The Yoorrook Justice Commission was set up to investigate the systemic injustices experienced by First Peoples in Victoria from the start of colonisation up to today.

Yoorrook is both a truth telling process tasked with creating an official public record of the true history of Victoria, and a royal commission – a colonial legal structure that comes with significant powers, and responsibilities.

How can the Commission meet its reporting requirements under the law, while ensuring its archives not only respect and reflect the voices and experiences of First Peoples, but are also held and controlled by First Peoples? 

And how can Yoorrook create an immersive, living archive that helps all Victorians better understand the history of the lands upon which we all live.

In the height of summer 2019, a group of Masters’ students from the University of Melbourne gathered in Maree Clarke’s backyard/ artist studio. Over the course of a month, the students worked alongside Maree and her family learning with and from them to create a series of artworks for a Clarke family exhibition to be held in Maree’s hometown of Mildura. 

As the students were learning to make a possum skin cloak, river reed necklaces and a kangaroo tooth necklace, they were also involved in digitising Maree’s vast collection of black and white photos taken by her in the early 1990s of southeast Australian Aboriginal people. The photographs included images of NAIDOC marches, community gatherings, weddings, births and everything else in between. 

For the students, the process of art-making, alongside members of Maree’s family, while simultaneously digitising the black and white photos, revealed the connections between the images from the past to the lives of people in the present and their artwork. 

This initial foray into making art with students, while working to digitise and record collections so they may be accessible for future generations, presented us with one way of thinking about the potential of a living archive, what it might be and could become. 

In this presentation, Maree and Fran will hold a conversation about the evolving living archive project – which has travelled between the USA, Newcastle (NSW) and Ngukurr in southeast Arnhem Land – where linking up stories, artworks, Ancestral collections and more, aims to reclaim the traditional/Western archive by centring Indigenous knowledges in the process.

In 1978, at the Fourth National Homosexual Conference in Sydney, Graham Carbery presented “A proposal for an Australian Gay Archives”. In the 45 years since, the Australian Queer Archives has collected, preserved, and celebrated the histories of LGBTQIA+ people and communities, providing a safe place for the abundance of diverse materials that document the history of the Australian LGBTQIA+ movement. This work continues today, but in the face of emergent and ever-changing archival challenges. Digitisation continues to raise questions, from the how-to to the “where do we keep this?", while broader sociocultural and technological changes have seen a shift from newsletters and zines made at kitchen tables to overwhelming quantities of born-digital materials. Archival metadata held in excel spreadsheets is still waiting for the acquisition of a cataloguing system, and more donations arrive by the day, providing endless exciting distractions…and endless processing work. In addition to challenges, there are also aspirations. Strengthening relationships with First Nations communities, and especially queer mob. Developing collections to include more records of trans, bisexual, and First Nations people. Enhancing the accessibility of collections both virtually and in-person. And continuing to share and celebrative diverse LGBTQIA+ histories by activating our collections in an ever-growing number of ways—including exhibitions, presentations, symposiums, workshops, and walking tours. In this keynote session, members of the Archives’ Committee will explore the journey of AQuA over the last 45 years, showcase highlights of the Archives’ diverse collections, and share some of the continued challenges faced by a volunteer-run community archive as it continues to grow and evolve. We invite you to come and learn about the Australian Queer Archives and its community, and share your professional insights and experience with us as we move into our next 45 years.

In the closing keynote, open government, digital transformation and data geek, Pia Andrews and one of our most versatile, highly regarded and respected recordkeeping professionals, Barbara Reed, will discuss the potential for recordkeeping to be at the heart of putting the ‘good’ back into government and governance in an algorithmic and data-driven age. Using Robodebt as an illustration of both the best and the worst of contemporary public service culture and practice, they will explore how recordkeeping can be part of, and reimagined for, adaptive, augmented and trustworthy digital government as a driver of meaningful, positive, and human-centred public sector reform. Together they will delve into Pia’s dream of a world where government policy is built in a way that is accountable, participatory, humane, adaptive, and accessible and consider the design mindset needed for realising this vision.