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National Native Title Tribunal: Home

6 Aussie Pride

Aussie Pride

Erving Goffman in 'The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life' returns the ancient words of the theatre- the 'shill', 'claque', 'stick' and 'shillaber'.

"To the degree that a performance highlights the common official values of the society in which it occurs, we may look upon it, in the manner of Durkheim and Radcliffe-Brown, as a ceremony- as an expressive rejuvenation and reaffirmation of the moral values of the community." (Goffman 1958:23)

This has me thinking. Ceremonies and ritual are not theatre. Theatre adopts aspects of ceremony and uses ritual elements but it is not either of these. Corroborees are not ceremonies either.

Cloud 5

In the air. That's where I am. Six weeks of sick leave to try and sort out a bad back. Moving house, travelling too much and being away from home, not to mention the timeframe within which I have to complete a film and thesis have led to this pause.
So I am at home in Sydney with my family laying up and trying to work out a way to accomplish this task as well as strengthening my body and soul.
The Research Centre have come good again and given me access to a G4 so i don't have the FCP problems necessitated in going back to an older version on my G3 laptop. I am lucky. No, more than that. The opportunity to do this Ph.D. is a gift which I value very highly and which drives me to finish. My supervisor, Howard Morphy, sat with me the other day looking at some footage and while I was talking about masks he observantly and diplomatically leaned me away from my tendency to say that masks are either this or that: black and white.
That is just not how things are. They may be black and white for me in a certain mood but that is far from a perspective that enables other people to enter into conversation and more than likely not a position I can hold for any length of time myself.
It is the grey area that makes life so rich and complex. The mediation between ideas is the fruit of academia. I'm no academic but I have gained a respect for an approach to learning which leaves behind my theatrical pragmatism of getting the show up and running at all costs. Such pragmatism seems to have led me to quite peculiar notions of common sense- primarily that somehow I had the best understanding of what common sense is. Now I am not so sure how common my sense has been.

Bishop Berkley formulated an exercise to demonstrate the relativity of our senses where, with 3 buckets of water, one hot, one cold and one luke warm when the left hand which has been placed in the hot and the right hand in the cold are similtaneously plunged into the luke warm, one hand will register the water to be cold while the other registers it as hot.

This is not right. I had believed it from reading the Bishops writings doing undergraduate philosophy. A few years ago when someone questioned the validity of this I did the test for myself. It didn't work at all as the Bishop wrote in his book. Perhaps because I knew what to expect there was no difference. In any case relativity is not circumvented as a state of being by the notion that the solution to the inacuracy of sensory perception is in a god who hangs out in a state of absolute and who recognises all the discrepancies of our humble senses.
On the other hand Charles Peirce does suggest that firstness is an absolute state that all humans have a certain contact with- that fundamental being. From that perception it is the personalised mediation of secondness and the socialsed mediation of thirdness that make up our understanding and life view- our common sense. So why is my view more or less deserving than anyone elses? That is precisely the point. If there are means to think about cross cultural experience by acknowledging our differences then perhaps we can aim to sense the firstness that people with dissimilar social backgrounds experience. This is what I am trying to experience and to share.

4

Today has been as long as the past few days finishing after 10pm and starting about 9am. I got feedback from Judith MacDougall today on an assembly/rough edit and it was timely. What do i need? Three shots that are essential to tell each scene. One shot that is the story per scene.
Stop with the coverage and get into communicating the lives of people, the objects they use and the way they relate to each other and the environment they are in.
In the case of the Federal court sequence it is the contrast between the use of GPS devices and electronic hearing pieces by the Court apparatus and Alan Griffiths who is the traditional owner whose knowledge of the country is by foot and which he communicates through painting, song and corroboree.
I need to think through what is crucial not just try and relay what happened while I was there.
Yes, I need to start again and find the images that hold and contrast and parallel them with the sound that must be there to tell the story.
My back is seizing up so I'm about to take time off to get that right.

