Page 207 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

value (Dussart 2000; Myers 2003). As one analyst of the use of media in Yuen-
dumu has argued,

Old people are not recording that knowledge which they consider to be the most
highly valued for Warlpiri consumption, because ultimately, they do not regard these
processes of recording to constitute a Warlpiri medium of exchange. This is the case
regardless of whether the cameraman is Warlpiri or European. Importantly, this
observation points . . . to a burgeoning inter-cultural domain in which Warlpiri
people interact enthusiastically with recorded images of their cultural practices,
past and present, which is viewed as in some respects distinct and separable from
the domain of the “really sacred.” (Hinkson 1999, 176)
In 1991, with these multiple motivations, members of the Warlpiri Media As-
sociation approached ¤lmmaker Ned Lander and his partner, Rachel Perkins,
an urban Aboriginal ¤lmmaker, who at the time was in charge of indigenous
productions at SBS, Australia’s national multicultural station, to see if they
would work with them to make the new Jardiwarnpa video. Rachel is the daugh-
ter of the late Charlie Perkins, a leader of the Aboriginal civil rights movement,
a man whose family had originally come from Arrernte people, living to the east
of Warlpiri lands in Central Australia. Because of her kinship connections,
Rachel began her work as an indigenous media maker in that region. By the late
1980s she joined with other Aboriginal activists from urban areas who were par-
ticularly vocal in demanding a positive and creative indigenous presence on
Australia’s two state-run television channels, resulting in the establishment of
indigenous units at both the ABC and the SBS in 1988. When Rachel moved
from Central Australia to Sydney to produce Aboriginal media for national
audiences at SBS, she made a strong commitment to include not only urban ab-
original people in her stories but also the lives of more traditional and remote-
living Aboriginal people. Based on the interest of Yuendumu elders in ¤lming
the Jardiwarnpa version of the Fire Ceremony for a national audience, she and
Ned Lander took the opportunity to collaborate with them, as producer and
director, respectively, and invited the Aboriginal anthropologist and activist
Marcia Langton to prepare the treatment. They hoped to “whet the audience’s
appetite for further information about the issues rather than to provide a mass
of detail which could not be absorbed in a one hour format” (Perkins 1991, 4;
cited in Bryson 1995).
The project required constant consultation with the community about which
versions of the ceremony would be shown in local, national, and international
contexts (Langton 1993, 80), a strategy consistent with the kind of negotiation
of knowledge discussed above.
Elders supervised and guided the crew, participated in the editing, and reviewed
all material. Constant viewing and screening of the material took place [at Yuem-
dumu]. . . . The tracks leading in and out of the grounds were open and the build-
ing had doors on each side so people could leave to comply with kinship avoidance
relationships. Cassettes were also circulated in the community and aired through

196 Faye Ginsburg