Sharon is a multidisciplinary researcher in the complex spaces of relational collaborations, politics of agency, applied ethics and Indigenous principles, practices and governance. She is a 2022 ARC DECRA Research Fellow at Australia’s National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG) at ANU’s John Curtin School of Medical Research (JCSMR). Sharon is a chief investigator (CI) on a 2021 NHMRC Ideas Grant and 2022 NHMRC Synergy Grant. Address: North Coburg, Victoria, Australia
The journey of two Aboriginal family groups discovering the history of their ancestor Bessy Flowers, who in 1867 was sent away from her Albany home, never to return.
ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, First Nations media organisations have been established across remote, regional and urban Australia, and have been broadcasting and producing media in and for their local communities. Many of the resulting community-managed audiovisual collections have yet to be digitised or archived and are often stored in substandard conditions. With UNESCO's deadline of 2025 for digitisation of analogue media fast approaching, these rich social and cultural heritage collections are at high risk of being lost. Since 2013, First Nations Media Australia (FNMA, formerly Indigenous Remote Communications Association) has worked closely with member organisations and national collection agencies to develop a First Nations Media Archiving Strategy and to support community organisations to develop the capacity to manage their collections according to best practice. FNMA is committed to keeping strong Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community control of media collections and recordings, and believes that the relationship between media production and access to archived recordings is intrinsically linked to the processes of self-determination, and to social, cultural and economic sustainability and benefit. FNMA has developed resources and training tools to enable community management of collections that ensures culturally important and sensitive materials are maintained on country and under the custodianship of cultural law keepers and senior knowledge holders. This paper explores the ways in which on-country archiving work enables local decision-making processes, which are considered critical to future collection access and use. This paper discusses how digitisation and preservation of First Nations media organisations are often hampered by a lack of funding needed for the equipment, software, training, preservation and ongoing management of community collections.
This paper considers the ontologies of relational
repatriation, cultural reclamation and reorient... more This paper considers the ontologies of relational repatriation, cultural reclamation and reorientation from past to present of ancestor photos by Aboriginal Elders, knowledge holders and their families. It leans into questions about cultural custodianship rights and the renewal of family kinship responsibilities to ancestors and kin, pictorially confined to repository collections of 19th and early 20th Century photographs. It engages with dialectical approaches to heritage reclamation and attends to the dialogic ethics and morals of an intimate social relatedness that does not separate history from meaningful experience, cultural authority from emotions. This paper explores cultural perceptions of identity and belonging animated by descendant family members when experiencing ancestors and kin pictured in photographs. Closely examined are the complexities of these interrelationships and the energetic social and political desire of Elders, knowledge holders, and their families to make something happen as part of contemporary knowledge practices, and for the continuity of collective memory and legacy – knowing the self through remembering ancestors and kin in relationship to country, each other, and the acknowledged power of oral narratives throughout time.
The article considers whether a Dynamic
Consent (DC) approach might be adopted
with cultural lead... more The article considers whether a Dynamic Consent (DC) approach might be adopted with cultural leadership to support communication, education, deliberation and flexible choices by First Peoples. It posits that the DC model can provide for autonomous and informed choice by donors and their descendants about the treatment of individual samples, cognizant of both the samples’ value for future research and their profound personal and cultural meaning.
Archives & Manuscripts Taylor & Francis Group, 2019
Authors: Sharon Huebner and Stella Marr
The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University ... more Authors: Sharon Huebner and Stella Marr
The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University of Melbourne Archives is discussed in relation to recognising, protecting and reclaiming Koori (First Peoples of southeast Australia) heritage. The settler collection includes early 1900s photographs of Koori people within two distinct albums – a family album that includes a series of studio portraits of Koori adults and children, and an album depicting Koori families on Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission Station. In the past, these albums have been defined by, and limited to, traditional archiving practices excluding Koori interpretation, authorship and social context. Restoring Koori ownership and authorship of intangible heritage plays a large part in consolidating ancestor photographs with Koori perspectives of identity and culture.
Authors: Sharon Huebner and Ezzard Flowers
Abstract: This article considers the dynamic relation... more Authors: Sharon Huebner and Ezzard Flowers
Abstract: This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang
Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organ... more Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organisations in Australia for over thirty years, representing a distributed national collection of high cultural, linguistic and national significance. However, technical obsolescence of analogue materials, harsh environmental conditions and limited access to technological and financial resources in many remote communities present serious risk of information and knowledge being lost forever. This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.
The ability to meld Koorie culture and technology relies on a relationship of trust with communit... more The ability to meld Koorie culture and technology relies on a relationship of trust with community members and a willingness to listen and hear the voices of Koorie individuals and communities. This paper gives a voice to some of the complexities of this ambition through personal stories about identity, community, and the role technology can play to create sustainable digital community archive. The stories reflect the need to preserve the rich and diverse culture of Koorie communities, when there exists a history of displacement from land, family and culture; and how pride in who you are and where you come from is connected to sharing cultural history and knowledge. (see: Archives and Manuscripts The Journal of the Australian Society of Archivists Volume 35 Number 1 May 2007 p. 18-33)
In this chapter, script development practices converge with the principles, ethics and improvisat... more In this chapter, script development practices converge with the principles, ethics and improvisational qualities of First Nations storytelling in Australia, to both amplify and communicate the cultural materialising and sensibilities of relational identity, truth and integrity. No longer a Wandering Spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers (2016) situates within its social palpability, a politics of agency fundamental to the movement of story between generations, and through time, by First Nations storytellers. Also mobilised are assemblages of attitudes, reconciliations and shared experiences produced by relational collaborations and approaches to script development that respect diverse expressions of identity and place-based learning. The composition of relational recognition, and understandings of ethics and protocols, such as those achieved through shared time on country,energetic dialogue and knowledge exchange, is an emergent discourse within this chapter about how intercultural script development can allow First Nations storytellers to lead the scripting of personal and family stories, in ways that they choose to do so.
