-
7. The Cultural Politics of Radio: Two Views from the Warlpiri Public Sphere
- NYU Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
142 > 143 In the first case considered here we glimpse the contradictory nature of the emergent community-based mediated public sphere and the ongoing challenges that Warlpiri social imperatives pose to the realization of a Warlpiri “community.” In the second case, the time of a neoliberal intensification of state “intervention,” we hear senior Warlpiri voices reflecting on the similarities and differences of the colonized past and present. These voices, carried by radio waves and the Internet, are directed both to the local community and to more distant listeners. In attending to these two moments, this chapter considers what radio activity reflects on Warlpiri people’s sense of who they are in turbulent times and on the increasingly complex parameters of their public sphere. Beginnings The town of Yuendumu originated as a ration depot on the edge of the Tanami Desert in 1946. The establishment of such depots, which were subsequently gazetted as Aboriginal reserves, was a cornerstone of “protection”era policy in Australia, wherein nomadic Aborigines of the continent’s interior were sedentarized and segregated from rural towns.1 Warlpiri people remember the early days of the settlement in terms of clear demarcations between themselves and the state agents who oversaw the town’s operations. Their camps were physically set outside the town perimeter. Adults worked as domestics, cleaners, gardeners, and laborers. All were fed in a central dining room. Yet one of the features of this early period of settlement, which in state terms was a focused exercise in the training of citizens, was that Warlpiri people retained a degree of autonomy from Europeans that enabled them to continue organizing their social world according to long-held cultural imperatives . They were subject to a strict authoritarian regime and regulated work routines during weekdays but then left to themselves after hours and on weekends. Warlpiri language was banned from the school classroom but continued as the lingua franca of the camps. Boys continued to be made into men through circumcision ceremonies, customary marriages and polygyny continued to be practiced, the extended kin relationships that organized land tenure and enacted cosmology continued to be fostered. In short, a kind of domain separation ensured that two forms of authority co-resided, probably for about the first fifteen years of settlement (see Trigger 1986). The children who were schooled during this period grew up with a distinctly bicultural orientation to their social world. In 1967 more than 90 percent of Australians voted in favor of a national referendum to amend two clauses of the constitution to enable the [44.192.132.66] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 10:39 GMT) 144 > 145 of social activity in this dynamic period—video records were made of culturally engaged school-based activities, as well as trips to country outside the settlement by people reestablishing connections to places not visited for many years, old people reminiscing, and meetings between residents and visiting bureaucrats about all manner of community development issues. Undertaken in a period prior to the launch of the first national satellite and before the development of legislative guidelines for remote broadcasting, the activity at Yuendumu was indeed relatively independent.2 Community-based media activity shifted onto a new footing after the federal government responded to calls to recognize the distinctive issues posed by the launch of national media, especially television, for remote-living Aboriginal people, by introducing the Broadcasting for Remote Aboriginal Communities Scheme (BRACS). BRACS equipment delivered to small towns across remote Australia enabled residents of these places to receive and rebroadcast to a local area of approximately one kilometer in diameter two television and two radio stations. Built into this equipment was a capacity to interrupt the incoming satellite signal and insert locally produced material. However, the equipment came without the necessary training and other financial support that would enable local production, and as a result, only a small number of towns established their own media associations and their own locally produced content. Radio broadcasting has historically been overshadowed by the relative excitement of visual media, yet it is the mode of mediated communication that Warlpiri people are most straightforwardly able to undertake on their own terms. At Yuendumu the early burst of video production and local television broadcasting soon gave way, in a period of dwindling resources and support, to radio-based work. Radio broadcasting that utilizes the first and subsequent generations of BRACS equipment is technologically straightforward, is the least demanding of financial support, and requires very little training. So throughout...