Introduction

Our shared pasts linger as accessibly amidst hills and along old roadways of this island as in the texts of the library and archive. To read either well, the other is required (Gough 2018, p. 264).

From 1908 to 1910, gentleman scholar Ernest Westlake travelled throughout Tasmania by bicycle, boat, and train, collecting thousands of stone tools and recording notes in interviews with settler descendants and Aboriginal community members. Though amateur collectors had been sending Tasmanian materials to European museums since the mid-nineteenth century, Westlake was the first Englishman to travel there to form his own collection and interview Palawa people. At the time, Westlake thought he was salvaging the remnants of a ‘disappeared race’; but instead his field notes ‘bequeathed a rich record of what had in fact survived’ (Taylor 2017, p. 55). Westlake’s field notebooks comprise the most substantial collection of Palawa language and cultural knowledge dating from the early twentieth century. They are a record of what Palawa ancestors thought and knew, and form a key source for the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s language reconstruction programme, palawa kani.

Westlake’s paper archives and artefacts from Tasmania, including 13,033 Aboriginal stone implements—the largest single collection in the world—have been housed by the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM), Oxford since 1923. It is one of thousands of distributed collections of First Nations artefacts, ancestors, and recorded knowledge found in large and small GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums) around the world, reflecting ‘the traditional collecting archive model, which disembeds records from their living contexts and preserves them for future access in custodial, institutional settings, as a legacy of colonization’ (McKemmish et al. 2019, p. 283).

First Nations Australians grieve their distance from these objects, people, and cultural records (Rimmer 2023). More than just geographical separation, many feel excluded by the institutional processes, protocols, and systems used to manage, store, and provide access to such collections (Thorpe 2021). Contributing to this distance is the continuing tendency to document and discuss collectors such as Westlake as institutional stories, and as part of the broader histories of collecting, Anglo-European expeditions, anthropology, archaeology, and Western science. It is true that these are mediated rather than direct Indigenous accounts of culture and knowledge (Gegeo and Watson-Gegeo 2001, p. 58), and there are many outstanding questions about the ethics and consent processes involved in their capture (Thorpe 2019a, p. 42). But the distributed records in Western institutions also constitute First Nations history, and are a vital, continuing link between present generations and long-standing cultural knowledge (Gooda 2012 p. 143; Nakata and Langton 2006, p. 4). As Aboriginal scholar and educator Eric Willmot argues, these ‘things we call objects from the past are in fact objects of the present’ (Willmot 1985, p. 41).

Aside from the physical repatriation of material, which is still the most prominent and desired response to collections removed from Country, digitisation and database technologies have a key role to play in reconnecting communities with their heritage. As far as the authors are aware, there has not been a formal request for the physical repatriation of material collected by Westlake; and while Westlake’s stone tools—wrongly removed from Country in their thousands—remain important, most interest in the collection is focused on the associated archival records. These readily lend themselves to digitisation. A digital archival resource, Stories in Stone: an annotated history and guide to the collections of Ernest Westlake (1855–1922), was first published online in 2013 by the authors of this paper and their colleague Gavan McCarthy. Stories in Stone provided access to digitised copies of Westlake’s papers from PRM and additional papers held in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH), along with thousands of words of supporting metadata and historical context. The inspiration to create the guide was to improve the accessibility of the collection for the Palawa community. Taylor had worked with Palawa community members, including Elders, since beginning a PhD on Westlake’s Tasmanian collections in 1999. This included providing typed transcriptions of Westlake’s interviews with ancestors; listening and noting responses; and sharing drafts of her writing before submitting or publishing her findings. Taylor also outlined plans for Stories in Stone to Palawa community members and shared links to the published version. Cultural geographer and Palawa Elder, Aunty Patsy Cameron described Stories in Stone as contributing ‘significantly’ to Tasmanian Aboriginal knowledge. But the guide did not change existing power dynamics or return ownership and control of this invaluable cultural knowledge to Palawa people.

With Stories in Stone currently offline, the authors have started working towards a relaunch of the guide and its contents. In this article, we combine a critical analysis of our past work with an outline of how we plan to better align with the political, archival, technological, and local landscapes which continue to shape responses to First Nations collections and culture. These include international human rights frameworks, concepts of Indigenous Data Sovereignty and archival sovereignty, co-designed archival technologies, and the establishment of a Palawa Resources Database and related governance structures at the University of Tasmania (UTAS). Drawing on the reflexive research methodology outlined by Mariam Attia and Julian Edge (Attia and Edge 2017), we see this as a key moment to step back and reflect on the guide and what has changed since it was developed before once again step** up to action. We are white settler academics who have both spent much of our careers working on projects which have attempted to preserve, research, and write about archives and collections of First Nations knowledges and objects using digital technologies and diverse ways of knowing, seeing, and kee** (McKemmish et al. 2010). By situating our identities and experiences more explicitly within the broader landscapes of human rights discourse and archival systems, this work will lay the foundations for the next phase of Stories in Stone, one which looks beyond scholarship, descriptive standards, and the provision of access to help facilitate First Nations’ aspirations for dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination.

Note on terminology

Throughout this paper, we use different terms depending on context. Broadly, First Nations Australians or First Nations is used to refer to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia, while recognising the diversity of peoples, languages, lands, and opinions this encompasses. In the sections on human rights, the term Indigenous is frequently used to reflect the language most commonly found in the records and literature of those movements. When referring specifically to Tasmania, we use the term Palawa, which, along with Pakana and Tasmanian Aboriginal, is a preference of that community.

