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William Lempert, "Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema" (U Minnesota Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, everyone, and welcome to New Books and Anthropology, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Regan Gillum, and today I'm talking to Dr. William Lempert, who is the author of the book Dreaming down the Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Welcome to the podcast, Dr. Lempert.
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C
Thank you. It's a real pleasure to join you. I appreciate you making the time.
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B
Yeah, thank you so much. I'm really excited to talk about your book. And before we get to the book, I'm going to ask you about yourself. And so your book, it kind of walks us through these different stages of Aboriginal filmmaking in Australia. But first, can you tell us about yourself and how you came to write Dreaming down the Track?
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C
Absolutely. So I'm at Bowdoin College. I'm the Osterweis Associate professor of Anthropology. Bowdoin is located in Brunswick, Maine. So, to put it succinctly, my research draws on years of ethnographic fieldwork with indigenous media organizations in the Kimberley region of Northwestern Australia to engage the dynamic process of filmmaking as a critical mode of transformation on multiple levels. So the short version was the second part on how I came to this topic. To make sure I answer it, there's a long version of that and a shorter version. So as I think a lot of anthropologists go through these processes, it's often a long and winding road that would have been difficult to sort of plan out that way. So there's a lot of unexpected termination, twists and turns, and serendipity. I first came to Australia in 2006 when I was an undergrad and I was doing an environmental sustainability program on the East Coast. And at the time, and to this day, I very much loved songwriting and music. And long story short, I fell in love with the variety of bands that were from a small town in northwestern Australia. I spent some time volunteering there on that trip, and then I came back for my PhD and a thread. Since 2006, over eight visits, 31 months of fieldwork overall in those decades has been the amazing amount of creative work. Film as focused in this book, but also music and theater and arts more broadly, and me really wanting to amplify the things that were already happening in those places, rather than my particular vision of what was happening, as well as trying to position myself as doing things that would be useful on a daily level within my visits and those projects, and really building the projects based on those two tenets, the things that were already happening, and me being able to do something that was very practically beneficial just in a sort of daily way.
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B
Oh, that's great. And that's really interesting for you to talk about how you came to Australia and took this interest in these bands as an undergraduate student, because it's like you never know what's going to bring you into the site and then keep you coming back for many years. Right. And to inaugurate a research project there.
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C
It's really true. And I think there's. There's something important about that process not being overly engineered and emerging through real human engagements, and that a field site really coming into relationship in that way.
- [05:08]
B
And so in the book, you join teams of Aboriginal filmmakers in, as you said, the Kimberley region of Australia. And the book includes in the title Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema. And I'm going to quote you. So by awakenings you write, quote, that the dynamic process of filmmaking could catalyze profound awakenings within its creators. And so what do you mean by awakenings? And also, can you just tell us about the larger arguments that you put forth in the book?
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C
Absolutely. And so ethnographic book titles are funny in that they often come at the very end of the process, and they're very obvious in retrospect. But it wasn't obvious to me that this would be the title throughout the process. So, yeah, I'll say a little bit about the book and how I came to thinking about Awakening sort of in relation to Dreamings as a central focus of this book in a sort of larger, symbolic and very specific literal way as well. So Dreaming down the Track, Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema. It's based on 31 months of fieldwork over those decades. It follows a subset of projects that I was involved with when I was embedded within Indigenous production teams and collaborated on dozens of films. And to sort of continue from my previous note that I visited in 2006, I came back in 2012 for that summer to see if people were interested in me working on a project with two indigenous media organizations that I had come to know several years earlier. I really tried to develop the project that summer. I came back the next summer having tried to understand what would be useful for me to do on an everyday level. We sort of refined the grants the following year and I went through the process that turned into chapter one in this book. And then I was able to come back for over 20 months of fieldwork. So I say that because in that process of trying to prioritize what would be useful for me to do on a daily basis, and the answer was essentially be a pinch hitter for someone who could just say yes in any role to any film project. So someone gets sick, can you do sound tomorrow? Can you get in this Toyota troop carrier and go for a month to this place? And so it put me in the position to say yes. And so when they needed people to fill in, I was able to do so. So what I tried to build on top of this was the social life of film projects. Because essentially what was useful was for me to be saying yes to everything and just following these films around. So building on that, I started to think, and what started to unfold about that was me thinking about films as having sort of literal and conceptual social lives that goes through planning, production, editing