Paper short abstract:

This paper explores some scenes of intimate memorialisation in central Australia, approached as emplacing processes of precarious 'holding-on': entanglements of digital and tangible materials, a daughter’s grief and the affordances of friendship in animations of remembered care, labour and love.

Paper long abstract:

In the wake of the death of a relatively successful senior town camp documentary painter, her surviving daughter, her widow, her grandsons, her brother and some extended family and I worked slowly together to conjure poignant past family events and remembered places in animated and immersive ‘expanded cinema’ media forms. In parallel, the family regularly decorated and dreamed of ‘fixing up’ her grave and her other daughter’s resting place in the same cemetery with ‘proper’ headstones, and of marking their birth places in some way. Enduring states of ‘feeling lonely’ for the deceased, abandoned settlement infrastructures, unfinished enterprises, water scarcity, disappearances, dashed hopes and disappointments sit at the heart of our collaborative experimental memorial work. Unwavering Christian faith and spirit communication led their way in both endeavours.

This paper stages some ethnography of these intimate memorialisations unfolding in the margins of central Australian social history. I approach these materialisations of memory - an animation of avian predation and canine care, a small film about invisible labour, and some brick cairns - as emplaced and emplacing processes of quietly holding-on, of making sanctuary; tactics of survivance amidst the exhausting demands of post-Land Rights displacement and precarious living, consolidating social and economic resources against erasure and the risk of forgetting.