Abstract
The film Remembering Yayayi emerged from a project to return raw 16mm film footage shot in 1974 at the early Pintupi outstation of Yayayi, near Papunya, by filmmaker Ian Dunlop, with Fred Myers as translator and consultant. Two subsequent remote Pintupi communities, Kintore and Kiwirrkura, were involved in the footage’s return. The material had not been available for research (or other) purposes until 2005, when VHS copies were made from the workprint deposited in the National Archives of Australia. In 2006, Myers and Stefanoff took this rare historical visual material in Pintupi language to Kintore and Kiwirrkura, showing it to individuals and family groups and holding community screenings. Responses were overwhelmingly positive. The tapes quickly became regular entertainment for patients undergoing lengthy renal dialysis sessions and Myers received multiple requests for copies. Over several years, one of Myers’ long-term Pintupi friends, Marlene Spencer Nampitjinpa, came to provide a moving personal commentary on the footage, enabling a feature documentary to be produced from it.
Original language | English (US) |
---|---|
Pages (from-to) | 217-238 |
Number of pages | 22 |
Journal | Language Documentation and Conservation |
Volume | SpecialIssue18 |
State | Published - 2020 |
Keywords
- Archive
- Film
- Memory
- Pintupi
- Repatriation
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Linguistics and Language
- Computer Science Applications
- Library and Information Sciences
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In: Language Documentation and Conservation, Vol. SpecialIssue18, 2020, p. 217-238.
Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - “We never had any photos of my family”
T2 - Archival return, film, and a personal history
AU - Myers, Fred
AU - Stefanoff, Lisa
N1 - Funding Information: Part of my current research interest, of course, is the issue of rights in cultural materials, and what had happened in Australia. Archival material like that was actually being freely shared with people who had permissions of the communities. That is, the National Archives recognised that communities had rights to their material, and if you had permission from them you could use it. But now, because the Australian Federal Government had removed most of the funding from the archives, the NFSA had to make money from their collections. We would call that a return to neo-liberalism, in which institutions had to earn their keep. They were obliged to charge us money, and it was quite a lot per second, commercial rates. They said, “Well, we’ll allow you to do it at academic rates,” which is still very costly. Initially Ian was quite upset because [as already indicated] he believed that he had authorial rights, as he was the creator of the film material, which in most copyright circumstances would give him control over it, even if he shared it [the film and the rights in it] with the community. But now, the government had a claim to it. So, we had some money in the grant, and we paid for the right to screen it in festivals. However, the film is marred, in some sense, by the necessity of including a stamp on it that says ‘Property of National Film and Sound Archives’, on all of the archival footage. It’s not terrible, but it does hinder its visual ability. Eventually, Ian rediscovered the Memorandum of Understanding that he had with Film Australia when he retired, which made it pretty clear, I thought, that he had rights to the material to use in his own projects, and he was a co-producer of this project. In the end, we needed a lawyer. The Australian National University legal team wrote to the National Film and Sound Archives about the rights. So, you have two government bodies basically hashing it out about the rights to this. Actually, ideally and theoretically, it belongs to the Pintupi communities themselves, and to Ian as a creator. In the end, the significance of the creator’s copyright privileges was allowed to stand. With the community’s agreement and the agreement of Ian, we were allowed to go forward without having to pay these horrendous fees. It’s quite an interesting story about the bureaucratisation of these protocols for establishing who has ownership rights in cultural material.20 Funding Information: We acknowledge the support of the Pintupi communities of Walungurru (Kintore) and Kiwirrkura in this project, as well as Papunya Tula Artists, the National Museum of Australia, and the Australian National University. Thanks to Ian Dunlop, Pip Deveson, Peter Thorley, and Nic Peterson for their many contributions, and to Howard Morphy, especially for housing this project at the ANU and helping with legal support. Grant support is acknowledged elsewhere, where appropriate. Funding Information: Remembering Yayayi was one product of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Linkage grant ‘Pintupi dialogues: reconstructing memories of art, land and community through the visual record’. Initially, it was called ‘the Yayayi Footage Project’, and became known officially as ‘Pintupi Dialogues’ in grant-writing. The ARC grant and a separate