and screening. And I spent years being embedded within dozens of film projects, from very serious, you know, documentaries to dramas, to music videos, to light hearted comedies, to hand sign films. And then following these films for a long time, they would. They wouldn't just be planned and get made and get edited, but they would go to screening, they would go through the film festival circuits, the TV circuits, and then they would have these afterlife echoes that would lead to more films. So awakenings really comes out of my focus again, very emergent, on working with a man named Mark Mora. And Mark Mora was a Kukaja elder in Balgo the Aboriginal community in the Western desert, in the great sandy desert. And when I first met him, he was, I would say, ambivalent about films. But in chapter one, I talk about a film project that he goes on that's really led by his sisters who stay at this women's center in this community. And, you know, that was his first film. And it, you know, what these films do is they take you to country, they take people to their homelands through a whole sort of caravan of Toyota Land Cruisers. And when I came back for my primary field work, there was this film called Jawa Jawa that was being planned that was a much bigger and more kind of expansive, well funded project through Screen Australia, the premier film Agency, through the public, as well as National Indigenous Television, the. The broadcaster throughout all of Australia. And he was charged as being the director. And he becomes more and more interested in cinema and filmmaking over this project. And, you know, when I was thinking back to the various stages of the films and the different relationships between the films and going through my field notes, I came to really see and realized that it wasn't just a period and process of him becoming interested in cinema, but he would have these kind of awakenings to the idea that filmmaking was one of many, but a powerful process for people, including him and his family, to go back to country and to say things on many levels to people in his family, to people in his community, to. To Aboriginal people across the nation and directly to the government. And he would often have these awakenings, quite literally, where he would, you know, we would talk or he would talk with people about films and he would go to sleep and then in the morning, bright and early, he would have crystal clarity on this vision for the next film. And so in the book, I talk about how there's this literal thing going on where Mark would go to sleep and talk about, you know, the dream that he had and, you know, when he awoke, he had a clarity on the next film project. But of course, dreamings in the Australian context has many meanings on the sort of broad matrix of what dreaming in Kukaja is described as jokoba, which is the interwoven matrix of country meaning, law, ancestral relations, landscape and temporality woven into that word. So when I thought about that, it seemed right that awakenings and dreamings would be central. And the corollary, dreaming also came from Mark's nephew because we would talk in what he would always say. Mark would say similar things, but his nephew, who went by the name Shorty, he'd often say that the dreaming isn't over. It's still happening. It's still down the track. And another theme to close off on this question, another theme in the book is future, but future is a very particular kind of word. And the way that people talked about the future implicitly and in this case explicitly was things being down the track. And down the track kind of conveys an element of along the horizon and movement, but it's less sort of linear and temporal in the temporal context than futures. And so that's a little bit about how that dreaming awakenings came to feel so central in the project.
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B
Yeah, thank you for that answer. And I think you. That answer kind of went into my next question, which is about Marc Mora. And as you just said, he was an Aboriginal man and a community leader and then the filmmaker. But he was also this constant presence throughout the book. I think he really helped to. He was probably sort of appeared to be your main interlocutor, and he really helped to structure the book. And you say also that he asks you to write about him. And I think it's his picture that's on the COVID of the book. And you can, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but, you know, he seemed to be, you know, obviously very important and central to the book. And so I wondered if you could talk about him as well and expand, I guess, on his role in the book.
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C
I would love to. Yeah. So he is on the COVID And that was a photo that I took when he was sitting next to the door to the old Bago mission where he walked in from as a child, which we might, you know, talk more about. One thing I should say about Mark, he was the person I was closest with over my field work and. And after. And one of the. The most difficult thing about this project is that he passed away during, you know, the pandemic, as well as many other people that are central in this book. And it wasn't Covid, but it was connected to an already precarious medical system of flying doctors and, you know, a single clinic that became even more precarious during that period of time. And so, you know, in the period after his death, it was not clear to me that I would or should finish this book. And it was only after going back the first time I could in 2023, because these communities were some of the most vulnerable to Covid in the world for variety of, I suppose, you know, intuitive reasons. It was only like after going for this four year break period after I'd been going for every year For a long time that, know, in talking with his family, that I decided to continue and I. And I talk a lot about this in the conclusion and after talking to his family, I got a lot of encouragement to. To finish it. And. And one can get in their own head about these kind of things. And. And I. I'll just say this before properly answering your question. One of the things that one of his daughters said is, you know, of course you should finish this. That was. That was the point. That's why he spent so much time on these projects. And so, you