Teleconference and Computers

In the late 1990's teleconferencing between communities, with jails in Darwin or Alice Springs or other distant services, is a common practice for several central desert communities. Yuendumu, Lajamanu, Willowra and Kintore are linked up through the TANAMI NETWORK, an Aboriginal multimedia organisation.

All the community schools have computers. The Lajamanu laboratory was used soon after its establishement in October 1997 to organise a workshop around the YAPA CD-ROM project.

Video and BRACS

In 1979, Warlpiri families used to gather once a week to sit on the ground and watch Western and Kung Fu films on a big screen. A few years later the open air screenings where replaced by video machines. Only a few people could afford to buy one, usually after winning a card game, but they plugged the machine on an extension cord so it could be seen outside by the largest number of people. The Warlpiri and other Central Australian Aboriginal people were worried that Western videos and the future coming of television would disrupt community life and tribal ways. So different programmes and studies were carried on to help the people to face the changes wrought by telecommunications (Michaels, 1986).

One of the main focuses was to train a few Aboriginal men and women to use video cameras so that they could use the video media for the entire community. Hundreds of hours were thus filmed to send news from one community to another and to collect the different aspects of traditional culture (dancing, painting, hunting) for the younger generations. For instance, in 1984, Paddy Patrick Jangala from Lajamanu made a fantastic staged documentary with twenty women to explain the significance of an important Possum Dreaming site (Glowczewski, 1989/1999). The Video was made as part of the negociation process with a mining company requesting an exploration lease on this land which had been given back to its traditional owners as part of a recently won big land claim. The Lajamanu elders explained in the film why the Yarturluyarturlu granite hills are sacred and consequently must not be damaged. The site has been protected ever since. Many of the Warlpiri video tapes have been worn out from having been used over and over. But people retained a keen interest in audiovisual medias from the experience.

In 1985 when the AUSSAT satellite brought television, several Aboriginal settlements developped BRACS (Broadcasting in Remote Aboriginal Communities), a system allowing broadcasting of any tape on all television sets in a vicinity of 30 km. The communities used BRACS to make their own local news and other programmes in their own language. An Aboriginal organisation located in Alice Springs, CAAMA, which broadcasted on radio in several languages, soon got a television licence and created the Imparja television. It has become a very popular channel in the Northern Territory, producing programmes in Warlpiri and other languages, advertisements and news specifically aimed at Aboriginal audiences, but also broadcasting Australia-wide programmes, such as series, films, sports and current affairs reports.

Extracted from the Dream trackers CD_ROM, (B. Glowczewski, UNESCO, 2000)