Page 210 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

how the presence of such work in the national mediascape is part of a steadily
increasing Aboriginal presence that, they argue, is helping to produce an indige-
nous public sphere, even under the regime of Prime Minister John Howard
which, since he took of¤ce in 1996, has been decidedly negative toward the sup-
16
port of indigenous cultural production. Writing in 2000, Hartley and McKee
sustained an optimistic tone:
Historically, European narratives have given agency to Europeans, construing
“natives” as passive recipients . . . but only rarely and grudgingly giving agency
and a “speaking part” to the “other” of their imaginings. . . . Indeed, it may be that
the “Indigenous public sphere” is evidence that “Australia” is indigenizing its narra-
tive sense of self as a whole. Thus, the current period may be characterized as an
intense dialogue between Aboriginal and Australian components of the overall
Australian “semiosphere,” the outcome of which is not yet resolved. (4)

Much has changed in the representation of Australian Aboriginal religious
practices since the 1970s, transformations that mirror the shifting place of in-
digenous people in the Australian national imaginary more generally. Tracking
the changes in the mediation of Aboriginal religious life on ¤lm, video, and tele-
vision reveals how these representations of ritual become re-signi¤ed in chang-
ing social practices as indigenous control over these forms of cultural produc-
tion grows in signi¤cance (though not unproblematically) from local to national
arenas of circulation. A central feature of that process is the increase in Aborigi-
nal control over media representations of their own cosmological worlds. In-
deed, the repatriation of archival ¤lms made under the salvage paradigm, dis-
cussed in the ¤rst section of the chapter, is an important dimension of that
effort to build an indigenous public sphere that resigni¤es relations in the past
as well as in the present. As Hinkson observed in 1999,
When VHS video tapes of Roger Sandall’s 1977 documentary Ngatjakula: A
Warlbiri Fire Ceremony arrived in the township . . . at a time when a version of
this ceremony was in the process of being re-enacted, the copies were quickly
snapped up by a number of ritual leaders. At one camp-based viewing . . . more
than 100 people gathered around a video player to watch the ¤lm, a number of
Warlpiri residents saw images of their parents and grandparents for the ¤rst time
since their deaths. . . . The arrival of such material tends to generate a great deal
of interest intergenerationally among Warlpiri people and often feeds into debates
about current-day problems and differences between the past and the present.
Audio-visual recordings have come to play a critical role as repositories of the
Warlpiri past. Their now prominent place in Warlpiri daily life has transformed
the process by which collective memory is constituted. (1999, 112–113)

Clearly, by the 1990s, video and television have been incorporated into older
formal traditions of religious mnemonics and representation—such as sand
and body painting and ritual performance—as regularized features of Warlpiri
forms of practice and objecti¤cation.
This process, understood as part of broader struggles for self-determination
and cultural recognition of indigenous Australians, characterizes efforts on the

Rethinking the “Voice Of God” in Indigenous Australia 199