"For the children...": Aboriginal Australia, cultural access, and archival obligation
2019
For whom are archival documents created and conserved? Who is obliged to care for them and
provide access to their content, and for how long? Te state, libraries, museums and galleries,
researchers, interlocutors, genealogists, family heritage organisations? Or does material collected
long ago and then archived belong personally, socially, emotionally, culturally, and intellectually to
the people from whom the original material was collected and, eventually, to their descendants? In
a colonised nation, additional ethical and epistemological questions arise: Are archives protected
and accessed for the colonised or the colonisers, or both? How are diferences regarding archival
creation, protection, and access distinguished, and in whose interest? Is it for future generations?
What happens when archives are accessed and read by family members and/or researchers, and
what happens when they are not? A focus on two interrelated stories – frstly an experiential
account narrated by Brenda L Crof about constructive archival management and access, and
secondly a contrasting example relating how the Berndt Field Note Archive continues to be
restricted from entitled claimants – facilitates a return to three interrelated questions: for whom
are archives created and conserved, who is obliged to care for, and authorise access to, them, and
to whom do they belong?
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