Storylines Program Dr Kate on ABC Radio

BEGINNING OF INTERVIEW 

Christine: It’s our regular segment and this week we’re going to hear about a project from the State Library of WA. They are digitally returning decade’s worth of photos to Aboriginal communities and families across WA. 

Dr Kate Gregory, Battye Historian, from the Library is here to tell us more. Thank you for driving through the rain Kate.

KG: Hi Christine, nah, it’s always a pleasure to be here.

Christine: [Laughs] It just shows how dedicated you are because the weather out there is not fun. Tell us about this collection of photos. Are they portraits? Natural shots? What have we got?

KG: Yes, no look this was just a really lovely thing to highlight for NAIDOC week, I thought, because the theme for NAIDOC week as we probably all know is ‘Heal Country’ and so, what I wanted to talk about today was this incredible ‘Storylines’ program that the State Library runs, as you said, to digitally return photographs to Aboriginal families and communities around the state. Now, just imagine the State Library holds thousands and thousands of photographs of Aboriginal people, taken across the decades from all sorts of different types of contexts, so, it covers things like mission history, the history of government reserves where Aboriginal people lived. It covers social activism you know, kind of social justice and the fight for Aboriginal rights in this state. There’s also really strong threads of community social history. So, we’ve got this incredibly rich collection, but we didn’t know a great deal about it in terms, of we found that we had lots of photographs of Aboriginal people that were unidentified and they were taken from a particular perspective. So, the State Library set up this program ‘Storylines’ and this is several years ago now. It got started in about 2013 to digitise these photographs and to work with Aboriginal communities around the state, to make sure that they know that we have these collections, to have a conversation with us about what these collections are, who are the people within these collections and to sort of stimulate this dialogue I suppose and to make sure that as a State Library we are doing the right thing. There’s a kind of ethics around these types of collections where often they were collected from communities and Aboriginal people, they may have had no idea that these collections even existed. So, to be able to then discover that there are photographs of your ancestors. It’s just an incredibly powerful tool. 

Christine: It could be the first time people see some family members. How often are names left off photos?

KG: Well, in the context of many of our collections, frequently unfortunately, because a lot of these collections may have been collected from a government perspective, these photographs so...or mission history. They may have been nurses for instance that worked at various missions that for a period of time, say in the twenties. We’ve had a recent collection come in from a nurse who worked at Moore River. It’s just been digitised and just been made available through ‘Storylines’ and this is a collection relating to the 1920s.

Christine: Yes, tell us about it.

KG: Well, look we’re not sure at this point. A lot of these photographs there are some named people; it’s a scrapbook. It’s a beautiful scrapbook that this nurse had assembled in the 1920s and her name was Rosina McDonald and it’s a disparate selection of photographs but she was a nurse at Moore River in 1923 and there are photographs of people in there that we know is somebody’s family and they’re not identified, so, we’ve digitised them, we’ve made them available through ‘Storylines’. It’s an online digital portal, I should explain that. 

Christine: Yes! So do you want to tell us about this portal? 

It’s a quarter past two. 

If you have just tuned in, Dr Kate Gregory is with me, Battye Historian. We are talking about this brilliant project and I am aware the weather is also terrible. Flash flooding, Canning Bridge just to let you know. Canning Highway is hectic. Stay safe. And also some traffic lights through South Fremantle, so take and listen to this in the meantime. 

So, how can people actual access it and we’ll talk about a few more details of the project too.

KG: Absolutely. Look so it’s online, so it’s online and accessible through the State Library website. The website is storylines.slwa.wa.gov.au and look anyone can access it. It is specifically designed for Aboriginal communities and Aboriginal families. It’s based on some software that has some really neat characteristics, in that, you can restrict sacred or sensitive material. You can set up women’s only kind of material as opposed to men’s and there’s lots of neat characteristics that are… it’s built from an Aboriginal perspective and actually designed from an Aboriginal perspective. 

Christine: It’s culturally important.

KG: It’s... yes that’s right. And it’s culturally appropriate, so, that’s really, really important. And look, it’s something that we work very closely with the community on in terms of monthly workshops that we hold in the State Library, in terms of sort of regional workshops that we run from time to time and it’s part of, I suppose, broader work around truth telling and really an awareness of what the lived experience of Aboriginal people has been throughout the decades in this state.

