Mukurtu: an online dilly bag for keeping Indigenous digital archives safe.
The Conversation71.5 MB(download)
Mukurtu - Warumungu word meaning 'dilly bag' or a safe keeping place for sacred materials - is an online system helping Indigenous people conserve photos, songs and other digital archives.
Nicholas Chevalier, Mallee scrub, Murray River, NSW, watercolour, 1871.
National Library of Australia
Captain Cook's 1770 voyage is well known. But at this time, Indigenous Australians also travelled great distances - let's recognise this in the 2020 commemorations.
An undated portrait thought to depict Bennelong, signed “W.W.” now in the Dixson Galleries of the State Library of New South Wales.
Wikimedia Commons
History has typically depicted Bennelong as a tragic figure lost between two worlds - but sailors' journals suggest he still held authority after his return from the UK.
It may be that the fortnight or so surrounding Australia Day is evolving into an annual season in which some of the deepest paradoxes of Australian identity play out in public.
AAP/Glenn Campbell
One of the 'first white women' to travel in the Northern Territory, Elsie Masson's attitudes to the Aboriginal people she met expressed the contradictions of racial thought at this time.
An image of the landscape around Bairnsdale in the late-18th century. D. R Long (Daniel Rutter), between 1856 and 1883.
State Library of Victoria
Aboriginal songs found in the notebooks of a Victorian anthropologist shed light on the mystery of a 'captive white woman' that has been debated for generations.
“New Hollanders” depicted in a 1698 edition of the explorer William Dampier’s journal.
Courtesy of the Pacific Collection, Hamilton Library, University of Hawai'i-Mānoa
The image, depicting a group of Indigenous people resisting their enslavement, predates the next oldest image by 75 years.
An engraving of Dirimera and Conaci by Giuseppe Mochetti taken from a daguerreotype of April 5 1852. Acc no 77930P .
With acknowledgements to the Archives of the Benedictine Community of New Norcia.
Aboriginal children are rarely named in the colonial archive. But the remarkable story of Dirimera and Conaci reveals two boys who, while removed from their land, had a keen sense of sovereignty.
Detail from Julie Shiels’ 1954 poster White on black: The annihilation of Aboriginal people and their culture cannot be separated from the destruction of nature.
State Library of Victoria
It is 50 years since anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner gave the Boyer Lectures in which he coined the phrase 'the great Australian silence'. How far have we come since?
Ring trees were made by binding young branches of young trees with reeds. As the tree grew, it formed a ring.
Tim Church/Timmy Church Films.
Where else but on the sports field can an under-educated and even a troubled Aboriginal youth achieve celebrity status and social mobility?
Social media has become a place of vitriolic myths about Indigenous peoples in the wake of the Gerald Stanley trial for the killing of Colten Boushie. Here, a vigil in support of Colten Boushie’s family on Feb. 13, 2018.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz
Social media posts since Gerald Stanley’s acquittal have been saturated with vitriolic rants and myths. If reconciliation is to be more than an aspiration, settlers must acknowledge our culpability.
The painting Group of Natives of Tasmania, 1859, by Robert Dowling.
Wikimedia
That colonial wars were fought in Tasmania is irrefutable. More controversially, surviving evidence suggests the British enacted genocidal policies against the Tasmanian Aboriginal people.
Isabel Daniels weeps as she speaks of her murdered cousin, Nicole Daniels, at the opening day of hearings at the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls in Winnipeg in October 2017.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/John Woods)
Canadians should be listening closely to stories coming from the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. We need to hear the truth and then help justice move forward.
Fossilised ancient human footprints at the Mungo National Park. How are we to engage with a history that spans 65,000 years?
Michael Amendolia/AAP
Over the past half century, Australia has experienced a 'time revolution' with Indigenous history pushed back into the dizzying expanse of deep time. The latest discovery reminds us that science, like history, is an ongoing inquiry.
A scene from Bangarra Dance Theatre’s 2014 work Patyegarang. An Eora woman, Patyegarang became the main informant for William Dawes, the first European to sympathetically chronicle the language and culture of the Sydney landowners.
Jess Bialek/AAP
Just 210 of nearly 13,000 biographical entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men and women. A new project aims to change this.
The academy has changed substantially since Plato’s time.
Wikimedia
Australian universities are teaching 'identity politics' at the expense of Western history, according to an Institute of Public Affairs report. But unis make decisions based on student demand, not politics.
Natassia Gorie Furber and Hamilton Morris in Sweet Country.
IMDB
An Aboriginal man shoots a white landowner in self-defence, triggering a tragic tale of racism in 1920s Northern Territory.
The 2016 Standing Rock protest was only the most recent manifestation of the indigenous American values inherited by European settlers on this land.
James MacPherson
Anti-immigrant policies ignore that American ideals like liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness can be traced back to the indigenous pioneers who once moved freely across North America.
Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literary Studies, School of Media, Entertainment and Creative Arts, Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology
Professor of Indigenous Studies at Monash University, and Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage, Monash University
