Karrabing: An Essay in Keywords

TESS LEA AND ELIZABETH A. POVINELLI

Using forms of “improvisational realism,” the north Australian- based Karrrabing Indigenous Film Collective mimics

and plays with strategies of fabulation and faux realism to provoke audiences into new ways of understanding the

multileveled worlds Indigenous families inhabit and think about. Successful as their ﬁlmography has been, Karrabing

works nonetheless enter a culturally saturated visual contract that threatens to tip their productions back into a rec-

ognizable, morally responsible, set of resemblances. This visual or social contract is not of the Karrabing’s making but

interpolates a response, which we explore here by way of keywords: ethnography/documentary, cultural maintenance,

training, collaboration, and transparency. [collaboration, cultural maintenance, documentary, ethnography, training,

transparency]

Introduction

cracked egg sizzles in fat in an aluminum fry pan,

as a metal spatula plays at the edges, lifting and

releasing the albumen as it yields its transparent

ooze to an opaque white. “What do you think about that

Dog Dreaming?” a woman asks a child who is sitting on

the kitchen bench, watching the cooking egg as she hugs

her knees close to her chest (see Figure 1). The answer is

not immediately ascertainable. Indeed, viewers don’t know

yet to what “Dog Dreaming” refers; and even when they

are introduced to the place to which the woman refers,

it is via an argument rather than a set belief. A group of

young adults and children debates what might have made

a series of stone water holes on a small hill: an ancestral

dog, digging machinery, dinosaurs, bombs maybe? Back

at the beginning, viewers only see a girl staring back at

the woman, the egg still spluttering, sounds of a televi-

sion show playing in the background. As the scene moves

from this discussion to one where householders have to

rapidly wake themselves from their scattered sleeping

places—a chair, a sofa, mattresses on a ﬂoor—there are no

wide map shots to show viewers where all this is taking

place. It is a lounge room, a house, a yard, then a street.

It could be anywhere. From the ﬁrst, viewers are asked to

work out what they are seeing, and while they are helped

with subtitles, the experience can be disorienting.

The ﬁlm stages this disorientation as one of loca-

tion and viewer. It suggests that the questions of

what and where are indeed legitimate, but subverts

the expected conventions of ready cross- cultural

translation or ethnographic exegesis by insisting that

non- Indigenous viewers also experience the disrup-

tions of place and time that are usually thrust upon

Indigenous subjects. Thus, the ﬁlm introduces a vari-

ety of frames of inquiry and reference that are part

of the common life of the Indigenous north: intro-

ducing metaphysical questions about the Dreamings

alongside socio- critical questions about the forces of

settler colonial coexistence, including how to avoid

and accommodate the relentless denial of Indigenous

privacy and agency, from state claims to manage

people’s time and money through to their intimate

domestic mattress arrangements. The disorientation

to reorientate the direction of a disruption of social

ease is deliberate, and yet, as we will discuss below

by way of common audience refrains, such efforts

meet an equal desire to return Karrabing narratology

to more familiar concepts, or if you will, more com-

fortable creations of unease. We stage our analysis

of this interpolative reception space by way of actual

dialogue extracts, Karrabing conversations, and a

discussion of keywords, while probing the expecta-

tion that Karrabing members will reﬂect upon their

ﬁlm projects in recognizably enlightening ways.

begin by brieﬂy describing the Karrabing and their

ﬁlmography (see also Angelotti 2015; Anon. 2015;

Karrabing Film Collective 2017; Povinelli 2016).

Karrabing Keywords LEA AND POVINELLI 37

The Karrabing

The Karrabing Film Collective is a grassroots coopera-

tive of friends and family members, including Elizabeth

Povinelli, whose lives interconnect all along the coastal

waters immediately west of Darwin, and across Anson

Bay, at the mouth of the Daly River, stretching outward

into a global transnational network of curators, artists,

and ﬁlmmakers. The Collective uses ﬁlm to analyze

contemporary settler colonialism and, through these

depictions, challenge its grip. Their ﬁlms operate at

many levels: from insider jokes and hints of a sentient

world beyond the edge of visibility, to probes on what

is causing everyday corrosion within Indigenous life.

The Collective uses the Emmiyengal language term

Karrabing (“low tide turning”) to disturb the usual

anthropological binary between place- based (“tradi-

tional”) Indigenous polities and displaced, diasporic

(“historical”) Indigenous socialities, seeing both as

“brittle and outdated ethnographic construct[s]” (Vin-

cent 2017, 3). While most members are Indigenous and

from seas and lands that stretch along the Anson Bay

region of the Northern Territory, the Collective places

emphasis on a set of friendships and family relation-

ships that stretch inland to freshwater communities and

as far aﬁeld as the United States. These forms of con-

nectivity knowingly and critically speak to the state’s

use of descent lineages and bounded spaces, enshrined

in land claim legislation, to artiﬁcially ﬁx them in a

“homeostatic antiquity” (Neale 2017, 59). The forms of

interconnection signaled by the term Karrabing push

explicitly against the methods by which state agencies

isolate and divide Indigenous people from one another

via racialized descent. Ceremony, marriage, laboring

together, and linguistic code- switching are all seen as

a means of connect[ing] people and country: they make

them one collective without canceling people’s inde-

pendence and difference from each other. As Linda Yar-

rowin puts it,

Through marriage, ceremony, sweat you joinim

but you also keep your roan roan strong. Det why

people bin strong then. They bin respect that nut-

her person because they also bin connected like

inside outside (As so with marriage, ceremony,

sweating in a place—by doing this you join the

places that these activities cross over, but you also

keep your own people and places strong. That is

why people were strong before white people came.

