A new facility in Alice Springs will allow Indigenous locals to access precious cultural and linguistic knowledge on country for the first time, without having to fly to Canberra.
Key points:
- AIATSIS will give Central Australians better access to more than one million cultural items
- The centre will work closely with local communities to preserve and exhibit cultural heritage
- It's the first facility AIATSIS has opened outside of Canberra
The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) opened a new centre in Mparntwe-Alice Springs on Thursday.
It is the first time AIATSIS — the only collecting institute in Australia exclusively focused on Indigenous history and culture — has opened a facility outside the nation's capital.
The new centre will give Aboriginal communities in Central Australia better access to more than one million cultural items — the largest collection of its kind in the world.
This includes nearly 800,000 photographic records, 42,000 hours of audio, and almost 2 kilometres of film.
Launch 'significant'
Jenny Nixon, an Alyawarre, Anmatjere, and Kaytetye woman and director of the new AIATSIS centre, said the launch was "significant".
"The community has a voice, the community has access, the community can do research on their history," she said.
"It's really important."
Through the new centre, AIATSIS will also work closely with local communities to preserve cultural heritage from the region.
Interim chief executive and Ngemba man Leonard Hill said they had chosen Alice Springs as the location of its new site for a number of reasons.
This included a longstanding partnership with First Nations Media Australia, the peak body for Indigenous broadcasters and media organisations, based in Alice Springs.
AIATSIS has been working closely with the organisation, using state-of-the-art technology to preserve, digitise and store at-risk cultural material.
"I think, also, the symbolism of opening in Alice Springs … is very important to me," Mr Hill said.
"Geographically it's almost the centre of Australia, and when we think about our First Nations culture and our people and their history it's central to Australia as a nation."
Focus on local staff
Mr Hill said six of the seven staff at the new Alice Springs centre were local Indigenous community members, and they hoped to train more local Aboriginal staff in collection, management, preservation, and digitisation in the years to come.
"Over the next couple of years I envisage that it would be something like 12 to 14 staff that we will have here in this facility," he said.
Ms Nixon hopes a dedicated engagement and exhibition space at the new centre will help more Indigenous locals to reconnect with their ancestry in a new way.
"We also have the ability … to research and find our history of our families as well, and even look at photos and identify key family members that we probably didn't know existed before," Ms Nixon said.
"It's such a great opportunity to be able to do that and to be able to access it in our community."