Indigenous Research Ethics: Claiming Research Sovereignty Beyond Deficit and the Colonial Legacy Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity, Volume 06, 109–123 Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020
The Australian Government recognises an obligation to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Is... more The Australian Government recognises an obligation to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Australia’s First Peoples) are included in the integration of genomics into the healthcare system. First Peoples inclusion in this area requires going beyond general principles for First Peoples health research.This extra need exists for historical reasons as well as the need to maintain connections between patients, participants and communities and between the bio-specimens and data contributing to the resources underpinning genomics. The National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG) at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, has developed a framework that addresses these requirements through its dedicated First Peoples governance and enduring community engagement processes relating to stored heritage materials, data management and culturally agreed terms for collection preservation and potential use into the future. This chapter incorporates a First Peoples perspective on the NCIG by describing the practical application of ‘doing the right thing’, proceeding at ‘the pace of trust’, obtaining informed consent as part of enduring relationships, acknowledging cultural perspectives, understanding diversity of views and cultural practices within and between communities and respecting the need for community ownership and self-determined mobilisation of First Peoples involvement with research. This culturally appropriate methodology has been developed in partnership with individuals, family groups and community leaders, who are directly involved in genomic research. It provides a model for First Peoples to play an invested and sustaining role in the future development of genome science and precision medicine.
In 2003 I participated in the production of a digital community project
for Victorian Koorie comm... more In 2003 I participated in the production of a digital community project for Victorian Koorie communities. The team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, who contributed their wide-ranging expertise to the Koorie Heritage Archive (KHA) project, are past and present members of dedicated units at the Koorie Heritage Trust based in Melbourne, Victoria, including the Koorie Family History Service, the Oral History Unit and the Collections Unit. The project’s intention was to bring together cultural heritage materials that are significant to Koorie people and currently dispersed throughout state record-holding institutions, private collections and local Indigenous community organisations; to record personal and community histories; and to document family and placenames, which are all important for recuperating and preserving Koorie knowledge, memory and identity. This chapter traces the development of the KHA as a pilot project, and looks at some of the key issues of creating and implementing this specific digital knowledge system, which lays new ground for appreciating and, if necessary, evaluating such projects. This chapter examines how a photograph, held within the media-rich KHA library, can offer a point of orientation to follow a dynamic human mapping of hidden pasts or misplaced histories that transpire from the interplay between memories and cultural artefacts. Through the personal, social and political stories told by Koorie people, I hope to capture the non-textual and often abstract nature of how Koorie individuals and their families navigate their way through the contested arena of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems. The lively and transformative Information technology and Indigenous communities 172 Published by AIATSIS Research Publications performance enacted with truth, conviction, tears and laughter, and firmly grounded in the activities of local community life, presents a timely place to consider how the past is reinscribed and reincorporated into a present-day reality. The following is therefore a reflective piece drawing on an 11-year history of working with Victorian Koorie people and a background in performance and visual arts, which emphasises the stories and places at the centre of culture and identity.
First Nations Media Australia, Alice Springs, 2022
Authors: First Nations Media Australia's Claire Stuchbery & Bronte Gosper with Andrew Dodd, Sharo... more Authors: First Nations Media Australia's Claire Stuchbery & Bronte Gosper with Andrew Dodd, Sharon Huebner, Lyndon Ormond-Parker, Brad Butler
The expanding COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten the safety of communities across Australia, including First Nations communities in rural, remote and suburban areas. From the very early stages of the pandemic response, First Nations media outlets have risen to the challenge of supporting and communicating with Indigenous people and broader audiences by providing targeted, relevant and reliable information and by fostering connections with individuals and between groups. The First Nations media sector proved to be a trusted source of information by tailoring messages to suit its audiences and by correcting emerging misinformation. It recognised and continues to address mental health issues associated with the pandemic by maintaining its focus on the welfare of audiences.
First Nations media organisations also demonstrated the important role they play in fostering identity and keeping communities strong and by often going above and beyond broadcasting and communicating through media channels. First Nations media organisations have adapted their crisis response to the pandemic to focus on vaccination information and managing information flow about the evolving directives for travel and lockdowns on an ongoing basis.
Through case study examples, this study provides an understanding about how First Nations media organisations operated during the early days of Australia’s COVID-19 pandemic. It also identifies key lessons that can be learned from that experience, both for the future benefit of media organisations and for those First Nations communities continuing to struggle with the impact of Australia’s most urgent public health challenge in nearly a century.
Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organ... more Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organisations in Australia for over thirty years, representing a distributed national collection of high cultural, linguistic and national significance. However, technical obsolescence of analogue materials, harsh environmental conditions and limited access to technological and financial resources in many remote communities present serious risk of information and knowledge being lost forever. This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.