3

Near Timber Creek

Somewhere in this entry I will get closer to the heart of what I am doing. This entry is a combination of my past weeks enterprise. Starting with changing a setting on Deja Vu ( the backup software) to clean up the weekly log I managed to lose my whole PhD folder. Everything was wiped and the replacement file left nothing of the previous folder. I won't go into detail how this happened but I immediately sought out a data restore program. I found Data Rescue and I could see my missing files in the demo version. Of course you have to pay the registration if you want to actually restore the files and my department advised me to use Disk Warrior and Nortons first. So I did. Disk Warrior read only the current directory and so did Norton even using unerase. In fact I think using unerase changed the capacity for Data Rescue to find my files. My department then bought the registration.
Now, running the cataloguing and content scans of Data Rescue, I can't see what I saw three days ago. Nothing works. The brunt of it is that I only lost 2 days work because I did do a manual backup earlier this week. Two days where I had surprisingly been lucid and wrote things I can't retrieve. As well as the gems I have to let go this is the second time I have done a final edit on a 7000 word article which is also lost. I spent more than a half a day on it each time. Gone again.
Don't hold onto anything is my life lesson.

My problem with backup is that I use too much memory with my media and I can't backup my system completely to the server provided by my Research Centre which allows only 1gig per person. I am about to change my whole system so that all these essential files can go there and I store my combined media separately. The reason I have not done this earlier is because I can't actually access the backup server. When I first tried to go onto the server earlier this year it didn't recognise my user password so unknowingly I tried to go in under guest instead. I was declined but at the same time I am now locked out of entering with a username and password. This is a preference somewhere in my username on my mac G3 powerbook. I know this because I can access the server by switching to another user on my computer and logging in from there. That is no use to me as I don't want to have to change everything over to the other user. My IT support at the centre have no idea where the preference is located. I need to find out...
I am at a loss to know why I have to do all this myself... but then I am also at a loss to know why so many other things are done for me. The world is a strange place where the demands that are made upon us are unrelated to the rewards and assistance that comes our way.

If this sounds as though I am going round in circles then you can feel a bit of the frustration I am going through. With such limited time to work on editing and writing I can't believe I am losing days on this.
So for the past two days I have tried to put aside the fact that my laptop, which I regard as home to all my work, has a huge memory hole in it. Instead I have concentrated on editing the footage of the Timber Creek Native Title trial that I filmed in March 2005. In this editing process I am learning something about what happened there that I didn't have time to take in while I was filming.

As I work my way through the way Alan Griffiths, the main corroboree creator/owner I have been researching with, talks about his country and acts in his country I see and hear things that I missed or didn't hear at the time. One of the reasosn for this is that I used an MP3 player in Alan's pocket and there were times when I was not able to hear what was said during the court session. As part of the first few days a lot of time was devoted to going to sacred sites to be on the land that . In my research I was fortunate to have the opportunity to film inside a Federal Court hearing where the questions and means of having those questions answered are supported by anthropologists and lawyers. Everything is rehearsed so that the types of questions which come up have been explained and discussed prior to the court hearing. I couldn't in three years come close to seeing and hearing this kind of material.
It makes me more aware, day by day, how strong Alan Griffiths and his wife Peggy are with their family, extended relations, art, custodianship of country, ceremony and corroborree.
The legal council for the Northern Territory government are following a line to try and discredit continuity of attachment by Alan and his family. The questions raised by their barrister with advice from their expert anthroplogist, in my mind only strenghten the case that Alan is the genuine custodian of a traditon which goes back a long way in this part of the world. That means in simple terms that under gadiya (European) law he and his family own the land.

I am off to finish editing the Timber Creek sequence. I have 26 minutes down from 6hrs footage. There are no issues with FCP today other than to say that it is a great tool. The new sound system is now working superbly, with Genelec speakers and an Apogee Mini-Dac preamp, since we changed it over from a USB to optical connection. Go technology.