My name is Marika Duczyinsky. I'm a
Gamilaroi -Mandandanji woman. My family come from Moree in northern New South
Wales. I'm a project officer in the Indigenous Engagement Team at the State
Library of New South Wales. ATSILIRN Protocol 2: Content and perspectives is
specifically looking at collections. It is especially looking at diversity
amongst those two things, and it is drawing attention to how important
it is to have diversity in both content and perspectives in
relation to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander collection items within
libraries. Libraries house often a really diverse array of collection items
relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. The collections are
often really diverse in terms of content, in terms of format and in terms of
perspectives. The one thing in which they lack often is that the voice – the
authorial voice – is not coming from an Aboriginal person; it's coming from the
non-Aboriginal person who was writing about an Aboriginal person as the
subject.
And so the material was not written with an Aboriginal person or in
collaboration, and often the Aboriginal people who were written about didn't
even know they were being written about. And so, in order to redress this
libraries really need to be contemporarily collecting from
communities. So they need to be looking at ways in which they can incorporate
those voices into their collections. If your library is unsure of what to do in
terms of contemporarily collecting, I would probably say to that, that I think
that means there is more work that needs to be done in terms of engaging with
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and building relationships.
It is really hard to collect from communities in a way that accurately
represents the documentary heritage of your state if you aren't engaged in
what's going on right now in communities.
Ongoing consultation with communities is
really important in terms of management of collections because it is
a fundamental part of redressing the lack of Aboriginal voices, and Aboriginal
people have a right of reply to the collections that are held about them in
libraries. And so, in every instance, I would always recommend that no matter
what the collection item is, if it contains stories about Aboriginal people
or indeed cultural knowledge, that Aboriginal people should be made, firstly,
aware that it is held in the library, because a lot of people and communities
don't actually know what is held within the vast collections of libraries,
firstly, and, secondly, ask them what are the appropriate cultural protocols that
should be followed to ensure that this is looked after in a way that respects
you and allows you to uphold your own cultural protocols.
And, where possible,
Aboriginal people should be listened to and those changes should be incorporated
in the way that the item is managed. The last thing I would say is that by
incorporating greater diversity of perspectives with regard to Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander collection items, libraries are deeply enriching
their collections. Not only contextualising the collections in terms
of presenting multiple perspectives, but also deeply enriching our understanding
of all the stories that relate to them. And that can only be a good thing, I think..