In the early 1860s on the west coast of Australia, a colonial settler from the Swan River Colony ... more In the early 1860s on the west coast of Australia, a colonial settler from the Swan River Colony photographed a Noongar girl living in the care of an English missionary at the Annesfield Native Institution, in Albany. A Noongar girl pictured in the early 1860s could easily be, as is the case for many historical photographs of Aboriginal people, a lost identity – an ancestor unnamed, and a history untraceable. However, written on the back of her photograph with Anne Camfield is the inscription: Bessie Flower (her letter signature being however, Bessy Flowers or in later years Bessy Cameron). In this screen-based work I explore the visibility of Bessy as she emerges from historic representation and into the imaginaries of her Noongar kin and Koorie descendants. I trace the lineage of events that awaken a place for Bessy – captured in an archive for many than 150 years – within the memories, and present day stories, of her family. The stronghold of family and kinship reignited.
This thesis repositions a story held in a colonial archive for more than 150 years in the lives t... more This thesis repositions a story held in a colonial archive for more than 150 years in the lives today of Western Australia Noongar and Victorian Koorie families. It is about the history of Bessy Flowers, an ancestor of both communities, and the production of a cultural legacy from a single historical photograph. The photographer of this particular photograph was colonial settler, Alfred Hawes Stone. Stone photographed Bessy as a girl while living in the care of missionary housemother, Anne Camfield. Anne was responsible for the Annesfield Native Institution established in 1852 in Albany, Western Australia. In June 1867, Bessy was one of five Aboriginal women sent from the native institution to the Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission in eastern Victoria. In this thesis Bessy’s history situates a Noongar and Koorie displacement from cultural family and community life. It is a history recorded in the correspondence of the missionaries and government officials who played a role in Bessy’s life, as well as in Bessy’s personal letters to Anne Camfield. Such records provide details of Bessy’s life, but it is the historical photograph that has provoked a powerful research inquiry that seeks the fate of this Noongar girl, who lived during times of cultural change for Australian Aboriginal people.The historical photograph of Bessy given context by her life history provides the impetus for exploring Bessy’s contemporary positioning within the everyday realities of her descendants in Victoria, and to her extended family in the southwest of Western Australia. By retracing the life history of their ancestor as a cultural practice of history, rather than a western practice of history the Noongar Flowers family and the Koorie Bryant family make visible a story of Bessy that is culturally relevant and significant to Noongar and Koorie ontologies of identity and place-memory. This cultural act of remembering is as I have detailed in this thesis, grounded in a conceptual and spiritual understanding that ancestors walk before you and not behind, and that the past is relevant to a present day Noongar and Koorie identity. As a result, in this thesis I participate in an exchange of cross-cultural and intercommunity dialogues that produce a cultural intervention with a history that represents from a cultural perspective, loss and absence. I also record the experience of this cultural intervention of the archive that is made visible through cultural stories and a contemporary visual presence that is off-centre to colonial perceptions, where the past is hermetically and lastingly sealed in archives and, to date, is given unchallenged perpetuity by Australian historians. This thesis maps a research project that has aimed to restore Noongar and Koorie emotion to an ancestral history, in the present.
Authors: Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Stephanie Russo Carroll, and Maui Hudson
REVIEW OF PRICTOR, HUEBN... more Authors: Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Stephanie Russo Carroll, and Maui Hudson
REVIEW OF PRICTOR, HUEBNER, TEARE ARTICLE - Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections of Genetic Heritage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Considerations of a Dynamic Consent Approach to Decision Making
Mapping Meaning, Issue 3: Archives and Photography, Editors Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Trudi Lynn Smith, pp. 38-64. , 2019
In the summer of 2019 (February-March), a group of graduate student volunteers from the Universit... more In the summer of 2019 (February-March), a group of graduate student volunteers from the University of Melbourne participated in a series of art-making workshops in the backyard of the southeast Australian Aboriginal artist Maree Clarke. These workshops coincided with their work to register the photographic collection of Ms Clarke's—a collection that arose from her cadetship in photography during the 1990s. The photographs consist of images of the Aboriginal community throughout Victoria during this period. The students' engagement with the photographs, alongside their work in collaborating with and learning from Maree and her family to make a series of art-works—a river reed necklace, a kangaroo tooth necklace and a possum-skin cloak—positioned the photographs in relation to Maree's ongoing contribution to culture-making through art-making, processes that are central to enhancing understandings of the interconnection of everything in relation to the Living Archive.
The journey of two Aboriginal family groups discovering the history of their ancestor Bessy Flowers, who in 1867 was sent away from her Albany home, never to return.
ABSTRACT Since the 1970s, First Nations media organisations have been established across remote, regional and urban Australia, and have been broadcasting and producing media in and for their local communities. Many of the resulting community-managed audiovisual collections have yet to be digitised or archived and are often stored in substandard conditions. With UNESCO's deadline of 2025 for digitisation of analogue media fast approaching, these rich social and cultural heritage collections are at high risk of being lost. Since 2013, First Nations Media Australia (FNMA, formerly Indigenous Remote Communications Association) has worked closely with member organisations and national collection agencies to develop a First Nations Media Archiving Strategy and to support community organisations to develop the capacity to manage their collections according to best practice. FNMA is committed to keeping strong Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community control of media collections and recordings, and believes that the relationship between media production and access to archived recordings is intrinsically linked to the processes of self-determination, and to social, cultural and economic sustainability and benefit. FNMA has developed resources and training tools to enable community management of collections that ensures culturally important and sensitive materials are maintained on country and under the custodianship of cultural law keepers and senior knowledge holders. This paper explores the ways in which on-country archiving work enables local decision-making processes, which are considered critical to future collection access and use. This paper discusses how digitisation and preservation of First Nations media organisations are often hampered by a lack of funding needed for the equipment, software, training, preservation and ongoing management of community collections.
