This
web site is a type of database.
The various people involved
and the collective life of the various times and places
in which we do our project, get swept up and displayed
in this website. That work is filtering and translating.
In this section we show a little of who does that and
how. We show ‘the making of ..” in
the way film makers sometimes produce a little movie
about the movie
The version of the website you are finding your way about in at present, is version 2.0, its final form at the end of the project. We actually have no trace of version 1.1. Version 1.2 an 1.3 have been archived. Trevor van Weeren put a design for version 1.3 together in May 2004 in response to discussions we had at our meeting in March. He used a particular template. This is the first item in our display.
A story.
During the March ’04
meeting in Darwin, we discussed the website for the
project.
“Who or what is
it for?”, we asked.
•It’s an exhibit, or an archive, both for
ourselves and as a context setting device.
• It provides information about what’s emerging
from the work
• It can help in acquitting our grant money
• We can be checked out by those in communities
who think we might be able to help them.
In June 2004, when Michael
Christie came to Melbourne for a smaller meeting with
Helen Verran, Trevor van Weeren and Juli Cathcart, we
were looking at Trevor’s working image of the
website: index cards arranged in a box. We recognised
the significance of a talk Raymattja had given us all
those years ago about the nyiknyik (native rat) and
its djarrma (carrying messages) work. We saw that the
image of the network of grass tunnels that these rats
sometimes make, is like a website. With their comings
and goings, this way and that, doing the gossipy, obsessive
work of carrying bits to and fro, nyiknyik forge nets
of connections and scurry-ways through the tall grass
of the small plains that are dotted around north east
Arnhemland and other parts of northern Australia.
Our nyiknyik is email.
The log of meetings and their minutes that the project
manager Simon Niblock keeps is one version of the network
of tunnels and connections that link things up. This
website is another version of the nyiknyik matrix. That
is our project.
There is an important
difference between the website with its carefully constructed
mesh of links both within the site and to the outside
and the nyiknyik mesh of grass tunnels. This website
has been made as an extra task. It does not just grow
in the actual process of doing the work that makes up
the many sites of collective work that we call ‘the
IKRMNA project’. And that task of website making
is done by Helen Verran, Trevor van Weeran and Juli
Cathcart down in Melbourne.
The actual manipulations
of arranging things through dreamweaver is done by Trevor
and Juli in their small house in Abbotsford. Some days,
just a few minutes away in Collingwood, across the foootbridge
over Hoddle Street, Helen struggles to get words to
hang together, sending numerous email messages to Trevor
and Juli because that is quicker than running back and
forth across the footbridge. Email also allows Michael
and others to tell us what was happening in various
places in the Northern Territory. They send us documents
that get linked into the site.
Why have we done this
extra task of making the website? And why are we also
exhibiting the work of making the exhibit about the
work? Is this concern with the personal just a form
of aggrandising self-indulgence? What some people call
‘vanity ethnography’? A short answer to
the charge is to point out that the ways we do our work
becomes ‘clotted’ as the entities that are
the outcome of the work.
The Aboriginal participants
in our projects tell us over and over again that things
are not real without their stories. With this website,
including this story about its making, we are trying
to realise (in the sense of actualise) indigenous databases
in the Aboriginal sense of the real.
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