AIATSIS (Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies) grant funded my collaboration with the mainly Pintupi Aboriginal–owned artists company, Papunya Tula Artists Ltd, Peter Thorley of the National Museum of Australia, and Nicolas Peterson and Philippa Deveson of the Australian National University (ANU). Our collective undertaking aimed to use film and photographic records “to animate historical consciousness” by using visual records to reflect with members of the remote Western Desert Pintupi communities of Walungurru (Kintore) in the Northern Territory and Kiwirrkura in Western Australia on a pivotal period in the history of the Pintupi people with whom I began research in 1973. The ARC grant extended from 2010 to 2013, but the project began much earlier. It involved not only returning to my earliest ethnographic work in Pintupi communities (see Myers 1986), but also looking further into the historical context of the policy of self-determination in Australia as it was elaborated in the early 1970s. There were further historical significances to the return of the visual materials: in 1964, a decade before he shot the Yayayi footage, Ian Dunlop, accompanying then patrol officer Jeremy Long, had photographed Pintupi people as being among the last Aboriginal people still living a nomadic life in Australia’s Western Desert. And, at the other end, while working on the return of this archival material, I became engaged in consulting on another project of archival significance, on the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory (MAGNT) collection of early Papunya paintings and the restrictions of what can be shown (Myers 2017a). Funding Information: The two Pintupi men were Freddy West Tjakamarra and George Yapa Yapa Tjangala. For the opening of a new art studio in that community, for Papunya Tula Artists, the artists company that began the acrylic painting movement (see Myers 2002). This period and the Pintupi case are discussed in Myers (2016). The article and book (Peterson & Myers 2016) were part of the results of a Pilot and Linkage grant from Australia Research Council (2010–2013), and an earlier research grant from the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (2009), both entitled ‘Pintupi Dialogues’. Funding Information: 11 This is the trip Lisa shared. It was a personal journey on my part, not supported by research grants but nonetheless passed through NYU Human Subjects research ethics review. Publisher Copyright: © Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - The film Remembering Yayayi emerged from a project to return raw 16mm film footage shot in 1974 at the early Pintupi outstation of Yayayi, near Papunya, by filmmaker Ian Dunlop, with Fred Myers as translator and consultant. Two subsequent remote Pintupi communities, Kintore and Kiwirrkura, were involved in the footage’s return. The material had not been available for research (or other) purposes until 2005, when VHS copies were made from the workprint deposited in the National Archives of Australia. In 2006, Myers and Stefanoff took this rare historical visual material in Pintupi language to Kintore and Kiwirrkura, showing it to individuals and family groups and holding community screenings. Responses were overwhelmingly positive. The tapes quickly became regular entertainment for patients undergoing lengthy renal dialysis sessions and Myers received multiple requests for copies. Over several years, one of Myers’ long-term Pintupi friends, Marlene Spencer Nampitjinpa, came to provide a moving personal commentary on the footage, enabling a feature documentary to be produced from it.
AB - The film Remembering Yayayi emerged from a project to return raw 16mm film footage shot in 1974 at the early Pintupi outstation of Yayayi, near Papunya, by filmmaker Ian Dunlop, with Fred Myers as translator and consultant. Two subsequent remote Pintupi communities, Kintore and Kiwirrkura, were involved in the footage’s return. The material had not been available for research (or other) purposes until 2005, when VHS copies were made from the workprint deposited in the National Archives of Australia. In 2006, Myers and Stefanoff took this rare historical visual material in Pintupi language to Kintore and Kiwirrkura, showing it to individuals and family groups and holding community screenings. Responses were overwhelmingly positive. The tapes quickly became regular entertainment for patients undergoing lengthy renal dialysis sessions and Myers received multiple requests for copies. Over several years, one of Myers’ long-term Pintupi friends, Marlene Spencer Nampitjinpa, came to provide a moving personal commentary on the footage, enabling a feature documentary to be produced from it.
KW - Archive
KW - Film
KW - Memory
KW - Pintupi
KW - Repatriation
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85137991974&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85137991974&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85137991974
SN - 1934-5275
VL - SpecialIssue18
SP - 217
EP - 238
JO - Language Documentation and Conservation
JF - Language Documentation and Conservation
ER -