This paper considers the ontologies of relational
repatriation, cultural reclamation and reorient... more This paper considers the ontologies of relational repatriation, cultural reclamation and reorientation from past to present of ancestor photos by Aboriginal Elders, knowledge holders and their families. It leans into questions about cultural custodianship rights and the renewal of family kinship responsibilities to ancestors and kin, pictorially confined to repository collections of 19th and early 20th Century photographs. It engages with dialectical approaches to heritage reclamation and attends to the dialogic ethics and morals of an intimate social relatedness that does not separate history from meaningful experience, cultural authority from emotions. This paper explores cultural perceptions of identity and belonging animated by descendant family members when experiencing ancestors and kin pictured in photographs. Closely examined are the complexities of these interrelationships and the energetic social and political desire of Elders, knowledge holders, and their families to make something happen as part of contemporary knowledge practices, and for the continuity of collective memory and legacy – knowing the self through remembering ancestors and kin in relationship to country, each other, and the acknowledged power of oral narratives throughout time.
The article considers whether a Dynamic
Consent (DC) approach might be adopted
with cultural lead... more The article considers whether a Dynamic Consent (DC) approach might be adopted with cultural leadership to support communication, education, deliberation and flexible choices by First Peoples. It posits that the DC model can provide for autonomous and informed choice by donors and their descendants about the treatment of individual samples, cognizant of both the samples’ value for future research and their profound personal and cultural meaning.
Archives & Manuscripts Taylor & Francis Group, 2019
Authors: Sharon Huebner and Stella Marr
The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University ... more Authors: Sharon Huebner and Stella Marr
The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University of Melbourne Archives is discussed in relation to recognising, protecting and reclaiming Koori (First Peoples of southeast Australia) heritage. The settler collection includes early 1900s photographs of Koori people within two distinct albums – a family album that includes a series of studio portraits of Koori adults and children, and an album depicting Koori families on Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission Station. In the past, these albums have been defined by, and limited to, traditional archiving practices excluding Koori interpretation, authorship and social context. Restoring Koori ownership and authorship of intangible heritage plays a large part in consolidating ancestor photographs with Koori perspectives of identity and culture.
Authors: Sharon Huebner and Ezzard Flowers
Abstract: This article considers the dynamic relation... more Authors: Sharon Huebner and Ezzard Flowers
Abstract: This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang
Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organ... more Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organisations in Australia for over thirty years, representing a distributed national collection of high cultural, linguistic and national significance. However, technical obsolescence of analogue materials, harsh environmental conditions and limited access to technological and financial resources in many remote communities present serious risk of information and knowledge being lost forever. This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.
The ability to meld Koorie culture and technology relies on a relationship of trust with communit... more The ability to meld Koorie culture and technology relies on a relationship of trust with community members and a willingness to listen and hear the voices of Koorie individuals and communities. This paper gives a voice to some of the complexities of this ambition through personal stories about identity, community, and the role technology can play to create sustainable digital community archive. The stories reflect the need to preserve the rich and diverse culture of Koorie communities, when there exists a history of displacement from land, family and culture; and how pride in who you are and where you come from is connected to sharing cultural history and knowledge. (see: Archives and Manuscripts The Journal of the Australian Society of Archivists Volume 35 Number 1 May 2007 p. 18-33)
In this chapter, script development practices converge with the principles, ethics and improvisat... more In this chapter, script development practices converge with the principles, ethics and improvisational qualities of First Nations storytelling in Australia, to both amplify and communicate the cultural materialising and sensibilities of relational identity, truth and integrity. No longer a Wandering Spirit—Imaginaries of Bessy Flowers (2016) situates within its social palpability, a politics of agency fundamental to the movement of story between generations, and through time, by First Nations storytellers. Also mobilised are assemblages of attitudes, reconciliations and shared experiences produced by relational collaborations and approaches to script development that respect diverse expressions of identity and place-based learning. The composition of relational recognition, and understandings of ethics and protocols, such as those achieved through shared time on country,energetic dialogue and knowledge exchange, is an emergent discourse within this chapter about how intercultural script development can allow First Nations storytellers to lead the scripting of personal and family stories, in ways that they choose to do so.
Indigenous Research Ethics: Claiming Research Sovereignty Beyond Deficit and the Colonial Legacy Advances in Research Ethics and Integrity, Volume 06, 109–123 Emerald Publishing Limited, 2020
The Australian Government recognises an obligation to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Is... more The Australian Government recognises an obligation to ensure that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders (Australia’s First Peoples) are included in the integration of genomics into the healthcare system. First Peoples inclusion in this area requires going beyond general principles for First Peoples health research.This extra need exists for historical reasons as well as the need to maintain connections between patients, participants and communities and between the bio-specimens and data contributing to the resources underpinning genomics. The National Centre for Indigenous Genomics (NCIG) at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, has developed a framework that addresses these requirements through its dedicated First Peoples governance and enduring community engagement processes relating to stored heritage materials, data management and culturally agreed terms for collection preservation and potential use into the future. This chapter incorporates a First Peoples perspective on the NCIG by describing the practical application of ‘doing the right thing’, proceeding at ‘the pace of trust’, obtaining informed consent as part of enduring relationships, acknowledging cultural perspectives, understanding diversity of views and cultural practices within and between communities and respecting the need for community ownership and self-determined mobilisation of First Peoples involvement with research. This culturally appropriate methodology has been developed in partnership with individuals, family groups and community leaders, who are directly involved in genomic research. It provides a model for First Peoples to play an invested and sustaining role in the future development of genome science and precision medicine.
