Film as cultural memory : the struggle for repatriation and restitution of cultural property in central Australia

My contribution to this volume reflects on how the Strehlow filmworks" the ethnographic films made by TGH Strehlow in the middle of the 20th century" intersect with the idea of repatriation. The aim is to invoke a number of questions that relate to the recovery of cultural memory and the maintenance of cultural heritage through film. At the heart of this inquiry are questions about the provenance and process of collection of the cultural materials now held by the Strehlow Research Centre (SRC). There has been, for many years up to the present, an implied concern with how repatriation would be enacted with the collection. The process has undergone a major shift by the introduction of digital technologies as a means of effecting digital repatriation and in this fashion overcoming some of the barriers that have historically been said to exist in repatriating physical objects from collecting institutions.