They respected that other person because they

were connected inside and had an outside).

(Povinelli et al. 2017)

Or as another of the Karrabing founders, Rex

Edmunds, has stated: “Karrabing means tide out. And

when it comes in, coming together.” What we are wit-

nessing is a more widespread doubling, a mode of con-

nectivity and independence, of sameness and difference.

This doubling of what is made strong as an individual

body (place, landscape) by being internally connected

to a set of surrounds counters the liberal dualism of

inside or outside, as the same or different. Such subtle

yet major conceptual distinctions sit at the heart of the

impasses between the aspirations of the Collective and

the metrics and discourses of governmental policy and

engaged publics. And it is this impasse that deﬁnes the

ﬁrst of the Karrabing ﬁlms.

When the Dogs Talked (Povinelli 2014) begins with

the housing problems of one member.

Tess Lea, associate professor of Gender and Cultural Studies at University of Sydney, is an anthropologist who

studies settler colonial policy making. In addition to helping the Karrabing Film Collective with their ﬁlmmaking,

she works in partnership with the NGO Healthabitat on a program of applied research aimed at improving public

housing and health for Indigenous and other structurally disadvantaged groups.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas professor of anthropology and core faculty in the Institute for Research on

Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Columbia University. Her writing has developed a critical theory of late liberalism

that would support an anthropology of the otherwise, primarily from within a sustained relationship with Indig-

enous colleagues in north Australia and across ﬁve books, numerous essays, and multiple ﬁlms with the Karrabing.

FIGURE 1. When the Dogs Talked (Povinelli 2014), opening

scene screengrab, Karrabing Film Collective. [This gure appears

in color in the online issue.]

38 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 34 Number 1 Spring 2018

Gigi: [It’s about] how we’ve been struggling

through life. I’m the mystery. Every time I have

all my family I have to put them up in my house

and it is overcrowding, sometime it is too much

for me. Sometime I just feel like walking out, feel

like going somewhere. Too many stress, too many

people. It affects all of us.

Rex: We want to go out bush where we can hunt

and ﬁsh and not pay rent, just be with the rest of

the family.

As with the housing conundrum, the Collective

itself emerged at an impasse and reorientation of fed-

eral state policy on Indigenous welfare in the Northern

Territory. Members originally began making short ﬁlms

as a method of self- organization and social analysis,

prompted by the radical experience of becoming refugees

in their own country (Povinelli 2002). Having come to

the other side of their parents’ experiences of the necro-

politics of settlement—the extraordinarily violent period

between genocide, assimilation, self- determination, and

the exhausting exhumations of cultural identity that

self- determination then required for land claims (Povi-

nelli 1994 and 2002; Roberts 2009; Rose 1991)—things

started to seriously unravel. As Povinelli has written

elsewhere,

[O]n March 15, 2007, members … were threatened

with chainsaws and pipes, watched as their cars

and houses were torched, and their dogs beaten to

death. Four families lost rare, well- paying jobs in

education, housing, and water works.

(Povinelli 2011, np)

In the shape- shifting vicissitudes of Indigenous

housing and wider social policy (Crabtree 2013; Lea

2012b; Lea and Pholeros 2010), the initial response to

this displacement had been vaguely hopeful. The fami-

lies were promised new housing, proper schooling, and

better jobs at Bulgul, close to the mouth of the Daly

River, a site that, while small and with low to no civic

infrastructure, was closer to their ancestral countries. A

tent settlement was set up; the tide was turning.

Linda: In 2007, that’s when we been ﬂeeing from

Belyuen. [We were] homeless people because we

never had that house, you know, so we all had

to live full house in Minmerrama [a public hous-

ing estate in Darwin] and then we all decided in

wet season we just going to move to Bulgul [Daly

River] and sleeping under the trees [in tents].

As they lived in small tents, waiting for the prom-

ised new housing, jobs, and schools, government policy

swiftly changed, unleashing what felt like a new wave

of violence. Aboriginal people could not receive fund-

ing for infrastructure on their customary country, but

were now told to shift to arbitrarily determined “growth

towns” (Markham and Doran 2015) or in the welfare

suburbs of the capital city.

Gigi, repeating her points: The ﬁlm we made was

about the lifestyle we been living, we trying to

show to other people how we been struggling

through life. We decided to make this movie, it’s

about me … because every time I have all my fam-

ily I have to put them up in my house. It’s a three

bedroom house and it’s overcrowded and it’s too

much for me and sometimes I just feel like walk-

ing out going somewhere. It’s too many stress. It’s

too many people.

