'That photo in my heart': Remembering Yayayi and self-determination

Abstract

What was self-determination? As debates about the future of small Aboriginal communities continue to rage in the public domain, the era in which Aboriginal people were encouraged to leave centralised missions and settlements to pursue relatively autonomous futures on their ancestral lands appears as a distant past. Self-determination as a bipartisan policy approach can arguably be temporally located between 1972 and 1996, a period in which anthropological research involving Aboriginal communities flourished, driven by the optimism of the times, but also particularly by the legislative requirements of the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act. A decisive shift in policy away from self-determination was declared by John Howard on coming to power in 1996, and was broadly followed by successive governments, both Labor and conservative Coalition. Particular moments in this policy shift have triggered much passionate debate among anthropologists over the past and future of remote communities and anthropology’s engagements with them (Altman and Hinkson 2009; Sutton 2009). With the initial intensity of those debates now behind us, we might expect to see some differently inflected late-career perspectives, especially from anthropologists who were deeply immersed in fieldwork in the 1970s and 1980s, the height of self-determination’s optimism. Remembering Yayayi is one such timely contribution; a film that brings focus to an iconic place of self-determination’s enactment, a film that by virtue of its methodology also circumscribes the Indigenous affairs landscape of then and now in understated but interesting ways. Remembering Yayayi, as its name suggests, is a film about memory. It is also a film about a place and a field of government-supported activity that no longer exist. Methodologically, it is a film with a complex temporality that enfolds images shot in different eras and diverse ways of seeing. Remembering Yayayi thus stimulates thinking around the ways the work of anthropologists can contribute to interpretations of the past and inform future focused policy-making. It also provokes reflection on what the medium of film might bring to such debates that the written word cannot.