Moving Image Restitution in Australia: Towards an Indigenous Critique

As demands for the return of looted artifacts to their communities of origin are once again intensifying, what are we to make of similarly displaced and sequestered moving images, in particular ethnographic and colonial film collections which holding institutions now frequently classify as “shared heritage”? The challenges facing audiovisual archives that care for such “sensitive” collections are many and far exceed the single question of return. They include everything from uneven terms of access to forms of epistemic violence that endure in archival infrastructures and  operations. While film archives in Europe are only beginning to face up to the long-standing demand for moving image restitution (Perneczky), their Australian counterparts have for several decades been engaged in a wide spectrum of archival practices we might call “restitutive” in this broader sense.

Australian Indigenous claims to moving images, as this essay sets out to demonstrate, are more than mere claims for inclusion; activating alternative understandings of possession and attribution, they offer a vision of restitution beyond the hegemony of liberal reformism. Instead of focusing on institutional actors, therefore, I emphasize the perspectives of Indigenous users of audiovisual archives. My purpose is to show how the relationships these users have formed with photographic and filmic images challenge established archival practice; how institutions have responded to these challenges and sought to accommodate Indigenous users; and finally, how Indigenous claims to moving images resist and transcend these forms of institutional accommodation.

In the wake of the watershed Native Title Act of 1993, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people frequented Australian archives in large numbers in search of evidence to support native title claims.¹ These new users not only claimed back much of what they found in the archive—images and sounds of their ancestors, knowledges, and land—but it also became apparent that the way these materials had been stored, handled, named, and transmitted was frequently inappropriate to Indigenous understandings of their cultural import. Claims by Australian Indigenous users compelled a wide-ranging process of institutional critique, which in turn spawned a body of critical anthropological research, highlighting tensions and contradictions within such movements towards restitution and reform.² Building on this sizable pool of practical experience and theoretical reflection, I argue that, for all its flaws and limitations, the Australian example can serve as a useful precedent for reckoning with the colonial legacies that shape the field of audiovisual archiving globally.³

While Australian Indigenous understandings of archival images differ considerably across cultures and time, the research literature suggests some common uses for moving and still images originally taken for administrative or ethnographic purposes: first, to reconstruct family histories, particularly in the context of the so-called “Stolen Generations”; second, to document and revive aspects of Aboriginal cultures, from rituals to languages, that have been eroded through forced separation and other processes of displacement or assimilation; and finally, to “express connections to place” (Lydon, “Photography and Critical Heritage” 18) beyond the collection of evidence in support of native title claims, even where those might also be at stake. In what follows, I consider these three vectors of reclamation in turn: in the image of the ancestor, the image of knowledge, and the image of land. In exploring these themes, it will become clear that a Western secular conceptual framework does not do justice to the ways in which Australian Indigenous people relate with and to images. These modes of engagement with visual material, moreover, have wide-reaching implications for both film archival practice and its political-legal framings.

The Ancestral Image

In Australian Indigenous cosmologies, filmic or photographic portrayals of ancestors are afforded respect because they are more than mere representations. The ancestral image can be conceptualized as participating in what it depicts—as being consubstantial with the ancestor—or as a presence expressive of agency, with the subject of the image being “present in it rather than represented” (Peleggi 340).⁴ Rather than speaking of images of the ancestors, then, it would be more appropriate to consider the image as ancestor, or simply to speak of “ancestral images.” This move approximates images to ancestral remains—and the archiving of such images to a mode of ancestor care.

To give an example of what that means for archival practice, we may look at the digitization of the Central Australian Aboriginal Men’s Collection (formerly the “Strehlow Collection”) at the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia (NFSA).⁵ Theodore George Henry Strehlow was an Australian anthropologist and linguist who produced over 160 hours of sound recordings and several reels of film, in addition to field diaries, genealogies, photographs and slides, nearly all of which relate to the Aranda (Arrernte) cultures of Central Australia, and mainly to men’s business, that is, secret ceremonies, sacred sites, and other forms of knowledge restricted to men. The presence of ancestors in these media posed entirely new and unforeseen problems for digital reproduction and duplication. First, a decision had to be made, in consultation with descendant communities, whether these presences should be digitized at all. Once it had been decided, the process itself came under scrutiny. As much of the material depicts secret knowledge, the archivists were not allowed to watch the film reels and audio tapes, only to handle them. The material had to be kept in a locked container separate from other items in the archive. As most of it concerned men’s business, only male archivists were permitted to work on the material. For the analogue material, these conditions, while controversial for some, were easily met in practical terms, though thinking through the implications for more exceptional scenarios (like an emergency evacuation) remained a taxing exercise for the institution. Digitization posed a further challenge: scanning and encoding the ancestral images into data would dematerialize and diffuse the bounded analogue objects into binary strings on the archive’s server, where nothing, strictly speaking, kept them apart. Eventually, it was agreed that a separate server was needed to accommodate the digitized ancestors’ needs.