When asked if the ﬁlm is thus her story, Gigi

replies, “It’s all of our story.” Here, we return to an ear-

lier point: the staging and distribution of disorientation

within and by Karrabing ﬁlms, and whose frame of ref-

erence is considered universal or particular. Gigi’s com-

ment that the ﬁlm stages “all of our story” can be read

as merely referring to “all of our (Indigenous members

of Karrabing) story.” Or can be broadened to “all of

our (Indigenous people living in the Northern Territory

under the harsh unforgiving logics of the Intervention)

story.” Or even further to “all of our (Indigenous peo-

ple living under continuous occupation) story.” And,

onward … soon the question of whose story is legible,

is universal, is the general condition and story of most

people, shifts—as does the dominant cinematic subject.

This kind of thing is what is generally known if you

live within the worlds of most people, Indigenous, of

color, subaltern, radically marginalized, carved by bet-

terment policies, and divided by extractive capitalism.

When the Dogs Talked [Dogs] is the ﬁrst of three

ﬁlms (Dogs, Windjarrameru: The Stealing C*nt$, and

Wutharr: Saltwater Dreams), often referred to as Inter-

vention Trilogy, that stage the condition of Indigenous

lifeworlds under the 2007 Northern Territory Emer-

gency Response, a.k.a. “the Intervention,” without spe-

ciﬁcally referring to it. Non- reference in turn raises

the impasse of documentation within conditions of

the present. What would the Intervention look like at

any rate in terms of its ongoing durative effects? How

would documentary ﬁlm stage and plot a harsh inter-

ruption of Indigenous life as also simply yet another

ongoing set of historical interruptions, as event and

Karrabing Keywords LEA AND POVINELLI 39

non- event at once? The barely articulable magnitude

of what might need to be witnessed exposes the delu-

sional promise of visual media as inherently offering a

comprehensive recording device, let alone attending to

phenomena that are otherwise invisible to an interven-

tionist apperception.

On one hand, Dogs is a ﬁlm about people con-

strained by their circumstances under conditions of

continuing late liberal settler occupation. The ﬁlm

begins with a family, plagued by the Darwin Housing

Commission about overcrowding, who set off in search

of their relative, Gigi, who holds the lease. Agents of

the Housing Commission tell them that if the absent

Gigi doesn’t come into the ofﬁce by the very next day,

she will lose the house. This loss will not be hers alone:

everyone who depends on it for a night’s sleep off the

street will suffer as well. In other words, homelessness

is a cause of the problem and the result. On the other

hand, it shows a group of families who also sustain

other connections, with each other, with their country,

with different rationalities and beholdings. As the road

trip commences to ﬁnd Gigi, and the extended family

travels ever further into their homelands and into argu-

ments about what to prioritize, the ﬁlm slowly reveals

the ordinary embodied interconnections between the

families and their countries that settler colonialism

consistently trammels over but has not eradicated.

Their counterclaims about how to live properly,

what it is to live well and according to local ethics,

are not positioned as an alternative to the world of

bureaucratized existence, but as something that pulses

in and around the shifting demands of such an exis-

tence, iterating and circumventing its ubiquitous

claims at the same time. Should they ﬁght for their

housing tenancy in the face of government regula-

tions about noise and overcrowding, or live with no

infrastructure on country ringbarked by subdivisions,

cattle grids, and fences? Or will they manage both

these existences and more besides, the calls of a desir-

ing, demanding, accusing, punishing, and reward-

ing country included? These question marks are not

answered by the ﬁlm but rather animated and ampli-

ﬁed by it. Every time a possible answer and thus exit

from their dilemma arises, it is immediately diverted

by another potential crisis, of very ordinary kinds.

In other words, the epistemic open with which the

ﬁlm begins is continually supplemented by a series

of practical openings and closings. The cause of the

holes in the ground that our young girl from the open-

ing scenes is asked about, the Dog Dreaming, might

be dinosaurs, men with machines, or a giant ancestor

whose paws got clubbed as ﬁresticks were turned and

turned in its outsized hands, burning and stumping

its ﬁngers. Who and what the ancestral dogs are as

these dogs persist into the present is the question the

girl leaves unanswered, confounding audience expec-

tations, egg still sizzling at the ﬁlm’s end. Not say-

ing may well be more disruptive than saying. She is

not going to represent a lamentable knowledge gap

between what her forebears would have said about the

Dog Dreaming, and young people’s knowledge today,

say. Nor will she be a measure of the dynamic claims

of “modernity” over a static Dreamtime.

By refusing the moral and conceptual binaries,

the ﬁlm teases the audience’s desire for closure, fol-

lowing ﬁlm credits instead with jokes about Star Gate,

foregrounding and laughing away a reference to the

mediating role of cinema memories embedded within

the ﬁlm’s narrative arc. But alongside these epistemo-

logical openings are the practical vortexes of a state

that demands competing versions of Indigeneity—both

bush savvy, and economically and domestically com-

pliant—without providing pathways and blocking avail-

able resources for fully realizing either. The Karrabing

wonder whether the state is all too happy for them to

fail at both: “don’t worry, they [white people] are still

killing us,” members will say. Like the Intervention, the

riot and its ramiﬁcations began long before the riot, and

will reverberate long afterward.

