Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond

Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond edited by Linda Berwick, Jennifer Green and Petronella Vaarzon-Morel xxviii + 345 pp., illustrated, University of Hawaii Press with Sydney University Press, 2020, ISBN: 9781743326725 (pbk), $45.001 Place-based cultural learning - of ceremonies, songs, stories, language, kinship and ecology - binds Australian Indigenous societies together, as described on this books back cover and the editors preface (p. xiii), neatly signposts the overarching focus of the 16 essays contained in Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond. [...]it is still a reflection of a familiar trend of First Nations being researched predominantly by non-Indigenous experts (reminding me of Linda Tuhiwai Smith's observations, particularly in the introductory chapter to her seminal work Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples).3 As Nimi'ipuu (Nez Perce) American Indian scholar Dr Gretchen Stolte noted in her review of Indigenous Archives: The Making and Unmaking ofAboriginal Art in 2018, which also had a low number of First Nations authors compared to non-Indigenous ones, there is a 'high number of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers engaging with archives, libraries, museum collections and art centres across the country', and I would emphasise that editors of publications involving Indigenous communities and subject matters should privilege First Nations writers as much as possible.4 The editors include a foreword written by Aboriginal man David Ross AM from the CLC and note in their preface that '[i]t is significant that several of the chapters in the volume are written by Indigenous people who are multiply engaged as both contributors to, and end users of, archives' (p. xiii). 1 Also available in open access through the journal Language Documentation & Conservation. 2 Central Land Council, Where We Are, accessed 31 August 2020, www.clc.org.au/articles/info/where-we-are. 3 Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies, 30-55.