In 2003 I participated in the production of a digital community project
for Victorian Koorie comm... more In 2003 I participated in the production of a digital community project for Victorian Koorie communities. The team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, who contributed their wide-ranging expertise to the Koorie Heritage Archive (KHA) project, are past and present members of dedicated units at the Koorie Heritage Trust based in Melbourne, Victoria, including the Koorie Family History Service, the Oral History Unit and the Collections Unit. The project’s intention was to bring together cultural heritage materials that are significant to Koorie people and currently dispersed throughout state record-holding institutions, private collections and local Indigenous community organisations; to record personal and community histories; and to document family and placenames, which are all important for recuperating and preserving Koorie knowledge, memory and identity. This chapter traces the development of the KHA as a pilot project, and looks at some of the key issues of creating and implementing this specific digital knowledge system, which lays new ground for appreciating and, if necessary, evaluating such projects. This chapter examines how a photograph, held within the media-rich KHA library, can offer a point of orientation to follow a dynamic human mapping of hidden pasts or misplaced histories that transpire from the interplay between memories and cultural artefacts. Through the personal, social and political stories told by Koorie people, I hope to capture the non-textual and often abstract nature of how Koorie individuals and their families navigate their way through the contested arena of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems. The lively and transformative Information technology and Indigenous communities 172 Published by AIATSIS Research Publications performance enacted with truth, conviction, tears and laughter, and firmly grounded in the activities of local community life, presents a timely place to consider how the past is reinscribed and reincorporated into a present-day reality. The following is therefore a reflective piece drawing on an 11-year history of working with Victorian Koorie people and a background in performance and visual arts, which emphasises the stories and places at the centre of culture and identity.
First Nations Media Australia, Alice Springs, 2022
Authors: First Nations Media Australia's Claire Stuchbery & Bronte Gosper with Andrew Dodd, Sharo... more Authors: First Nations Media Australia's Claire Stuchbery & Bronte Gosper with Andrew Dodd, Sharon Huebner, Lyndon Ormond-Parker, Brad Butler
The expanding COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten the safety of communities across Australia, including First Nations communities in rural, remote and suburban areas. From the very early stages of the pandemic response, First Nations media outlets have risen to the challenge of supporting and communicating with Indigenous people and broader audiences by providing targeted, relevant and reliable information and by fostering connections with individuals and between groups. The First Nations media sector proved to be a trusted source of information by tailoring messages to suit its audiences and by correcting emerging misinformation. It recognised and continues to address mental health issues associated with the pandemic by maintaining its focus on the welfare of audiences.
First Nations media organisations also demonstrated the important role they play in fostering identity and keeping communities strong and by often going above and beyond broadcasting and communicating through media channels. First Nations media organisations have adapted their crisis response to the pandemic to focus on vaccination information and managing information flow about the evolving directives for travel and lockdowns on an ongoing basis.
Through case study examples, this study provides an understanding about how First Nations media organisations operated during the early days of Australia’s COVID-19 pandemic. It also identifies key lessons that can be learned from that experience, both for the future benefit of media organisations and for those First Nations communities continuing to struggle with the impact of Australia’s most urgent public health challenge in nearly a century.
Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organ... more Audiovisual materials have been produced and stored by remote Indigenous media and cultural organisations in Australia for over thirty years, representing a distributed national collection of high cultural, linguistic and national significance. However, technical obsolescence of analogue materials, harsh environmental conditions and limited access to technological and financial resources in many remote communities present serious risk of information and knowledge being lost forever. This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.
In the early 1860s on the west coast of Australia, a colonial settler from the Swan River Colony ... more In the early 1860s on the west coast of Australia, a colonial settler from the Swan River Colony photographed a Noongar girl living in the care of an English missionary at the Annesfield Native Institution, in Albany. A Noongar girl pictured in the early 1860s could easily be, as is the case for many historical photographs of Aboriginal people, a lost identity – an ancestor unnamed, and a history untraceable. However, written on the back of her photograph with Anne Camfield is the inscription: Bessie Flower (her letter signature being however, Bessy Flowers or in later years Bessy Cameron). In this screen-based work I explore the visibility of Bessy as she emerges from historic representation and into the imaginaries of her Noongar kin and Koorie descendants. I trace the lineage of events that awaken a place for Bessy – captured in an archive for many than 150 years – within the memories, and present day stories, of her family. The stronghold of family and kinship reignited.
This thesis repositions a story held in a colonial archive for more than 150 years in the lives t... more This thesis repositions a story held in a colonial archive for more than 150 years in the lives today of Western Australia Noongar and Victorian Koorie families. It is about the history of Bessy Flowers, an ancestor of both communities, and the production of a cultural legacy from a single historical photograph. The photographer of this particular photograph was colonial settler, Alfred Hawes Stone. Stone photographed Bessy as a girl while living in the care of missionary housemother, Anne Camfield. Anne was responsible for the Annesfield Native Institution established in 1852 in Albany, Western Australia. In June 1867, Bessy was one of five Aboriginal women sent from the native institution to the Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission in eastern Victoria. In this thesis Bessy’s history situates a Noongar and Koorie displacement from cultural family and community life. It is a history recorded in the correspondence of the missionaries and government officials who played a role in Bessy’s life, as well as in Bessy’s personal letters to Anne Camfield. Such records provide details of Bessy’s life, but it is the historical photograph that has provoked a powerful research inquiry that seeks the fate of this Noongar girl, who lived during times of cultural change for Australian Aboriginal people.The historical photograph of Bessy given context by her life history provides the impetus for exploring Bessy’s contemporary positioning within the everyday realities of her descendants in Victoria, and to her extended family in the southwest of Western Australia. By retracing the life history of their ancestor as a cultural practice of history, rather than a western practice of history the Noongar Flowers family and the Koorie Bryant family make visible a story of Bessy that is culturally relevant and significant to Noongar and Koorie ontologies of identity and place-memory. This cultural act of remembering is as I have detailed in this thesis, grounded in a conceptual and spiritual understanding that ancestors walk before you and not behind, and that the past is relevant to a present day Noongar and Koorie identity. As a result, in this thesis I participate in an exchange of cross-cultural and intercommunity dialogues that produce a cultural intervention with a history that represents from a cultural perspective, loss and absence. I also record the experience of this cultural intervention of the archive that is made visible through cultural stories and a contemporary visual presence that is off-centre to colonial perceptions, where the past is hermetically and lastingly sealed in archives and, to date, is given unchallenged perpetuity by Australian historians. This thesis maps a research project that has aimed to restore Noongar and Koorie emotion to an ancestral history, in the present.
