Contribution short abstract:

Filmmaker Tim Mummery reflects on the 20 year odyssey to complete his documentary NAMARALI. The film charts Aboriginal artist Yorna Woolagoodja’s quest to ‘repaint’ an ancient ochre cave painting thereby energising culture via a vital ceremonial practice. The paper will reflect on questions of time.

Contribution long abstract:

My paper will reflect on the experience of completing my documentary film NAMARALI over twenty years.

Part lament for cultural destruction in the wake of colonization and part roadmap for cultural rejuvenation, NAMARALI details the quest of Australian Aboriginal artist Yorna Woolagoodja to repaint a remote, ancient cave painting of the Wandjina creator-spirit Namarali.

This paper will reflect on time.

Firstly, my experience of time as the defining ingredient in my journey as a non-Indigenous filmmaker to gain the permissions, trust and understanding of the community to tell this story.

Secondly I will reflect on time as a building block within the film’s structure to attempt the representation an animistic worldview within the linear construct of a documentary structure.

Time is controlled and manipulated as we move between storytelling modes. The historical narrative opening of the film is regularly disrupted by archival footage that speaks to the cyclical nature of refreshing the Wandjina. The second half is overtaken by the ceremonial journey, where the camera assumes the position of an initiate on the shoulder of a demonstrative elder. It is here the audience is released in to a languid space of co-existing with community on country to sense the wonder inherent in First Nation stories experienced in homelands.

I always intended NAMARALI to be a subjective, empathetic glimpse of an animistic worldview. With the film’s completion, I can finally call myself an ally to Yorna and his mission to place ceremony back at the heart of culture’s long storytelling tradition.