Digital Cultural Heritage Archives

While the Mulka Project has unlimited possibilities and dozens of projects in the works, one primary task is the building of a collection of digital images, sound and video that is available to the local community as well as, with certain conditions, outside researchers.  The project office houses a server that shares an iTunes library with sound and video and Northern Territory Library’s ‘Our Story’ database with still images.  Anyone can come in to the booth and view public materials from the archives on iMac computers.  One of these iMacs is also connected to the projector and sound system in the Saltwater Auditorium, so films can be viewed on our three-metre wide screen.

Photo of makarrata ceremony at Yirrkala in 1945 by air RAAF officer Harry Wentworth Eyre.		Our own photo of our performance at the 2007 Dreaming festival in Woodford, Queensland.

At this stage, the community can see close to a thousand images dating from Dr. Donald Thomson’s 1930’s photographs to the present, hear 500 audio tracks from Dr. Richard A. Waterman’s 1952 fieldwork up to a series of podcasts from local secondary students posted this school term, and view 47 movies from 1948’s Australian-American Expedition to Arnhem Land to films done by Yirrkala students and Mulka Project staff in recent months.

Still from the film ‘Aborigines of the Seacoast, 1948’ shot at Yirrkala by the Australian-American Expedition to Arnhem Land.		Still from the video ‘Girls Going Hunting’ shot by Mulka Staff and Yirrkala CEC secondary students in July 2007.

If you have any photos, video or sound recordings you've made in the area and would like to contribute, please contact us!