Authors: Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Stephanie Russo Carroll, and Maui Hudson
REVIEW OF PRICTOR, HUEBN... more Authors: Nanibaa’ A. Garrison, Stephanie Russo Carroll, and Maui Hudson
REVIEW OF PRICTOR, HUEBNER, TEARE ARTICLE - Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections of Genetic Heritage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Considerations of a Dynamic Consent Approach to Decision Making
Mapping Meaning, Issue 3: Archives and Photography, Editors Nat Castañeda, Karina Aguilera Skvirsky, Trudi Lynn Smith, pp. 38-64. , 2019
In the summer of 2019 (February-March), a group of graduate student volunteers from the Universit... more In the summer of 2019 (February-March), a group of graduate student volunteers from the University of Melbourne participated in a series of art-making workshops in the backyard of the southeast Australian Aboriginal artist Maree Clarke. These workshops coincided with their work to register the photographic collection of Ms Clarke's—a collection that arose from her cadetship in photography during the 1990s. The photographs consist of images of the Aboriginal community throughout Victoria during this period. The students' engagement with the photographs, alongside their work in collaborating with and learning from Maree and her family to make a series of art-works—a river reed necklace, a kangaroo tooth necklace and a possum-skin cloak—positioned the photographs in relation to Maree's ongoing contribution to culture-making through art-making, processes that are central to enhancing understandings of the interconnection of everything in relation to the Living Archive.
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The journey of two Aboriginal family groups discovering the history of their ancestor Bessy Flowers, who in 1867 was sent away from her Albany home, never to return.
Featherstone, Daniel; Stuchbery, Claire; Huebner, Sharon; Ormond-Parker, Lyndon; Dodd, Andrew
ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, First Nations media organisations have been established across remote, regional and urban Australia, and have been broadcasting and producing media in and for their local communities. Many of the resulting community-managed audiovisual collections have yet to be digitised or archived and are often stored in substandard conditions. With UNESCO's deadline of 2025 for digitisation of analogue media fast approaching, these rich social and cultural heritage collections are at high risk of being lost.
Since 2013, First Nations Media Australia (FNMA, formerly Indigenous Remote Communications Association) has worked closely with member organisations and national collection agencies to develop a First Nations Media Archiving Strategy and to support community organisations to develop the capacity to manage their collections according to best practice. FNMA is committed to keeping strong Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community control of media collections and recordings, and believes that the relationship between media production and access to archived recordings is intrinsically linked to the processes of self-determination, and to social, cultural and economic sustainability and benefit. FNMA has developed resources and training tools to enable community management of collections that ensures culturally important and sensitive materials are maintained on country and under the custodianship of cultural law keepers and senior knowledge holders. This paper explores the ways in which on-country archiving work enables local decision-making processes, which are considered critical to future collection access and use. This paper discusses how digitisation and preservation of First Nations media organisations are often hampered by a lack of funding needed for the equipment, software, training, preservation and ongoing management of community collections.
repatriation, cultural reclamation and reorientation
from past to present of ancestor photos by Aboriginal
Elders, knowledge holders and their families. It leans into
questions about cultural custodianship rights and the
renewal of family kinship responsibilities to ancestors
and kin, pictorially confined to repository collections of
19th and early 20th Century photographs. It engages
with dialectical approaches to heritage reclamation and
attends to the dialogic ethics and morals of an intimate
social relatedness that does not separate history from
meaningful experience, cultural authority from emotions.
This paper explores cultural perceptions of identity and
belonging animated by descendant family members when
experiencing ancestors and kin pictured in photographs.
Closely examined are the complexities of these
interrelationships and the energetic social and political
desire of Elders, knowledge holders, and their families to
make something happen as part of contemporary
knowledge practices, and for the continuity of collective
memory and legacy – knowing the self through
remembering ancestors and kin in relationship to
country, each other, and the acknowledged power of oral
narratives throughout time.
Consent (DC) approach might be adopted
with cultural leadership to support
communication, education, deliberation and
flexible choices by First Peoples. It posits that
the DC model can provide for autonomous
and informed choice by donors and their
descendants about the treatment of individual
samples, cognizant of both the samples’
value for future research and their profound
personal and cultural meaning.
The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University of Melbourne Archives is discussed in relation to recognising, protecting and reclaiming Koori (First Peoples of southeast Australia) heritage. The settler collection includes early 1900s photographs of Koori people within two distinct albums – a family album that includes a series of studio portraits of Koori adults and children, and an album depicting Koori families on Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission Station. In the past, these albums have been defined by, and limited to, traditional archiving practices excluding Koori interpretation, authorship and social context. Restoring Koori ownership and authorship of intangible heritage plays a large part in consolidating ancestor photographs with Koori perspectives of identity and culture.