know, there. There's a lot to say about Mark. One of the things is that, you know, Mark Mora's life story encapsulates, you know, a multitude of aboriginal experiences across time and space. His, you know, there's one point in the book that we go through his life because he wants to take his life story at the place that's on the book cover in a different day. And I think there's something about his life that really disrupts the narrow limitations that are often placed on indigenous possibility and the binaries that are reaffirmed that are really, of course, false and limiting. So he was born before his family made settler contact. He went through law, which is the sort of rites of passages, as a youth and into teenage years. And so it was partly interrupted, but he continued to go through it when he was in the mission that's on the COVID So this was a Palatine mission. He was there until Balgo moved to another location. He helped to build Balgo. He went on a long trip. It was very unusual for someone born in his context and where he went all the way to the Indian Ocean, to the town of Broome, where these organizations, Packham and Galari, that I volunteer in and that are the center of this regional media world. He went there and he would truck pearl shells, which is what that town, Broome is known for, along the Indian Ocean. He worked for regional cattle stations as an expert horse tamer. He. He was known as the horse whisperer. He was the one person who could sort of tame any horse. And he returns to Bago to be married after, again, he has this dream that calls him home. And a lot of his life is, you know, for him, so much about the dreaming, but literally his dreams. And the last chapter is a song that he receives through his dream. But there's a lot in his dreams at night that motivates his life. And so these films are kind of one extension of that. It's not that they're special because they're films. This is kind of how his revelations have come to him. But throughout his life, he's traveled across the continent to fight for land rights. He served as the leader for the opening of the Yaga Yaga community in his country south of Balgo. It was very successful and almost a victim of its own success because it drew all this government interest. And through that process, it went into decline. And then late in life when I come to know him, which I don't realize at the time when I meet him, but it's just after his low point in life, he becomes a nationally recognized film director of Jawa Jawa and other films, and starts working toward returning home with his family to their country. And so it also provides a sort of final chapter for him that gets him back to country, sort of reasserts his role as a leader in Balgo. After this whole process of Yaga Yaga and other personal tragedies, it's sort of an unusual and eclectic trajectory that interconnects many worlds that are imagined as separate. The other one thing I would say about him is there's a sort of history of anthropologists focusing on one individual. And in books such as NYSE or Vita, and I really love those books. And what I think, I think people who write in this focus and this process are grappling with is the danger of focusing on one person in the way that they might implicitly come to stand in for other people and the scope might become quite narrow. And so keeping that in mind, as I was writing this book, I wanted to focus on Mark because that was the truth and that felt like the most vital story to tell. But the goal, and I think it's the case in this book, he doesn't in any way need to, or it's suggested that he stands in for other people because there are so many other filmmakers and media crew whose films and processes are engaged. And because even though we're following along with Mark, the structure of the book is really following the social lives of Mark's films as these interactional kind of processes and the other films in that orbit. So it moves through the aboriginal mediascape kind of, you know, from the perspective of him and those close around him. And the final thing I would say to connect the idea of awakenings and focusing on Mark is one of the things that I came to realize, which I suppose is a meta comment about. The point I'll make is that, and this is kind of the thesis of the whole book, is that it's not just that people were telling their. Their the things that they thought in the films, but that the process of cinematic envisioning actually transformed how they imagined and wanted to come to actualize their futures during, in a lot of ways, apocalyptic times. So, you know, and in a sort of anthroparlance, they're constitutive rather than representational. They created the vision for the future as they were being forged, especially when they unfolded without external control in some of the ways that are discussed in the middle chapters. So I might leave that note there and I could return to any of those discussions too.
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B
Yeah.
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C
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- [23:23]
B
And I liked, as you said, the structure of the book follows the social life of media because the structure seemed to mirror the production of film where you kind of like begin with the planning and the preparation, then you move to the shooting and then editing and then screening the films. And so the, even the structure of the book kind of takes you through the making of the film. So that was, so that was another kind of structural aspect as well as like Mark then also appearing through much of the book. But then of course you also introduce us to other people. And that takes me, I think, to the second chapter where it's called like Laughing with the Camera. And in that chapter you Discuss the process of shooting a film. And I mean, that was really fascinating because it seems very rugged where teams, you're in these, they're called like troopies, the Land Rovers, and you're going off road into these very remote areas to film these different stories. And so I wondered if, can you tell us about this, like, this process of filming, what were the hazards of doing it? Because I think this is unlike filming that one. Much of the filming that one would find, like, say, in the United States, even. Even with, like, alternative films.
