Mick Dodson Appeals to Save Indigenous Heritage

THE Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies will develop an “urgent plan” to identify, gather, store and share indigenous heritage, saying its historic collection of Aboriginal culture is at risk.

The institute will seek “the best minds across the country and around the world” to help, chairman Mick Dodson will tell a ­National Press Club audience in Canberra today.

He calls for community and government support for the project, warning the legacy is in jeopardy because the institute cannot protect its collections and is unable to visit communities to record oral history and languages and recover materials from “biscuit tins and shoe boxes in garages”.

“We will work hard to develop new partnerships with Australian and international corporations, governments and individuals who can contribute to realising a site of pilgrimage for all Australians, and the millions of international visitors, who want to know and understand more about the world’s longest continuous civilisation … ,” he will say.

Professor Dodson will warn that long after each of us have passed on, what we leave our children and their children to the Australian nation, “will be measured by the legacy we build, or fail to build, now.”

“When the institute began, in 1964, the mission of what was then known as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies was to rescue knowledge about Australia’s indigenous cultures before they were lost forever. It was thought then, even by the best minds, that we were a ‘primitive’ and dying race,” he says.

Professor Dodson says the institute now has the most extensive and best contextualised collection about indigenous Australia in the world. “It is a site of pilgrimage,” he will say in his speech.

However, the challenges of maintaining and extending the collection requires ­national commitment. ” With goodwill, intelligent design and funding, there’s no reason why the institute and the Australian nation cannot do better,” he says.