Designing Stories in Stone

The combined Ernest Westlake papers include the correspondence, notebooks, publications, photographs, maps, and other related material from his time in Tasmania housed in the PRM; and in the OUMNH the notes and notebooks related to Westlake’s English fossils and palaeoliths collected from 1870s, his French eoliths (broken rocks Westlake believed were ancient stone tools) collected at the turn of the twentieth century and deaccessioned from OUMNH in 1980, and notes and correspondence related to another of Westlake’s interests, water divining and psychical research. Though the Tasmanian papers are one, smaller part of these collections, they are of particular significance to researchers of Tasmanian Aboriginal culture and history, including Palawa community members, because they include notes made in conversation with settler descendants and with Palawa ancestors about Aboriginal language and cultural knowledge.

Rebe Taylor first encountered the papers in 2000 as a PhD student on exchange from the Australian National University. Staff at the PRM informed her that the five boxes of records were not catalogued, and they asked whether she could number the folios and folders and write a box list as she worked. Taylor recalls:

I did so happily, but it was not merely my lack of expertise that left me dissatisfied with my efforts. While the box list gave dates and factual descriptions of the records, it did not make a coherent sense of the archive, neither the reasons for its creation nor its own history as an entity (Taylor 2012, p. 25).

Following completion of her doctoral thesis, and before starting work on a monograph detailing Westlake’s journey to Tasmania, Taylor wanted to make his Tasmanian papers available, including ‘my historical research and explanatory annotation so no researcher need repeat my efforts in piecing together the historical pieces’ (Taylor 2012, p. 25). She saw this as a way to make the material more accessible, and to create a valuable resource for the Palawa community, but also as a way to bring a sense of closure to some of the work Westlake himself had never completed, overtaken by his ambitions to start an alternative scouting movement for children, and then cut short by his accidental death.

When Taylor began her PhD research, parts of Westlake’s Tasmanian archive were already available in other forms. The Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP), which started in 1945, photographed Westlake’s Tasmanian notebooks, selected correspondence, exercise books, and other material to create two microfilm reels which were deposited in Australian national and state libraries. The short Westlake entry in the AJCP Project handbook describes the material as ‘relating to Westlake’s visit to Tasmania’ including ‘notes on Trucanini and other Tasmanian Aborigines’ (O’Brien 1998, p. 193). In 1991, historian NJB Plomley, with assistance from Lynda Manley and Caroline Goodall, published an edited version of Westlake’s notes as The Westlake papers: records of interviews in Tasmania by Ernest Westlake, 1908–1910.

As with all forms of collections documentation (Jones 2021), these projects were shaped by specific technologies and perspectives. AJCP material was listed using short entries in published handbooks, with longer reference lists (three pages in the case of Westlake) only available as unpublished typescripts or photocopies held alongside the microfilm.Footnote 1 Though the reference list included the names of many of Westlake’s Australian and European correspondents, the only Palawa person mentioned by name is Trucanini [Trukanini] in the Scope and Contents note for the collection. There is also no information on the papers that were not photographed for AJCP; however, the Tasmanian notebooks were at least reproduced in their entirety. For his published version, Plomley removed many of the illustrations and edited, reordered, and excised text without indicating where. He wrote in his introduction that the interviews were evidence not of cultural survival but of loss — that Westlake had come ‘too late on the scene, the traditional knowledge having already died out’ (Plomley 1991, p. 4; Ryan 1996, p. xxv; Taylor 2012, p. 9).

Taylor started discussing an online guide to Westlake with Gavan McCarthy in 2006. McCarthy developed a series list from Taylor’s handwritten box list, creating intellectual grou**s that did not reflect the physical arrangement of the records while retaining references to box, folder, and folio numbers. He then created an inventory listing in the Heritage Documentation Management System (HDMS), standards-based archival software developed by the Australian Science Archives Project in the 1990s. The papers were photographed in their entirety by Taylor and McCarthy in 2008, and Mike Jones in 2010, including additional inventory and series description work carried out onsite. Further description and annotation work by Taylor (assisted by Jones) then took place over the next 2 years. Together, this material formed the HTML archival guide Stories in Stone, produced using the Finding Aid generator built into the HDMS.

Taylor has remained in regular and close consultation with members of the Palawa community since 1999, including descendants of ancestors who were interviewed by Westlake. As part of her PhD research, in 2002 Taylor stayed as a guest with an Elder on Cape Barren and was introduced to descendants of the people Westlake had talked to on the island in 1909. On other journeys to Tasmania’s mainland between 2003 and 2016, during which time she was writing Stories in Stone and her later monograph, Into the Heart of Tasmania, Taylor worked with various Palawa Community members, including Elders, to learn how Westlake’s notes demonstrate Palawa endurance and continue to be used for cultural resurgence work. While Taylor engaged with respected Palawa Elders and scholars, they spoke to her as individuals, not as representatives of Palawa Community organisations. Further, while community feedback underscored for Taylor the value of Westlake’s archive, including the value of improved access, this feedback did not determine or influence the design of the HTML guide. Stories in Stone was written and organised based on the authors’ experience and interests as non-Indigenous historians and archivists; archival standards and the limitations of the technology used (Zilio et al. 2000); and the wishes of the two Oxford institutions involved. The seventeen series comprising the Westlake papers were clearly divided by institutional holdings, and historical timelines and a detailed bibliography were added. The source institutions also had specific requirements about citation procedures. A new (and then innovative) image viewer was developed for the guide with a button that would automatically generate a citation for the user based on item-level metadata. A detailed ‘Copyright & Citation’ page was added outlining separate citation requirements depending on whether users were accessing the physical records, the digital images of records, or citing the guide itself.

