Setting the scene: orality, text and trust
Storytelling underpins Koorie communities. By storytelling we are emphasising the passing on of narrative histories. Storytelling is the art of portraying in words, images and sounds what has happened in real or super-real events. This project recognises that there exists a basic human communication that comes from a fundamental desire, or even need, to tell each other what happened (secular and religious, real and imaginary) through the most expressive and immediate means possible; in dramatic storytelling. Storytelling in our project is never juxtaposed against real history, rather it is accepted as a form of the latter.
Prior to colonisation Koorie cultures were predominantly oral. Stories, and the protocols, places, roles and rituals which supported their transmission, were the foundation for maintaining relationships, conveying communities’ laws and codes of behaviour, teaching children. It is generally recognised, and clearly evident in this study, that despite the impact of colonisation and of efforts to extinguish Indigenous culture Koorie people continue to express their knowledge and experiences orally to a significant extent.
Embedded as they are in a western knowledge framework, the organisations and professions with responsibility for managing the records of society generally reflect and enforce a privileging of the narratives contained in written records over those from other sources. Further, there exists a complex and multifaceted tension between these organisations and Koorie communities for whom written records have often been instruments of dispossession and surveillance and who after generations of distrust remain wary of government organisations.
Australian Indigenous narratives and archival discourse
The year 2007 represents a remarkable milestone in Indigenous Australian history; it is ten years since the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s Bringing Them Home Report, forty years since the “Vote Yes” referendum and fifty years since the National Aboriginal and Islander Day of Commemoration (NAIDOC). History and historical narratives, written and spoken, are of keen importance to Koorie people. The Australian community’s efforts to address issues such as Native title and the Stolen Generation illustrate how closely understandings of the past relate to effective action for Indigenous and national wellbeing in the future. In recent times we have seen significant government action around issues of social disadvantage, health and domestic violence, all of which have their origins in historic understandings of past actions and inactions.
In the decade since Bringing Them Home, recognition of the past and ongoing impact of the forcible removal of Indigenous children from their families has motivated efforts at many levels of Australian life to create and support opportunities for reconciliation. The Bringing Them Home report devoted a chapter to the role records and recordkeeping institutions should play in supporting family and community reunions and the reclamation of personal and community identity. The report made several recommendations around preserving records and providing access to them. It also made recommendations (albeit in somewhat less detail) to enable Indigenous Australians to ‘manage their own historical documentation’. Over the last decade government archival institutions and some other records holders such as churches have responded with a range of initiatives to provide better access to records and better services to Indigenous people seeking information. These have included the establishment of name indexes, Memoranda of Understanding to ensure consultation with Indigenous communities, efforts to employ Indigenous people or appoint them to advisory or governing bodies, exhibitions, guides to relevant records and scholarships to train Indigenous recordkeepers.
Significant to this project, two of many imperatives highlighted by the report were:
These findings resonated with the recommendations of the 1991 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody.
As Indigenous and settler communities in various countries and regions have jointly reflected on their engagement with archives there has been a growing recognition that western archival paradigms and practices conventionally position Indigenous people as the subjects of records. Such paradigms do not support Indigenous people taking a greater role in decision making about records which provide sometimes extensive narratives about themselves. This has been a component of a broader professional discourse over recent decades which has began to recognise the nature of records as tools of institutional or national systems of remembering and forgetting or as the product, in some instances, of surveillance and control. Archival institutions are beginning to take on board the need to ensure that their frameworks and services do not continue to represent this system to Indigenous people.
There are 3 components to the research approach:
Stage One: User Needs Analysis
(January 2004 to July 2005)
A user needs analysis, involving 72 interviews, collected Koorie views on storytelling and recording; trust and authenticity in oral and written records; and issues relating to control, ownership, custodianship, accessibility and privacy. The interviewees from throughout Victoria form a ‘purposive sample’, with the key characteristics represented being, gender, age, place of abode and community roles. From this analysis a set of ‘scenarios’ were developed to illustrate various user needs.
For more information on stage one see the following paper:
Stage Two: Modelling Indigenous community-oriented archival services
(January to December 2006)
A case study using the scenarios from Stage One to explore the services currently provided by the Koorie Heritage Trust Inc. and the Public Record Office Victoria. It involved interviewing 22 Koorie clients of archival services, mediators and service providers, and the development of models of trust and distrust of archival systems and services.
Stage Three: Specifying a Koorie Annotation System
(2007 to 2008)
The original outcome of this project was to produce an archive for Koorie Oral Memory. In response to a key need identified in Stages One and Two, this outcome was modified into developing a framework and set of functional requirements for a trusted Koorie Annotation System that will allow Koorie communities to add their stories and perspectives, comment on or challenge the version of events in the archival records, and provide information about their context.