Paper short abstract:

This paper reviews the outcomes of a large Australian Research Council-funded project, Globalisation, photography and race, a partnership between four European museums aiming to historicise photograph collections and return images to Aboriginal relatives and descendants.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reviews the outcomes of a large Australian Research Council funded project, Globalisation, photography and race: the Circulation and Return of Aboriginal Photographs in Europe, a partnership between four European museums aiming to historicise photograph collections and return images to Aboriginal relatives and descendants. Archival photographs of Australian Aboriginal people were amassed during the colonial period for a range of purposes, yet rarely to further an Indigenous agenda. Today however such images have been re-contextualised, used to reconstruct family history, document culture and express connections to place. They have become a significant heritage resource for relatives and descendants. As a medium of exchange, photographs of Aboriginal people have served vastly different purposes within Indigenous and Western knowledge systems, from embodiments of kin and ancestral powers, to visual data that actively created scientific knowledge. In the digital age, it has become an urgent matter to understand and balance these traditions, and over
 the last decade, numerous innovative projects have employed digital means
 of making this resource accessible to Aboriginal communities: what are the benefits and challenges of this work to date?