There were efforts made to support broader accessibility. Unlike earlier versions, the people interviewed by Westlake were listed by name in the descriptive metadata, and detailed notes and cross-references allowed users to follow relationships that cut across archival hierarchies or led into secondary published materials. An ‘Introduction’ page providing historical context to the collections and their contents was also added as a landing page before users entered the guide proper, and the archival term ‘Provenance’ was replaced with ‘People & Museums’. Many of these basic changes required manual editing of the HDMS-generated HTML files by Jones to override the default options built into the archival software (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1
figure 1

Home page for Stories in Stone, last updated in 2017. https://web.archive.org/web/20200216054023/http://www.westlakehistory.info/

Full size image

Even with these edits, archival language and references to European institutions, collectors, and scholars dominated Stories in Stone. The ‘People & Museums’ (Provenance) entries are for Westlake, the two Oxford museums, three Oxford curators and professors, and the three authors of the guide. There is no acknowledgement of First Nations sovereignty over the Country or cultural knowledge discussed, and it is not until the user navigates the upper layers of the archival hierarchy, through series lists and series descriptions, to the long text-heavy sections titled ‘Inventory listing’, that Palawa knowledge holders and Elders are named as contributors to the archive.

Our primary aim was to make Westlake’s papers more accessible. Reflecting on the results in her subsequent book, Into the Heart of Tasmania, Taylor writes: ‘It is rare that a historian has their chief archive available online for readers. You can go and query my interpretation, or travel beyond my focus on his Tasmanian journey to carry out your own exploration of Westlake’s life and work’ (Taylor 2017, p. 17). Rather than building the guide for a specific target audience, we hoped that by producing sound scholarship and archival description, then putting the results (including the unexpurgated digitised records) online, the guide would be useful to a wide range of people (Gavan McCarthy, in Turnbull 2021). And the published guide was well received. Stories in Stone won a Mander Jones award from the Australian Society of Archivists in 2013 for the ‘Best finding aid to an archival collection held by an Australian institution or about Australia’. Reviewers praised its information architecture and usability, the inclusion of narrative and discursive elements, and its contribution to a broader shift in the presentation and delivery of digital collections.Footnote 2

But access in itself is not the only requirement for communities, nor is it the only outcome of digitisation. As political scientist Arun Agrawal puts it: ‘Knowledge freely available to all does not benefit all equally’ (Agrawal 1995, p. 432). Archival schema and historical scholarship are familiar to some users, but many find the terminology and structure of a hierarchical guide to records difficult to navigate, requiring learned ways of thinking and searching to produce useful results (Bearman and Trant 1998; Bowker and Star 1999, pp. 294–295). The prominence of institutional histories—collectors, museums, universities, Oxford professors—also likely provides a barrier to use.

Despite the fact such records are of demonstrable value, not just as historical reference material but for their contemporary generative capacity (De Largy Healy 2014), the Westlake papers are key among several historical sources used in the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre’s programme, palawa kani, which is reconstructing a modern Palawa language based on vocabulary lists and other historic accounts of Tasmania’s nine original languages (Rimmer and Sainty 2020). The development of palawa kani is an integral part of Palawa resurgence and reconnection to Country and culture (Flynn et al. 2021). But palawa kani researchers began using Westlake’s notebooks when the only available version was the printed copies of the microfilm created by AJCP. While Taylor has informed members of the palawa kani research team about Stories in Stone, the authors are not aware that they have since started using it.

Redesigning the Westlake guide requires time, step** back from the need for a specific ‘product’ to reflect on the processes and relationships required to work in reparative and accountable ways (Christen and Anderson 2019). Over the past decade archival scholars have argued that, in addition to archival standards, structures, and expertise, there is an increasing recognition that archivists and scholars need to ‘work in the community to encourage archiving as participatory process’ (Cook 2013, p. 114); and the community cultural and institutional landscape in lutruwita/Tasmania has changed in significant ways since the guide was published. In 2021, the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and its predecessor organisation, the Royal Society of Tasmania, offered formal Apologies to the Palawa community for past wrongs, including the illegal removal and display of Trukanini’s skeleton as the ‘last’ of her ‘race’ (Rimmer and Taylor 2021, 2023). UTAS (where this article’s authors are now based) apologised to the Palawa community for its past wrongdoings in 2019 (University of Tasmania 2019). UTAS has also advanced opportunities for Indigenous-led research and teaching. Palawa sociologist Maggie Walter, appointed as inaugural Pro Vice Chancellor of Aboriginal Research and Leadership in 2014, instigated the Indigenisation of all University curricula; created two Indigenous-led undergraduate subjects on Palawa ‘Lifeworlds’; established a Senior Indigenous Research Scholarship programme; and supported Palawa academic and professional appointments. In 2020, Walter also created the Palawa Resources Database which identifies and manages Palawa research and teaching materials created and held by UTAS in line with the principals and protocols of the Maiam nayri Wingara Indigenous Data Sovereignty collective,Footnote 3 namely ‘the right of Indigenous peoples to govern the collection, ownership, and application of data’ and the recognition of ‘data as a cultural and economic asset’ (Walter and Prehn 2023). Worimi UTAS sociologist, Jacob Prehn, is a key contributor to Indigenous Data Sovereignty research. Prehn is currently working with colleagues including a Palawa Advisory Group to launch a Palawa Resources Database to provide foremost teaching materials to support the Indigenisation of curriculum in ways that respect Palawa data sovereignty. At the time of writing, the authors are about to address a meeting of the Palawa Database Advisory Group to begin a conversation about how to redesign Stories in Stone so that it adheres to Indigenous Data Sovereignty principals when it is relaunched online. An internal launch of the Palawa Resources Database is planned for early 2024.

