Documentation Cultures: Arnhem Land 1935-2015

Ceremonial activity has always been a form of documentation for Yolngu-the Indigenous people of north-east Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia. Drawing on ethnography and archival research, I aim to show the intergenerational and cross-cultural role played by persistent documentation practices. My analysis is based on embedded fieldwork undertaken in Arnhem Land between 2008 and 2015. An ethnographic approach is combined with archival research to examine documentation produced by a range of Yolngu people between 1935 and 2015. I argue, Yolngu approaches to documentation drives knowledge management locally and shapes cross-cultural projects, creating a mass of documents that reflects a documentary agency. Previous research on ceremonial activity, and ritual practices more broadly, has not explicitly addressed the ways in which knowledge is performed as documentation. This research enables a culturally inflected view of documentation that provides a different perspective on the ways in which media and performance is used as a means of acting in the world. Each chapter includes a discussion of Yolngu engagement with documentary production, and the examination of documentary evidence selected from the archive. These multiple perspectives frame my analysis of performance and ceremony as documentation in the context of ritual, educational, artistic, legal and political action