Page 202 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 9.1. Warlpiri men during a Ngatjakula ceremony, August 1972. Photograph by
Nicolas Peterson. Used by permission.

structure the ¤lm or to address the audience directly, formal conventions that
routinely shape contemporary documentary style. Despite these signs of hege-
monic control over Aboriginal life audible in the explanatory sound tracks by
anthropologists who structured these ¤lms, these works were also considered
classics of observational cinema, “characterized by a commitment to record
whole events, spatially and temporally” (Dunlop 1983. 16). Like Pandora of
mythological fame, I could not contain my curiosity and thought I owed it to
myself as a researcher and scholar to view at least one of the ¤lms in the privacy
of the department’s projection booth.
I threaded the 16-mm projector with the 1977 ethnographic classic A Walbiri
Fire Ceremony: Ngatjakula, made by Roger Sandall with anthropologist Nicolas
Peterson who offers commentary on the role of this spectacular ceremony in
4
restoring social order, directed to a presumed non-Aboriginal audience. The
ceremony is both about settling up grievances (in which ¤re plays a crucial,
cleansing role) and a statement of Aboriginal ownership of land, told through
stories of the journeys of ancestral beings and the places they visited, all of
which are represented in songs, dances, body designs, and painting (Langton
1993, 75–76; Peterson 1970).
The event culminates at night with one group of ritual participants (kirda),
elaborately painted and arrayed with dry brush, dancing toward a large ¤re
while being ritually beaten with burning torches by kurdungurlu, their ritual
“managers” and key moiety counterparts in the cosmological orchestration of
Warlpiri ritual life. The climax comes when huge towers of brush are ignited,

Rethinking the “Voice Of God” in Indigenous Australia 191