Native title discovery

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Tags: anthropology, discovery, Indigenous, summer-2011

A funeral service takes place in Cherbourg in 1934

A surprise discovery made by UQ researchers came full circle during NAIDOC Week celebrations in July.

Postgraduate students Kim de Rijke and Tony Jefferies presented findings of their native title research in Cherbourg to coincide with a new exhibition honouring the life of prominent anthropologist Caroline Tennant-Kelly.

A large collection of Ms Tennant-Kelly’s papers were hidden for 20 years before Mr de Rijke and Mr Jefferies discovered them in a cattleman’s shed in northern New South Wales in late 2009.

Since then, funding from the Social Inclusion Division of the Attorney General’s Department has allowed the team to analyse and index the collection – almost 2000 items in all – and compile the research on DVD to hand back to local communities.

Mr de Rijke said Ms Tennant-Kelly’s documents shed light on the social and cultural practices of the Indigenous people she lived and worked with, particularly in Cherbourg.

“The ethnographic record from those years is scant and very little first-hand information was available regarding the conditions of cultural life at Cherbourg during the 1930s,” he said.

Caroline Tennant-Kelly and her husband in 1929

“These materials demonstrate both the maintenance and adaptation of Aboriginal cultural practices in a situation where the odds were stacked against them.”

The research team categorised the large number of documents and created an index that allows a search through place names, personal names, Aboriginal language names and certain key topics in native title.

“The collection is valuable for historians and contemporary commentators, containing first-hand accounts of major issues in Australian history that continue to today, including Aboriginal living conditions, social issues associated with urban sprawl and the experiences of refugees and other immigrants in numerous places across Australia,” Mr de Rijke said.

By Cameron Pegg

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