- [24:41]
C
Absolutely. Thank you for that question. And, you know, I can tell you how I came to comedy, which is perhaps not an intuitive theme for a process that, you know, is difficult and defined by a lot of danger potential and otherwise. So, yeah, so in Balgo, a lot of these film trips would be southward toward, on sort of one track that goes to Yaga Yaga that's semi used and sort of safe to drive. And then beyond that, even though it's desert, um, the reason it's dicey is not just because it's. It's a desert, but because there are so many little roots on the ground that can puncture your tires. And so the reason I focus on tires so much throughout the book is because tires are the one thing that are by far, that's by far the most important in the desert. It's not water or food or anything else that was ever the issue. It was always tires. And so you're right, it is dangerous in a lot of ways. And I came to understand that danger is so relative and contextual. So to give an example of how danger is hard to understand, in a way, there were multiple moments and two that come to mind. But I'll tell the one that has to do with Mark, where I felt such deep failure and concern and. And I was so wrong about what was going on and the sense of danger. And so Mark, myself and his nephew, who I'd mentioned earlier, Shorty and Shorty's wife, we were going on a relatively short overnight film trip. And I had. One of the main things you do before one of these trips is you organize tires. And I thought I had done that and I had food and everything. And so we're going south. And long story short, we get a tire puncture. Not a huge deal. We have two tires. They're patched many times, but they should work. And I get. I get the spanner that, you know, the thing that would take off the lug nuts. And I realize that it's not the right fit because there's sort of two styles of them. And so it's not going to fit. We don't have a satellite phone. This isn't like a major production. We are out in the desert with no way to change a tire, you know, many, many, many miles from anyone. And, you know, I think this was the first time this had happened and no one was worried except for me. I was very worried. And, you know, Mark just kind of takes a look at the situation. He's like, oh, okay. This happens especially with, you know, white fellows such as myself organizing things. This would not have happened, you know, if he had been organizing a vehicle. But he very calmly takes his lighter out, kind of considers the wind, walks downwind a little bit, and he lights a fire and he kind of starts lighting across a wide stretch that will take the fire away from us. And Shorty explains to me, and I'd heard this, but what Shorty explained to me is that Eric, Mark Morris Son, would keep an eye out on the horizon and we would be lighting fires all day because that's part of taking care of country. But normally when you're lighting fires, you would see in the horizon a series of fires, sort of columns. But if you see one very big fire and not a second, you can kind of realize that someone's stuck. So he lights all these fires, they're going downwind and people kind of stretch and just start unloading the kangaroo tails that we had brought for the next day. And, you know, we all start, you know, making a fire and coals and digging the underground oven for the kangaroo tails. Because what they know and what I came to realize is that without a doubt, Mark son Eric would be there in two and a half hours. And so they lit the fire, they were ready to make lunch so that we could all eat when he got there. And that's exactly what happened. And so danger is, you know, it is so contextual. And a lot of things that I thought were dangerous weren't, but there was vice versa. There were things that I realized were dangerous which had to do with sort of dynamics around control at points. And so to the other point about this chapter, comedy, there were a lot of moments that were funny, but funny because there was a sort of absurdity and irreconcilability, which is something I talk about throughout the book, between the logic of how sort of Aboriginal media makers and community members on these projects would understand things very deeply and practically, yet the sort of white fellows, which is the very normal way of talking about non Aboriginal people in communities how they would have sort of control of the vehicles and you know, all the material objects. Something I kind of describe as, you know, that the metaphorical tires of everything and, and the average, you know, you know, drivers, mechanics, navigators, you know, have a steep understanding. But there's this paradox where they don't have control over the materials often. And so there ends up being this sort of dark absurdist comedy in that tension. And I thought that humor and laughter and comedy was a way to get at some of those deeper issues that unfold during those tensions. And those tensions are at their very highest in these trips. And you know, final thing is on the other end of the sort of individual trip, on the, on the big film trips like in Jawa Jawa, there'd be a huge caravan of, you know, a dozen troopies and you know, maybe 50 people. There's a lot of people involved. And the danger isn't getting stranded because there's many people, but you know, there's this whole, you know, story where you run out of water or there's these things that happen because of irreconcilable kind of communication. And that's actually the actual danger. That's the danger of what can happen. And what people would often say, it's not the thing that happens in the desert, it's the thing you do after. It's the panic and the misunderstanding. And I was inspired by folks like Vine Deloria Jr. Who wrote a wonderful chapter about comedy. And there is more of a literature in Australia I think, because Australia is a sort of more comedy oriented place by folks like John Carty and Yasmin Mushar Bosch who also work in similar contexts in that region. You know, really drawing on their insight about how comedy takes you deep into very serious topics.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I really love the idea of comedy and how people would yield it with their, in their stories. And then, and also as you, as you discussed the conditions in which they were filming, I mean, that was fascinating. And so it also seemed like there was this critique of how Aboriginal people were depicted on mainstream screens and like this was built into Aboriginal cinema. And so you attended, for example, a film workshop where Aboriginal film workers, filmmakers were learning like a series of aesthetics that were, that were different from mainstream media. And so I wondered what did filmmakers learn in these, in these workshops?
