on national television or regional screenings, allows Pintupi socialities and desires to be shared and to speak in the space that currently engulfs them.
Acknowledgements
The research on which this chapter is based was supported by grants from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (2009) and an Australia Research Council Linkage Grant (2010–2013), as well as support from the National Museum of Australia. This chapter is much indebted to many people, as is the story told. I want to thank my colleagues Ian Dunlop, Pip Deveson, Peter Thorley, and Nic Peterson for their many contributions, collegiality, and ideas. Especially, I thank Bobby West, Jimmy Brown Tjampitjinpa, Marlene Nampitjinpa Spencer, Monica Robinson, Irene Nangala for their support, insight, and patience. Thanks especially to Papunya Tula Artists for sponsoring the project. I thank Paul Sweeney and Luke Scholes, at Papunya Tula, for their support of the project, of getting out into the Kintore and Kiwirrkura communities, and for various consultations along the way. Thanks also to Sarah Brown and the Western Desert Dialysis Project for support and for helping define a future for this project. Thanks to the numerous interviewees we pestered in this process: Jeremy Long, Bob Edwards, Jeff Stead, Peter Fannin, Terry Parry, Ken and Leslie Hansen, Dick Kimber. And thanks to Carolyn Cann for helping find some of the materials we consulted in developing the archive of the project. Finally, thanks to Faye Ginsburg, Jane Anderson, and Haidy Geismar for reading and discussing this chapter with me and helping to make it come about – and especially to Jane for a Herculean effort to edit the chapter down to size.
Notes
1 I realize there is considerable debate about whether returning digital material to a community is “repatriation.” Here I am using the term in a colloquial sense as we were using it to discuss more generally a return to the Pintupi communities of video material shot with them but which they had not seen. The extent to which it would be repatriated in any more formal sense was itself a question we had.
2 I am indebted to Jane Anderson for this way of teasing apart the complex story in these terms.
3 Pintupi is one of the many dialects of the broader Western Desert language family. The people referred to as Pintupi are Western Desert people who came eastward toward missions and settlements on the eastern edge of the desert, to Hermannsburg, Haasts Bluff, and later Papunya, from the 1930s to the 1960s. In moving from the desert eastward, they settled – or became sedentarized – in communities that relied partly on food and resources from outside and aimed at their protection and later their assimilation toward the Anglo-Australian norm. See Myers (1986).
4 The Commonwealth Film Unit was originally established in 1945 as the Australian National Film Board to produce documentary films dealing with matters of national Australia.
5 Dunlop, I. and Gray, J. 1958. Balloons and Spinifex. Australian Commonwealth Film Unit, Lindfield, NSW.
6 Renamed Film Australia in 1973.
7 See Myers (2006).
8 See Bryson (2002). The resulting films of this project, directed by Roger Sandall, were Pintupi Revisit Yaru and Pintupi Revisit Yumari.
9 Discussions of the restrictions on filming ceremony and the specific events – or transgressions – that brought these concerns into play can be found in Bryson (2002) and Myers (2015).
10 Deveson (2012) writes that “Dunlop had gone to Yirrkala [in 1970] wanting to adopt a new approach to his filming with people – and wanting to establish a real collaboration with Yolngu.”
11 Dunlop’s ideas about ethnographic filmmaking were evolving at this time, both through his own engagements with people, through the growing availability of lighter cameras, sync sound and color film, and through a growing awareness of ethnographic film work elsewhere – of Jean Rouch, Robert Gardner, Colin Young in 1966 and Tim Asch and David MacDougall in 1972 (Deveson 2012).
12 Sound operator Es Giddy and backup camera operator Jon Rhodes.
13 The activities of ethnography and filmmaking were not always easily coordinated. The sheer technical and physical requirements of getting the camera and sound recording set up, getting a decent angle to capture activity, asking people to continue what they were doing or to do it again so they could get it right – all of these materialities of filmmaking were in conflict with my own rather less constrained activities. Especially, since Pintupi communities are rather unstructured, and unplanned, the project of filming in them is often at odds with their pace and flow.
14 I went alone. Dunlop had been planning to accompany me on the trip, but only a few weeks before we were to leave, he broke his leg badly in a fall, and was unable to travel. My former student Lisa Stefanoff and Basil Schild joined me on the visit to Kiwirrkura and helped record the events there.
15 In 1973 and 1974, at Yayayi, Pintupi people would sometimes come across – or ask to see – a book with photographs of themselves or their relatives. The older people would often slam a book closed, or put it down, if they came across the image of someone who was deceased. They certainly would not speak their name, and would whisper to me some terms to identify them. Younger people would, even then, be interested to see.
