About 18 km from Alice Springs, on Eastern Arrernte land, sits an enormous structure resembling something out of an Andrei Tarkovsky dreamscape. While the exact size of the site remains undisclosed, we can assume it occupies a large expanse of land, as can be seen clearly on Google Earth. A massive complex with thirty-eight radomes-protecting radio dishes and juxtaposed against the red desert sand omnipresent in the region, the sight itself is baffling: it’s difficult for the uninformed to imagine its function. First described as a “space research station” to the public after the US and Australian governments signed a treaty in December 1966, the structure was renamed as a “Joint Defence Research Facility” in 1988.

Since then, Pine Gap has become a vital warfighting save point for the US military. Code-named RAINFALL, the base is jointly run by the Australian Defence Force and US intelligence services the CIA, NSA and NRO. It is also a key contributor to the NSA’s global interception effort, which includes the ECHELON surveillance program. Although its alarming function has been exposed by a number of academics since the 1970s, the widely-publicised leak in 2017 by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden uncovered an extensive archive of top-secret documents concerning the agency’s foreign surveillance operations. This contained evidence that showed the role of Pine Gap had become more military-focused over time. A joint investigation by the ABC and The Intercept in the same year found a document revealing that “One of RAINFALL’s primary mission areas is the detection and geolocation of Communications Intelligence, Electronic Intelligence and Foreign Instrumentation signals” — basically jargon that points to Pine Gap’s function in the deployment of drone strikes.

Over the years, human rights activists and other anti-militarists have made consistent efforts to protest against the site’s existence. In Alice Springs itself, the role of Pine Gap continues to be an open secret. “When they get on those buses to work [at Pine Gap], they don’t even talk to each other,” Eastern Arrernte traditional landowner Felicity Hayes says to Peter “Coco” Wallace halfway into the 2021 documentary Peace Pilgrims, about the 800 or so Pine Gap employees that live in Alice Springs.

Directed and written by independent filmmaker John Hughes, Peace Pilgrims can be said to be a screen representation of Kieran Finnane’s 2020 book Peace Crimes, an account about a group of pacifists who in 2016 embarked on a trip to Pine Gap from their home at the Peter Maurin Farm in southern Queensland. Made up of six Catholic Workers’ Movement members, the “pilgrims” entered Pine Gap with the intention to sing songs of lament and pray for peace; they would later represent themselves in court, expressing their position against US war crimes and saying that they had sought permission from Wallace to be on his land. As is now known, the six — father and son Jim and Franz Dowling, Margaret Pestorius, Andy Paine, Paul Christie and Tim Webb — were arrested and charged under the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act 1952, which states that trespassing of Pine Gap is prohibited and if breached results in a jail term of up to seven years. The older Dowling, a fervent anti-war activist, had attempted similar incursions since 1986, the most notable occasion alongside three other members of the Christians Against All Terrorism group a decade prior (this was the first time the Act was enacted, although the four were eventually acquitted).

In Twilight Time, which can be described as Hughes’ 2024 follow-up to Peace Pilgrims, we see some repeat footage, such as when photographer Kristian Laemmle-Ruff recounts his expedition to Pine Gap’s periphery in his bid to take its photo, which eventually became the cover image for Finnane’s book. We are also taken to ACMI’s Film Conservation department: here, the screen zooms into a smaller screen showing a talking head with a cherubic face and a mop of dark brown hair. The archival footage, from Gil Scrine’s Home on the Range (1982), introduces this man as Des Ball, strategic analyst at ANU. “Now, if the United States is simply considering an attack on Soviet cities, then the loss of Pine Gap doesn’t affect that, it can always attack Soviet cities. But it needs Pine Gap. Pine Gap is the only installation which can provide the sort of real-time intelligence on military targets in the Soviet Union,” Ball is recorded as saying in what Hughes regards as the original Twilight Time. We also hear from Nautilus Institute researcher Richard Tanter, who has worked closely with Ball for decades, as well as Wallace and Hayes, who express acute frustration at their land having been stolen without recourse.

“Twilight Time is the film about Des Ball and Peace Pilgrims is the film about Pine Gap,” Hughes tells me when I meet him over a coffee last week. “I tried on a couple of occasions to convene filmed interviews with [Ball] — once for Traps, and once for another film I did called All That is Solid. On both occasions, he was elsewhere, so he referred me to other people. When he passed away in 2016, I was kicking myself that I hadn’t got it together to go and meet him and shoot a long conversation with him.”

Released in 2024 and screened for the first time at the Melbourne International Film Festival to sold-out theatres last year, Twilight Time charts Ball’s life and work. Yet it is also about one of the biggest elephants in Australia’s room: its close ties with the United States of America. This is evident from the 79-metre monstrosity that sits erect on Russell Hill, its prominent eagle-topped zenith visible from other vantage points in the nation-state’s capital. And perhaps it was because of this proximity, where Ball could see it and be reminded of it, that his pursuit for the truth began. In Twilight Time, we are shown footage from Ball’s years as an economics undergrad at ANU, where he, during a protest against military conscription during the Vietnam War, climbed atop the old King George V statue. He was fined $10 as a result.

