Nidja baal Gideon Digby. Baal quoppaduk wedjela maaman. Baal boordier Noongarpedia. This is Gideon, he is a beautiful non-Aboriginal man who has been central in leading us in the Noongarpedia work. Baal boordier Wikimedia Australia. He is the President of Wikimedia Australia. Baal gnulla koorl Noongarpedia kalyogool. He has been traveling along with us on the project continually.
Nidja Mum Jeno. Baal nyininy koorlboorli yirra yaakiny karnarn. This is Jen Buchanan. She sits behind, standing tall and speaking truly. Baal Katatjin Koorlboorli University of Western Australia. She is a Research Associate of the project and is based at the University of Western Australia.
The project also turned to existing databases in various stages of evolution. Some of these included:
Len Collard’s See:
Len Collard’s Nidja Beeliar Boodjar Noonook Nyininy: see
Cockburn Council’s Nyungar Wardan Katatjin Bid-Derbal Nara: see
Kim Scott’s See
SWALSC (South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council) and other organisations’ and individuals’ databases. See
In this way we and other Wikimedians became mentors and co-producers. We set out to attract others to a process of becoming volunteers, activists and
This was in some ways the most important part of the project, since it involved recruiting citizens to the Noongar
Some might suggest that we depart from traditional knowledge-transfer techniques, where elders are central to the process of managing the transmission of Noongar knowledge. We do accept, as Collard et al. (2004) put it: ‘
Although senior Noongar people are both conducting and assisting the project, it is equally true that young people with an interest in popular music and culture, in urban life and technology, and also non-Noongar sympathisers, share responsibility for uploading the language and its burden of knowledge into the digital environment.
Indeed, a difficulty that is potentially dangerous for the future of the language is experienced when Noongar people or groups (whether families or associations) retain
During the early stages of conversation among the initial team, it became evident that we would have to contend with layers of impacts associated with intergenerational colonial trauma. We predicted that this may deter Noongar community members from supporting the work and sharing their knowledge on culture and language; and that they would be very uncomfortable with Noongar knowledge being put on an open-access global network. Dealing with this was a crucial part of the early work of the project and something that took much of our time during the first year.
However, what seemed more clear as the project progressed was that the Wikipedia platform itself might prove helpful, not just in allowing people to start making Noongar knowledge public but also in allowing us to experiment with how to move through the challenges of postcolonial trauma.
Of course many of the traditional Western ideas and practices have been seriously shaken up by the global digital revolution, particularly since the creation of Web 2.0 platforms.
Typically, Western practice and institutions (such as universities, heritage organisations and old disciplines in the sciences and social sciences) approach their work with Indigenous groups using the following narrative structure as a frame. This frame takes much of its inspiration from Romantic traditions.
Chapter one of this narrative I’ll call the ‘Genesis’ chapter. Here, so the story goes, Indigenous knowledge existed as pristine, intact and full of magnificence (or at least with great insight). Many of our early coastal explorers, visiting the shores of the west coast of Australia, saw Noongar as those who possessed wisdom untainted by the iniquities of Europe, and representing the key to the study of what was called ‘the History of Man’. In this chapter science ‘discovers’ knowledge that its rich for the taking.
Chapter two I’ll call ‘Tainting by outsider forces’. Here, ironically, the cruel and despicable forces of colonisation smash Indigenous knowledge-holders. I say ironically because, as Edward Said and others have reminded us, science and the academy were deeply implicated in that process and have since played a huge part in the ‘Orientalisation’ of Indigenous knowledge (Said, 1987).
Chapter three I’ll call the ‘Death of culture’ chapter. Here, those Indigenous people who survive the onslaught are a ‘broken people’, culturally deprived and lost, devoid of any traditional knowledge and living in a dysfunctional state with little access to the knowledge, language and benefits of modernity. The only hints of the old knowledge remain in remnant artefacts, often called ‘tangible heritage’, and in the form of burial sites, rock art, tools and the occasional sacred tree. It is assumed that in limited circumstances some elders possess some of this knowledge.
The final chapter I’ll call the ‘the Emergence of the New High Priests’. This conclusion to the story starts from the same premise that has prompted most social policy interventions into the lives of Indigenous Australians: that there is a need for special measures to be taken to ‘protect’ this knowledge, knowledge that is facing a crisis of survival. The job of these new heroes of knowledge, these ‘New High Priests’, is to capture what remains and see that it is protected in what my Roebourne friend, Ngarluma man Tyson Mowerin, calls ‘sleeping archives’ (cited in Collard and Palmer, 2015a).
I am not suggesting that elements of this narrative are in some way
Ingrid, can I bring you in here?
Noongar katatjin (knowledge) cannot exist in the absence of Noongar family, country and healthy spirit. Conversely, where the other elements exist, knowledge will flourish. The ongoing health (what Westerners might call knowledge integrity) of Noongar katatjin is held in song, on country, through ‘karnarn’ (speaking truly across the generations). In this way Noongar knowledge is a living thing, made alive through country, visits to country and maintained by good relationships across moort (family).