By the end of the ﬁlm, as the opening scene repeats

itself, hopefully viewers see more at stake than merely

the positivity of cultural redemption that audiences

crave, even as settler colonialism denies the same to

Indigenous people. Instead (again, hopefully), the audi-

ence begins to feel the disorientation of their own moral,

political, and social compasses in a way that Nietzsche

might appreciate. But this cannot be controlled for. When

showing When the Dogs Talked to an audience at the

Gertrude Contemporary (a not- for- proﬁt gallery and

studio complex in the city of Melbourne, Australia), an

audience member sought clariﬁcation about the relation-

ship between Karrabing actions and Dreaming reactions

and about the moral nature of the Dreaming itself. “Is the

Dog Dreaming good or bad?” she asked. The answer, Kar-

rabing works insist, is not to choose one or the other, but

to refuse the underlying framework of the question itself.

Their second ﬁlm, Windjarrameru: The Stealing C*nts

(2015), makes this more explicit. Windjarrameru explores

who goes to jail for what kind of stealing and violation,

and what kinds of punishments meet different types of

transgression. As in Dogs, mobile phones play a role.

Windjarrameru opens with a young Indigenous ranger

sitting against a tree, scanning for something, relieving

the time with selﬁes as he listens to music on his phone.

It has clearly been a prolonged vigil. He is interrupted

by a group of age mates who call him over to join in as

40 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 34 Number 1 Spring 2018

they share a carton of hot beer they happily found in the

scrub, with a short speculation on how the beer came to

be there in the ﬁrst place, subtly suggesting the normalcy

of everyday trespass on Indigenous lands.

“Where do you think this beer came from?” asks

one. “Campers,” answers another. “They must

have forgot to put [the beers back] in their Esky.”

As the drinking goes on, slurring words and slowing

bodies, the boys’ banter shifts from teasing to serious

words about what being locked in Darwin’s Berrimah

jail is like, where so many Indigenous men end up.

Being accused of stealing when there were clearly

trespassers on their country turns out to be one of many

double standards that pass before viewers’ eyes. Before

the young drinkers collected him, our young ranger was

tracking suspected illegal mining activities, a problem

that the adult Karrabing Collective members had thrown

into the plot. In this ﬁlm, the illegal miners are acted by

Indigenous men, complete with mirrored aviator glasses

and a callous disregard for the sacred sites they are

intent on destroying, while other Karrabing actors show

the collusion between extractive capital, policing, and

incarceration. The unlikely image of Aboriginal mining

executives works because of the actors’ perfect capture

of their cynical ways, a character analysis based on

deep familiarity with racialized forms of accumulation

through dispossession (cf. Harvey 2005).

Linda Yarrowin: Explaining the plot: “The

[miners] act like crooks, dig-

ging up land like that sacred

site.”

Gavin Bianumu: “Us mob didn’t report the

miners. Only us mob took the

blame.”

Rex Edmunds: “Like we go jail anything, but

Berragut [white people] they

steal everything” (see also

Madden 2015).

As they consider the roles played in the incident

by the ancestral present, the regulatory state, and the

Christian faith, the third ﬁlm in the trilogy, Wutharr:

Saltwater Dreams, now ﬁlmed almost exclusively with

smartphones,

further explores the multiple demands

and inescapable vortexes of contemporary Indigenous

life. Across a series of ﬂashbacks, an extended Indige-

nous family argues about what caused their boat’s motor

to break down and leave them stranded out in the bush.

In crucial ways, Wutharr returns to themes explored in

Dogs, but now with a deeper transtemporal framework

that insists that their present life sits within and along-

side an actively interpreting landscape. The ludicrous

nature of the punitive welfare state is on full display as

one of the members plays a state agent sent to help the

group ﬁll out the forms necessary to pay off a large ﬁne

they accrued for boating to their own country without

proper safety equipment. By the time the agent outlines

the seventh densely arcane document, any purported

rationality to state practices has ﬂown out the window.

What returns is an equally demanding ancestral realm.

When one of the protagonists—having been caught in

a maelstrom that takes her back to 1952—asks her (still

living) ancestors why they punished her and her family

by breaking the motor, the answer is simple: you don’t

come and visit us enough. Here is the Catch- 22: to ful-

ﬁll their country obligations in the context of contem-

porary late settler liberalism, they must violate the state

law, or vice versa. They cannot avoid one or the other

“punishing them.”

