New media projects at Yuendumu

I write these notes just a few months in advance of the publication of my most recent ethnographic project with Warlpiri, a work I describe as a displacement ethnography, See How We Roll: Enduring Exile between Desert and Urban Australia (Duke University Press, 2021).

That book tracks two and half decades of transformations in Warlpiri life and Australian governance through the intimate prism of a close friendship. Its primary focus is on transformations in the life of a woman from the desert who is making a new situation for herself, having been displaced from her hometown. Notwithstanding the speculative questions with which my Continuum essay ends, I could not have envisaged this particular life story playing out at that time. How quickly things change. A vital mediation of the displacement I write about is the mobile phone. Phones are lost many times over, they often run out of credit, and they are utterly essential for keeping in contact with kin. The interactions enabled by the phone—as well as the music it plays, the repositories of photographs and video clips it holds, its opening to the space of social media—in turn provide essential grounding for persons navigating the turbulence of displacement.

In my exploration of various dimensions of Warlpiri sociality in 2002 I gave remarkably little attention to kinship as the primary force through which all activity—mediated or not—turns. In the two decades that have followed, a confluence of factors has brought new scrutiny to Aboriginal kinship. In the context of a comprehensive shift in government policy away from ‘self-determination’ to an approach that is sometimes described as ‘normalising’ or ‘neo-assimilation’ or ‘re-colonising’, the primacy of kinship has often been identified as a key troubling factor in Aboriginal people’s failure to achieve successful lives. New biopolitical technologies such as the BasicsCard—which quarantines welfare payments for expenditure at particular outlets—have been invented to decisively intervene in the social dynamics of kin-based distribution of cash. 

Here we are drawn back to Eric Michaels’ prescient warning regarding the devastating implications of Warlpiri being given no choice but to embrace a thinned out ‘lifestyle’ cultural future. It is such a future that Australian federal government policy offers desert people.

Across this period of accelerating change, the activity about which Eric Michaels wrote with such energy, insight and passion marks a momentous time. A time of fresh thinking, new creative partnerships and considerable hope. The legacy of that time lives on in the Pintupi Anmatyerre Warlpiri Media Association (PAW Media), its remarkable and ever-growing archive, and the generations of Warlpiri who continue to be enthusiastically drawn into new forms of cultural production. Media might well provide valuable windows onto a changing world, but they are also the circuits through which people increasingly wrestle with the multiple pressure points in their lives.

Revisiting this arena of cultural practice and its representation in this journal seems appropriate and timely for a number of reasons. It is now two decades since Michaels took up his research at Yuendumu. Significant developments have occurred in that township subsequent to the completion of that research and Michaels’ untimely death. Moreover, Michaels’ research into Warlpiri people’s utilisation of new media coincided with a particular moment in the ever-evolving process of globalisation and the conceptualisation of that process by cultural theorists. Both globalisation and the debates concerned with its implications for cultural difference have expanded considerably over that timeframe. Finally, Michaels’ discussion of Warlpiri people’s engagement with new media was partly fuelled by his advocacy of a particular model of self-determination. In a newly emergent discourse that incorporates Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal writers, as well as commentators of both the political left and right, there are calls for a major critical reformulation of that policy framework. For all these reasons it seems timely to revisit Eric Michaels’ analysis of and concerns regarding the introduction of new media to ‘remote’ Aboriginal Australia.

In this article I wish to do three things. Firstly, I will briefly revisit the central findings of Eric Michaels’ research and recall his predictions of what the introduction of new media such as television into Warlpiri social life was likely to entail. Secondly, I will briefly explore the major media developments that have occurred at Yuendumu in the years since Michaels was working there. Finally, in pointing to what I see as the limitations of Michaels’ analysis, I will offer the beginnings of an alternative way of thinking about Warlpiri people’s continuing motivation for engagement with new visual media and communications technology in an era of accelerated globalisation.

