Abstract
http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p139Drawing on the fields of postcolonial studies and media theory, this article analyzes Frances Calvert’s 1990 documentary, Talking Broken, which, inter alia, looks at the role of space, place and media amongst Australia’s ‘other’ Indigenous minority, Torres Strait Islanders. The article explores the historical and geographical complexity of the space-place-media relation (particularly in terms of the centre-periphery relations between the Torres Strait and the Australian mainland), and considers the extent to which Calvert – after the Australian bicentenary of 1988 – is able to absorb and playfully challenge such formulations. More broadly, it considers the extent to which contemporary Indigenous media might go further and enact a shift from absorbing and challenging such formulations to taking control of media institutions themselves.
Highlights
Drawing on the ields of postcolonial studies and media theory, this article analyzes Frances Calvert’s 1990 documentary, Talking Broken, which, inter alia, looks at the role of space, place and media amongst Australia’s “other” Indigenous community, Torres Strait Islanders. he article explores the historical and geographical complexity of the space-place-media relation, in terms of the centre-periphery relations between the Torres Strait and the Australian mainland, and considers the extent to which Calvert, ater the Australian bicentenary of 1988, is able to absorb and playfully challenge such formulations
Despite growing moves towards a contemporary rapprochement2, it is still possible to leaf through canonical readers in both ields (e.g. Ashcrot, Griiths and Tiin; hornham, Bassett and Marris) and ind a relatively limited set of mutual references. his is puzzling, not least because postcolonial studies’ thematic interest in questions of space, place, property and land, and how they are mediated by language, seems apt to be addressed from the perspective of recording and communications media and vice versa
I ofer this observation less as a polemic or detailed argument, –one could cite counter examples–and more as an invitation to explore some of the possibilities of mutual dialogue through a speciic case study: the spatial and ilmic representation of Australia’s “other” Indigenous community, Torres Strait Islanders and their descendants
Summary
140 Peter Kilroy, Screening Indigenous Australia: Space, Place and Media. Space, Place and the Torres Strait Islands he Torres Strait Island region–home to Australia’s Melanesian Indigenous community–comprises a series of ive island groups situated between Papua New Guinea to the north and the Australian mainland to the south, between the Coral and Arafura Seas, and, beyond that, the Paciic and Indian Oceans to the East and the West (Beckett 26-32), and that anomalous and heavily mediated spatial position is an important part of what I want to address in this article. His leads on to the other great cliché of Torres Strait ilm: the use of, oten decontextualized and exoticized, anthropological ield recordings of Indigenous Torres Strait music played over the aerial opening sequence Calvert breaks with this convention, and with the illusion of representing the Torres Strait as if from an unmediated “Islanders” point of view, by always accompanying the “talking broken” telephone motif with a dense soundtrack of ambient sounds (the sea, wind, etc.), recordings of Torres Strait Islanders literally talking Broken/Yumplatok on the telephone and Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1968 composition, Stimmung.. Calvert cuts from a somewhat martial contemporary school assembly on Boigu Island, where the students sing the Australian national anthem, “Advance Australia Fair”, to a shot of lag-wielding colonial discipline and paternalism in the same ilm In both cases, she leaves the soundtrack of the irst shot running over the selected images of the second in order to make the point. One might choose to characterize this process of archival appropriation, the broader igure of irony undoubtedly plays an important role in Calvert’s early work, and it is heightened in the crucial “media” section of the ilm, which begins with a series of visual and verbal puns: irstly, a shot of a photograph being taken of an Anglican bishop (Kiwami Dai from Saibai Island) alongside a group newly conirmed by him on hursday Island (igure 4)
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