Conclusion: An Immanent Alterity

The book’s conclusion situates audio media in the context of the Northern Territory Emergency Response (the NTER), colloquially termed “the Intervention”). It foregrounds the politicized and contested character of multiple domains of Indigenous Australian life. The chapter’s ethnographic narrative describes a media crew’s visit to a remote community, showing how hunting and exchanging gifts are highly valued practices folded into the broader project of making Indigenous media. The forms of kin relationship reproduced in the contexts of hunting, and the ways that such hunting is critiqued by non-Indigenous bureaucrats, provide a narrative means to make plain the ways that Indigenous cultural practices can require a reflexive, even defensive stance vis-à-vis outside eyes. The conclusion suggests that these activities provide a fundamental rubric for understanding the radical mediatization of the Aboriginal voice in the twenty-first century.