Lutheran Archive Photographs Returned
In June 2015, the Far West Languages Centre, in partnership with the Adelaide University - Mobile Language Team, Lutheran Archives and the Koonibba Aboriginal Community Council negotiated repatriation of all images held within the Lutheran Archives of Koonibba Mission.
The project aimed to return images and history of Koonibba Mission back on country to the Ceduna region. It is envisioned that the local Aboriginal community assists in naming of person(s) in the images, and to remember both the history of the land, but also the people who lived and worked at Koonibba.
These images and videos are a beautiful source of history that will assist in the community empowerment and growth of Ceduna and Koonibba relationship as well as facilitate shared memories.
ARCHIVAL AND RESEARCH
The Far West Languages Centre at times have the opportunity to visit different Archival Institutions to collect a range of audio, written or video content that can be used for Language revival and restoration. Staff and some locals have had the opportunity to visit places such as the Adelaide SA Museum, Adelaide State Records and AIATSIS Archival Collections in Canberra as part of the Far West Languages Centre research for materials collected over many years.
Research also occurs through having discussions with locals to collect languages and history that assist with the language work eg pastoralists, previous teachers, past residents and more. The Far West Languages Centre is always looking for more information that could help towards the collection of records held within the Centre as a central location for locals to access.
If you have any information that you think could help with the revival and restoration of the languages or just history information you wish to share and store for the Aboriginal Community, we have scanning abilities in office and would be more than happy to scan your information or have digitisation of materials such as dvd, cd, cassette recordings etc. please come and see the Staff at the Centre.
Researching Archival Institutions.
Archival Research Links
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Australian Institute of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Studies
As an intergenerational keeping place for Indigenous Australians the AIATSIS collection is significant across all four categories – historic, artistic / aesthetic, research / scientific, and social / spiritual – and remains the most extensive and best contextualised collection of Indigenous Australia in the world.
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Daisy Bates Online Archives
In collaboration with the National Library of Australia (NLA), these web pages make accessible this extremely valuable collection of over 23,000 pages of wordlists of Australian languages, originally recorded by Daisy Bates in the early 1900s, made up of the original questionnaires and around 4,000 pages of typescripts. This will enable reuse of the collection by Aboriginal people searching for their own heritage languages and by other researchers.
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Tindale Online Archives
The South Australian Museum Archives contains Bound Journals of expeditions and supplementary papers; Indexes to journals and language research; Copies of journals; Notes and drafts for proposed Gazetter of Aboriginal place names; Photographs relating to journals, and Folders of Anthropology slides; compiled Vocabularies and grammatical sketches, Annotated complimentary source materials, and Manuscript documents; Speech and sound recordings, and associated documentation on tribes; Maps; Expedition films; and Correspondence.