This article therefore precedes rather than reports on discussions with the UTAS Palawa Resources Database. However, this conversation builds on Taylor’s more than 20 years of engagement with Palawa community members. Moreover, it offers an opportunity to rearticulate the significance and background of Westlake’s archive and of Stories in Stone in the context of major shifts in contemporary international and national approaches to the rights, dignity, and sovereignty of First Nations communities as well as the substantial technical changes in digital archiving that have paralleled and attempted to facilitate those shifts. The following substantial section steps back from the specifics of the guide to reflect on this wider context of change as essential background to the extensive work already completed and as a foundation for the many essential relationships on which any future action will be built.

Changing landscapes

2023 marks the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR 1948), which opens: ‘Whereas the recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world’ (United Nations 1948). The call for papers for this issue of Archival Science quotes from Article 1 of the UDHR—‘All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights’—while public GLAM institutions (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums), arts organisations, and governments find support for their work in Article 27, which champions ‘the right to freely participate in the cultural life of the community’.

The UDHR’s claim to universal freedom, dignity, and equality is easy to undercut. The term ‘dignity’ was not well defined, and until well into the nineteenth century referred to social status, nobility, power, or religious preferment rather than to any universal or moral quality (Debes 2017, pp. 1–3). At the time of the UDHR’s ratification, ‘most Third World countries were still under colonial rule’ (Pollis and Schwab 1979, p. 4), and though First Nations Australians were technically Australian citizens under the newly instituted Nationality and Citizenship Act 1948, they were unable to vote and remained subjected to many discriminatory laws and regulations that im**ed on their ability to participate in social, cultural, and political life. However, the pursuit of universality meant there was no room for recognising such inconsistencies. Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (charged with drafting the Declaration), was clear on this: ‘provisions relating to rights of minorities had no place in a declaration of human rights’ (quoted in Morsink 1999, p. 274).

Support for specific cultural rights suffered as a result. The ‘cultural life’ referenced in Article 27 is singular, with no recognition of diversity, and in subsequent decades there was little analysis of this aspect of the Declaration for fear of provoking debate about cultural relativism (Stamatopoulou-Robbins 2007, p. 4). The concurrent Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (ratified on 9 December 1948, one day before the UDHR) was similarly limited. Early drafts had included an article focusing on cultural genocide, including the intentional destruction of language, religion or culture, prohibiting language use, or ‘Destroying, or preventing the use of, libraries, museums, schools, places of worship or other cultural institutions and objects’. But these sections, clearly relevant to the experiences of Indigenous peoples in settler colonial states, were labelled ‘minority rights’ and removed (Morsink 1999, pp. 274, 371; Stamatopoulou 2011, pp. 391–392).

In the second half of the century, minority rights were taken up at the local and national level. Civil and Indigenous rights movements emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, including in Australia where First Nations peoples pursued legislative and constitutional change, land rights, cultural recognition, and, increasingly, self-determination (Broome 2002, pp. 175–205). In 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote about these struggles in Africa, and in the process pushed back against abstract philosophical notions of human dignity. ‘The colonized subject has never heard of such an ideal’, he argues, ‘African peoples quickly realized that dignity and sovereignty were exact equivalents. In fact, a free people living in dignity is a sovereign people. A people living in dignity is a responsible people’ (Fanon 2004, p. 9,139).

Sovereignty, responsibility, and control soon emerged as central concerns for those thinking about archives and collected heritage. In 1978, William Hagan described American Indians as ‘archival captives’, and in 1979 Colin Tatz wrote of race politics in Australia: ‘For Aborigines the ultimate indignity is the sovereignty of those who control the gathering and dissemination of the written and spoken word concerning their situation’ (Tatz 1979, p. 86). Ten years later, Henrietta Fourmile picked up on Hagan’s term to describe First Nations Australians as ‘captives of the archives’, and continued: ‘in the context of Aboriginal sovereignty it is completely untenable that one “nation” (i.e. European Australia) should have a monopoly and control of such a substantial body of information concerning another, the Aboriginal “nation”’ (Fourmile 1989, p. 4).

These concerns gathered momentum in the 2000s. As Taylor, McCarthy and Jones worked on Stories in Stone, the Australian Research Council project Trust and Technology: Building Archival Systems for Indigenous Oral Memory, based at Monash University, worked with around 80 Koorie and other Indigenous people, and several local Koorie, Indigenous, and archival organisations. The project concluded that: ‘Australian archival initiatives have not adequately addressed the aspiration of Australian Indigenous peoples to control documentation about them held in archival records’ (Iacovino 2010, p. 354). The resulting Statement of Principles included Principle 2: ‘The rights of Indigenous people should extend to making decisions about the creation and management of their knowledge in all its forms, including knowledge contained in records created by non-Indigenous people and organisations about Indigenous people’ (McKemmish et al. 2010, p. 38).