At the outset I acknowledge that I have a one-sided advantage in this discussion. Eric Michaels cannot respond, and no doubt his response would have been lively. I also acknowledge that it is far easier to offer critical commentary on another’s work with the benefit of hindsight than it is to charter new territory oneself. Clearly Eric Michaels charted new territory; he opened up our thinking regarding the interplay between new media, globalisation and cultural difference. My comments are offered a decade and a half after his death, and in a spirit of critical engagement I am sure Michaels would have approved of.

The first stage in this history is relatively well known, indeed the Warlpiri Media Association has attained an unusually high profile for a small Aboriginal media association, largely through the writings of the late Eric Michaels. Michaels, an American researcher, was appointed by the then Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies [4] in 1982 to assess ‘the impact’ of introducing television to remote Aboriginal Australia (Michaels 1986). His published works (see especially Michaels 1994) depict what he saw as a culturally distinctive Warlpiri approach to video production and viewing, and a series of associated concerns regarding the implications of ‘mass’ media being integrated into Warlpiri people’s daily lives. His descriptions of Warlpiri cultural resilience in the face of massive social change had wide appeal, particularly for academics and students with an inter-disciplinary interest in contemporary indigenous cultural expression (and here I include myself), and especially those in the newly emergent field of cultural studies. Michaels completed his fellowship in 1986 and met an untimely death in 1988. In subsequent years, in the wake of AUSSAT’s launch and the introduction of new media to remote communities, a near industry of writing about indigenous media was born (see for example Spurgeon 1989; Molnar 1990, 1991; Langton 1993; Tafler 1994; Fischer 1995; Ginsburg 1993, 1995; Meadows 1994, 1996).

Yet many of the writers who took up Michaels’ findings did not have the benefit of carrying out their own fieldwork in this area. As a result, key aspects of Michaels’ analysis were taken at face value and reproduced in a raft of published and unpublished work. When I went to Yuendumu in 1995 to undertake extended fieldwork ten years after Michaels, I found the Warlpiri Media Association of his accounts difficult to recognise in the reality I was confronted by. Unsurprising some might say, ten years is a long time in the life of any Aboriginal organisation. But over the next two years I spent at Yuendumu it became clearer to me that while no doubt much had changed in the decade between his departure and my arrival, there were certain aspects of Michaels’ analysis that remained decidedly problematic.

In a number of published works, Michaels traced the expressions of Warlpiri social relations through the production process. A video entitled the ‘Coniston Story’ was reportedly the first video produced specifically ‘for the camera’ (Michaels 1989: 42). In describing the wider context in which this oral history video was recorded, Michaels introduced his readers to some of the primary underpinnings of Warlpiri sociality. So that, for example, on the day the filming was to take place, Michaels was somewhat bemused to find that more than twenty people, travelling in several cars, accompanied the appointed video worker, storyteller and himself out to Coniston where the filming was to take place. Only later did he learn that what at first appeared to him as a curious yet arbitrary assembly of people was actually a core group of owners and managers of the country to be visited. This was, Michaels observed, no

… afternoon picnic with a casually assembled assortment of available kinship riders. In fact, each of the people accompanying us was directly accountable, in terms of Aboriginal reckoning, for some aspect of the story we were telling. The video could not be made without their presence (Michaels and Kelly 1984: 30).

The storyteller for the Coniston Story was one old Japangardi, son of legendary ‘Bullfrog’, one of two Warlpiri men who claimed responsibility for the death in 1928 of a dingo trapper Fred Brooks. Brooks’ murder was the trigger for punitive raids through Anmatyerre and Warlpiri country in 1928–9 in which dozens of Aboriginal people were killed, a terrifying time in Aboriginal memory that has come to be known as the Coniston massacres.

