Ms Shellie Smith

The Time Layered Cultural Map of Australia (TLCMap) is an open-access platform for mapping cultural and historical data. It has an extensive gazetteer of historic Australian settler placenames, and an expanding listing of First Nations place names, along with a growing range of other mapping tools. Users can combine new map layers with existing ones, visualise them as timeline maps and journeys and share them via stable URLs or embed them in external websites. The platform accommodates users new to digital research methods. All that is required to create a map is one or more items with a title and latitude and longitude. 

As TLCMap aims to map the meaning and cultural value of locations on the Australian continent, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander involvement and collaboration is essential. One of the avenues for this partnership is a Fellowship scheme for Indigenous PhD students, a key part of our 2023-4 LIEF project. This will provide collaborative opportunities for the development team to learn from Indigenous researchers, and for the Indigenous Fellows to steer development and use TLCMap systems for projects of their own choosing. Two $10,000 Fellowships will be offered. 

This is an opportunity for TLCMap to benefit from genuine collaborative input, and for experimentation and skill-building on the part of the Fellows. Proposals for work under the scheme can be broad-brush and exploratory, and assistance will be provided with technical aspects of digital mapping. 

Project Description

The consequence of the early and the brutal colonisation of Muloobinbah (Newcastle), and the effect this had on the Awabakal people through displacement and death, the destruction of traditional life was swift. These impacts have resulted in a landscape where cultural knowledges are scarce and often contested. Although fragments of knowledge remain within Community, the western archive – with all its bias and misinterpretations – has become a key part of rebuilding this shattered culture. The failure to recognise the destructive impacts – both past and present – those colonial practices have had on Indigenous culture, and the western built environment’s role in their ongoing displacement, has yet to be reconciled. The call to engage and design “with Country” is nothing new, but as with previous iterations, it fails to acknowledge this devastating history. Opportunities for communities to reawaken their culture need facilitation before the sharing of these Indigenous Knowledges can be expected, otherwise further marginalisation is likely to occur. This research aims to address this problem by developing approaches for enabling cultural reclamation of Indigenous knowledges related to spatial practices. Through employing Indigenous research methodologies for rebuilding and reclaiming Awabakal spatial practice, the research will propose a meaningful approach to engaging with this material through creative practice research.

Firstly, a triangulation of knowledge will be developed and gathered through:

A review of the western archive (specifically the Source Book of Aboriginal Newcastle, University of Newcastle), yarning with community, and performing creative cultural practice. These different forms of knowledge will be employed to develop a more holistic view of the fragmented traditional spatial practice of the Awabakal people.

Secondly, the information will be mapped using the Time Layered Map interface to create a spacialised resource of Awabakal Newcastle in the early colonial period.

And thirdly, these assembled knowledges that have become spatialised will become embedded in the creative practice project-based component of this research. Creative practice research offers multi-modal, situated opportunities to explore how this cultural reawakening can become part of engaging and designing with Community and Country.