Page 200 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

produced by the Film Unit exquisitely embodied in practice the appropriative
relationship of the settler society to the cultural/religious practices of Australia’s
indigenous inhabitants. At that time the Institute’s research paradigm (although
contested by some) bracketed the contemporary political realities of Aboriginal
people in favor of creating ¤lm records of indigenous ceremonial life in remote
areas but separated out from the broader social conditions they faced. The Film
Unit focused in particular on recording men’s restricted rituals, producing more
than a dozen ¤lms based on these activities between 1964 and 1969 (Peterson
2003, 133). Despite doubts raised about the strict rules governing the circulation
of certain kinds of sacred knowledge in traditional communities, the Institute
felt that as long as these were only seen by academic audiences in Australia’s
cities, this prohibition was being honored, not taking into account the possible
circulatory reach of ¤lm and photographic materials until the 1970s when the
¤lming of secret ceremonies was stopped (Peterson n.d., 1). 1
In part this was because of the ways in which Aboriginal religious practice
has been positioned in social science since Durkheim’s classic treatise (1912),
as an incredibly elaborated cultural system despite the simplicity of their every-
day material culture. Following in that tradition of scholarship, the aim of the
Institute and its ¤lmmakers was to document key rituals and ceremonies that
form the core of Aboriginal religious expression in an effort to obtain a record
for continued scienti¤c study. These classic ethnographic ¤lms were made out
of a concern that traditional cultural practices were disappearing (Langton
1993, 77). For Aboriginal subjects, the production of ¤lms for the Institute often
became the occasion for elders and others to revisit sacred sites, sometimes
located on lands they no longer occupied, an opportunity that, at the time, in-
evitably elicited cooperation.
However, the indigenous communities represented in the colonial ¤lm ar-
chives failed to disappear as predicted, although traditional knowledge of cere-
monial life declined. Aboriginal Australians managed to survive the onslaughts
of violent settler colonialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and
the assimilationist policies that prevailed from the 1930s until the 1970s under
a regime that Jeremy Beckett (1988) aptly calls welfare colonialism. By the mid-
1970s those ¤lms of Aboriginal traditional life that had been made under the
sign of their possible cultural erasure became part of a material legacy to which
indigenous activists claimed rightful ownership. Realizing that their relatives
and ancestors might not have cooperated under conditions resembling what to-
day we would call “fully informed consent,” Aboriginal activists began to protest
the use and circulation of these archival ¤lmic images outside indigenous sys-
tems of control.
Their protests were based on a number of concerns. First, many of the people
in the ¤lms were now dead; Aboriginal protocols prohibit the circulation of
names and that protocol has been extended to the showing of ¤lm and photo-
graphic images of those who have passed on, especially in the vicinity of their
2
relatives. Second, certain cultural practices—totemic designs, songs, and cere-
monial dances—should only be seen by those who have been initiated and in-

Rethinking the “Voice Of God” in Indigenous Australia 189