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Black Australia slips the net

By Deborah Bogle

14 June 2001 - FOUR years ago, I went to Darwin to report for this newspaper on a Fullbright Symposium entitled Indigenous Cultures in an Interconnected World. One of the papers was delivered by John Hobson, from the Koori Centre at the University of Sydney.

Apart from his day job as co-ordinator of the centre's Student Academic Support Unit, Hobson also runs KooriNet (www.koori.usyd.edu.au), pretty much in his spare time.

KooriNet has a directory of about 400 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander sites, and includes the search engine BlackTracka. It also built and/or hosts web sites for more than a dozen indigenous community organisations, and runs numerous internet mailing lists with around 1200 subscribers.

Hobson's paper at the Fullbright Symposium (which is linked off the KooriNet home page) outlined the KooriNet project and looked at ways of building an indigenous Australian presence on the net, which, as he observed, was then very limited.

This month, he revisited the subject in a piece for the Australian Library and Information Association journal, inCite. He was able to report that there are now many more indigenous websites (on KooriNet there are more than double the number in 1997). But the good news ends there - participation is as limited as ever, he concludes.

"The internet in Australia is largely the province of the middle class and the educated, and the cities," he writes. "It is inherently elitist. And, while it remains so and the status of indigenous Australians remains unchanged, so will their participation in it."

Even those communities and organisations that do have a web presence, usually just have what Hobson calls "a signpost on the freeway to the world". Those with any depth tend to be the official sites, such as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission's (www.atsic.gov.au) or the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies' (www.aiatsis.gov.au).

This comes as no surprise. Even before I contacted Hobson, I had heard a similar story when I asked around community workers among the Yamaji people in my local area. Were they online, I wanted to know, and did the local community have access?

The Yamaji News, a fortnightly newspaper put out by the Yamaji Languages Aboriginal Corporation, has no web presence at the moment but looks like going online sometime in the future. Doreen Mackman, a linguist at the Yamaji Language Centre, who set up the News, believes an interactive web version would be useful for schools, but of limited use for the wider audience. So few of its readers have regular net access, and a free paper using the old dead tree technology succeeds admirably.

Given the content, archiving is not really necessary and distribution has never been a problem, despite the relatively large circulation area. They use the post, and the community network. If anyone's heading bush, they take a pile of papers.

About four years ago, the centre received some funding to put together the Yamaji Networking site. The idea was to create family resources - such as pictures, family trees and histories - which could be accessed by family members living far apart. The site is still online, and there is some password-protected information on one Yamaji family, but the project stalled, largely because of issues of permission and access to restricted and sensitive information.

"There were so many obstacles, and there never was any clear resolution about who would have access, and who would decide," says Mackman.

However, there had been considerable interest in the idea of networking at that level and, everyone agreed, there was lots of potential, particularly for members of families seeking to rebuild family trees and re-establish ties broken by removal and separation.

On the AIATSIS site, there's a family history area, with detailed information and links to other resources to assist indigenous people to trace their parentage. It includes the Biographical Name Index of personal names in published material held in the AIATSIS library.

There are also links to other databases, including InfoKoori, the Lismore-based Koori Mail's archive, and the Don Cameron Military Index, which includes names of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander servicemen.

The ATSIC site has a home page for the Bringing Them Home Taskforce, where one can download various documents relating to the inquiry into the stolen generations. There is also contact information for the various link-up (family connection) agencies, but no access to the services via the web.

Given the low rate of net access in the indigenous population, people are probably not clamouring at the institutional firewalls demanding access. Still, if people are keen to get online, they'll usually find a way. Even in the most remote communities you're likely to find technology that offers reasonably reliable and quick connections to the net.

In his paper, Hobson urged his audience - mostly librarians - to make resources available to local indigenous community groups and individuals.

My local library already does. As I've mentioned in a previous column, there are a couple of Yamaji schoolgirls here who regularly log on to web chat groups at the library computers.

The teen rooms they visit are pretty tacky - lots of cybersex, and people with handles like BigJohnson or, his big brother, HugeJohnson. They're US-based, but the girls seem to like the fact that they're chatting with people from somewhere else. What would be the point of chatting to someone from around here, they ask, looking at me blankly. They admit to faking their ages - 15 becomes 17.

If there were a chat space for indigenous teenagers, they'd definitely go there, they say, but no one I spoke to knew of one. KooriNet is planning one soon - Hobson simply has to find time to plug in the software and hang around to make sure it doesn't fall over.

"It's a bit like inviting a whole lot of people to a dance," he says. "If they all turn up but the band doesn't show, you're in trouble."

Sourse: The Australian

related links :

• Growing the Indigenous Australian internet
  June 2001 - Participation in online services by Indigenous Australians is currently very limited. The rate of individual computer ownership is extremely low and private access to internet services is minimally represented within this.
• Tribal voices
  March 31, 2001 - Roulla Yiacoumi looks at the people, culture, health, music and art of Aboriginal Australia on the web.

Further information: culture issues page - includes news index and external links

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