Some of these considerations are more widely applicable. Looking at photographic images of colonial subjects in the Dutch Virgin Islands, Temi Odumosu has similarly framed these images as “ancestor remains,” thus raising a whole new set of questions about responsibilities of care also in film archives of colonial and ethnographic provenance. Respecting cultural restrictions on reproduction and circulation is an important part of returning the “cultural authority” over images, even where physical image carriers are retained in the archive. Data sovereignty, i.e., control of access and dissemination of digitized images and other digitally stored information, including names and categories used in catalogs and databases, should therefore be understood as an intrinsic dimension of moving image restitution.⁶

The paradigm of “shared heritage,” which in the European context has established itself as the institutional euphemism of choice for colonial and ethnographic collections, too often remains wedded to a Western liberal conception of “sharing” as free, unhindered circulation. To this understanding of sharing on the model of universal free exchange, we might contrast the logic of the gift. Where the former relationship is extinguished in the moment of its realization, the latter weaves enduring ties of mutual recognition and responsibility. Take the recommendations in Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy’s 2018 report on the restitution of African heritage held in France. In this document, which is rightly considered a landmark statement in the current debate, the authors propose the blanket digitization of all audiovisual materials pertaining to African cultures, to be made available under an Open Access license on a centralized online portal custom-built for this purpose. This recommendation, however well-intended, reflects wider institutional attitudes to shared film heritage. When audiovisual archives in Europe mandate “access” to such collections, it is usually they who set the terms of accessibility, whatever they may be. They determine how far access should extend, how this heritage can be exploited (or not); they assess collections, decide what will be digitized to what standard and how it will be datafied, all the while precluding alternative conceptions of what it might mean truly to share this archival responsibility and authority. All such decisions are cultural and curatorial prerogatives that should belong to communities of origin, making necessary close consultation—not as an afterthought, but as a central feature from the earliest stages of any restitutive effort, including, for instance, the placement of community stakeholders in museums and archives to engage in their own provenance research.⁷

Images-in-Place

Images of country, like ancestral images, are presences rather than representations, of particular lifeworlds and the lifeways they hold. While many Australian Indigenous people turned to the archive in search of evidence for native title claims, their relation to the land in the image frequently transcends this evidentiary impulse. Claims to land are inextricably entangled with the ownership of songs, stories, and knowledges (Koch et al. 83). Land, as a cultural landscape, is not separate from these other forms of cultural expression. Ancestry, likewise, extends metonymically from kin to country. Still and moving images inscribe the land in these multiple, overlapping, and interconnected dimensions. Aboriginal land claims, then, are also claims to a different understanding of ownership and belonging, which extends to the land present in the image.

One way of operationalizing these observations for archival practice is by linking them to the idea of “provenance-in-place” (Ghaddar). In this view, which was at the center of Third World struggles for archival self-determination during the long 1960s, archival provenance ought to be anchored not in authorship or property, but in the place to which the archive in question pertains. Considering films and photographs as “images-in-place” also raises the question of archiving “on country,” or of the decentralization of the archive, moving away from monolithic repositories located in urban centers towards a proliferation of self-run and self-determined “gathering places.” In the context of European-held shared heritage, by contrast, and in North-South archival cooperation more generally, the building of archival capacity “on the ground” is a secondary concern at best—and is framed as development aid extended by generous Western donors rather than as a form of archival restitution or reparation.

Against Copyright

Aboriginal or Indigenous claims to moving images thus move us beyond a narrow understanding of restitution as “return” and towards a comprehensive view of restitution as a form of reparative worldmaking whose field of action encompasses all aspects of archival practice and infrastructure, including how we understand the authorship and ownership of images. Understandings of ownership do not spring up spontaneously from the whims of archival practitioners, but have an “objective” basis in law, where they are codified, for instance, under the title of “intellectual property” (or IP). Indigenous people have leveraged intellectual property rights to reclaim sovereignty over their cultural heritage, including over images, effectively couching their claims “in a language that power understands” (Handler in Coombe). However, extant legal frameworks often do not serve them well at all. In Rosemary Coombe’s words, IP “fail[s] to reflect the full dimensions of Native aspirations and impose[s] colonial juridical categories on postcolonial struggles in a fashion that reenacts the cultural violence of colonization” (232). In the realm of the image, copyright rules supreme. This legal framework yokes image property to a narrow understanding of authorship which does not recognize filmed subjects—let alone other, non-human, agencies—as co-creators and thus co-owners of the image. Jane Anderson describes the author as “a figure of dispossession, working to legally and socially reduce and exclude other cultural forms of articulation, expression, and association with cultural knowledge products” (237). As Brenna Bhandar has shown, authorship and property are entwined concepts with common colonial origins: it is through mixing their labor with land presumed to be “undeveloped,” “improving” it in the process, that the settler first establishes their claim to Indigenous land.

Indigenous claims to moving images do not simply reproduce the legal categories of the West—which are the legal forms of global capitalism—they also push against and exceed the limits of the Western legal imagination, exposing its historical contingency and cultural specificity. Authorship is individual, whereas Indigenous claims to possession are often collective or, more accurately, dividual. Unlike in the European tradition, where “belonging divides and property disowns” (Strathern 531), Indigenous understandings of possession entail enduring connections. In this view, ownership does not imply the free disposition over what is owned but instead generates new obligations and responsibilities. Possession, we might also say, is here defined not as a right of property but as an obligation of care.⁸

Film and photographic media have historically acted as conduits for processes of objectification, commodification, and property-formation; they have served to record, objectify, and separate land and populations. At the same time, as Marxist legal scholar Bernard Edelman has shown, the invention of photography and other means of mechanical reproduction initially troubled and perplexed the law. With their strange, “automatic,” and “objective” subjectivity, Edelmann argues, these media destabilized and disrupted prevalent conceptions of authorship and property alike. To become property, they first had to be legally aligned with the property form, which in turn required a change in perception, whereby the act of taking a picture came to be seen as a new modality of older forms of expropriation. Australian Indigenous claims foreground and reactivate these suppressed potentialities of film and photography to destabilize the property form—which has important implications for moving image restitution. As Jane Anderson, Ariella Azoulay and others have pointed out, restitution narrowly understood as repatriation or return presupposes and maintains the legal regime of property and authorship. It does nothing to address the original violence of dispossession and objectification—in this instance, the taking of images as property—but rather entrenches its power in the present. While I do not wish to diminish more pragmatic approaches embodied by archival protocols and the entire discourse of moral rights, I would argue that restitutive efforts should be complemented by a more radical critique of these underlying legal and political forms, with a view to their ultimate abolition.