Michaels observed that while in European terms Japangardi could speak of these events in his own right, in Warlpiri reckoning his telling required the presence of certain specific kin to authorise the performance as junga, proper or true (Michaels and Kelly 1984: 30). Japangardi has rights to the story as the descendent of one of its key protagonists, but also as kirda, owner of the Dreaming and country in which these events occurred. Relevant kurdungurlu, managers, must be present to witness that Japangardi tells his story ‘proper way’. Michaels observed in the filming of this video that in line with the ritual relationship between owners and managers, only kirda appeared in front of the camera, on centre stage as it were. Kurdungurlu stayed ‘on the side’, witnessing and directing (Michaels and Kelly 1984: 32).

Elsewhere, Michaels discusses the particular kinds of challenges that audio-video recording practices pose for people such as the Warlpiri who carefully regulate the exchange of knowledge within kin groups as well as across generation and gender. The revelation of ritual knowledge, for example, traditionally occurred in contexts grounded in space and time, with strict control over who could/could not see and/or hear what was being revealed. Michaels points out that recording these events in audio-visual format dissolves such constraints, enabling knowledge to be lifted out of the space and time and social context in which it was originally exchanged (Michaels 1985). In seeking to highlight Warlpiri people’s distinctive experience of new media, Michaels provides examples of what he sees as the clashing of two cultural systems diametrically opposed in their logics:

The bias of mass broadcasting is concentration and unification; the bias of Aboriginal culture is diversity and autonomy. Electronic media are everywhere; Aboriginal culture is local and land-based (Michaels 1989: 13).

People familiar with Michaels’ work will recall that his interest in Warlpiri media activity was by no means merely anthropological. Michaels was an advocate of community broadcasting, and saw particular possibilities arising from Warlpiri people’s engagement with new media. One aspect of his work centred on predicting what the ‘risks’ associated with bringing television to remote townships such as Yuendumu might be. In his most well-known work, For A Cultural Future, Michaels spells out the implications of Warlpiri people failing to realise control over mass media. Around this question of control, he articulates two alternative possible futures for the Warpiri; a choice between cultural maintenance and what he dubs as ‘a cultural future’, or a ‘lifestyle future’ and cultural demise. In Michaels’ analysis this ‘lifestylism’ looms as a threat wherever bureaucracy attempts to undermine local Aboriginal control. ‘In a practical sense’, Michaels writes:

I want to subvert the bureaucratisation of [Aboriginal media], such as may be expressed in the training programs, funding guidelines, or development projects which claim to advance Aborigines, but always impose standards alien to the art (because these will be alien to the culture producing it). Wherever Australian officialdom appropriates a population, as it has attempted to do with Aborigines, it quickly bureaucratises such relationships in the name of social welfare. This assuredly defeats the emergence of these sovereign forms of expression, as it would defeat Jupurrurla’s own avowed objective to create Yapa—that is, truly Warlpiri—media (Michaels, 1989: 25).

By ‘cultural future’, Michaels means:

… an agenda for cultural maintenance which not only assumes some privileged authority for traditional modes of cultural production, but argues also that the political survival of indigenous people is dependent upon their capacity to continue reproducing these forms (1989: 73).

‘A cultural future’, he argues, ‘can only result from political resistance’ (Michaels 1989: 78).

