THE AGE http://www.theage.com.au/daily/990421/news/news14.html Wednesday 21 April 1999 Aboriginal documents may be lost By JANINE MacDONALD CANBERRA Crucial documents that could enable some ``stolen generation'' Aborigines to trace their families are turning to dust at an indigenous research storage house in Canberra because there is no funding to preserve them. Copies of old community newsletters, reports from chief protectors of Aborigines around Australia and ``blanket records'' that identified indigenous families seeking blankets are deteriorating and becoming unreadable. The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra says it does not have the money - about $100,000 - needed to put the records in order and transfer them to permanent records such as microfilm. The institute yesterday began a training course, called Link-Up, to help indigenous family reunion organisations around the country understand the full extent of the records available to them, to teach how to perform Internet and library database searches and how to find pre-1900 written records. The institute's principal, Mr Russell Taylor, said they had been inundated with calls for help and demand for family tracing since the stolen generation report was published. ``There is no doubt that we in the institute are concerned about resources needed to make sure these records are acquired, managed and preserved,'' he said. The institute also believes there is a need for a national name index that would identify family name, language groups, geographical location and birth and death dates of family members. The institute's library director, Ms Barbara Lewincamp, said it would cost around $100,000 a year to conserve the records and pay the salary of an indexer. ``We can have our books by (historian) Henry Reynolds and the rest of it, but it is the material that comes out of communities that lets us hear their own voice,'' she said. Through ATSIC, the Federal Government allocated $11.25million over four years, as part of its response to the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Bringing Them Home report, to set up grassroots family reunion services in each state and the Northern Territory. The National Archives received $2million to order their indigenous records, the National Library received $1.6million for an oral history project, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is funded by ATSIC to employ a resource worker to help connect services. The national Link-Up contact number is 1800 730 129. ************************************************************************* This posting is provided to the individual members of this group without permission from the copyright owner for purposes of criticism, comment, scholarship and research under the "fair use" provisions of the Federal copyright laws and it may not be distributed further without permission of the copyright owner, except for "fair use." -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
