The Future Custodians of Ancient Tales

In the red centre of Australia, a land dry and sparsely populated, is the community of Hermannsburg, also known as Ntaria. Here, the effect of 200 years of white settlement on traditional Aboriginal culture was keenly felt by the younger people of the community. Sitting amidst two distinct, overlapping cultures, the young men and women lacked a thorough understanding of either.

WSU academics, led by Professor Hart Cohen from WSU’s School of Humanities and Communication Arts and the Institute for Culture and Society, introduced a program to strengthen ties with both cultures and improve literacy for the teenagers. They worked in close collaboration with the elders and leaders of the Arrernte community and the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs.

Twenty-two students from Ntaria School took part in a digital storytelling project that aimed to build their capacity for sharing intergenerational knowledge. A core part of the project involved the students exploring more than 150 years worth of genealogical information housed in the Strehlow Research Centre, which enabled the students to learn about their collective and individual social and cultural identities.

The experience was documented on film; a collaboration between the teenagers, community elders and teachers, museum staff, the Ntaria School, Professor Cohen and colleagues Associate Professor Juan Francisco Salazar and Dr Rachel Morley. A documentary filmmaker originally from Canada, Cohen has been working with the Strehlow material since the late 1990s. In 2001, he wrote and directed Mr Strehlow’s Films, a movie about the founder of the research centre’s collection, T. G. H. Strehlow, who was the son of German-Lutheran missionaries, and an Arrernte-speaking anthropologist and linguist. 

Strehlow grew up on the central Australian Hermannsburg mission that is now Ntaria, 125km south-west of Alice Springs. Between the 1930s and 1970s, he amassed a significant collection of sacred Aboriginal men’s objects, as well as family trees, photographs, and film and sound recordings.

The archive’s genealogies, kinship diagrams and family trees are a unique resource, Cohen notes. “As it turned out, these are some of the most comprehensive records ever collected in Australia to do with Aboriginal people.”

Uniquely, the archive documents not only family ties familiar to Western culture, but also family relationships, and birth and conception sites, which have a layered and totemic significance in Arrernte culture.

In 2011, with the support of the Australian Research Council’s Linkage program, Cohen and the WSU team worked with project partners, the Strehlow Research Centre and the Northern Territory Library service, while engaging with key community members including the Ntaria School teachers and representatives from Wurla Nyinta, a community reference group, to create a knowledge system that would use the collection as the basis for a digital database.

Cohen explains that the project took a sudden change of direction: “After speaking to many locals, we realised that they didn’t really have the infrastructure to use [a digital database]”. The local school provided a new avenue. “With the enthusiastic cooperation of both the Ntaria School principal and classroom teacher, we suggested that instead, we teach digital storytelling as a way of bringing students into contact with the archive.” 

In the film, called Ntaria Heroes, Western Arrernte elders, Mark Inkamala and Mavis Malbunka, were able to use the collection to talk about local history. Some of the students were able to trace their ‘skin names’ for the first time. This culturally important designation helps identify Aboriginal family, ties to Country and rules governing social etiquette.

Ntaria Heroes cinematographer and Arrernte man Shaun Angeles notes the importance and timeliness of the project, commenting “we need to do as much as we can with these young people while their elders are still around.”

By improving their ability to find and share intergenerational knowledge, Cohen says he thinks the students came away with more tools to explore their identity. “It’s been shown,” he says, “that having a strong sense of an Aboriginal identity contributes to better outcomes for psychological health and well-being … so we think the project has had an impact on many planes.”

Ntaria Heroes was first screened at the Ntaria School in August 2016, and it can be found online.