Here, I want to hone in on Michaels’ unproblematised deployment of the concepts of ‘cultural maintenance’ and ‘traditional modes of cultural production’. In his terms, a ‘cultural future’ will only be realised if the Warlpiri can ‘embed [video] production in traditional forms’ (Michaels & Kelly 1984: 34). There is a false dichotomy implicit in this statement—between traditional and modern, culture and lifestyle and, indeed, local and global—that assumes cultural reproduction to be a static process. In Michaels’ accounts ‘culture’ is reified as a set of aesthetic practices or ‘systems’ to be preserved, rather than comprehended in its richer more anthropological sense of practices and meanings enacted in social relations evolving through time. It is in the deployment of this rigid and reified notion of ‘culture’ that Michaels’ model of Warlpiri media practice runs into trouble. For there is a further unintended consequence here: in adopting a discourse of ‘cultural maintenance’ Michaels allows Warlpiri people only one way of engaging with new media that is considered truly authentic. In so doing he falls prey to what Robert Hodge (1990) has dubbed the ‘spirit of Aboriginalism’. In this ‘cultural future’ Warlpiri people will manage to do what no other people have done before them: they will succeed in subverting the very logic of the mass media and globalisation. Here lies the possibility of enhanced Warlpiri autonomy, and the protection of their ‘sovereign forms of expression’ (Michaels 1989: 25). Yet if they fail, they will be subsumed within the homogenising tendencies of those same media, lose their cultural distinctiveness, and become but one manifestation of a pan-Aboriginal mass. Michaels’ argument is clearly anti-globalisation; for him the continuing resilience of Warlpiri cultural identity is dependent upon Warlpiri people’s ability to hold what he sees as the homogenising tendencies of globalisation at bay. Yet he fails to comprehend the contradiction implicit in his model: the very social form which is identified as posing an unprecedented threat to Warlpiri cultural life—technological mediation, in this case incorporating video and television—is simultaneously held up as offering the key to their potential salvation.

At this point it is worth pausing to consider the context in which Michaels was developing this argument. I stated at the outset that part of my interest in revisiting his work is to explore the extent to which Michaels’ accounts of Warlpiri media practice resonate with debates about the nature of globalisation that were emergent at the time he was writing. In fact, it was not until the end of the 1980s that globalisation became an explicitly articulated focus of study for cultural theorists. The end of the ‘80s was momentous in world politics—the collapse of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the students’ uprising in Tiananmen Square, all signalled the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a ‘new world order’. Inextricably bound up with these developments was the acceleration of global capitalism, brought forth by a symbiosis of the market and a massively expanded electronic media (Jameson 1992: 275, Hinkson, J. 1993). These events in turn resonated throughout the academy and were mirrored by a considerable shake-up of critical thinking which had been emergent over four decades. The end of the 1980s saw a proliferation of writing concerned with transcending binary frameworks and exploring new approaches to understanding the cultural implications of globalisation (see for example Featherstone 1990; Jameson 1992; Marcus & Fischer 1986; Tomlinson 1990). Early approaches tended to be framed within the binary distinctions of the previous era: globalisation was viewed as either equal to homogenisation or diversification; one was either ‘for’ or ‘against’ globalisation. More recently, binary frameworks of thinking have to a certain extent been displaced by concerns to explore what is occurring on the local side of the global-local nexus [5]. Anthropologists and cultural theorists have sought to understand the different ways in which the complex processes of globalisation penetrate local communities and become embedded in local social relations, practices, and meanings (see for example Appadurai 1995; Fardon 1995; Clifford and Marcus 1986; Friedman 1990).

Michael’s work on Warlpiri media practice can be located at the early end of this emergent body of writing. The oppositional framework of his analysis—his prediction that the technological mediation of the Warlpiri life world would result either in a ‘cultural future’ or a ‘lifestyle future’ (Michaels 1989)—is to some extent reflective of the politics and sensibilities of that period. Michaels’ stance clearly reflects a binary vision of politics [6].

There are other, less abstract, angles from which to critically engage with Michaels’ static oppositions. As I discuss later in this article, such oppositions fail to reflect a long and complex history of inter-cultural engagement at Yuendumu that well and truly pre-dates the arrival of television (and indeed the end of the Cold War). Yet perhaps the most compelling counterargument to Michaels is simply reflected in the subsequent use of communications technologies that occurred at Yuendumu after his departure.

• a functioning telephone system (supporting phones and fax machines in the offices of all community organisations, phones in most European homes, and five public phone boxes three of which were available after business hours)\

• two television channels (ABC and Imparja) transmitted simultaneously, with ‘interruptibility capability’ for insertion of other programming

• two radio stations, ABC and Imparja, again, with ‘interruptibility capability’

• email and internet access (utilised at this stage by three community organisations and the school)

• a video conferencing network (Tanami Network, co-owned with the communities of Lajamanu, Willowra and Kintore and linked to sites in Alice Springs and Darwin) (Hinkson 1999, chapters 4 & 5).

