Len Collard

Chapter 9: Noongapedia karnany balang – responses to challenges

A reflective conversation, responding to issues raised in Chapter 8 of this Report, conducted among: Len Collard (Chief Investigator), Ingrid Cumming and Jennie Buchanan (Project Research Associates), Gideon Digby (Wikimedia Australia) and David Palmer (host).

Chapter 2: Dumbart jen jen: first steps

This chapter is written as a conversation (held in December 2016) between David Palmer (host), Ingrid Cumming, Jennie Buchanan (both Research Associates of the project) and Gideon Digby (President of Wikimedia Australia), who introduce themselves and go on to discuss their roles in the Noongarpedia adventure.

Chapter 8: Bulla djandanginy – Challenges and tensions

Some of the difficulties confronting a project like this are the consequence of a history of colonisation and institutional oppression of Aboriginal people in south-west Western Australia (Haebich, 1992; 2000; Haebich and Morrison, 2014). It is a history characterised by land theft (Reconciliation, n.d.); a history in which only a minority of the original, Indigenous population survived the first decades of colonisation (Green, 1984; Swain, 1993; Aboriginal Legal Service, 1995), and a history in which that population was then subject to a period of discriminatory legislation and the denigration of Noongar language and culture which lasted well into the late twentieth century (Haebich, 2000). More recently, Noongar language and knowledge has increasingly been celebrated in mainstream cultural life – festivals, theatre, music, literature, exhibitions and the like, along with numerous examples of general urban and street signage and, of course, Welcomes to Country. It has become a major denomination in the currency of identity and belonging in this part of the world.

Chapter 1: Kura koorliny – Introduction: What is the project?

In 2006 Justice Murray Wilcox of the Federal Court of Australia found that native title continued to exist in Noongar3 boodjar (country). The decision demonstrated one of the world’s most remarkable examples of cultural and physical resilience on the part of an Indigenous group. This is particularly so when one understands the onerous demands placed on claimant groups, to provide (i) detailed evidence of a distinct culture and set of practices at the time of ‘sovereignty’, (ii) the claim-group’s continuity of language and knowledge, and (iii) demonstrated knowledge of and connection to ancestors at the time of ‘sovereignty’. Kingsley Palmer, author of the Single Noongar Claim’s Expert Anthropologist Report, concluded that the maintenance of Noongar knowledge, language and culture is monumental ‘testimony to an enduring Indigenous tradition that continues to survive despite the odds’. The following Report includes stories of present-day efforts to maintain this tradition of cultural resilience through novel, contemporary and globally networked means. It includes stories about a project that took as its dual aims (i) to carry out research concerned with bringing together old Noongar knowledge and new social media, and (ii) to make the social effort to build a digital platform that helps to make information about Noongar culture and ancient traditions available to the public, as well as to Noongar ‘users’ of that language and culture. In this way it is a story about research being used to support attempts at social and cultural development: research as social enterprise, and as ‘creative citizenship’.

Chapter 5: Katitjin kulungka mia – Work with schools

As in chapter 2, this chapter is written as a conversation (held in December 2016). David Palmer (host), Ingrid Cumming and Jennie Buchanan (both Research Associates of the project), discuss their roles in delivery of workshops for schools in the Noongarpedia project.

Chapter 3: Noongar boordier gnulla katitjin – The influence of Noongar knowledge

Despite the history of settler colonisation and state control (Attwood, 1989), where Indigenous people and their knowledge has been ‘classified, excluded, objectified, individualised, disciplined, and normalised’ (Best and Kellner), it is important to recognise that this is not the complete story. Western science and knowledge systems have had a long history of interrelationship with Australian Indigenous cultural life and systems. As bell hooks (1992) put it when describing the influence of African-Americans on US culture (see also Todd Boyd, 1997), even in the worst circumstances of domination, blacks have an ability to manipulate, shape and open up exchanges with white knowledge systems.