16 Jimmy Brown pre-screened the footage attentively, quietly clicking his tongue at moments that struck him, responding to scenes. Jimmy was one of the “old Pintupi,” people who had come in from the bush before 1960, and he regarded the “new Pintupi” with a certain kind of nostalgia, relatives but people who were still “bush” people. At the long sequence of Yanyatjarri Tjampitjinpa making boomerangs, he commented, “He’s a happy man. Everybody likes to be around him. Always happy.” At another point, when Freddy West was butchering and sharing a kangaroo he cooked, Jimmy remembered, “He was a very kind man” (Myers field notes Monday May 29, 2006).
17 Louise Curham, Project Officer, Film Preservation at the National Archives was very helpful in the project, allowing access and reproduction of materials.
18 While the email refers to “tapes,” it was actually copies of the DVD that we left at Kiwirrkura. As will become clear, my close friend Bobby West Tjupurrula was one of the principal consultants and supporters of the whole project.
19 The fields of power and interest around this footage have been even more complex than I can discuss within the narrative confines of this chapter. The trip to Kiwirrkura to screen the film required crossing into Western Australia and engaging with the Ngaanyatjarra Land Council that represents Kiwirrkura as well as the Central Land Council that represents Kintore. This required negotiating another set of relationships and jurisdictions, not to speak of personal animosities and jealousies.
20 As a side note, I should say that the film material had already achieved usefulness. When the Indigenously owned painting cooperative Papunya Tula Artists celebrated the building of a new studio at Kintore in 2007, they invited me to show some of the archival footage to connect the early days of Papunya Tula (at Yayayi) with the present. At the screening, the Pintupi descendants of those in the footage were interested, even enthusiastic, about this material. Later, in 2007 the National Museum of Australia held an exhibition of Pintupi paintings, “Pintupi Painting: Out of the Desert,” focused on work of the mid-1970s. I suggested to Vivien Johnson, the guest curator, that she consult with Ian Dunlop about using some of the footage involving the painters. Ian’s long-time collaborator, Pip Deveson, was contracted to make a one-off, 20-minute film for display within the exhibition. The film was translated and entitled Pintupi Painters at Yayayi. This proved to be a huge success. The audience in the small theatre (within the exhibition) was never less than half full, with standing room only on the final weekend.
21 Peter Thorley has been an important part of the repatriation and documentation project, in the processes of consultation and later in the screening at the National Museum. As Partner Investigator of the ARC grant, he was the link to the National Museum. Thorley was a curator at the National Museum in 2008, but his link to the project is based on his history as a teacher-linguist at the Pintupi community of Kintore in 1988. Not only did he speak Pintupi-Luritja quite well, he was very close as a colleague with two Pintupi women educators, Irene Nangala and Monica Robinson Nangala – the two women we asked to be consultants on the project, because of their interest in Pintupi history, their concern that this be part of local education, and their skills as cultural translators.
22 In my visit to Central Australia in 2006, I had discussions with then-Media Officer at the Central Land Council, Jane Hodgson, and also some communication with the Ngaanyatjarra Media Centre as locations for holding or sharing the footage as “Pintupi heritage.” Neither really had the resources or capacities to do so effectively.
23 This grant was from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS). The AIATSIS grant allowed us to work with two Pintupi consultants in Canberra for a week in 2010, and two others at Kiwirrkura in 2011, sessions we recorded and documented for the archive that we expected to produce for the footage, as documents of Pintupi history.
24 Monica and Irene were leaders at Kintore. They had considerable experience as teachers in the Kintore school and through that had participated in the development of the ideology of Pintupi self-determination, of “holding the community” (see Keeffe 1992; Folds 2001).
25 For this reason, a set of three DVDs, with menus that made major sequences easily accessible, were prepared and distributed to people who had requested copies through Papunya Tula.
26 The Northern Territory Intervention, officially known as the Northern Territory Emergency Response Act 2007, was a controversial Federal response to reports of rampant child sexual abuse and dysfunction in Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory and a significant movement away from policies of self-determination. For a sense of these debates, readers might consult Altman and Hinkson (2007). Two of the key antagonists of the self-determination policy and support for homeland communities have been Helen Hughes (2007) and Gary Johns (2001).
27 I am not the only person to experience this. Even Indigenous colleagues, curators for example, have suggested that collaboration may take place through this kind of initiation and response. Certainly, it seems unrealistic to expect one’s partners to have the kind of aesthetic and technical frameworks to construct the edited version of a film – at least not without some kind of training.