By June 2001 Yuendumu’s connectedness to the ‘outside’ world had expanded even further—there were now four television channels being transmitted simultaneously, access to telephones had increased subsequently, with phones recently installed in 14 new Warlpiri houses, and Eftpos facilities were now available in the Social Club store.

This potted history of technological evolution at Yuendumu deserves considerable unpacking, but it is not my intention to do so here. I list these developments in shorthand merely to spell out the extent to which ‘remote’ townships such as Yuendumu have been caught up in the telecommunications revolution which has swept the world in the past two decades. 15 years ago, Michaels saw the introduction of commercial television looming as an unprecedented challenge to remote living Aborigines. With the benefit of hindsight, the arrival of television comes to be seen as just one manifestation of a much broader process: globalisation, in a new accelerated and technologically extended form (Sharp 1993), carried to all corners of the world [7].

New communications technologies have greatly expanded Warlpiri people’s engagement with images, objects, people and places that originate from outside their township. Conversely, they have made Yuendumu ever more accessible to a whole array of institutions with diverse interests in that place. But how has this high-tech revolution manifest itself on the ground at Yuendumu? To invoke the work of Jonathan Friedman (1990), how has globalisation been localised? What other changes in Warlpiri social life has it coincided with? 

From Michaels’ time to the early 1990s, a locally produced Warlpiri news program was broadcast with varying regularity, and from time-to-time other programming was transmitted. The really concentrated focus on television broadcasting came to an end after Francis Jupurrurla Kelly, who had worked so closely with Michaels, resigned from Warlpiri Media in 1991. The changing activity of the media association over time has reflected a changing personnel and skills base. For a significant part of the period between 1992 and 1996, for example, Warlpiri Media was represented by one Warlpiri woman, Valerie Napaljarri Martin, who received support from a series of white advisers who turned over in rapid succession. During this period there was greater emphasis on radio broadcasting, with lesser attention given to video production and television broadcasting.

Recall Michaels’ stated aspiration to ‘subvert the bureacratisation of Aboriginal media’ (1989: 25)? After his departure from Yuendumu such resistance was considerably difficult, as the resources accompanying Michaels’ research fellowship were no longer available to the project. Alternative funding had to be found and before long, Warlpiri Media was operating more or less within the constraints of federal government funding provisions. These constraints presented a particular bind for Warlpiri Media. By 1994 the organisation could only access money to fund a coordinator’s position if that position was expanded to include the provision of training to eight other media associations of the region. The delivery of this training program in turn, while appreciated by neighbouring media associations, meant that little time could be dedicated to supporting activity at Yuendumu. Indeed, for a good part of the early 1990s the Warlpiri Media coordinator was based in Alice Springs for logistical reasons, visiting Yuendumu on a fortnightly basis.

In late 1996 these circumstances changed. The arrival of a highly skilled and entrepreneurial coordinator [9] saw Warlpiri Media’s organisational base begin to expand. A number of collaborative projects undertaken with professional film makers were launched; Munga Wardingki Patu—Night Patrol, Marluku Wirlinyu—the Kangaroo Hunters, Bush Mechanics. Successful applications for grant monies to fund these projects brought much needed resources into the organisation which could in turn be used to support other activities. A video trainer was employed. By June 2001 the organisation employed three non-Aboriginal people—a manager, video trainer, and radio trainer—as well one Warlpiri man, a multi-talented digital artist, musician, sound recordist, website designer, and computer technician. Six male and one female CDEP [10] scheme participants were also working for the organisation in a range of capacities, most particularly, in radio broadcasting. In recent months Warlpiri Media had taken up a weekly three-hour spot on CAAMA radio, and there appeared to be a great deal of enthusiasm for participating in this work. A locally produced CD profiling bands of the region was in the process of being mixed down. A four-part series of Bush Mechanics was in final edit.