After many years of deliberation, the international community had arrived at a similar view. Leaving behind earlier concerns about ‘minority rights’, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) was adopted on 13 September 2007 (United Nations 2007). UNDRIP includes reference to self-determination (Article 3) and autonomy (Article 4); the right to practice culture (Article 11) including by accessing, using, and controlling ‘ceremonial objects; and the right to repatriation of their human remains’ (Article 12); the right to revitalise history, language, and traditional knowledge (Article 13); and ‘the right to maintain, control, protect and develop their cultural heritage, traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions, as well as the manifestations of their sciences, technologies and cultures’ (Article 31). As this summary suggests, UNDRIP includes a strong focus on culture, cultural diversity (Stamatopoulou 2011, pp. 388–389) and participation through processes of maintenance, development, and control (Quane 2011, pp. 259–262). Unlike UDHR, the Declaration also supports the notion of collective rights, not just the rights of individuals. Participants in the process saw such rights as: ‘not only critical to indigenous spirituality but also [to] maintaining the intergenerational nature of all our social, cultural, economic and political rights’ (Gilbert and Doyle 2011, p. 296). Overall, these rights are framed as ‘the minimum standards for the survival, dignity and well-being’ of Indigenous peoples (Article 43). Though rhetorically less strident than Fanon, the Declaration clearly links dignity to collective responsibility and sovereignty.

Some settler colonial nations were uncomfortable with the implications of such claims. UNDRIP arrived in the last months of more than a decade of conservative rule in Australia under Prime Minister John Howard—a period where First Nations politics were characterised by fractious relationships and contested histories (Macintyre and Clark 2004). Australia became one of only four nations to reject the proposed Declaration in 2007 (along with Canada, New Zealand, and the USA, all former British colonies and the world’s largest settler nations), before adopting it as a non-binding document in 2009, following a change of government.

With 17 of its 45 articles addressing the protection and promotion of Indigenous culture, it is unsurprising many have explored the relationship between UNDRIP and archives (for example, Frogner 2022; Janke and Iacovino 2012; Mckemmish et al. 2011; Thorpe 2021, pp. 85–91). Mick Gooda, in his role as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner for the Australian Human Rights Commission, reflected on its relevance in 2012:

The onus is on the institutions of archiving and record kee** to evolve in order to accommodate Indigenous peoples, rather than on Indigenous peoples to conform to mainstream practices … The role of governments and others, including archivists and record keepers, is to position themselves to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to move themselves from passive and powerless subjects, to active participatory agents (Gooda 2012, pp. 145–148).

Similar ideals also appear in other guidelines and protocols for the sector, including the ATSILIRN Protocols and the Tandanya Adelaide Declaration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network 2012; Expert Group on Indigenous Matters 2019; Garwood-Houng and Blackburn 2014). However, as Worimi woman and archivist Kirsten Thorpe points out, the latter in particular remains custodial in approach, lacking ‘focus on supporting the care and protection of archives and management of cultural heritage on Country. We cannot lose sight of this work to ensure that archival pursuits are not extractive but instead support community sustainability’ (Kirsten Thorpe, in Barrowcliffe et al. 2021).

Thorpe is one of a number of First Nations archivists pursuing these aims today. Her doctoral thesis ‘Unclas** the White Hand’ presents a powerful argument for the value of archival sovereignty, defined as referring to ‘archives developed through locally constituted approaches, protocols, and governance structures’ (2021, p. 7). Many of Thorpe’s research participants saw the Indigenous Data Sovereignty movement as a ‘guiding light in building new processes around decision-making with data and archives’ (2021, p. 146). In drawing on such influences, archival sovereignty represents a step beyond already-established shifts in archival theory and practice. Concurrent with the emergence of First Nations calls for control over their own history and cultural knowledge, leading archival thinkers have increasingly questioned custodial models (Cook 1992; Ham 1981), and have urged the profession to incorporate participatory (Huvila 2008; Shilton and Srinivasan 2007), community-based (Bastian and Flinn 2018), relational, affective (Caswell and Cifor 2016), and distributed (Findlay 2017) ways of working. Archival sovereignty combines these ideas with a commitment to structural change and decolonisation, the latter used to signify an actual shift in ownership and authority rather than just a metaphorical gloss (see Tuck and Yang 2012). Thorpe defines an archive that recognises Indigenous sovereignty, ‘functions to reform its position from being perpetrators of harm’ and enables ‘Indigenous people to exercise their self-determination to reclaim and re-story the archives to speak back to them and amplify their context and meanings’ (Thorpe 2021, p. 208).

Access to original records is not necessarily a requirement for recognising sovereignty over records and the cultural knowledge they contain, nor is (or should) physical custody be considered a prerequisite for intellectual management and control. Where physical materials are distributed or otherwise difficult to access, copies (digital or otherwise) can bring together and reconnect ‘the fragments of Aboriginal history and knowledge to support local access and community identity’ (Thorpe 2017, p. 903; see also Punzalan 2014). Though postcustodialism typically discusses models where centralised archival authority maintains control over distributed records, there is space here too for approaches where authority is transferred to distributed structures while records remain in custody within institutions.

Digitisation and digital technologies are widely recognised as a key tool for returning or ‘repatriating’ material in this way (for example, Bell et al. 2013; Hawcroft 2016; Nakata et al. 2008). The updated 2012 ATSILIRN protocols were expanded to include a new section on digital management which highlights the potential of digitisation as an ‘enabling technology that permits virtual repatriation without institutional relinquishment of heritage materials’, while also calling for such work to be undertaken using consultative and cooperative approaches to ensure the results are both sustainable and culturally appropriate (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network 2012; see also Barrowcliffe et al. 2021).