Talking to Viewers, Talking to Karrabing:

Lessons in Keywords

Whenever Karrabing members are present for questions

after viewings, whether in Berlin, Jerusalem, Athens,

Mechelen, or Canberra, audiences attempt to pin the

meaning of what they are seeing to gain a better ac-

count of Karrabing intentions. The questions are usually

provocative, genuine, and probative, invoking laughter,

discussion, and interaction. As such, they are not wrong

questions. Still, they are also indicative of a ﬁeld of

power in the kindly quest for meaning, a subtle, well-

intentioned semantic plea, which here, in turn, we place

into a dialogue around keywords, probing the audience

probings for what they reveal about the politics of re-

ception and circulation. For it is this play between con-

ditioned expectations—what a liberal, educated, Western

audience has been tutored to know about Indigenous

existence and what Karrabing members want to say

about who they are—that all Karrabing ﬁlms make vis-

ible.

Ethnography/Documentary

One of the continual questions the Karrabing are asked

is one of genre (Povinelli 2016). Depending on where

the ﬁlms are shown, different suggestions are presented

for members to select from: ethnography, documentary,

surrealism, hyperrealism, faction, or neorealist nonﬁc-

tion. When Povinelli is available to the audience, the

Karrabing Keywords LEA AND POVINELLI 41

question often turns to ethnographic ﬁlm, and more

speciﬁcally, the tradition of Jean Rouch and his work

in colonial French West Africa (Rouch 1978). Some are

more insistent than others that the ﬁlms be considered

part of the ethnographic tradition (as opposed, say, to

Augusto Boal’s [2000] techniques otherwise known as

theatre of the oppressed).

There are many things one might say about this.

The ﬁrst, importantly, is to note that contemporary eth-

nographic ﬁlm is an incredibly rich and diverse visual

ﬁeld, one that is often more effective as a probative

media than written ethnography, which nonetheless has

been relentlessly critiqued as the ultimate form of colo-

nial representation (Biddle 2008; Deger 2006; Ginsburg

2010, 2011; MacDougall 1998). As one of the found-

ers of ethno- ﬁction—a genre that would spill into the

written work of innovative anthropologists like Michael

Taussig (Eakin 2001; Taussig 2004)—Rouch’s own work

broke multiple existing genres and helped to create

visual anthropology as a ﬁeld; but the problematics of

representing “the Other” simply to re- present ourselves

remained. As Rachel Moore (1992) argued some time

ago, “Indigenous video” does not solve the problems

which plague claims of ethnographic authority. Yet

while these are important discussions, they misdirect

Karrabing intentions. Working through issues of (mis)

translation and (dis)orientation are key Karrabing meth-

ods, yet members have never positioned their work as

the empowered solution to issues of anthropological

voice, raising the question of why ethnographic ﬁlm

is assumed to be the genre in which the Karrabing are

working.

One answer is obvious: one of its members is an

identiﬁed anthropologist, albeit one who became such

at the request of the parents and grandparents of cur-

rent Karrabing members (Povinelli 2016). Another

answer is that the Collective builds their narratives out

of their everyday lives, and representing the quotidian

is the claimed space of anthropological work. What is

more interesting to explore is the collapse of a collec-

tive form of creation into a form of being represented

by oneself or another: by the anthropologist or by the

group. In other words, the function of the ﬁlm work is

to be represented or to represent oneself to an audience.

To show oneself for the other. As Linda Yarrowin has

said, “Our ﬁlms show what it is really like, what’s really

going on, in our lives.” At another time, she restressed

the point: “A true story but story; real but got story.”

Likewise, Natasha Bigfoot Lewis describes Karrabing

ﬁlms as “true” in the sense that even though the most

documentary of the ﬁlms are ﬁctional scenes mocked

up out of reality, they are things that have or could have

happened, a truthful capture of being Indigenous today.

And yet what members also say is that these ﬁlms are

making true something in but as- of- yet unable to deﬁne

about the world. Sheree Bianamu and Ethan Jorrock,

younger members of the Collective, describe this as a

coming to understand, through the process of pulling

into visibility through the needs of ﬁlming and sweat-

ing back into country, how the stories their parents and

grandparents told them are not merely “children sto-

ries” but a means of framing their and their cohort’s

actions and land reactions (Bianamu et al. 2017). Here,

the question turns from one of genre and classiﬁcation

to practice and formation: what practices bring forward

a formation of social and land existence that Karrabing

members struggle to (re)make as true, an issue which

surfaces again with the question of collaboration.

Collaboration

The word collaboration, like ethnography, is not a word

Karrabing tend to use, although it is a question routine-

ly asked, perhaps as a front for the question people are

too polite to ask: namely, what exactly is Karrabing?

Either way, answers are not readily converted into the

pithy statements different interlocutors are cued to hear,

for they cut athwart the anthropologized deﬁnitions of

land, kinship, and relatedness now enshrined in both

legal and popular cultural recognition systems. The sin-

gularity of the concept also implies a mode of copres-

ence that would otherwise not exist but for the deliber-

ate intention of working together, raising the question:

is it collaboration when the formation is already a set of

relations among people who have lived with, loved, hat-

ed, and helped each other forever, relations of timeless

duree and meaning? Here, we remember Rex Edmunds’

statement that Karrabing means “as the tide comes in,

coming together.” This describes a group of people who,

like the tides, come together and move apart as different

functions of their lives converge and dissipate, neither

as a once- off nor as a constant steady state, but as a

continuation of relational practices.