In skimming briefly across the history of the Warlpiri Media Association it is possible to identify a particular dynamic at work; a gradual expansion of the organisation’s operations, and a gradual shift in direction to activities that are not necessarily or unambiguously local in focus [11]. It is this dynamic which underwrote a subsequent major development at Yuendumu, the establishment of the Tanami Network.

Now a question often asked in relation to Tanami Network is why would people who are so ‘disadvantaged’ according to what we might refer to as ‘mainstream social indicators’ want a video conferencing network? Indeed, a criticism commonly levelled at those associated with the network’s establishment is that the amount of money involved—$1.6M infrastructure and substantial recurrent costs—could have been allocated to other, more basic priorities. From one perspective, taking the health, housing, and education circumstances of many Warlpiri families into account, surely, they are right. Yet, if we conjure up the diverse social arenas in which contemporary Warlpiri life is lived, this question of priority is recast in complex and important ways. The above example gives the beginnings of a sense of this—increasingly Warlpiri identity is enacted in diverse contexts that are geographically and culturally distant from Warlpiri country and Yuendumu. Over the past two decades a new kind of mobility—interstate and overseas travel—has become commonplace, most directly as a result of the growing national and international interest in Warlpiri art. As Warlpiri people travel further away from home, they and their kin require new social mechanisms through which to maintain communication with each other. Such linkages are highly valued because of the premium Warlpiri people place on maintaining and reproducing social relationships through intensive interaction. Mechanisms such as video conferencing enable such communication to take place in a new technologically extended (Sharp 1993) form. Because video conferencing is a visual medium, it also enables the kin who stay at home to witness some aspects of the traveller’s experience.

The range of uses to which Tanami Network was put over the first four years of operation provides a wider context for considering such issues. In surveying such uses (see table above) it becomes clear that describing Warlpiri people’s use of video conferencing in terms of ‘cultural maintenance’ is misleading. Certainly, there are categories of links that could be seen as simply extending the context in which relations between kin are fostered and reproduced—particularly the categories of family/community meetings and prison links. But as the data in the table reflects, these are by no means the dominant uses [14]. When Warlpiri people participate in video conferencing—whether it be in school classes, in exchanges with other indigenous peoples, in meetings with government departments or service providers, or in exhibitions of Warlpiri art—they may be engaging in many things, but I would argue that ‘cultural maintenance’ is low order among them. It seems to me that there is a different cultural dynamic at work here. This is a tendency in Warlpiri society to go forth, as it were, to reach outwards, to engage with people, objects, images, and ideas, across the inter-cultural divide, at the same time as seeking new ways to maintain connections with the kin who now travel through this expanding social arena.

To locate these developments explicitly within current debates about globalisation: it is clear that Warlpiri people’s engagement with the wider world via new media such as video conferencing is a two-way process. As the potential points of articulation between the local and the global increase, it follows that Warlpiri people, like the rest of us, require new mechanisms with which to grapple with these new circumstances. From one perspective modes of communication such as video conferencing can be seen as sustaining locally grounded Warlpiri social life: one of the most significant features of Tanami Network is that it enables Warlpiri people to participate in a whole range of forums without leaving home. But this is not to say that in doing so they ‘resist’ globalisation, on the contrary. There is a contradiction embedded in this process. At the same time as new media provide the Warlpiri with new mechanisms for dealing with contemporary circumstances, those same media also sustain those circumstances. Globalisation has become embedded in Warlpiri social relations in complex ways, meaning at base that Warlpiri identity is no longer simply enacted through the highly localised social formations which have long been associated with Aboriginal societies, but also, and increasingly, through more abstract, technological modes of exchange. As a consequence and as I discuss below, Warlpiri people face new challenges and choices regarding how they might hold together the different orders of social relatedness that circumscribe their world.

