In Australia, academics at the National Indigenous Media Association’s headquarters in Brisbane are exploring CD-Rom as a way of preserving fast- disappearing Aboriginal languages.
They will then make recordings available to a rising generation of urban Aborigine children who have been cut off from their tribal roots and culture.
NIMA’s director Chris Lee, a city-born Aborigine, rediscovered his ancestral heritage some years ago during a radio and television training course that took him into the Central Desert and into contact with his tribal past.
He wants to find funds to set up access points in media centres around Australia so that newly computer-happy urban Aborigine youths will be able to locate and delve into aspects of their own tribal history. They will also be able to hear the spoken languages that were for so long suppressed.
Last year saw the publication of Macquarie Aboriginal Words, the first Australian Aborigine dictionary to be produced. It includes word-lists from just 17 of the 200 or so original indigenous languages of Australia, most of which are now extinct.
But the NIMA CD-Rom project goes much further than a paper dictionary. It provides users with a database that will combine photographic and film archive with video, text, maps, and sound recordings that pass on grammar, syntax, inflection and intonation, as well as mythology and ancestral lore.
This is a long-term project that will eventually open up access to the crateful of recordings Chris Lee and his NIMA co-workers have been collecting. They have been working to preserve languages now only known and spoken by a dwindling number of elders in the Australian outback.
Using CD-Rom to keep these languages alive maximises the potential of new technology to serve the past and build bridges to the future.