Conceived in terms of funding systems, “collabora-

tion” might further assume members of the Collective

represent discrete sovereign descent groups, as if these

are an actual timeless entity—as if different descent

groups discretely exist, having always done so in this

type of form, who are now collaborating. Here too

there is greater ﬂuidity in practice. Let’s say one way

in which you get country is through your father; but if

your father dumped you (“just left his egg”), then you

might reckon country through your mother’s father.

Then, areas that might be one’s country are always

distributed and shifting. Tides come in and out, the

42 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 34 Number 1 Spring 2018

sands shift, the ﬁres rage, the rivers ﬂood, banks erode,

the Dreamings are crossed and push back with their

demands, economic livelihoods ebb and ﬂow, and peo-

ple move and get married across different assemblies.

There are absorptive modes of kinship and there are

exclusive ones. For Karrabing members, absorptive

modes dominate: blood relations and friends alike are

enfolded. Of course, formal kin might be judged with

different criteria: how good an aunty, or daughter,

nephew, son is this one, in relation to affective ties

met or failed? But this is as ﬁxed as group boundaries

might get; which is to say, affectively speaking again,

hardly ﬁxed at all, amid other histories of relating,

responding, beholding, and feeling—and simply being

present, returning, staying.

It would be truer, but perhaps not clearer, to say the

Collective collects relations between people who tran-

scend the normative categories of liberal recognition.

So another answer to the question of what is the Karr-

abing, or how does it collaborate, might be to say it is

a formation that represents decisive self- organizing prior

to the imposed land council model of sovereign groups

that preclude lively sociality. And this convoluted answer

would be needed because all this inherent ﬂuidity became

administratively settled under systems of bureaucratic

and anthropological recognition: the boundary and the

heteronormative descent deemed by social anthropolo-

gists as being true for everywhere helped render all other

modes of assembling secondary, meeting a government

demand for certainty in the moment of exerting disci-

plinary muscularity out of old ethnographic forays (Povi-

nelli 2002). Karrabing posit a mode of belonging to each

other and to a stretch of landscape that runs counter and

diagonally across this ethnographic burden, refusing it, as

Audra Simpson (2014) might say, even as they foreground

how this burden weighs down and deforms their lives—

and deforms them according to a speciﬁc, if evolving, late

liberal settler logic. Yet, just as a self- organizing “all one

family” assemblage does not pull anthropologisms from

the law’s determinative carvings, so too Karrabing mem-

bers are apprehended differently.

Povinelli: “We can love each other as much as we

want—but white people and governments inter-

pret and frame us differently; we can’t pretend the

world is structured differently.”

Cultural Maintenance

If a general demand is often made of Indigenous col-

lectives to produce narratives as forms of representa-

tion rather than as ﬁlmic innovation or straight play,

a more speciﬁc demand is that Indigenous artistic

effort be for something beyond the artistic produc-

tion itself. Again, like the question of genre, or col-

laboration, the matter is complicated. After all, as a

group the Karrabing Collective, including Povinelli,

see ﬁlmmaking as a powerful means of actualizing

what is already potentially within the group. Telling

and retelling narratives, analyzing why scenes fol-

low each other, ﬁguring out how one generation’s

embodiment of their analytics of people and place is

reﬁgured in another, and arguing about what aspect

of this analytic should be a part of a ﬁlm: all these

practices do indeed keep in the present, by making

them vital and compelling, what settlers would like to

conﬁne to the fading past. One could probably even

quantify the effects of ﬁlmmaking and the continuing

embodiment of Karrabing beliefs as a form of “cultur-

al maintenance.”

And yet, cultural maintenance per se is not why

many Karrabing make ﬁlms and artworks. Instead,

they make them because how they now make them—

on their own schedule; scenes shot periodically; in

some cases one person playing one role, in other cases

multiple bodies playing multiple parts—is fun and

absorbing, a diversion in a boring week, a means to

open travel interstate and overseas, a way of having

something “to show” in their lives, a pragmatic rea-

son to come together, and a reason to co- create. Like-

wise, the success of Indigenous ﬁlm and art as a mode

of production, and the vital roles played by regional

art and media centers in Australia, does not neces-

sarily pivot on grand intent or glorious capacities

but because they enable a way of doing, involving,

and being together on country that is otherwise being

strangled (for more on art centers, see Biddle 2016;

on copresence as creativity in land care, see Vincent

2017). Film and art succeed for Karrabing when they

take on board seriously the terms of everyday life

and pragmatics. The multiplicity of reasons various

members might make ﬁlms opens the purposivity of

ﬁlmmaking to an ever widening set of ends and thus

opens the possibility of what ﬁlmmaking might do for

Karrabing members. In this sense, Karrabing ﬁlmmak-

ing refuses the late liberal capture of all practices by

economic rationality or cultural recognition, includ-

ing the idea of ﬁlmmaking as an apprenticeship to a

more industrious pathway in the name of individual

or community betterment. But this, like any answers

so far, cannot lessen audience and potential funder

demands that the point of making ﬁlms is transitional,

a teleological quest for a self- disciplined and accred-

ited future destiny.