Repatriation and return, like archival work more broadly, are a process rather than a single event or static product. The landscapes outlined in this section continue to evolve, including in Australia with the ongoing impact of the Uluru Statement from the Heart—which opens with a statement of sovereignty, ‘never … ceded or extinguished’ (First Nations National Constitutional Convention 2017)—and the debate surrounding the 2023 Referendum on the Voice. The remainder of this article explores how archival technologies have responded to these changing landscapes, followed by an examination of the potential for a new version of Stories in Stone grounded in the local landscape of contemporary lutruwita/Tasmania.

Changing technologies

The first version of Stories in Stone started with an archival tool already familiar to the archivists involved—the Heritage Documentation Management System (HDMS)—which was used with minimal adaptation to create the HTML finding aid. In doing so, we accepted many of the constraints of that system, including one-to-one relationships between items and provenance entities, hierarchical description, static inventory lists, and a publication-style format which neither encouraged nor supported user engagement and feedback. In the years since, alternative software options have reached a new level of maturity.

The oldest is Ara Irititja, a FileMaker Pro database established in 1994 for capturing and managing Anangu cultural materials and now regarded as ‘the longest running and largest community-based, multimedia digital archive in Australia’ (de Souza et al. 2016, p. 38). Though the underlying data model is not complicated, as Martin Hughes and John Dallwitz note, the development process took considerable time:

[this] is a fundamentally simple database system with less than 15 fields for data entry, spread over three primary tables with ten ancillary tables. Described like this it might seem particularly inefficient that this system has taken more than 2000 h over 10 years to develop. Clearly, the work has not been in the data structure (Hughes and Dallwitz 2007)

The project was developed at the request of Anangu elders, and reportedly became ‘beloved’ by community members (Thorner 2010, p. 126). The database allowed them to manage digital objects (initially film, sound, documents, objects, and maps) either sourced from existing collections or newly created (Christen 2006, p. 58). The user interface incorporated Anangu language terms and very visual, graphic elements, and access points included custom-designed computer terminals designed to cope with the temperatures and conditions found in remote communities. At the core of the system were three structurally identical databases, for open knowledge, men’s knowledge, and women’s knowledge. In kee** with community protocols, the latter two were never stored on the same computer (Hughes and Dallwitz 2007). In addition to technical development, the project included training and capability development for community members (Scales et al. 2013), after which people could not only access records in the archive, but also (with appropriate permissions) add stories, names, or other information to the documentation. This allowed multiple voices and narratives to accumulate around individual items (Christen 2006). The database has since been adapted for numerous other contexts, including for the Northern Territory Library (Gibson 2009), Western Australia’s Storylines, and Victoria’s pilot Koorie Heritage Archive (KHA) project (Huebner and Cooper 2007).

Like Ara Irititja, the Mukurtu platform started with a single community relationship. Self-described ‘accidental archivist’ Kimberley Christen (2011) had worked with the Warumungu community since 1995. By the mid-2000s, the community had gathered thousands of photographs and other records, including digitised artefacts returned by state museums, and were struggling with their management. Christen describes how, after lengthy consultation sessions with the community and technical consultants, they came up with a list of requirements for a digital community archive, including community-focused metadata and search categories, user-generated comments, and content restrictions based on community protocols (Christen 2008, p. 21).

The first version of the resulting archive was installed in Tennant Creek in 2007. It was named Mukurtu, or ‘dilly bag’ in Warumungu, to refer to a ‘safe kee** place’ that not only protects its contents but provides a space for supporting relationships and knowledge (Christen 2019, p. 158). Initially running on a MySQL server, the open source platform hosted by Washington State University (WSU) has since moved to a Drupal backend and (since 2013) is available as Mukurtu CMS, including hosted and mobile versions. Features include the ability for community members to add their own metadata and descriptions to items (including as video or audio content), granular access controls based on cultural protocols, the ability to apply Traditional Knowledge (TK) labels to items, and options for round-trip** collections data augmented by community users back to source institutions (Christen 2011, 2012a, 2012b). Mukurtu has been used for multiple projects, mostly in Australia and the USA, with the first international Mukurtu hub launched in Sydney in late 2018 (Thorpe 2019b; Thorpe et al. 2021). The following year Christen noted:

Although Mukurtu CMS was primarily envisioned as an access platform, what it has become is a platform for access, return, reuse, and repatriation. That is, while the return of digital materials from archives and other collecting institutions is a primary reason that Indigenous communities use Mukurtu CMS, return is imagined as a whole set of practices that include future access, use, and circulation (Christen 2019, p. 166).

In kee** with this, the NSW Australian Mukurtu Hub is intended to do more than just provide access to the software, also offering to assist in develo** community capability and fostering partnerships between the Hub, communities, and institutions (How We Can Support You 2019).