Christine: Is there a geographic element to this platform? I know we have a state wide audience with us, so, there’s going to be families from all over the place listening. How does it work?

KG: Yes, absolutely and that’s one of the great features of this software, of this portal. You can actually search for materials geographically. So, if you’re interested in Roebourne for example or Karratha and want to find out what collections do we have because, you know it’s a vast range of collections. For instance, I know that we’ve got lots of photographs from Karratha station in the sixties, this is prior to Karratha the town being established of course because there was Karratha station prior to Karratha. So, people can actually use this. There’s a map and it’s a geospatial kind of mapping of the collections, so you can click on and drill down into all sorts of collections that will come up that relate to that region, which is a terrific feature I think because often people are interested in those place-based histories and they want to know if they’ve got family, because often this is also about reconnecting with family, right. I mean given the history and there’s a lot of trauma here of course as well in terms of the Stolen Generation.

Christine: Yes, it’s got to be hard to look at some of these photos for sure. I was just thinking about that... how what an impact it will have. 

So this is the ‘Storylines’ program. It’s storylines.slwa.wa.gov.au

Where else have the collections come from?

KG: Well, yes, I mean a whole range. I think that there are many private individuals who have also donated collections and look, one thing I do want to mention is there’s a really fabulous trend emerging and that is Aboriginal curated collections that have been donated to the State Library and they are starting to come in more and more as trust is being built with Aboriginal communities around the state, where they are from an Aboriginal perspective, so, you would remember a couple of weeks ago we were talking about...

Christine: Yes!

KG: The Mavis Phillips Walley collection... that’s a ‘Storylines’ kind of collection. That came about through ‘Storylines’.

Christine: It was so good to have Dallas in as well. It was brilliant, yes.

KG: It was! And so look, that collection is an example. So there’s kind of Aboriginal curated stories and I think that one of the beauties of this is that it’s really, ’Storylines’ is stimulating these intergenerational conversations so where you’ve got in a community, say, if we’re holding a workshop, you’ve got elders with young kids, as well, sitting by a computer, bringing up these images; digital images of their grandparents and people that they may never have seen photographs of, able to yarn and tell these stories and to the next generation and it’s just [unclear].

Christine: Have you witnessed that happening?

KG: Yes, I have and I am very, very privileged to witness that happening really and very privileged to witness people discovering photographs of their father and or grandfather for the first time. 

Christine: It’s like a digital reunion.

KG: It is amazing. It’s, yes, it’s really.. .the power of these images and it is very interesting because often times, you know, Aboriginal culture... there’s this kind of idea that… and photographs are powerful and certainly if people have passed on, then we might need to take photographs down to restrict that access for a period of time and the beauty of ‘Storylines’ is that it enables us to do that very, very easily. So, it’s a really responsive and flexible approach to actually managing these collections and making sure that Aboriginal people have the right to speak back to the archive; their archive that we are keeping in perpetuity.

Christine: If people want to get in contact with someone from the Library instead of necessarily going through the website, what advice would you have to them? If they maybe have a collection or they want to ask a question personally, how does it work?

KG: Well, we do encourage people to go to our website and we’ve got lots of information on the website about how to donate collections and about our Indigenous holdings, our Indigenous collections and the ‘Storylines’.

Christine: Email?

KG: Yes, or there probably is an email. I think probably to email info@slwa.wa.gov.au

Christine: Good save [laughs].

KG: Or to ring the State Library because we’re always very, very happy to talk to people and point them in the right direction.

Christine: Great, because I know there are going to be people interested in this and sometimes it’s a good place to start. 

It’s wonderful that you’re doing this Kate. 12,000 odd photos as well?

KG: Yes, that’s right. We’ve reached 12,000 items in the ‘Storylines’ platform itself. There are 6,300 people identified within those photographs and they’ve been identified by the community.

Christine: My jaw has dropped. Well look, I do hope that you can reunite some more family members with those photos. 

Look, I know that you have to head South, so please take care. I’ll get an update on the traffic, so that you can hear it in the car. 

Thank you so much for coming in.

KG: Thanks Christine.

Christine: That’s Dr Kate Gregory, very lucky to have her on board. She is the Battye Historian from the State Library of WA telling us about their ‘Storylines’ project, so 12,000 photos, over 3,000 people and you might have a family member in there.

info@slwa.wa.gov.au or storylines@slwa.wa.gov.au

END OF INTERVIEW