Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us

Workshop announcement

We are very excited to announce this year’s workshop on Tati Tati Country in Victoria, Australia from March 21-23. Our German team, along with two representatives from the MfN, Dr. Sylke Frahnert (Curator of Birds) and Mandy Ullmann (Archivist) will be travelling to Australia for this special occasion.

We hope our meeting will be a good starting point for future communication and collaboration between the First Peoples of the Murray River region and Museum für Naturkunde and the Ethnologische Museum in Berlin, Germany. Like many European museums, these Berlin museums care for collections that testify to First Peoples expertise and cultural traditions. In the case of these museums, this includes information documented by William Blandowski and Gerard Krefft, who worked extensively with Indigenous knowledge holders when they travelled along the Murray River in 1856/57.

We invited Uncle Brendan Kennedy, Tati Tati, Wadi Wadi and Mutti Mutti, former Chair of the Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages to come on board as an expert collaborator on language. We also invited Wadi Wadi, Yorta Yorta and Ngarrindgeri master weaver Aunty Glenda Nicholls to provide insight into the waterway fibre processes documented by Blandowski. The project has also benefited from Timothy Stranks’ exhaustive research into the life and work of Blandowski. Together we invited them to Berlin to work with the collections. These visits, expert advice and leadership from Museums Victoria has revealed significant previously unidentified language and cultural belongings. The project has also started to shift the way these institutions think about and care for Southeastern Australian First Peoples collections.

The Australian team suggested this on-Country workshop to present our findings to cultural practitioners and Community representatives and, if possible, initiate a conversation with Berlin institutions on issues of access, First Peoples intellectual property rights and custodianship. With the Berlin team stuck on the other side of the planet, it fell to the Museums Victoria team; Rebecca Carland, Senior Curator, History of Collections; Caine Muir, Senior Curator, Southeastern Collections and Jess Alderton, Project Coordinator to do all the heavy lifting to make this plan a reality. Our heartfelt thanks to them all.


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
fionamoehrle (March 15, 2025). Workshop announcement. Berlin's Australian Archive. Retrieved July 15, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/13hk4


You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.