Will it harm the sheep? Developments and disputes in central Australian indigenous media

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Dowmunt, Tony. 2015. Will it harm the sheep? Developments and disputes in central Australian indigenous media. In: Chris Atton, ed. The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media. June 1st 2015: Taylor & Francis, pp. 469-480. ISBN 978-0-415-64404-4 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

Videos made in and by remote traditional Aboriginal communities in Central Australia have been at the forefront of debates about Indigenous People’s media for the last 30 years. In 1991 I made a TV programme – Satellite Dreaming, co-produced with the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association (CAAMA) – about this work. 20 years later I returned to Alice Springs to research what had happened in the intervening years.
This chapter outlines what I found, and how the passage of time (and much of the writing by others I came across on the subject) has made me question many of the assumptions I came to Australia with in 1991, when my thinking was heavily influenced by the work of Eric Michaels. Since then his writing has been severely critiqued, in particular the idea underpinning it, that this media work can be assessed within an uncomplicated model of cultural resistance to European domination. Also, the policies of Aboriginal self-determination that held sway in the 1980s, have given way to more apparently oppressive forms of governance typified by the ‘Intervention’ in the Northern Territory. Nevertheless I found that many of the impulses that sustained the work in the 1980s have a continuing relevance and power.

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