Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema
(Hardback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
Dreaming Down the Track: Awakenings in Aboriginal Cinema
By (Author) William Lempert
University of Minnesota Press
University of Minnesota Press
10th September 2025
United States
Classifications
Professional and Scholarly
Non Fiction
Indigenous peoples
Social and cultural anthropology
Physical Properties
Hardback
296
Width 140mm, Height 216mm, Spine 15mm
482g
Description
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 AboriginalState relations are represented and understood, both within communities and for the broader public. Throughout, Lempert stays true to Moora's insight that film can preserve community stories for generations to come, toward the aim of enacting sovereign futures.
Author Bio
William Lempert is assistant professor of anthropology at Bowdoin College. His work has been published in several journals, including Cultural Anthropology and American Indian Culture and Research Journal.
