Ancient Traditions Preserved

On the north-east coast of Arnhem Land at the Galiwinku Knowledge Centre, there is an initiative taking place to preserve and revive one of Australia's indigenous cultures. This is being carried out by a number of Echo Island's clan members in a digital form described as "an elaborate, multi-level database: words, music, dance-steps, will all live on in the software and the server computers of the Knowledge Centre."

Offering a historic perspective, the author adds "if the first great change in indigenous affairs since the end of assimilation was the 'homelands movement' of the 1970s, and the return of Aboriginal people to their own country, then the rise of information technology can now be seen as the second: endangered songs and obscure, secret patterns, held until now only in the minds of old men, are being safely stored and kept for future generations."

According to Howard Morphy of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies, "New technology is allowing people to store and access their cultural knowledge. This is part of an emerging shift of great importance."

Richard Gandhuwuy Garrawurra, one of the animators of the Galiwinku project describes the Centre as "a kind of university for instruction, a virtual museum, where images of objects held elsewhere can be kept, a gallery for returned masterpieces, an electronic information hub." Gandhuwuy and his colleagues have drawn up an elaborate floor-plan. In the archives are the following items: old song recordings, photos, cross-referenced stories and associations from the various clan-groups. The groups hope that eventually three different levels of information will be included: "public, private, and secret (there's a traffic-light analogy: green, yellow and red). For the moment, though, everything being entered into the Knowledge Centre's little bank of PCs and lap-tops is "green" -- basic, public information: the habitats of birds, plants, trees, their stories, links and meanings, the medicines they yield, the seasons they predict, their names in languages and dialects."

The author points out that in spite of this scheme to maintain culture, "everyone in the remote Aboriginal world knows culture is dying." At the same time hope is expressed in this way by one clan member, "Knowledge preserves culture..." "Every tree, every plant, Yolngu people have a special feeling of what they are. Keeping this knowledge alive brings our young people back to life, people will breathe again. If we can educate them in our way, then they will become loyal to their background, they will have discipline, it will improve our law and order."

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