From Forgetting to Remembering

In Loving Memory of ...

A Panaka relative has passed away and various kin have gathered together to help prepare the funeral text or 'pipa' (pipa kurrakurra) for the church service in five days' time. An atmosphere of sadness pervades the small room, intermingled with an air of respectful, industrious, focused productivity emanating from the different generations of the one extended family. Five women are huddled around a computer. All eyes are focused on the screen as one young woman responds to the instructions issued by her elders. It is a scene that exemplifies the collaborative, historically constituted and essentially social nature of cultural production elemental to everyday practice in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands' communities today.

Among the Ngaanyatjarra, everyone is regarded as being related to everyone else. Social organisation is the core force in the structuring of funerals and distinct protocols are respected. All yarnangu belong to one of six sections in the kinship system: Purungu, Karimarra, Milangka, Tjarurru, Yiparrka and Panaka (see Figure 3 in the Introduction). The section system defines everyone's relationship to each other and acts as a guide to protocols at funerals and other ceremonies. This funeral is organised by those of the Tjarurru section, who are the designated tilitjartu or traditional undertakers. The tilitjartu (the husband, or wife, and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law of the deceased) are those who take on the role of the 'workers' at funerals. It is the role of the tilitjartu to communicate the 'sad news' to distant kin and inform them when the funeral will be held and where. Funeral notices are faxed to locations hundreds of kilometres away, and kin travel long distances to attend to the social obligations and responsibilities associated with the funeral. Families who are unable to attend fax their condolences, and these are read out at the funeral service. It is also the role of the tilitjartu (or others who assume the role if tilitjartu are unavailable) to negotiate, write and produce the funeral text.

On the day of the funeral, the tilitjartu escort the family to the church. After the service, the tilitjartu go ahead with the coffin and take responsibility for the burial at the cemetery on the outskirts of the community. In times past, upon completion of the burial, the tilitjartu would return to the wailing mourners and throw gum leaves over them, followed by a ritual exchange of gifts such as spears, coolamons, resin, ochre or hair-belts. Nowadays, once the burial is complete, mourners shake hands with the tilitjartuto thank them for their work, and contemporary objects, such as blankets, are exchanged.

Funerals in Warburton and the other Ngaanyatjarra communities occur with an unsettling regularity – an unnerving reminder of the high mortality rate among Indigenous people in Australia. Since the mid-1980s, with the establishment of community cemeteries, funeral rites in the Ngaanyatjarra Lands have taken on many features typical of Christian funerals. This is manifest in the textual dimension and the manner in which Christian symbols and values permeate the discourse. Funerals signal the ever-evolving nature of social practice in this remote Aboriginal Australian context. Moreover, this contemporary ritual exemplifies how introduced practices have been adopted, adapted and merged with remnant practices of the past. This, in turn, has generated new cultural practices and altered social protocols that have become the new norm for successive generations.

Textual practice as cultural practice

Over the last decade or so, funerals have become textually mediated events. Nowhere is this more evident than in the emergence of 'pipa': written eulogies in the form of small booklets that are handed out to mourners at the church service. These texts represent one of the more vivid examples of the textual dimension of changing social practice in the desert communities of the Ngaanyatjarra Lands.

The eulogy production process has undergone a rapid and profound transformation in less than a decade. Prior to this, written eulogies, if they existed at all, were simple, handwritten texts, inclusive of errors in grammar and spelling. By the early 2000s, computer technology had become commonplace. It was, however, typically located within the sphere of non-Aboriginal control. Access to computers was generally negotiated through personal relationships with non-Aboriginal staff who worked in office locations or non-Aboriginal friends who assisted on their home computers. The writing process was thus typically mediated through a literate person (generally non-Aboriginal). Simple templates were often constructed in Microsoft Word, enabling quick layout and production in busy offices. As I discuss in Chapter 7, increased access to computers in public spaces over the last five years has led to greater Ngaanyatjarra autonomy in the writing and production of increasingly complex documents. Now, many young people have computer competence and are independently able to produce ever more sophisticated documents, inclusive of graphics and photographs. Although a typical practice in Warburton, computer-mediated texts are, however, less common in the smaller, more traditional communities, where a simple handwritten 'Order of Service' may suffice.

The process of writing the pipa is communal. It brings the sociality of related kin together in textual form. The relationship with the deceased continues on, living in the text 'so the children continue thinking of him, being with him'. In this collaborative literacy event, everyone can contribute ideas on how the text should be constructed, what images and symbols should be used and, importantly, how the list of grieving relatives should be ordered. As a literacy event, the production of the funeral text involves, firstly, research – finding accurate dates of birth, names of extended family, and details of personal histories and selecting appropriate verses from the Bible in English or Ngaanyatjarra. Next, the text is drafted on paper, keyed into the computer, edited and borders and symbols are inserted. Previous funeral texts are also referred to, thus, features of this new written genre, including layout and formulaic phrases, are modelled, imitated and transmitted. Older relatives dictate recounts of significant events that younger writers attempt to structure into a cohesive written narrative, usually in English and occasionally Ngaanyatjarra. Young...