Cirrus@Austlit

'From the early days of remote community radio, in the late 1970s, Australia's remote Indigenous communities, personnel from government bodies and the audiovisual media industries, have come together to embrace satellite technology. While this new technology facilitates much-needed communications into the most remote regions of Australia, it also presents an ongoing challenge to Indigenous communities in their efforts to retain and promote their cultural traditions, languages and methods of storytelling.

The Remote Indigenous Media Association (RIMA) Oral History Project is a project within the National Film and Sound Archive's (NFSA) Oral History Program. In collaboration with work of NFSA's Indigenous Collections Branch, the focus of the project is to record the stories and historical voices of the people and pioneers associated with the history of Indigenous media in the remote regions of Australia.' Source: The author.

'History has largely been written by non- Indigenous historians and unique perspectives of Indigenous historians are still only emerging. This paper discusses some of the research projects I have worked on over the last ten years as an Indigenous curator, artist and oral historian. I will discuss some of the methodological approaches I have employed when working with Indigenous communities on exhibitions and oral history recordings. The research projects discussed aim to have a multi- method approach to sharing traditional Indigenous culture and knowledge whilst utilising modern methods and technologies to tell our stories.' Source: The author.

'Native American Writer Leslie Marmon Silko notes that within traditional Pueblo society, story telling (oral history) is part of a communal process of remembering, in which everyone is expected to listen and to speak up and contribute a detail or a fact that has been omitted, or to recount a conflicting version. People welcome even conflicting versions of events, recognising that loyalties, grudges and kinship influence narrative choices, and truth lies somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points and outright contradictions arising from old feuds and rivalries.

This paper explores this way of oral history, and memory making. It focuses on accounts by and about unemployed young people in a rural community in Southern Tasmania. It discusses the way these accounts were collected, transcribed and transmuted, in a collaborative venture, into literature (to date, a novel and a radio play) in order to stand witness to a community's memory and experience and also to ensure that particular individuals not be shamed - a dialogue which includes the conflicting accounts, attitudes, opinions and versions whose effective coexistence is essential to maintaining co-operative interdependence in small island communities.' Source: The author.