Page 209 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

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Fig. 9.3. Still of senior Warlpiri woman preparing for a ritual performance from the
documentary Jardiwarnpa: A Warlpiri Fire Ceremony. Used by permission.

said that the presence of the camera and the intent of the ¤lmmakers launched
a cultural revival which was centered around an attention to ¤ne ceremonial de-
tail” (Bryson 1995, 3–4). The resulting hour-long documentary, entitled Jardi-
warnpa, was part of a national series on SBS called Blood Brothers (1992), which
grouped four one-hour documentaries focusing on the lives of four prominent
Aboriginal men.
The broadcast of Jardiwarnpa (along with circulation of other forms of Ab-
original art, dance, music, writing, crafts, and so on) has helped to establish and
enlarge a counter public sphere in which Aboriginal concerns—cosmological as
well as political—are central and emergent, constituting a new form of cul-
tural capital. Jardiwarnpa demonstrated how Aboriginal ritual and cosmological
worlds could be represented on mass media, more or less on their own terms.
As Melinda Hinkson noted in her research on Warlpiri response to media in the
late 1990s, “Warlpiri people are extraordinarily experienced when it comes to
presenting certain layers of knowledge and withholding others, particularly in
situations involving non-Aborigines” (Hinkson 1999, 176). Furthermore, the
presence of indigenous claims to culture and land, presented in high-quality
broadcast format on national television, enables this contested domain of cul-
tural assertion to address a national audience, and to ¤nd a place in Australia’s
national narrative. Media theorists John Hartley and Alan McKee comment on

198 Faye Ginsburg