Abstract: This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang
This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.
potential use into the future. This chapter incorporates a First Peoples perspective on the NCIG by describing the practical application of ‘doing the right thing’, proceeding at ‘the pace of trust’, obtaining informed consent as part of enduring relationships, acknowledging cultural perspectives, understanding diversity of views and cultural practices within and between communities and respecting the need for community ownership and self-determined mobilisation of First Peoples involvement with research. This culturally appropriate methodology has been developed in partnership with individuals, family groups and community leaders, who are directly involved in genomic research. It provides a model for First Peoples to play an invested and sustaining role in the future development of genome science and precision medicine.
for Victorian Koorie communities. The team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous
people, who contributed their wide-ranging expertise to the Koorie Heritage Archive
(KHA) project, are past and present members of dedicated units at the Koorie
Heritage Trust based in Melbourne, Victoria, including the Koorie Family History
Service, the Oral History Unit and the Collections Unit. The project’s intention was
to bring together cultural heritage materials that are significant to Koorie people and
currently dispersed throughout state record-holding institutions, private collections
and local Indigenous community organisations; to record personal and community
histories; and to document family and placenames, which are all important for
recuperating and preserving Koorie knowledge, memory and identity. This chapter
traces the development of the KHA as a pilot project, and looks at some of the key
issues of creating and implementing this specific digital knowledge system, which lays
new ground for appreciating and, if necessary, evaluating such projects.
This chapter examines how a photograph, held within the media-rich KHA
library, can offer a point of orientation to follow a dynamic human mapping of hidden
pasts or misplaced histories that transpire from the interplay between memories and
cultural artefacts. Through the personal, social and political stories told by Koorie
people, I hope to capture the non-textual and often abstract nature of how Koorie
individuals and their families navigate their way through the contested arena of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems. The lively and transformative
Information technology and Indigenous communities
172 Published by AIATSIS Research Publications performance enacted with truth, conviction, tears and laughter, and firmly grounded in the activities of local community life, presents a timely place to consider how the past is reinscribed and reincorporated into a present-day reality. The following is therefore a reflective piece drawing on an 11-year history of working with Victorian Koorie people and a background in performance and visual arts, which emphasises the stories and places at the centre of culture and identity.
The expanding COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten the safety of communities across Australia, including First Nations communities in rural, remote and suburban areas. From the very early stages of the pandemic response, First Nations media outlets have risen to the challenge of supporting and communicating with Indigenous people and broader audiences by providing targeted, relevant and reliable information and by fostering connections with individuals and between groups. The First Nations media sector proved to be a trusted source of information by tailoring messages to suit its audiences and by correcting emerging misinformation. It recognised and continues to address mental health issues associated with the pandemic by maintaining its focus on the welfare of audiences.
First Nations media organisations also demonstrated the important role they play in fostering identity and keeping communities strong and by often going above and beyond broadcasting and communicating through media channels. First Nations media organisations have adapted their crisis response to the pandemic to focus on vaccination information and managing information flow about the evolving directives for travel and lockdowns on an ongoing basis.
Through case study examples, this study provides an understanding about how First Nations media organisations operated during the early days of Australia’s COVID-19 pandemic. It also identifies key lessons that can be learned from that experience, both for the future benefit of media organisations and for those First Nations communities continuing to struggle with the impact of Australia’s most urgent public health challenge in nearly a century.
Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using
innovative digital technologies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1dAynpp9R4
REVIEW OF PRICTOR, HUEBNER, TEARE ARTICLE - Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections of Genetic Heritage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Considerations of a Dynamic Consent Approach to Decision Making
The journey of two Aboriginal family groups discovering the history of their ancestor Bessy Flowers, who in 1867 was sent away from her Albany home, never to return.
Featherstone, Daniel; Stuchbery, Claire; Huebner, Sharon; Ormond-Parker, Lyndon; Dodd, Andrew
ABSTRACT
Since the 1970s, First Nations media organisations have been established across remote, regional and urban Australia, and have been broadcasting and producing media in and for their local communities. Many of the resulting community-managed audiovisual collections have yet to be digitised or archived and are often stored in substandard conditions. With UNESCO's deadline of 2025 for digitisation of analogue media fast approaching, these rich social and cultural heritage collections are at high risk of being lost.
Since 2013, First Nations Media Australia (FNMA, formerly Indigenous Remote Communications Association) has worked closely with member organisations and national collection agencies to develop a First Nations Media Archiving Strategy and to support community organisations to develop the capacity to manage their collections according to best practice. FNMA is committed to keeping strong Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community control of media collections and recordings, and believes that the relationship between media production and access to archived recordings is intrinsically linked to the processes of self-determination, and to social, cultural and economic sustainability and benefit. FNMA has developed resources and training tools to enable community management of collections that ensures culturally important and sensitive materials are maintained on country and under the custodianship of cultural law keepers and senior knowledge holders. This paper explores the ways in which on-country archiving work enables local decision-making processes, which are considered critical to future collection access and use. This paper discusses how digitisation and preservation of First Nations media organisations are often hampered by a lack of funding needed for the equipment, software, training, preservation and ongoing management of community collections.
repatriation, cultural reclamation and reorientation
from past to present of ancestor photos by Aboriginal
Elders, knowledge holders and their families. It leans into
questions about cultural custodianship rights and the
renewal of family kinship responsibilities to ancestors
and kin, pictorially confined to repository collections of
19th and early 20th Century photographs. It engages
with dialectical approaches to heritage reclamation and
attends to the dialogic ethics and morals of an intimate
social relatedness that does not separate history from
meaningful experience, cultural authority from emotions.
