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About the Project

 

The research journey

   

       
 

This web site

       
 

This web site is a type of database.

The various people involved and the collective life of the various times and places in which we do our project, get swept up and displayed in this website. That work is filtering and translating. In this section we show a little of who does that and how. We show ‘the making of ..” in the way film makers sometimes produce a little movie about the movie

The version of the website you are finding your way about in at present, is version 2.0, its final form at the end of the project. We actually have no trace of version 1.1. Version 1.2 an 1.3 have been archived. Trevor van Weeren put a design for version 1.3 together in May 2004 in response to discussions we had at our meeting in March. He used a particular template. This is the first item in our display.

A story.

During the March ’04 meeting in Darwin, we discussed the website for the project.

“Who or what is it for?”, we asked.
•It’s an exhibit, or an archive, both for ourselves and as a context setting device.
• It provides information about what’s emerging from the work
• It can help in acquitting our grant money
• We can be checked out by those in communities who think we might be able to help them.

In June 2004, when Michael Christie came to Melbourne for a smaller meeting with Helen Verran, Trevor van Weeren and Juli Cathcart, we were looking at Trevor’s working image of the website: index cards arranged in a box. We recognised the significance of a talk Raymattja had given us all those years ago about the nyiknyik (native rat) and its djarrma (carrying messages) work. We saw that the image of the network of grass tunnels that these rats sometimes make, is like a website. With their comings and goings, this way and that, doing the gossipy, obsessive work of carrying bits to and fro, nyiknyik forge nets of connections and scurry-ways through the tall grass of the small plains that are dotted around north east Arnhemland and other parts of northern Australia.

Our nyiknyik is email. The log of meetings and their minutes that the project manager Simon Niblock keeps is one version of the network of tunnels and connections that link things up. This website is another version of the nyiknyik matrix. That is our project.

There is an important difference between the website with its carefully constructed mesh of links both within the site and to the outside and the nyiknyik mesh of grass tunnels. This website has been made as an extra task. It does not just grow in the actual process of doing the work that makes up the many sites of collective work that we call ‘the IKRMNA project’. And that task of website making is done by Helen Verran, Trevor van Weeran and Juli Cathcart down in Melbourne.

The actual manipulations of arranging things through dreamweaver is done by Trevor and Juli in their small house in Abbotsford. Some days, just a few minutes away in Collingwood, across the foootbridge over Hoddle Street, Helen struggles to get words to hang together, sending numerous email messages to Trevor and Juli because that is quicker than running back and forth across the footbridge. Email also allows Michael and others to tell us what was happening in various places in the Northern Territory. They send us documents that get linked into the site.

Why have we done this extra task of making the website? And why are we also exhibiting the work of making the exhibit about the work? Is this concern with the personal just a form of aggrandising self-indulgence? What some people call ‘vanity ethnography’? A short answer to the charge is to point out that the ways we do our work becomes ‘clotted’ as the entities that are the outcome of the work.

The Aboriginal participants in our projects tell us over and over again that things are not real without their stories. With this website, including this story about its making, we are trying to realise (in the sense of actualise) indigenous databases in the Aboriginal sense of the real.

 

 

 

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