Ball’s sense of justice coupled with the insatiable thirst for knowledge resulted in a momentous discovery which caused him to pursue an entirely new path, and until the end of his life in 2016, he committed himself to collecting information about US signals intelligence. From a simple childhood in country Victoria, Ball topped his home state in three matriculation subjects which allowed him to go to ANU as a National Undergraduate Scholar. After obtaining his security studies doctorate, he worked at Rand Corporation (he is famously known for advising the Kennedy administration against nuclear warfare during his time there), and made regular visits to the Karen National Liberation Army in the jungles at the Thai–Myanmar border so as to teach them ways of guerilla resistance based on his know-how. Of course, having spent much of his life in Canberra, Ball was still most interested in Australia — in particular the Joint Research Facilities in Nurrunga in South Australia (which has since been shut) and Pine Gap. Throughout his student years and beyond, Ball continued to be deemed a “person of security interest” to ASIO; when asked in the years prior to his passing about the surveillance, he said he was surprised by “the extent of the resources they had devoted [to him]. […] ASIO had lost the plot by then.” His most well-known text on Pine Gap, A Suitable Piece of Real Estate (1980) is dedicated to “a sovereign Australia”. While this may appear an oxymoron, it’s Ball’s way of trying to articulate what it might mean for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people to work towards sovereignty together.

Matching Ball’s own longstanding obsession with military intelligence, this fascination with Pine Gap has been an enduring one for Hughes since he was first made aware of it in the 1970s as a young leftist. Looking at his oeuvre, which comprises more than twenty films and a couple of series developed for television with Betty Churcher, it’s evident that the filmmaker has a particular inclination towards films that centre social justice, or right some wrong about the world. Hughes’ first film as a twenty-four-year-old in 1972 was Nowhere Game, astonishingly trailblazing in how it discusses harm reduction and safe injection rooms despite the fact that there had yet to exist language for those stances at the time. Senses of Cinema (2022), which is how I first came to be acquainted with his work, charts the filmmaking co-operatives of of the 1950s to the 1980s Melbourne and Sydney — a look at a more utopian past for artists in Australia, where unions would fund work and where it was crystal clear that the artist was also a worker, not an entertainer nor a public relations officer.

Likewise, Twilight Time possesses a radical spirit: the film is put together like a collage in which time is not linear. It also mashes together several interrelated ideas and events at once, not unlike an essay. “It’s a bit of a compilation film, an index of sources,” Hughes tells me after mentioning that he’d collected a lot of material for it, having embarked on the project in 2018. In the few films of his that I’ve seen, he’s always credited himself as “writer-director”. This got me thinking that if the written essay is a translation of the picture in your mind, then the filmic essay is a translation of that translation. It also brings to mind other avant-garde video essayists, such as Dziga Vertov and Agnès Varda.

Hughes continues:

Like Senses of Cinema, [Twilight Time is] an index of independent film culture documenting resistance to American installations, because as you know, the archives of oppositional culture or even working-class culture is not collected and valued in the same way that the cultural productivity of the ruling class is collected and valued.

This rings true, because even when one understands the facts about Pine Gap to be irrefutable, watching Twilight Time is a way of accessing a truth one doesn’t see enough of. It’s a delight to share in Ball’s curiosity and active pursuit of the truth, and the film incites a newfound fury at the innumerable things empire has taken away from us, not to mention the ways in which American hegemony has shaped our imaginations through media, literature and art.

This is to say that Twilight Time brings together form and content: it moves at a pace that deliberately feeds human attention, antithetical to today’s “Netflix brain”. Or as Hughes puts it: “someone who is educated by television and hasn’t had the opportunity to engage with the essay form in literature or film.”

In Ball’s last interview, weeks before his death, when asked by journalist Hamish McDonald what Australia was getting out of Pine Gap, he said,

Everything, and nothing. Everything, in the sense that we get access to all this intelligence flowing through. Nothing, in the sense that it’s not really what we want.

We can juxtapose this against the final scene in Twilight Time, which focuses on a 2021 televised meeting between Joe Biden, Boris Johnson and Scott Morrison to announce the AUKUS partnership. At the end of the telecast, Biden says thanks to “the Australian fellow” without saying Morrison by name. Remember just a few weeks ago, when many Australians were gleeful about Trump’s ignorance of Dutton’s existence even though the latter had designed a campaign after the former to only face absolute and utter failure? Twilight Time is ultimately an indictment of the Australian colonial-capitalist character, which after decades has been assimilated into the citizenry’s DNA: how it is happy to be America’s minion in order to feel just that bit closer to power even if it renounces the association on the surface.

While the very existence of Pine Gap may have sounded like a conspiracy theory a few decades ago, former CIA agent and whistleblower Victor Marchetti appears in both films, uttering the same line from the same recorded interview: “The main reason for the secrecy was to keep the Australian and the American public ignorant, particularly the Australian public.” The question remains: despite all that we know, what might real sovereignty look like if we disregarded capital and put land rights at the forefront?

Twilight Time screens at Miscellania in Melbourne VIC on 22 May 2025, with other dates as follows: The Backlot Theatre, Perth WA – 14 June 2025; Dendy Cinemas Cooparoo, Brisbane QLD – 11 July 2025; Dendy Cinemas Southport QLD – 13 July 2025; Nimbin Bush Theatre, Nimbin NSW – 17 July 2025; Palace Byron Bay NSW – 18 July 2025; Event Cinemas Cairns Central, Cairns NT – 20 July 2025; Deckchair Cinema, Darwin NT – 24 July 2025.