Karrabing Keywords LEA AND POVINELLI 43

Training

Anthropologist in audience: “So I noticed from the

credits [for Windjarrameru] that Aboriginal peo-

ple are not holding the cameras. Are they being

trained to this work, so they can get jobs?”

Particularly in Australia, where bureaucratized

apperception of Indigenous possibility reigns even within

anthropological circles (Lea 2012a), there is an ongoing

demand that Aboriginal people adhere to reiﬁcations of

their traditions. In terms of content, Indigenous sufferers

must be obligated by their responsibilities to country,

and be thwarted by an uncaring State, in particularly

recognizable ways. And as ﬁlmmakers holding the

restorative device that now symbolizes all racial and

economic inequality, the camera itself, they should not

only be representing themselves as ethnographic subjects

but also as good citizens in the making. The work of

being involved in ﬁlms cannot be to simply provoke

thought, mess around with meaningful purpose, have

an excuse to get together, relieve boredom, or have fun,

but has to be tied to an instrumental outcome. That is,

beyond the demand that a ﬁlm’s political work be done

according to narrative conventions, audiences want

the additional reparative move of having black hands

holding the camera (see also Moore 1992): anything less

is a diminution of Indigenous speaking authority, and a

weakened platform for the ultimate goal of “real jobs.”

That the marshaling of non- Indigenous resources,

expertise, and mediatic technologies in order to rewrite

how the profound inhospitalities of settler colonial-

ism are survived and resisted is not a betrayal of one’s

indigeneity seems like an obvious point, one that has

been powerfully made by scholars and practitioners

alike (e.g., Ginsburg 2004). But given the insistent

demand that this playful work of critique and analysis

instead be interpreted as a labor of self- improvement,

oriented toward the ﬁctive policy category called “real

work,” it is a point worth reiterating. The instrumental

demand has interpolative effects. Karrabing members

will answer that they too are showing their agency. But

when Linda Yarrowin tells a questioner: “We actually

doing something for ourselves. Not just being stomped

down. People recognize we. Make us stronger,” this is

not a statement of “we are training ourselves for the

purpose of securing tax- paying jobs as videographers,”

but indicates a different pragmatism: one of conﬁrming

and creating social relations, activating new possibili-

ties for ongoing and freely associating agency, in a sit-

uation in which land itself (and not only government)

has desires for and designs on people’s agencies.

There is another purpose of the ﬁlmmaking that

the younger members note which could be categorized

as “development” oriented: the pleasure that comes

from shooting scenes, and of showing them to appre-

ciative audiences, traveling across their countries and

the world. Indeed, the way Karrabing increasingly pro-

duce their ﬁlms strains the military worker logic of ﬁlm

production with its harsh timetables, technical require-

ments, and shoot schedules. Moving to smartphone cin-

ematography, as the latest productions do, scenes are

shot whenever the time seems right—folks are around;

moods are good; an iPhone is charged; the place is

right. And why not? Living within late settler liberalism

creates enough stress for anyone and everyone. What

if ﬁlmmaking were at core to retrain the self to instead

experience the ludic pleasures of co- making, of con-

sciously co- being, without a disciplining agenda?

Behind the scenes, these different perspectives are

given shape in outline form as people talk through var-

ious possible scenarios, sometimes in formal meetings,

but just as often more informally, as people are driving

somewhere, sitting around somewhere else (Figure 2).

All scenes are improvised based on members’ experi-

ence, desires, and mutual understanding. This said,

while the above expositions suggest neither whole-

scale acceptance nor rejection of liberal settler terms

and conditions but rather a grappling with its incessant

demands and having fun in the process, Karrabing ﬁlm-

making is not about substituting an avant Indigenous

cinematic practice to replace that of Hollywood, or for

that matter, government- generated truth claims, with

counterclaims about Indigenous alterity. Instead, they

are a practice of critical probing of the conditions (of

continuation) within which the lived realities of Indig-

enous lifeworlds proceed. And herein lies the rub for

FIGURE 2. “Improvisation.” Photograph by Tess Lea. [This gure

appears in color in the online issue.]

44 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 34 Number 1 Spring 2018

reception politics. Karrabing ﬁlms are better described

as the residual artifacts, not quite secondary but not

quite objects either, of ongoing living analytics that are

expressed in multiple modalities, being playful, hanging

around, environmental listening, and political scanning

included.

Transparency

Rocky: “Berragut [white people] got this way of

talking; what do they mean with that word ‘trans-

parency’?”

It was an enjoyable conversation at the end of

a ﬁlm shoot. Tess, the policy ethnographer, was ask-

ing her foreign types of questions about Karrabing

decision- making processes and what people meant by

their term “open book,” mimicking audience interest in

how the Collective operates as a collective. Open book,

she learned, like transparency, had ﬂexible valence,

generating different kinds of synonyms, from “nothing

is hidden” or a shared problem (“what are we going to

do with the money?”), to a probative sense of opening a

topic in which everyone can participate, without a hid-

den agenda, without a fast looming deadline, with the

pace, like that of using iPhones for ﬁlming, that allows

multiple styles of chipping in. Open book means words

do not veil intentions but disclose potential actions,

establishing agentful possibilities.

