Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema

What can Aboriginal filmmaking reveal about Indigenous presence and futures?

The product of years of embedded fieldwork within Indigenous film crews in Northwestern Australia, Dreaming Down the Track delves deeply into Aboriginal cinema as a transformative community process. It follows the social lives of projects throughout their production cycles, from planning and editing to screening, broadcasting, and after-images. Across its narrative sweep, this ethnography engages the film career of Kukatja elder Mark Moora to demonstrate the impact of filmmaking on how Aboriginal futures are collectively imagined and called forth.

William Lempert highlights a series of awakenings through which Moora ultimately came to view cinema as a process for catalyzing his family’s return to their home country of Mangkayi. This biographical media journey paints an intimate portrait of the inspiring possibilities and sobering limitations of Indigenous envisioning within settler states. Lempert traces how Moora’s life and films convey a multiplicity of Aboriginal experiences across time and space, from colonial contact to contemporary life in communities like Balgo, including the continued governmental attempts to undermine them.

Amid ongoing negotiations to establish the first treaties between Indigenous nations and Australian states, Dreaming Down the Track illustrates what is at stake in how Aboriginal–State relations are represented and understood, both within communities and for the broader public. Lempert stays true to Moora’s insight that film can preserve community stories for generations to come, toward the aim of enacting sovereign futures.

Reviews

“In this deeply engaging and beautifully written book, anthropologist William Lempert asks us to join him on his journey into remote Australia as he collaborates over many years on a number of films envisioned by and made with the remarkable Aboriginal elder and Kukatja leader Mark Moora. Lempert’s vivid prose invites us to consider the dilemmas facing contemporary Indigenous Australians and shows how they are reimagining their lives through the transformative possibilities of Aboriginal cinema in the face of a too-often dystopian present.”
—Faye Ginsburg, director, Center for Media, Culture, and History, New York University

“Building trust and creating a lifelong relationship of respect guided through the lived experiences of the people, the land, and living kin, William Lempert mastered the journey to ‘listen with his eyes and see with his ears.’ Dreaming Down the Track fuses chapters through circular storytelling, connecting the past, present, and future into our current moment. A must-read for those who want to learn how to be brave.”
—Anne Poelina, chair, Nulungu Research Institute, University of Notre Dame Australia, and Martuwarra Fitzroy River Council