The way that it is ‘protected’ is through it being produced and reproduced across the generations. Rather than collecting and capturing it, knowledge is maintained by dancing it, singing it, walking it, speaking it and sharing it. In this way the knowledge experts are the dancers, singers, storytellers, teachers, and carers of children. In other words, the way that katatjin is made strong and brought back from ‘sleeping’ is to reignite its production. We don't necessarily put it somewhere (like books, museums, dictionaries etc.), we get it happening.
And that’s roughly where we got to after lots of talking and lots of contemplation. This didn’t relieve us of the challenges but it gave us a way of thinking about how we could move ahead.
The first challenge is in coming to a decision about what constitutes Noongar. Research undertaken by our colleagues at the Noongar Boodjar Language Cultural Aboriginal Corporation indicates that Noongar grammar has undergone massive reconfiguration over the past one hundred or so years. Noongar Language Centre:
The next challenge would be in recruiting a good number of people who are confident enough in language to become active in posting. The evidence in front of us from what and who we knew suggested that the few people who were confident enough to use full sentences in Noongar were not particularly ‘digitally native’ (members of a generation that grew up with competence in digital platforms) or digitally confident.
Furthermore, most of these people are overcommitted and involved in other Noongar renewal work. Clearly, allowing only posts in full Noongar sentences would likely limit the participation of younger people, who were beginning their journey with Noongar language and knowledge, leaving them out of the process until they could first acquire a high level of skill and knowledge.
Within the first several months of the project, much of our time was occupied with gathering as much information and sources about Noongar culture as we could. We started by using the set of listed domains that we had set out within the ARC grant and using them as a structure to help guide our search. This included country, story, citizenship and pop culture. In the first instance we stuck to what was already available on open-source platforms already available online. This allowed us to start creating entries in what we called the ‘hybrid wiki site’ specially created for our project.
We used the term ‘hybrid’ to denote our keenness to design a ’pedia that would encourage people to use Noongar, English and what Len Collard calls ‘South-west West Australian’ – combining Australian English and Noongar usages and content.
The Gnullar kadadjiny website was no longer needed after the creation of the Noongarpedia incubator site.
Later in the first year the ‘Noongarpedia’ Facebook page was created, attracting over 250 followers, keen to keep updated on the project. Facebook page:
Quickly the project found a means through which to identify data that helped with the creation of the ’pedia, while staying connected with those who later became key Noongarpedians.
At the same time, Jennie began to establish a relationship with me. At that time I was Vice-President of Wikimedia Australia.
Current site available at
The other person contacted Wikipedia Legal in San Francisco and they sent out a letter to Len and Co. about the use of the WikipediaTM trademark. When I emailed Len he responded with ‘Yes, let’s set up a meet’. I didn't hear anything further, so I assumed that he had just let the project go because of the trademark issue. I didn’t hear anything again until August/September, when Jennie turned up to a Wikimedia meet-up.
As we started experimenting with a Noongapedia site, it became clear that such a site could have real value given the amount of digitally recorded information that already existed that is related to Noongar. One of the immediate benefits of creating a Noongarpedia site was that this content, existing in disparate places, could be drawn together using Noongarpedia as a centralised platform. In this way Noongarpedia could complement other digital sites by being a point of reference for the immense body of works that exist, and a very accessible place for many trying to gain information.
When we began to understand how Wikipedia operates we started to see its potential as a means of recruiting young Noongarmedians as active producers and transmitters of knowledge. In common with traditional Noongar systems, the Noongarpedia site encourages users to be both consumers and producers of knowledge. This very much deepened their experience with Noongar, as users were forced to engage with it across modes: sometimes listening, sometimes reading, sometimes seeing and sometimes making and reproducing.
Web 2.0 platforms emerged when conventional and more static websites opened the way for blogs and social networking sites. These new sites allowed users to interact and collaborate in the production of content with each other through social media dialogue. In this way Web 2.0 platforms were designed to draw upon the knowledge and work of visitors as co-creators of user-generated content, using web-based architectures to build knowledge communities. Here knowledge is ‘open source’ and shared in the sense that consumers are also producers. Axel Bruns (2008) coined the term ‘produsage’ as a way of describing this kind of user-led content creation. Examples of Web 2.0 include social networking sites, blogs, wikis, folksonomies, video sharing sites, hosted services, Web applications (apps), and mashups (Hartley et al., 2013; Flew, 2008).
First, as a team it was important for us to examine what others had produced and start to think about the history of Noongar knowledge and Noongar knowledge transmission. Although we are a team of academics, we hadn’t previously worked together to make sure we brought this content together. Our expertise varies and while, between us, we probably had a good idea of many of the online sources, we wanted to make sure we brought all this together in one place.
Second, part of our plan was to start the work by gathering potential sources for those who we were keen to get involved. Even at this stage we knew it would be good to offer potential Noongarpedians a body of work to help them use as sources.
On the 11th November 2016 we remembered him in this way on our Noongarpedia Facebook page: