March 2010 - Issue #9
Colourful, creative and fighting to stay local
Story by Karin Derkley
View articles in related topics: Media, Social Inclusion
In 2009 at Pilbara and Kimberley Aboriginal Media (PAKAM) in Broome, Swinburne University of Technology researcher Dr Ellie Rennie watched as Indigenous media worker Henry Augustine loaded 67 videos on to a hard drive and prepared to drive by car 120 kilometres north to the Aboriginal community of Beagle Bay. The programs had been produced by the organisation over the past seven or eight years, and most were just a few minutes long – sport programs, cooking and public health programs, videos of hunting and ceremony, music clips of local rock and reggae bands.
Mr Augustine was driving north at the request of the Beagle Bay community. The people there, like those in many other remote Indigenous communities around Australia, craved the chance to see these records of their local everyday life, of ceremony and of community education on their TV sets. Mr Augustine’s job was to plug the hard drive into a computer at the Beagle Bay Remote Indigenous Broadcasting Station to send the programs out on a local television channel to the town’s 250 residents.
Making and watching local television such as this has become an integral part of community life in remote Aboriginal communities, particularly in northern Australia. But when the plug is pulled in 2013 on analogue transmission, these communities will lose control over their local television stations.
For Dr Rennie, a research fellow at Swinburne’s Institute for Social Research, her work to explore the significance of local media production for remote Indigenous communities could see her documenting the end of a unique media system that has become the victim of new technology.
Aboriginal communities had been making and distributing local videos since the 1980s, starting with pirate (unlicensed) television stations at Yuendumu and Ernabella, until the Australian Government responded by allocating community broadcasting licences. The compact all-in-one radio and television stations that followed were designed to allow local control over the retransmission of satellite content and to provide communities with the means to produce and broadcast local programs.
Today, larger media organisations – remote Indigenous media organisations – have taken responsibility for these smaller stations, with eight large organisations and 150 smaller stations operating in remote Australia.
As most communities did not have the capacity or resources to run local television stations on their own, these large media organisations developed content-sharing networks, such as the Indigenous Community Television (ICTV) channel, which provided a programming feed. Communities that still wanted to screen local content could insert programs into the schedule. In this way Indigenous media was able to develop an alternative model of media production and distribution to mainstream broadcasting.
Dr Rennie says these programs have played an important role in remote communities. “Very often they are basic records of daily life, but it is a daily life that is completely different from the rest of the country.” Some videos are intended to maintain culture, she says. For instance, a recent video of a ceremony told in three different Aboriginal languages – Ngarti, Kokotha, and Walmatjarri – was produced partly as a resource for young people.
The act of video production in itself is also helping to keep young people involved in the maintenance of traditional life, Dr Rennie says. However, the opportunity for communities to make and watch these programs has been placed under threat. In 2007, at the Australian Government’s direction, the ICTV service was replaced by National Indigenous Television. It operates via satellite, leaving remote communities without a distribution platform. While a few remote broadcast stations were inserting some community programming locally, most went without. However, there was some good news, with ICTV’s return in November 2009, with help from the Western Australia Government’s Westlink satellite channel, made available on weekends.
The second setback is digital broadcasting. Inserting local content over either the older ICTV or its newer version National Indigenous TV will not be possible after 2013 when analogue television is switched off.
In January 2010 the Australian Government announced that only a portion of transmitters in regional Australia will be converted to digital, but that subsidies for domestic satellite dishes will be available for homes where there is no terrestrial service. That means that the television transmitters used by local, analogue, remote Indigenous broadcasting stations will be made redundant and television in many communities will be delivered by satellite only.
Inserting community-made programs over the top of analogue channels is relatively straightforward, Dr Rennie says. “But it’s impossible for a local community to take control of a satellite signal being delivered direct to people’s homes.” The eight remote Indigenous media organisations now operating are hoping that the government will at least reinstate a full-time satellite channel for the Indigenous Community TV station, which would allow each region to control a portion of the programming schedule.
Installing dishes on the roof of the homes in these communities, and maintaining them over their lifespan, will also be a massive task. Some homes in the remote north will need a 2.4-metre dish on their roof to receive digital television rather than the 90-centimetre dish needed for urban regions. Although the National Broadband Network will one day provide alternative means of distribution, broadband speeds in remote areas are likely to be far slower than in the cities and even where broadband speeds are adequate, subscription costs may be prohibitive.
Linda Chellew, media manager of the Indigenous Remote Communications Association, says that Dr Rennie’s work is playing an important role in examining and describing the significance of Indigenous television to remote Indigenous communities. The association is the peak body and resource agency for remote Indigenous media organisations, representing more than 150 remote and very remote communities that broadcast television and radio Australia-wide.
The much-vaunted National Indigenous TV, while appreciated, has an urban focus that has little relevance to people living in remote areas, Ms Chellew says. “The life and experiences of Indigenous people in remote areas bears little connection to that of people in urban areas.
“The government doesn’t seem to understand the importance of these communities being able to see programs and receive information about services and issues in their own language, presented by people who are part of their own value system. Hearing your own language on television is essential to community wellbeing. These remote peoples need programs that are driven by their own community issues rather than by national concerns.”
Another issue is the dire need for better resources and funding for video production. “The remote sector has always been treated by government as an amateur and marginal sector,” Dr Rennie says. “But the media-makers of remote Australia are doing incredibly important work. There are women and men who are dedicating their lives to cultural maintenance and community education, and they’re hamstrung by the stereotype that they are just playing around.”
People like Mr Augustine are training people in the skills to produce and transmit content with meagre resources at their disposal. The equipment essential for transmitting programs is often housed in hot and airless huts unsuitable for such technology. Meanwhile there are thousands of hours of video and film and thousands of photographs deteriorating for lack of the resources to properly catalogue and archive them. “There is so much work that needs to be done,” Ms Chellew says. “And so much value that could be gained by training young people in these important multimedia skills.”
For Dr Rennie, the bittersweet aspect of her research at Swinburne is the fact that she may be documenting the end of a unique media system. “It is tragic that the model of remote television that has evolved since the mid-1980s – based on community ownership, grassroots organisation and regional collaboration – could soon be a thing of the past.”
The Swinburne project aims to:
- examine the structure and role of remote Indigenous media organisations and their networks within communities;
- reveal how community media organisations can assist in promoting communications uptake and use;
- monitor developments at the national level;
- examine tensions between low-cost community content and (high-end) national media industries and the role of both in innovation;
- investigate the impact of local Indigenous content;
- develop research approaches to better understand the place and use of community-based media within the broader mediascape; and
- produce a book on the prospects for cultural and technological innovation via the Indigenous media sector.