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C
That's a wonderful question. And to the point that the films weren't just representational, they were constitutive that people came to understand through making the films. The whole media scape was like that. So for Example in Jawa Jawa, there's a whole pre production process. There was the process of making it where all these things unfolded. And then there was this editing process that was very social that I talk about in one of the chapters. And then what would happen is the film would be screened in say, Balgo as its world premiere. And then it would go to the National Remote Indigenous Film Festival. And that film festival was so much. Or yeah, there was the film festival, but it was a sort of broader kind of conference. And you know, at these kind of events you would have nightly screenings that were not sort of somber, quiet, watching and rating things. These were very interactionalist. People would, you know, make relations through them. But during the day it was much more like an academic conference. In fact, it feels more like the AAAs than anything else. If the AAAs were sort of even more functional than they are, was a lot of getting into. I mean, there was the thing that's true about conferences where it's the meeting up with people you don't get to see often that means a lot. And you talk about projects like Over Tea in between things. So there's that, but there's also these workshops where people are really getting into skills. There's. There's a whole awards process which feels very different than most awards that individuals are celebrated for lifting up stories of their communities or like them receiving an award is really about the elder that they're, you know, honoring through a project. But what also happened in these amazing workshops, and I, I mentioned one of them because it makes explicit what was often implicit, the way in which people were using film language to reflect on how Aboriginal people had been framed and making very particular choices. So for anyone listening who makes films, you know, the rule of thirds, you know, the various like choices around narration, editing, lighting, all these things were discussed as things that, that say a lot in a visual language about sort of the authority of the person, the story. And people were very interested in aesthetics too. But because Aboriginal people have been, you know, as in many other indigenous settler colonial context, people have been stereotyped. In the Australian context, it's very often a temporal kind of stereotype framing Aboriginal people as the oldest continuing societies. And through that, through that framework which has elements of truth, but it's twisted into a sort of anachronistic, out of time depiction. So a lot of it was like, how do you present people as having the authority that they do have? Filming people from eye level, which often means putting the camera on the ground. And often we would Actually, so, like, for anyone who makes films, often you have a tripod and it goes to a certain bottom level, but then the middle piece kind of stops it from going lower. So we'd often dig a hole so that the middle piece could go even lower so that the camera could remain steady, but it would be at eye level, you know, just, you know, as, as low as it needed to. So there, there were people who had really explicitly thought about this. So, yeah, they would, they would lower the tripod all the way down and, and a lot of other things like that. So I think people had been intuitively doing this. But it was a great making, making that kind of production values explicit. One of the things that I came away with is this idea that, you know, when someone says that a film had good production values, we kind of, even though they're values, it. It goes unnamed what those values are. And there's a. There are particular set of values and people talk about low production values. And some of the things that happen in community filmmaking might be imagined that way because they're shakier or they're not, you know, they don't have this certain type of aesthetics. But it made me just think about the idea of production values as something that denotes a certain set of values and to not take those for granted. And that throughout this entire project, people are articulating and enacting production values that are different and in no way lesser. And in those values, a lot is revealed. So I really appreciated that workshop and there were many such cases where. And the other, I think, key point about this is I did not go to film school, which I felt really nervous about. And so when I visited in 2012, I found that the thing that would be useful for me to do is be a helping hand on film projects. So in the year that followed, I just learned as much as I could about all the various forms of filmmaking, from recording to reflectors and all that. But I was no expert. But my goal was to not be dead weight, to be able to do any basic task. But my film school was in the desert with the people I worked with. I was a film student and volunteer, and they taught me what it means to make cinema. And, you know, in reflecting, there's something really great about being a student because you're taught in a way that, you know, people who come in who are clearly professionals in their realm are not taught in that way. So I ended up being grateful that I hadn't gone to film school for this particular project. Film school is wonderful, but just for this project, I think it was actually a benefit, even though it wasn't something that I thought of in that way as I was starting the project.
- [39:03]
B
Yeah, no, I really, I really like that. That idea of learning this whole other, a whole other way to imagine cinema, that, that is, that is different from what we see in much like mainstream film, but also like film in the United States. And it was clear that those Aboriginal values were always like front and center for people and very unapologetically with the people like they would. They always seem to want to maintain the relation with each other and, you know, like deferring to elders, you know, not not wanting to say no to each other in different ways. I thought you kept Aboriginal culture very like, to the fore of the book.
- [39:52]
C
I really appreciate that. The thing that I would say is that one, it's an interesting thing. You write a book and you spend a decade on a project and you work really hard to try to get it right and to do an honorable project. But also the thing that I come away with is also just how little in the grand scheme of things.
- [40:22]
B
You.