While technology alone is not enough to overhaul historical relationships between communities and GLAM institutions or ‘decolonise’ the archives (Hughes and Dallwitz 2007, p. 157), Ara Iritija/Kee** Culture and Mukurtu nevertheless contain functionality, data structures, and interfaces that help support a number of the key concerns of First Nations people outlined in the previous section. Access is carefully managed, with a significant proportion of the contents of such databases available only to those with specific relationships to relevant communities. As anthropologist Haidy Geismar notes:

These archives insist on develo** a relationship between these collections and ‘the public’ in which the users must identify themselves in order to achieve appropriate degrees and levels of access … constituting a newly differentiated public sphere which, while similarly resisting the privatization of archival material, runs parallel to the open access movement, in fact challenging key tenets of openness and accessibility (Geismar 2017, pp. 333–334)

This is less about restriction, and more about prioritising First Nations cultural needs (see Maxine Briggs, in de Souza et al. 2016, p. 42). Second, those who do have appropriate levels of access can also contribute. Both platforms provide functionality where people can add collection items, stories, narratives, descriptions, and tags, including material that recontextualises, ignores, or directly contests content from institutions, disciplinary professionals, or other users. In doing so, users enact ownership and self-determination by redescribing, ‘re-storying’, and resha** the archives. The result is a proliferation of voices, positionalities, and relationships—part of a continuing, fluid process of archiving and documentation rather than a defined event ending with the creation of a fixed archival product. In large part, this has been achieved by involving First Nations people, not just as subjects, sources, or end users, but as partners in the development process (Augusto 2008, p. 217).

At the University of Tasmania, the Palawa Resources Database is now using Mukurtu. This custom instance, designed for Palawa, will support their aim to provide UTAS teachers with the resources to Indigenise curricula while adhering to Indigenous data soveriegnty principals. Such work is aided by the fact that the CMS is open source. Mukurtu is managed by staff in tenured positions at Washington State University, with the development of new functionality primarily funded through federal, state, industry, and non-profit grants. Establishing an instance requires web hosting and some technical expertise, but the platform remains more accessible than Kee** Culture KMS, which is now licensed and managed by an independent developer (Strathman 2019, p. 3729) and at the time of writing costs AUD $6000 per year for a single archive and more for multi-archive licences (Kee** Culture KMS cloud hosting, service and support plans 2023).

The costs of implementing these systems are more than financial. Even before the development of Kee** Culture KMS’s ‘software as a service’ model, the Koorie Heritage Archive did not proceed past the pilot stage due to the ‘technological and administrative demands of a “closed” archiving system’, including the ‘ongoing commitment to carry out widespread community consultation to respectfully represent the cultural protocols of Koorie individuals and communities’ (Huebner 2013, p. 181). While there are grants available for establishing new sites and systems leading up to a launch, recurrent funding for such activities is often harder to source (Strathman 2019, p. 3728). As noted previously, the Palawa Resources Database project has established a community governance group for this purpose and will benefit from the comparatively small size of the Tasmanian population along with institutional support from the state’s only university.

There remain conceptual challenges that need to be considered when implementing platforms like Mukurtu CMS. While the data structures employed are less linear than the static, hierarchical guides produced by HDMS, the approach is item-centric and does not provide a great deal of scope for incorporating broader contextual information. If, as with Westlake, the foundational data is imported from an existing catalogue or collections management system, there is also a risk that an information silo will be created that is difficult to discover for those not involved, providing a sense of community control without requiring that the GLAM sector itself undertake the harder work of systemic change. But—as Christen herself points out in her recent work—the CMS forms only one part of an interconnected ecosystem of technologies, relationships, governance structures, and institutions required to support contemporary First Nations communities. The collaborative systems for archival and data sovereignty for First Nations peoples are social as well as technological (Daniel 2007, p. 149), and require significant resources to establish and maintain.

Local landscapes: redesigning Stories in Stone

Effective design requires attention to more than just global landscapes and technologies. Redesigning and reframing Stories in Stone requires engagement with local landscapes to create something more akin to Thorpe’s vision of an ‘Indigenous Living Archive on Country [that] proposes the moulding of these materials back to communities so that they can be discussed, critiqued, expanded and animated in local community contexts’ (Thorpe 2021, p. 227). As Walter and Stephanie C. Carroll write of Indigenous Data Sovereignty—a set of principles that frequently reference UNDRIP—First Nations peoples and community groups ‘require what is currently excluded; disaggregated, contextualized data that represent Indigenous lifeworlds and Indigenous priorities’ (Walter and Carroll 2021, p. 10).

Therefore, while technically possible to simply republish the guide in its existing form (and this may still be a first step), the more important work involves develo** relationships (Christen and Anderson 2019, p. 112). The authors have started this by engaging with the Palawa Resources Database Advisory Group at UTAS. Moving beyond individual consultations, Stories in Stone requires collective ownership and support from community representatives. Though these structures have coalesced at the university, this does not mean simply transferring responsibility for the guide to another colonial institution (Evans et al. 2018, p. 138). Such a move would not shift the power dynamics involved, nor would it necessarily help with sustainability. One of the reasons the guide is currently offline is due to the way the University of Melbourne handled digital resources produced by the eScholarship Research Centre following the closure of that centre in 2020. If, as Cree man Shawn Wilson suggests, ‘Indigenous axiology is built upon the concept of relational accountability’ (Wilson 2008, p. 77), those invested in making the Westlake papers accessible need to develop mutually accountable relationships that help to support this collective aim in the long term.

We are only just beginning our conversations with the Palawa Resources Database Advisory Group, but our current aim is to document either a selection of the Tasmanian materials from the Westlake papers in Mukurtu as part of that database, or the Stories in Stone guide itself as a digital resource for broader (culturally appropriate) use. This will open possibilities for new descriptions, the inclusion of Palawa voices, and the gradual participatory re-storying of the records, as well as providing improved flexibility around the documentation and management of access and use. Returning local control of these key records to community in this way will facilitate sovereignty over the records, their description, and the cultural knowledge they contain.

