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In 2003 I participated in the production of a digital community project for Victorian Koorie communities. The team of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people, who contributed their wide-ranging expertise to the Koorie Heritage Archive (KHA) project, are past and present members of dedicated units at the Koorie Heritage Trust based in Melbourne, Victoria, including the Koorie Family History Service, the Oral History Unit and the Collections Unit. The project’s intention was to bring together cultural heritage materials that are significant to Koorie people and currently dispersed throughout state record-holding institutions, private collections and local Indigenous community organisations; to record personal and community histories; and to document family and placenames, which are all important for recuperating and preserving Koorie knowledge, memory and identity. This chapter traces the development of the KHA as a pilot project, and looks at some of the key issues of creating and implementing this specific digital knowledge system, which lays new ground for appreciating and, if necessary, evaluating such projects. evaluating such projects. This chapter examines how a photograph, held within the media-rich KHA library, can offer a point of orientation to follow a dynamic human mapping of hidden pasts or misplaced histories that transpire from the interplay between memories and cultural artefacts. Through the personal, social and political stories told by Koorie people, I hope to capture the non-textual and often abstract nature of how Koorie individuals and their families navigate their way through the contested arena of Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowledge systems. The lively and transformative performance enacted with truth, conviction, tears and laughter, and firmly grounded in the activities of local community life, presents a timely place to consider how the past is reinscribed and reincorporated into a present-day reality. The following is therefore a reflective piece drawing on an 11-year history of working with Victorian Koorie people and a background in performance and visual arts, which places emphasis on the stories and places at the centre of culture and identity.
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