This paper explores cultural perceptions of identity and
belonging animated by descendant family members when
experiencing ancestors and kin pictured in photographs.
Closely examined are the complexities of these
interrelationships and the energetic social and political
desire of Elders, knowledge holders, and their families to
make something happen as part of contemporary
knowledge practices, and for the continuity of collective
memory and legacy – knowing the self through
remembering ancestors and kin in relationship to
country, each other, and the acknowledged power of oral
narratives throughout time.
Consent (DC) approach might be adopted
with cultural leadership to support
communication, education, deliberation and
flexible choices by First Peoples. It posits that
the DC model can provide for autonomous
and informed choice by donors and their
descendants about the treatment of individual
samples, cognizant of both the samples’
value for future research and their profound
personal and cultural meaning.
The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University of Melbourne Archives is discussed in relation to recognising, protecting and reclaiming Koori (First Peoples of southeast Australia) heritage. The settler collection includes early 1900s photographs of Koori people within two distinct albums – a family album that includes a series of studio portraits of Koori adults and children, and an album depicting Koori families on Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission Station. In the past, these albums have been defined by, and limited to, traditional archiving practices excluding Koori interpretation, authorship and social context. Restoring Koori ownership and authorship of intangible heritage plays a large part in consolidating ancestor photographs with Koori perspectives of identity and culture.
Abstract: This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang
This report outlines a collaborative project undertaken by the Melbourne Networked Society Institute and researchers from the University of Melbourne’s Australian Indigenous Studies Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using innovative digital technologies.
potential use into the future. This chapter incorporates a First Peoples perspective on the NCIG by describing the practical application of ‘doing the right thing’, proceeding at ‘the pace of trust’, obtaining informed consent as part of enduring relationships, acknowledging cultural perspectives, understanding diversity of views and cultural practices within and between communities and respecting the need for community ownership and self-determined mobilisation of First Peoples involvement with research. This culturally appropriate methodology has been developed in partnership with individuals, family groups and community leaders, who are directly involved in genomic research. It provides a model for First Peoples to play an invested and sustaining role in the future development of genome science and precision medicine.
for Victorian Koorie communities. The team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous
people, who contributed their wide-ranging expertise to the Koorie Heritage Archive
(KHA) project, are past and present members of dedicated units at the Koorie
Heritage Trust based in Melbourne, Victoria, including the Koorie Family History
Service, the Oral History Unit and the Collections Unit. The project’s intention was
to bring together cultural heritage materials that are significant to Koorie people and
currently dispersed throughout state record-holding institutions, private collections
and local Indigenous community organisations; to record personal and community
histories; and to document family and placenames, which are all important for
recuperating and preserving Koorie knowledge, memory and identity. This chapter
traces the development of the KHA as a pilot project, and looks at some of the key
issues of creating and implementing this specific digital knowledge system, which lays
new ground for appreciating and, if necessary, evaluating such projects.
This chapter examines how a photograph, held within the media-rich KHA
library, can offer a point of orientation to follow a dynamic human mapping of hidden
pasts or misplaced histories that transpire from the interplay between memories and
cultural artefacts. Through the personal, social and political stories told by Koorie
people, I hope to capture the non-textual and often abstract nature of how Koorie
individuals and their families navigate their way through the contested arena of
Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems. The lively and transformative
Information technology and Indigenous communities
172 Published by AIATSIS Research Publications performance enacted with truth, conviction, tears and laughter, and firmly grounded in the activities of local community life, presents a timely place to consider how the past is reinscribed and reincorporated into a present-day reality. The following is therefore a reflective piece drawing on an 11-year history of working with Victorian Koorie people and a background in performance and visual arts, which emphasises the stories and places at the centre of culture and identity.
The expanding COVID-19 pandemic continues to threaten the safety of communities across Australia, including First Nations communities in rural, remote and suburban areas. From the very early stages of the pandemic response, First Nations media outlets have risen to the challenge of supporting and communicating with Indigenous people and broader audiences by providing targeted, relevant and reliable information and by fostering connections with individuals and between groups. The First Nations media sector proved to be a trusted source of information by tailoring messages to suit its audiences and by correcting emerging misinformation. It recognised and continues to address mental health issues associated with the pandemic by maintaining its focus on the welfare of audiences.
First Nations media organisations also demonstrated the important role they play in fostering identity and keeping communities strong and by often going above and beyond broadcasting and communicating through media channels. First Nations media organisations have adapted their crisis response to the pandemic to focus on vaccination information and managing information flow about the evolving directives for travel and lockdowns on an ongoing basis.
Through case study examples, this study provides an understanding about how First Nations media organisations operated during the early days of Australia’s COVID-19 pandemic. It also identifies key lessons that can be learned from that experience, both for the future benefit of media organisations and for those First Nations communities continuing to struggle with the impact of Australia’s most urgent public health challenge in nearly a century.
Unit, Research Unit for Indigenous Languages and the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation. In partnership with the Kanamkek-Yile Ngala Museum, Wadeye, NT, and the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the researchers investigated how culturally significant and endangered Indigenous audiovisual archives could be effectively preserved and transmitted to current and future generations using
innovative digital technologies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1dAynpp9R4
REVIEW OF PRICTOR, HUEBNER, TEARE ARTICLE - Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections of Genetic Heritage: The Legal, Ethical and Practical Considerations of a Dynamic Consent Approach to Decision Making