These processes are more important than radically redesigning the look and feel of the guide itself; however, there are some developments to Stories in Stone that are likely required to further these aims. A new entry point could be developed to acknowledge Country and Palawa sovereignty over the knowledge contained in the Tasmanian records and provide introductory contextual information that more explicitly highlights the cultural significance of some of the papers in the archives for Palawa community members. Incorporating language codes, visible geographical information, and (for the notebooks in particular) the names of interviewees as provenance entities will help to reframe parts of the Westlake papers as Aboriginal knowledge and history closely connected to specific, local landscapes. More visible options for searching the guide could help move away from the need for users to navigate through text-heavy linear archival hierarchies to reach item-level content and digitised records; and ‘generous interfaces’ (Whitelaw 2015) featuring visible digitised content may help to reveal the scope and content of the papers more effectively.

It is also important to maintain the link between the Tasmanian papers and other parts of the Westlake archives. While the Tasmanian material is enormously significant as a record of traditional knowledge, it remains inextricably entangled with Westlake’s life and other collecting, and the broader history of the natural sciences changing Western understandings of Aboriginal culture and society—even if these traditions remain in ‘a somewhat problematic tension’ (Nakata and Langton 2006, p. 4). In taking knowledge away from local people and landscapes in Tasmania, these records have become embedded in other contexts which have continued to leave traces (Herle 2003, p. 194). Furthermore, as anthropologist and historian Jason Gibson reminds us in his recent book on the repatriation of Indigenous cultural heritage, when we take objects ‘home’ it is not only the thing being returned that is transformed; ‘home’ is a changing place, shaped and reshaped through time by ‘the different colonial inheritances that alter both the people and places where objects were originally collected from’ (Gibson 2023, p. 36). The social, cultural, physical, and political landscapes of lutruwita/Tasmania have changed significantly from the time when Westlake rode the hills and old roadways of the island speaking with locals and picking up stone artefacts.

We believe archivists and archival standards continue to have a valuable role to play in effectively documenting these complex, interrelated elements. But it is essential this happens in ways that do not then lock users into needing to understand and engage with hierarchies and terminology particular to the archival profession. Instead, we need to carefully structure data and provide options where users can see these structures clearly, while simultaneously exploring more fluid (Srinivasan and Huang 2005), variable, user-centred options for displaying, searching, navigating, and accessing archival records and the information required to understand their meaning and context. In doing so, we can better support the many communities of users interested in exploring not just the ‘papers of Ernest Westlake’ but the many other parallel, horizontal, and multi-dimensional aspects of such archives without prioritising any one community or perspective over another (Bastian 2006, p. 281), and without defaulting to formal archival standards and structure as the most visible instantiation of the content. Utilising Mukurtu as part of the ecosystem of technologies and social structures used to manage the archives and make them available will also ensure local communities can contribute their own perspectives, not by replacing existing aspects of the records but by allowing such complexity to develop and accumulate over time.

Finally, we need to embrace the idea that whatever is produced is not a final or fixed product, but another step in a continuing process. Part of ensuring archival sovereignty and community control is to document and make available information about the archival process itself, the decisions taken, and the governance structures in place. Series 1 of Stories in Stone is an introductory series: ‘Records generated from researching and cataloguing Ernest Westlake’s papers in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History’. Under this slightly unwieldy title are records including historical material describing the collection by Pitt Rivers curators, Taylor’s cataloguing notes from 2000, and publications and photographs that help provide further context to Westlake’s collection and work. Treating this as an open series, the authors aim to archive a snapshot of the guide in its current form before continuing to document the development of Stories in Stone and the records it contains, including the curation and transfer of material to Mukurtu, and the governance meetings and discussions related to the project. By making the process visible in this way we hope to remain self-reflexive and accountable to past, current, and future relations.

Conclusion

The 2013 version of Stories in Stone was the culmination of many years of scholarship and archival work. For the first time, the full Westlake papers in the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History were digitised, and a detailed archival guide prepared containing significant contextual information, including the names of Aboriginal interviewees. Making this work available online transformed the accessibility of the collection, previously only viewable in Oxford, via the partial and decontextualised microfilm version produced by the Australian Joint Copying Project, or as edited, excised textual transcriptions published by NJB Plomley.

However, Stories in Stone was shaped more by archival technologies, collecting histories, and institutional requirements than by an interest in contributing to systemic change. Since the release of Stories in Stone, the landscape of First Nations politics and heritage has continued to develop, with generations of activism and negotiation contributing to a growing collective understanding of the relationship between dignity and control over heritage. Writing about the Indigenous archiving and well-being, Joanne Evans et al. conclude: ‘simply providing access is not enough, nor is it the full potential of what archival institutions can facilitate’ (Evans et al. 2018, p. 143). Data and archival sovereignty, as outlined by Walter, Thorpe and others, requires shifting existing relationships of power (Law Commission of Canada 2000), including the development of social and technological systems that support access, use, control, and decision-making, all embedded in local communities and landscapes.

In this article, we have reflected on our own roles in these processes by examining the Westlake papers and Stories in Stone within these changing international, technological, and local landscapes. This work has allowed us to propose a series of future steps for redesigning the archival guide, not just in terms of the website and its functionality, but with reference to the relationships and governance structures needed to undertake effective archival and historical work in such contexts. Archivists and historians must continue to reflect in this way, on past as well as current projects, if we are to support First Nations sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination. The alternative is to risk becoming increasingly removed from contemporary landscapes as our practice and our relationships become set in stone.