- [40:22]
C
Know, that I know on some level that you end up being a student at the end as well. And, you know, it's a real act of generosity, you know, for people to, you know, invite me in and trust me, you know, to really try to get it right. And again, I was very much a student throughout and remain so. And to your point about people saying no, it's another sort of production value. So, you know, anyone who has ever been part of a film project, even a sort of medium sized one on the film in the production schedule, there's so much pressure. You sort of had limited time to get so many shots. There's a lot at stake. You can't really reschedule. And so things have to happen. There's a lot of pressure and people feel very confident exerting that pressure. In all of these projects, even the biggest ones, the highest stakes ones that I worked on, there were moments where people would say, I want to stop, I don't want to do this anymore. And there wasn't a moment's hesitation. Everything turns off. There's no, like, well, are you sure? Why don't we take five? Everyone turns the camera off, packs up everything. And it's like in that moment, it's over. And it's not a game, it's not a tactic. It just is their wish. And so it. And they're an elder in that community with absolute respect and authority. And so it is over in that moment. And then in every one of those cases, within like 20 minutes, we're just like, you know what? Don't worry about the film. Let's have a cup of tea and let's do something else. Inevitably someone, you know, that person would say, you know what? Let's do the film. Because I think there, there's this feeling out of, you know, especially for folks who have been, whose other people control has been so exerted. I think people are often trying to gauge the priorities and the real power dynamic that's going on. And so that's something that I also really learned that there's a different approach to what it means for people to not want to do something and for that not being a problem at all. And there was this idea called balya that in kukaja means good, but what it means specifically is that things are done the right way. And so that is one of the core production values. It's a much better outcome that a film stopped when it should have and never got made. Then it turned out really beautifully, but it wasn't done appropriately or done under some sort of pressure or duress. And that's just. That couldn't be more opposed to a lot of filmmaking, you know, in other contexts. When did making plans get this complicated?
- [43:31]
B
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- [44:24]
C
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- [44:49]
B
Yeah I love that aspect of the filmmaking. And I wanted to ask you about, I guess, your position as a filmmaker, as an ethnographer and carrying out the research, because, as you just mentioned, there were these moments when people would kind of test the control that they had. But you also talked about this, too. There's this constant tension between these different worlds of Aboriginal people and Australians, and I guess, as they're called, white fellas, and then some people have more strained relations than others with these different groups. And you write about that. And so I wondered how you navigated all of these worlds and if you came across any challenges, either, you know, through your position, positionality, or. Or something else while undertaking the research.
- [45:44]
C
Yeah, absolutely. That's a wonderful question. So, you know, I was in a very particular situation where I was very clearly a white fella coming in, but I was also not Australian, which turned out to matter, you know, in this sort of local way of thinking about things. But more importantly, I was embedded within Packham, the Pilbara Aboriginal Media, Pilbara and Kimberly Aboriginal Media Association. And there is a deep love for certain organizations, especially media organizations. I mean, there are certain, like, musicians from Broome who come in, and it's like Elvis in the 50s. People love making music, making films. There's a whole, you know, music studio and film center in the art center in Balgo. So I was in a very. I was in a situation where I was embedded within a group that was beloved. So, you know, it would be very different if I was coming in with a health organization or with a governmental program. So I got to hang out with people and do radio projects and a variety of things that were about people having, as, you know, total control of their film project. So, in a way, I didn't have the more common experience of most white fellows coming in with organizations. And, you know, there were some kind of funny things that happened. So in the process of learning, for example, when we were driving in, the first time I ever came to Balgo, the person I was sitting next to, his name was William. And he said, you know, we had the same name. We're going to be working together. We should go by the same skin name. And so skin names are the sort of eight or 16 based on, you know, male, female, and everyone has a category who spends time in community. And it was important to have that. Otherwise you're a guardian or a stranger. So it's easy to overstate these things, but it's just practically beneficial to have one. So he said, you should go by Jongle So I said, great, I'm the student. I'll follow whatever you think is appropriate. And we get there, and people ask me what my name is. Oh, and the more important thing is the reason he said that is because someone with our name had recently passed away, so our name couldn't be spoken. So he said, you know, don't. Don't use your name. Use Zhangla. So people would ask me my name, and I'd say, well, I'm going by Jongle because my name is, you know, kumanjai. And so people would ask me, you know, okay, but at the shop, for example, like, oh, what's your name? I was like, well, Jang. Language. Like, okay, there's a lot of jungle people. What's your name? I said, well, kumanjay, meaning, you know, you kind of can't say that name. And, you know, people say, like, you know, but what's. What's your name? And they kind of came to realize that I was, you know, not saying it because of this. But what I didn't understand is that that's contextual. That depends on the particular families. And so they were advising me to be overly cautious, to not make mistakes. And so then I would go by, you know, people would ask me, you know, where, you know, what's your middle name? And I say, david. It's like, oh, you can't use that name. I was like, okay. But I did with some people, and people said like, where are you from? And I was going to UC Boulder. So I'd say, I'm Colorado. And it's like, oh, yeah, people love Colorado. That's a place that's beloved there. So people would call me Colorado. And then later on, as time passed, people would call me by Willie.
- [49:45]
B
And.
