Trust & Technology Project: Background

Prior to European settlement, Aboriginal Australia was mainly an oral culture. Memories, and the story-telling associated with them, played an important role in the transmission of cultural knowledge from one generation to the next. To this day, Aboriginal people value their oral traditions over and above those recorded by European historians, anthropologists and other observers, or the documentary evidence created by governments, churches and private organisations. The importance of oral traditions continues to underwrite much Aboriginal culture. We use the term ‘oral memory’ as a short-hand reference to historical knowledge that has been transmitted orally from generation to generation. In the project itself, we will consult Indigenous communities about appropriate terminology for this concept.

Many significant records about Indigenous communities reside in institutions such as libraries, public record offices and other archives, and are often written from a non-Indigenous perspective. For reasons such distrust in government institutions, and lack of educational opportunities, many Aboriginal people have been reluctant (and often unable), to access this material. We aim to investigate the perspectives of Indigenous people before embarking on attempts to provide access to oral memories, to understand the way in which these communities would like their memories represented and delivered. It is hoped that the development and delivery of services driven by local Indigenous communities will aid the process of reconciliation (Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation (2000)).

This project will undertake an extensive exploration of the needs of Indigenous communities, and the extent to which existing archival services meet these needs. Based on the outcomes, archival techniques and technology will be used to build a prototype of an archival system that provides access to oral memory. The project will provide a unique opportunity to achieve outcomes valuable both to archival services and Indigenous communities, including those in rural and regional areas. Although it will focus on oral memory, its findings in relation to building trust and understanding between archival institutions and Indigenous communities, and modeling archival systems that support community-based or community-oriented archival services, will be highly relevant to archival services for Indigenous communities more generally.