28 It was, itself, the result of Pintupi initiative for remote dialysis, funded by an art auction and supported in part by proceeds from Papunya Tula Artists.
29 In contrast, the dialogue with Bobby has been sporadic, or better, punctuated in time – less narratively coordinated.
30 This material has been used in a second film Deveson has edited, Marlene’s Story, which will be a “special feature” with the main film.
31 Scholes was an ideal choice to do this consultation. He has had extensive experience with Pintupi men, both as a field officer at Papunya Tula Artists, and also through his involvement with consultation issues while he was an assistant curator at the National Gallery of Victoria during the “Tjukurrtjanu: Origins of Western Desert Art” exhibition in 2011 which had involved important considerations of what could and could not be seen by a general public. For discussion of this, see Myers (2011: ix-xi).
32 Bobby, as chairman of Papunya Tula Artists, had been familiar with some of the issues surrounding the exhibition of restricted imagery and had been an important consultant on the question of how to exhibit (or not) some of the early collection of Papunya Tula paintings at the Museum and Art Galleries of the Northern Territory.
33 Luke’s email included more extensive and very important commentary from Bobby, showing in significant ways how this footage is and has been processed. I will return to these later in the chapter.
34 See Myers (2014).
35 See Myers (2002, 2014, 2015).
36 Deveson made those editing changes, and given the comfort with which footage had been accepted for public screening over the past several years, along with its approval for screening by Jimmy Brown in 2006, we felt we had support to go forward with a new edit.
37 This MOU between Dunlop and Film Australia was “A Policy for the Future Custody and Use of Ethnographic Film Collection produced by Ian Dunlop for Film Australia between 1962 and 1996.”
38 Initially, we were told that the licensing fees for worldwide distribution would be between $50,000 and $140,000.
39 A previous contract with the NFSA had been for use of the material in academic research which would also constitute “Fair Dealing” under the Australian Copyright Act.
40 See http://www.deepeninghistories.anu.edu.au/protocols-for-indigenous-research/ (accessed August 12, 2015). The conditions of this project were radically different from those that led to the existence and histories of our archive.
41 I discuss elsewhere Bobby’s concerns about the film earlier in this process.
42 We got this letter of support from Papunya Tula Artists:
Papunya Tula Ltd is a company that is owned by the Pintupi people of Kintore and Kiwikurra.
We have been working with Professor Fred Myers since 1974 when Ian Dunlop filmed him and our parents and grandparents at Yayayi. We are very happy with the film, “Remembering Yayayi,” that Professor Myers and Pip Deveson have made with that old film. They have consulted us at every stage of making the film including showing us the final version.
We want to be able to have copies for the community and for Professor Myers and Pip Deveson to be able to show it to other people. We want people to know about how our parents and grandparents were living.
(letter from Paul Sweeney, Manager, June 23, 2014)
43 The National Indigenous Television channel (NITV) was originally funded as a nationwide Indigenous television service by the Australian government in 2005, launched in 2007 and was originally only carried by cable and satellite providers. In 2012 SBS (Special Broadcasting Service, one of Australia’s public broadcasting services dedicated to multilingual and multicultural programming) took over the management and operation of NITV and the network was re-launched as a free-to-air channel.
44 Most of the people with whom I spoke offered their opinion that these fees, and the application of them, were a response to severe budgetary cuts made to Screen Australia and the National Archives, including the National Film and Sound Archives.
45 Lacking help from the government, but rather with support from Papunya Tula and the Australian Aboriginal art world, the first dialysis machine and treatment center was acquired with proceeds from an art auction at the Art Gallery of New South Wales that accompanied the retrospective exhibition of Papunya art, “Papunya Tula: Genesis and Genius,” curated by Hetti Perkins.
46 These festivals were the Royal Anthropological Institute Film Festival, in Bristol, England, June 2015; the Nordic Anthropological Film Association Festival in Warsaw, Poland, September 2015; and the Jean Rouch International Film Festival, Paris, France, November 2015.
47 Jeff Stead was community adviser at Yayayi in 1974, a position he held as a field officer with the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. Stead, with whom Deveson and I conducted a separate interview in 2011, appears several times in the film footage.
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Filmography
Desert People. Dir. Ian Dunlop. Film Australia. Lindfield, NSW. 1967
Balloons and Spinifex. Dir. Ian Dunlop and J. Gray. Australian Commonwealth Film Unit. Linfield, NSW. 1958.
Pintubi Revisit Yumari. Dir. Roger Sandall. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. 1970.
Pintubi Revisit Yaru-Yaru. Dir. Roger Sandall. Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies. 1972.