- [49:46]
C
But because this had unfolded through time, like, there were like five different names I went by. It was all based on, like, my kindergarten level of understanding context around naming. But one of the reasons that people, you know, were so gracious is because I was coming in with this media organization that was really beloved. And the other thing I'll say is that, you know, people experience all sorts of control, you know, inappropriate behavior, you know, and often, you know, abusive behavior, you know, by what white fellows coming from outside of the community. And I was really, you know, overwhelmed by the generosity that people had to take every person as an individual, you know, despite those many, many experiences, and to just take everyone as. As the person based on their relationships. So, yeah, I mean, people were very gracious and have had a lot of difficult experiences, but it was a lot of fun being with the media organizations because they are so beloved. I mean, you walk around with a camera and kids will say, let's do a promo. And so Indigenous community television is the sort of satellite television in the community. And people would just say action. And you turn on the camera and they'll say ictv, showing our way, which is the promo that they do between things. So like there's, so there's such a deep love of making film and radio and music that when you're in that world, that's the thing that feels present and anyone non controlling furthering that mission is swept up in this wave of creativity. You know, sometimes that radically shifts on bush trips depending on personalities. But there's, it's all to say there's a very different dynamic in the cinemascape and media world because people love it so much.
- [51:48]
B
And so this question is kind of, I guess it's kind of a longer question, but it's about your relationship with the study of like Indigenous media. And I ask this because, you know, obviously anthropology has this history of examining Indigenous film and media production. And of course you cite this work in your book. And so it took me back to when I was a teaching assistant in anthropology in graduate school and I was a teaching assistant for Dominic Boyer and we were teaching media, culture and society. And I was his TA and he taught a section on Indigenous film. And in the section he taught work by like Eric Michaels, which, which I think talks about the Dreaming and then like Faye Ginsburg and Terry Turner and we also showed the film Satellite Dreaming. And. And I remember there are these debates regarding Indigenous film. It was about Indigenous film, like generally, but of course it involved Aboriginal film in Australia. And it was about whether like filmmaking was eroding the culture of Indigenous people or whether it strengthened it. And there were all of these like vigorous debates about this in anthropology. And so I'm not sure that maybe those debates have sort of passed. And so possibly you may not be as embroiled in them as they were in the past. But I wondered how you build on this work or see yourself contributing to this area of Indigenous film and media.
- [53:24]
C
Thank you. That's a wonderful question connecting many different dots. Eric Michaels, Faye Ginsberg, the folks that you mentioned, really crucial scholars and conversations that have shifted over time. And I'm very much in conversation with that work and a couple things. So one, being inspired and reading that work, what became really apparent to me, which is just so apparent in these contexts is there really is no need for an Anthropologist, in my view, to come in and make a documentary film, an ethnographic film about things. Because there are so many people making films in such vivid ways with such deep context and nuance and analysis. So I knew I didn't want to make ethnographic films. And yet filmmaking felt like such a vital component. And so the fact that it was useful for me to be a volunteer and be embedded into these organizations, I wanted to convey, because I'd seen a little bit earlier on, I wanted to convey something about the process in detail, including the editing, which I always wanted, when I was studying cinema, to know more about editing. It's shrouded in mystery. There's so little written about it, and it's so important. So part of it is I wanted to convey the magic that was embedded within the moment that the final films. There's some of that magic in it, but there's so much more. And the process is the thing itself, whereas it feels like the film is one artifact, one outcome, one after image, but not the thing itself. So I wanted to convey that. And what I had was, you know, the luxury through grants and, you know, a PhD program to spend years, which I thought is what it would take to really sink into these projects that expand months and years. So I really wanted to get into the social life of the projects. And one of the things, because I was thinking a lot about, you know, about that. Another book I really love is Phone and Spear by Miyarka Media, including Jennifer Deger and several other folks who are writing together. I was also guided by their idea in a very similar context, Collaborative media, with one white fellow outsider making things together. She says their vision of Ayuttha anthropology is not to reveal one world to another, but to bring worlds into relationship. And to me, that felt like not just a good focus for my project, but a very honorable and important way to think about what ethnography should be doing and can do. And so in light of that, I was thinking about what is this relationship? People are watching TV, 3G turns on, all of a sudden there are issues around outside television, there is ictv. But I'll say something about one of these elements that's often used to discuss this, which is images of deceased individuals, which connects even to this cover of this book. And so over time, it used to be that images of people who were deceased were destroyed and never looked at again. And then over time, that shifted images increasingly, depending on a variety of factors and location, images sort of are kept, are looked at and not for the closest Family often. But the argument has often been this is a sort of correlation and demonstration that, you know, broad strokes, because it's often presented this way, that culture is eroding and that people are losing their traditions, that whole framework. But the longer I spent here, the more months and years I spent, I came to realize it's actually very different. It's much more along the lines of, you know, when someone says no and the film stops, and it actually stops because they have control, appropriately, then they continue. And so one of the reasons to destroy images is because there was so little control at that point, and it was contextual. Kind of like my. Me not knowing when I could say my name to people. It was safest for me just to never say it because I didn't