At the most basic level, the accuracy of Toyne’s critique is reflected in the very first television broadcasts that were made at Yuendumu in August 1985. VHS recordings of these broadcasts are held in Warlpiri Media’s video archive. In viewing these tapes, one observes a group of young Warlpiri men in the broadcasting room, with a non-Warlpiri voice audible in the background, recognisably that of Peter Toyne, discussing technical problems with the planned transmission. Conversation between the young men is in Warlpiri, with much joking. When Toyne advises the men that the transmission link has been secured and they are ‘on air’, two Warlpiri men seated side by side in front of the camera compose themselves and start talking to each other in English. Their discussion takes a question-answer format, decidedly un-Warlpiri in its manner. One asks the other, ‘what is your name?’, ‘where do you live?’, ‘what do you work?’.

Now, it seems striking that such a prolific writer as Michaels, particularly with his interest in the social relations of Warlpiri video production, chose never to write about the social relations of this first broadcast. The conclusion I draw from this episode is that, at the outset, the Warlpiri participants in the Yuendumu video and television project seem to have had their own, very particular assumptions about who their viewing audience was. Surely it was not Warlpiri people they were imagining watching their exchange on television monitors? Alternatively, perhaps it was, and these men were familiar enough with mainstream television formats to be engaging in mimicry. Regardless, it would seem that in this early phase, something more complex was occurring than the ‘Warlpiri TV for Warlpiri people in the Warlpiri language’ that Michaels documents.

My aim in drawing attention to these first broadcasts is not to expose Michaels’ depictions of Warlpiri media activity as myth. What I do want to do however is give some focus to a core aspect of the Yuendumu media experiments which remains largely invisible in Michaels’ accounts, namely, their inter-cultural nature—inter-cultural in terms of participation, inter-cultural in terms of the traditions being engaged, inter-cultural in terms of the meanings produced. It follows that there are two important questions to be addressed: firstly, why did Michaels’ fail to capture the inter-cultural nature of the media project? And secondly, why does it matter?

As the only high-profile Aboriginal leader to have comprehensively entered this fray Noel Pearson’s interventions have attracted a great deal of attention. Pearson is calling for a new form of self-determination in which the interactions between Aboriginal communities and government are brought into a new alignment. His model focuses particularly on the need for cultural redevelopment to take place within Aboriginal communities. At the centre of Pearson’s vision is the call for a new pact of responsibility and reciprocity between individual Aboriginal men and women and their families and communities, and in turn between those communities and the wider Australian society. Pearson calls for the establishment of new indigenous governance institutions that might provide a centralised interface between indigenous communities and government and other service providers. Pearson’s is a bold and extremely important intervention into the self-determination debate. But as Martin (2001) has argued, his model of self-determination requires of Aboriginal people a form of individual responsibility that has no precedent in Aboriginal society, raising the prospect that the changes Pearson is calling for may in fact lie beyond the capacity of indigenous groups themselves to institute (Martin 2001: 18).

It is only in the unfolding of such debates, and indeed in recognising some of the cultural constraints on self-determination that a whole range of related issues might be addressed. An associated question that might be raised that allows us to place Michaels’ work in the context of these debates is, whose interests are served in the characterisation of community development as an unambiguously Aboriginal process? Like other community developments in remote Aboriginal townships, it is clear that Aboriginal media projects have not arisen spontaneously within an Aboriginal domain. It follows that there may be a whole host of reasons why Aboriginal people want non-Aboriginal people to continue being involved in their organisations.

