Conference Papers
Session WS.1 A workshop to seek strategies for transmitting topographical and genealogical information at a time of transformation
Convenors: Nic Peterson and Grace Koch
Over the last forty years enormous amounts of genealogical, topographical and other cultural information has been gathered by anthropologists working on land and native title claims. There is now a substantial demand both of the anthropologists who collected this information and the organisations holding it, for access to it, by both old and young in many remote communities, especially where it has been codified into maps or family trees. While handing over this material, which is often the property of land councils and representative bodies, might seems unproblematic, there are in reality a number of taxing issues that need to be addressed before such material can be made freely available. This is most obvious in the case of the detailed topographical maps compiled for most claims. Ever since Phillip Toyne and Dan Vachon (1984) developed the ‘Comalco Model for mining negotiations’ in the late 1970s, restricting the circulation of maps has been seen to be important especially in South Australia and the Northern Territory. This is a model taken for granted today, especially in the Northern Territory. A mining company indicates the external boundaries of the area they wish to prospect and then are told which areas within it they must avoid. This reversed the previous system where Aboriginal people provided maps that located all the sites in the area sought, and those areas without sites were then free for miners to explore. Restricting the circulation of site maps greatly strengthened Aboriginal people’s hand in negotiations. In Western Australia the old situation still prevails and leads, among other things, to Aboriginal people avoiding handing over information on site location because such information is made publically available through the Department of Indigenous Affairs database. The existing public record is thus substantially incomplete, with all the problems that can create.Recently, the difficulties arising from making genealogies freely available have been discussed by Rebecca Morgan and Helen Wilmot (2010). In this case the difficulties relate to the way in which these materials can aggravate conflict within Aboriginal communities as people seek to use them to rule people in an out of claimant groups, often without understanding the complexity of such records and the need for interpretation. Other reasons for not making information freely available are that it can breach legal professional privilege and may be seen as ‘polluting’ the testimony of Aboriginal witnesses.These are just some of the problems facing individual researchers, land councils and other bodies receiving requests from individuals, institutions and communities for access to the materials that have been produced. It is proposed that we hold a session organized as a workshop with short presentations to discuss these and related problems and possible solutions to them. Likely participants are representative from the Northern and Central Land Councils, people from other land councils, representative bodies and archives from across the continent as well as many individual researchers.