understand. And so it was safest for images just to never be seen because control was really important and context was important and not understood. But I think rather than this demonstrating some sort of narrative around the decline of culture, it's actually something very different. It's the increase of control around images and media. So now, for example, there's this whole national structure of archives through a program called Ari Irdija, which it lets people put films and footage and images into different sort of very specific protocols in which they're not seen by certain people. They're not seen for five years. People have control of these things. And so there's a way in which has. It's. It's almost the opposite of this, like, loss of culture argument. It's the gain of control within that. And so I think there's a lot that's shifting, and many things that are pointed to about sort of dangers of loss of culture are not that simple or sometimes even inverted. And that being said, there are, of course, serious issues around digital divides of not having access and of images coming in. Another thing that came to mind to me a lot is that it's often presented as, you know, aboriginal people. People in certain contexts can't handle the Internet or certain things. It's much more so the speed. Because I grew up where Facebook kind of came online in undergrad, it was sort of by degree, a little bit every month. But the sort of state change in communities that go from no tower to a 3G or 4G network is so fast that it's not just a problem there. It would be a problem for anyone experiencing technological change at that speed. So this is all to say that there's a lot of things that I think seem like something very different than they are, and this sort of and it's worth being very cautious, I think. I think Eric Michaels is very right and especially thinking in that way that he did and because of his work. So many, so many of these things unfolded around indigenous television and cinema. I think in this current moment it's really worth being very cautious about how things are read in terms of, you know, the danger of, you know, outside influence. Things can fall into purity politics and, and categories of what it means to be authentic or modern or those kind of things that have very little meaning and the community context and are sort of imposed by outsider imaginings about what it is to be a particular kind of person.
- [60:52]
B
Yeah, no, I think that was important what you said about control and who has it and how it shifts the debate around the erosion of culture to who gets to control what culture is. So that's great. And so I think we're coming to the end of the interview and so I'm coming to the last question and it's the question that we normally ask is now that dreaming down the Track is out in the world, do you have any new projects that you're working on or are you planning new projects that you have on the horizon?
- [61:28]
C
That's a wonderful question too. So the most relevant answer there is a book project I'm starting. I would very much love to spend a lot more time in Australia in the medium term future. I do have a baby recently, so I'll be spending more time at home. And the next book project will be about outer space colonialism, which is another project I've been working on that came out of native science fiction related work. I would very much love to spend a lot more time in Balgome communities. Focus on a hand sign project. Because one of the subset of films we got into was the sign system that Mark and many in the communities were very interested in. And embedded within that is a whole politics and set of worlds and traditions and connection around disability in the context of Aboriginal children having the highest rates of ear infection induced deafness in the world and hearing loss. But those kids really not being disabled in community because of the depth of sort of gestural communication and sort of becoming disabled in a Western context when they leave and often sort of forced to leave for reasons around programs of ostensible care. But the most important answer is so when Mark passed away, this book project came to a halt. What also came to a halt was the film called Mangai Calling that we had been working on for many years and it was only in 2023 talking to his Family where they said, you know, you should finish. You should finish the book and you should finish the film. And so I finished the book and it came out. And the film is the thing that I'm devoted to now over this next year. And it's based on, you know, 20 or so hours of me, Mark and Larry going into the desert. And Mark had this clear vision about making a film about the future and what he called the real film, not because the other films weren't real, but because of what he came to talk about as reality, as the thing that would carry on into the future, the thing that would keep the dream alive for his children and great grandchildren down the track. And so a very quick side note, if that's okay, is the thing that helped me get back into this book is I was accidentally. I was updating a computer and I accidentally clicked on one of those pieces of footage from Mungai Calling. And this was just like a year after Mark's death, or maybe longer, I think maybe two years. But I was transported in that moment. And over the next day, I watched all of the footage over many long days. And it made me think about the things that he always said is he could only say the things that he needed to say in his country. And the promise of film for him was being able to say the right thing at the right time, most importantly, in the right place, the cinema being this sort of portal. And so I was listening to him say all these things, and that's when I went to visit his family. So it's harder to do the film because so much of his presence in it. But the next thing is to spend this next year finishing the film. Next us summer, I'd go to Balgo and screen the rough cut based on what they had told me in 2023, and we'll edit it together over a month or two in Balgo, and then we'll put it out in the world if they would like that. And that feels like the big, major final sort of arc of this particular project. So I'm looking forward to getting back into that film. And in a way, that film feels perhaps the center of gravity even more so than the book, because that's the thing that Mark was really engaged in.
- [65:44]
B
Well, we will look forward to those projects and we'll wish you luck and congratulations on the baby as well.
- [65:51]
C
Thank you.
- [65:53]
B
So thank you so much for sharing the book. I'm Regan Gillum, and I've been talking to Dr. William Lempert, who is the author of the book Dreaming down the Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Thank you so much for writing this book and for sharing it with us on the podcast.
- [66:11]
C
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