Earlier I posed the question why does it matter that Michaels failed to identify the inter-cultural nature of the media projects he was involved in? This is a question that deserves to be addressed on a number of levels. At the most localised and practical level, developing a better understanding of how Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people work together, and indeed don’t work together, is critical if organisations such as those under discussion here are to find a more stable base from which to operate. It is not uncommon for new non-Aboriginal employees to arrive at Yuendumu grasping their copy of Michaels’ The Aboriginal Invention of Television, or Bad Aboriginal Art, with particular preconceptions about the nature of the organisation they have come to work for and the role they will be expected to play. Enthusiasm often turns to bewilderment when reality does not match their expectations. Warlpiri people and non-Warlpiri people commonly have divergent understandings of the workplace and differing expectations of each other. It is not unusual for non-Warlpiri employees to leave Yuendumu disaffected and confused about what their time in the township has amounted to. New arrivals are given few handles for grappling with the complicated and evolving inter-cultural context they have come to work in. Fuelled by a well-entrenched discourse about the self-determining nature of Aboriginal community broadcasting, such a scenario becomes self-perpetuating.

Of course, the bemusement I speak of is not one-sided. Workplace relations have implications for the social lives of Warlpiri people outside the workplace, and it is not uncommon that they express frustration in relation to the constant turnover of staff, the difficulty of breaking in new staff, and to voice concerns about the difficulty of retaining corporate memory.

[In the early days] yapa [Warlpiri people would] usually come in [to the settlement] for rations and go back to camps. And then round about maybe middle of the sixties, they started to come in. Two or three had houses, so, people could see, you know, ‘Oh good, [I’ll] make a humpy next to it. So, bit by bit, they’re starting to come in … And then in the seventies, more people coming. And then more yapa jobs, and training, night school, or go to Batchelor College. So more and more young people went to school … And they could see more and more lifestyles of kardiya [Europeans], to live … Like in Darwin, we used to [visit] going to place to place … And we learnt how to read, and read the street sign, so more and more we could be free…

This reflection, recorded in the context of a much longer conversation between Poulson and myself at Yuendumu in November 1995, gives an evocative description of the parameters of the Warlpiri world opening out once mobility accompanying new forms of work and education became available to Warlpiri people. This opening out is clearly a two-way process in which Warlpiri people are actively engaged, and facilitated by access to transport, increased mobility, improved communication with centres outside Yuendumu, as well as more accessible news of events occurring in the world at large via radio. Importantly, all of this predated the arrival of television.

It is important to note that researchers have made a constant presence throughout this history, dating back to times prior to Yuendumu’s establishment. More recently, in the era of self-determination, researchers have been at the forefront of helping facilitate many of the significant inter-cultural initiatives at Yuendumu, including not only the establishment of the media association, but also Warlukurlangu Aboriginal Artists Association, and the Tanami Network. Throughout the history of community development at Yuendumu, from well before Michaels’ time to the present, there have been many mutually enriching partnerships between Warlpiri and non-Warlpiri people that have driven such projects. It is through these relationships that the rhetoric of doing things ‘two ways’ has been fostered and given substance. Understanding how this wider context of inter-cultural engagement permeates the social relations of townships such as Yuendumu would seem to be critically important to the reformulation of self-determination as both a policy program and a political ideal. The proper representation of this inter-cultural context matters, because, as Francesca Merlan (1998: 170) has observed, at the most basic level ‘representations of Aborigines by others affect what they are allowed to be and become’.

The more than 1200 video tapes produced at Yuendumu over two decades that now form the contents of the Warlpiri Media video archive provide a window on these evolving circumstances. As documented by Michaels the archive contains audiovisual recordings made in the 1980s of public ceremonies, country visits, hunting and gathering expeditions, and sports events. But there are also recordings of community meetings at which Warlpiri people identify and attempt to deal with ‘problems’ such as petrol sniffing that have no precedent in pre-contact Warlpiri life. There are visits to the township by politicians and bureaucrats during which the crossed purposes of government and Warlpiri aspirations [18] are documented time and time again. There is the presentation to a senior Warlpiri woman of an Australia Day honours award, video conference links with Yuendumu artists and other indigenous peoples on the other side of the globe, and much more. These are some of the multifacted dimensions of social life at Yuendumu in an era of accelerated globalisation. The video archive constitutes an important historical record of two decades of social life in a unique and dynamic township where inter-cultural engagement has increasingly become a central part of what it is that Warlpiri people do.