Paper short abstract:

Collaborative research beyond academic or institutional settings can reframe initial aims and create novel outcomes. A successful project with Indigenous rangers produced 3 films, none specified in initial project planning and only one visible to the state actors who funded it.

Paper long abstract:

Indigenous ranger programs are important to contemporary regional Australia, popular with both program participants and the communities where they operate. Substantial government and corporate investment in these programs means that state and institutional actors are increasingly interested in the outcomes being achieved - environmental outcomes, but also wider socio-economic effects. A project funded by the Federal government through the National Environmental Research Program designed to investigate and classify these outcomes contained a clear objective for community 'engagement'. Enacting this objective in a Yolngu context in northeast Arnhem Land where I as an ethnographer was already enmeshed in long term reciprocal relationships and associated moral responsibilities resulted in the re-casting of the project to encompass collaborative film production as well as textual communication. Evolving field circumstances, ranging from the death of a close Yolngu relative, the availability of local cameramen, and bad weather on the most crucial day of filming, repeatedly transformed the nature of the project. Two ancillary films, one a 'training video' for local rangers, the other an extended record of the funeral of the son of a key research collaborator, emerged from these transformations, neither reported in formal project outcomes. The third film, presented here, explicitly engages with the state funders of the project, combining pedagogy, political assertion, and an invitation for reciprocity, whilst also incorporating structural and content elements deemed important for local community consumption.

Film: 'Let's care for this country': the Yirralka Rangers at Baniyala homeland

Directors: M Barber and D Marawili 22 mins