Showcasing contemporary visual arts in connection with considered curation of Koorie cultural heritage, the film-based digital content of the virtual tour and multimodal learning content presented in association with the National Gallery of Victoria Ian Potter Gallery’s exhibition of Maree Clarke’s Ancestral Memories is exemplary in its inclusion of community voice (stories, perspectives and values) in the cataloguing, presentation and contextualisation of Indigenous material culture.
As often highlighted in debates about the cultural capacity of technology, the promise of the digital opens up the possibility for Aboriginal communities to be the ‘gatekeepers of their own digital cultural heritage’, as Nick Richardson, Collections and Access Manager at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) has observed (de Souza et al., 2016, p. 20). As opportunities for co-creation and co-curation emerge, Jason Lewis, Canadian Professor and a Co-Founder of Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace and the Initiative for Indigenous Futures, has asserted In a piece titled “A Brief (Media) History of the Indigenous Future,”:
“If you are not present in the future imaginary of the dominant culture – you’re in trouble – that means that they don’t imagine you in the future… So we have to start proposing images of who we are and where we’ll be” (Lewis, 2016).
The Aboriginal Knowledge, Digital Technologies and Cultural Collections Policy, Protocols and Practices Paper demonstrates how emergent technology can be used to empower and enrich communities most negatively impacted by the digital divide (de Souza et al., 2016). The digital materials created and curated in support of Ancestral Memories serves as an excellent illustration of the critical and creative capacities of multimodal technologies in the service of story and song.
Through expanding intercultural understanding into digital environments, Artists like Clarke continue and revitalise Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander cultures and country. Enacting guiding principles of transference and sustainability, integral to intercultural understanding, are expressed through language, stories and cultural protocols connected to Koorie cultural heritage through the cultural material history of honoured objects like Walert – gum barerarerungar, 2021. This work is just one of many cultural material texts presented and curated in Clarke’s show, which can also be experienced virtually.
One of the most important aspects of works like Ancestral Memories is that they provide context for collection items in a curated online space. It is significant to note that in reclaiming and rearticulating curation of cultural memory, communities are able to restore and recover old narratives and begin to weave them into images of Indigenous Futures proposed by Lewis. By highlighting important aspects of a collection and linking stories and histories to Aboriginal collection items and objects, community leaders like Clarke reposition the dominant perspectives and narratives that run through the galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAM) sector.
Particularly poignant for myself has been the intercultural understanding shared through the digital storytelling regarding the work Walert – gum barerarerungar, 2021, a possum skin cloak by artist Maree Clarke. Made from sixty-three possum pelts which have been stitched together using sinew from kangaroo tails, this traditional Yorta Yorta text has been translated and transformed for digital audiences, with its cultural significance and importance spoken to by the artist herself. The importance of listening to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and hearing them in digital environs, is equal to concerns of optics and visibility, as it is the audience that often must rely on English, itself an imposed technology, to decipher the long understood stories and biographies of Victoria’s original inhabitants.
Additionally, the digital story is accompanied by a workshop activity, with worksheets and discussion activities aimed at Levels 3-6. The activity is a collaborative recreation of the process of generating a possum skin cloak narrative and then combining these distinct narrative elements in collaborative constructionism. To fully take advantage of the benefits of the digital form, a suggestion for improvement that might be made would be to embed a digitised creative padlet for greater interactivity and extended collaborative groups beyond the physical classroom. Accessibility options could be greatly extended if this were to be considered, as well as the ability for further modelling and scaffolding using programmed inputs and symbols.
References
de Souza, P., Edmonds, F., McQuire, S., Evans, M. & Chenhall, R. (2016). Aboriginal knowledge, digital technologies and cultural collections policy, protocols, practice.
Lewis, J. E. (2016). A brief (media) history of the indigenous future. Public, 27(54), 36–50.