It contrasts with—which is to say, in discussion it

was contrasted with—how non- Indigenous people tend

to deal with Karrabing members. An example was given.

A land council representative might call, demanding to

speak to a “Traditional Owner”.

Speaking to this new

category of legal personhood clariﬁes the mechanism

for individualizing and hierarchizing the negotiation of

access to land, usually for non- Indigenous extraction

and enterprise development purposes. The transparent

consultation, already made opaque to anyone outside

the introduced category of “Traditional Owner,” can

further hide its agenda through an overabundance of

impenetrable material, said too fast; as comprehensive-

ness in the service of obfuscation, delivered in thick

documents; or as radically simpliﬁed brevity, as in a

pipeline that is coming through, with no words on the

two kilometer land clearances either side of the pipeline

to be permanently leveled along its entirety (the hid-

den sting behind the actual consultation being recalled).

Such transparency is relayed in Wutharr, where the

“why” of ﬁnes is conveyed through the administrative

violence of impenetrable documents.

Linda: “That story [from Berragut], it cross-

crosses. One story for this person; a different one

for wepella [us people]. Like snake.”

Or, closer to the scene of global audience recep-

tion, via the background work of getting Karrabing

members physically to such scenes of audience recep-

tion, we could take the moment of trying to get pass-

ports. After searching for birth certiﬁcates, creating

repeat head shots to ﬁnd ones which retained distinct

facial features out of a booth’s poor artiﬁcial lighting,

and locating legitimate “authorized” witnesses to sign

these photographs as true, members discovered they

had faithfully completed the wrong forms. Between

earlier encounters with the passport authorities and

the day of submission, another tectonic policy shift

had occurred. Children born from naturalized Austra-

lian citizens could no longer assume their own Aus-

tralian citizenship, a restriction that was announced

in the negative, non- transparently: a line requesting

proof of parent’s naturalization as part of a passport

application no longer appeared in the otherwise iden-

tical forms, rendering our completion of the original,

subtly more inclusive, document null and void. As the

now incorrect documents of Indigenous applicants

were torn up, the settler colonial nation-state asserted

the non- national status of some, but not all, of its

immigrant offspring.

So can the ongoing distance between Indigenous

everyday lives and the desires of their interlocutors be

bridged? We would say the answer is not better and

better rendition. The Karrabing did not form themselves

to be a translation machine or as a solution to the repre-

sentational dilemmas of ethnographic description under

continuing occupation. Rather, the gaps in interpreta-

tion and expectation are an inevitable outcome of the

bureaucratized, ethnologized imaginations that many

viewers bring to their interpretation, elicited by Karra-

bing media regardless of intention, revealing the power

or force of the demand that Indigenous communicative

forms be reformatted, or leveled, so as to be compre-

hendible and intelligible, while avoiding the implica-

tion that structural relations of power the ﬁlms speak

to sit inside theater spaces too. Grounded in the desire

for palatable, consumable difference, the ﬁlms resist

while accommodating the audience expectations they

are speaking to, an accommodation that attenuates as

Karrabing ﬁlmography moves further away from more

readily readable ﬁcto- documentary formats into the

more real surreality enabled by smartphone technolo-

gies. In this, the audience reception loop is similar to

that of policy expectation, permeating creative efforts

even as it is sidestepped, simulateneously satisfying and

Karrabing Keywords LEA AND POVINELLI 45

resisting the desire for redemptive Indigeneity as a con-

dition of audibility.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the ongoing vibrancy,

creativity, and resilience of the Karrabing Film Collec-

tive and its allies. Lea’s ability to undertake ﬁeldwork

with the Karrabing was enabled by an Australian Re-

search Council Discovery Grant [DP 1094139] entitled

“Can there be good policy? Tracing the paths between

policy intent, evidence, and practical beneﬁt in regional

and remote Australia.”

Notes

Unless otherwise indicated transcript, all dialogue

extracts are from conversations within and between

Karrabing members and recorded in ﬁeldnotes by Lea and

Povinelli.

Previous ﬁlms were produced with the help of an external

ﬁlm crew.

A question that is beyond the scope of this essay but de-

serves separate reﬂection is that of adoption and why spe-

ciﬁc art world curators have responded to Karrabing ﬁlms so

positively, citing Karrabing innovations in terms of length,

addressivity, and aesthetic imaginaries, including their lay-

ering and articulating of images to demonstrate both the

separation of Indigenous and non- Indigenous peoples and

their irreducible interpenetrations.

In the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act

1976 (Cth), s3, Traditional Aboriginal Owners are deﬁned

legally as “in relation to a relevant tract of land, a ‘local

descent group’ of Aboriginals who: (1) have common spir-

itual afﬁliations to a site on the land, being afﬁliations

that place the group under a primary spiritual responsi-

bility for that site and for the land; and (2) are entitled by

Aboriginal tradition to forage as of right over that land).”

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