Introduction
The decision to write Storying the Archive: Evoking the Fryer Library Collection has its origins in a 2019 NAIDOC week event, in which Librarians Mia Strasek-Barker and Flic French selected some items from the Fryer Library collection and invited Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander colleagues to respond to them. That project produced a very heartfelt NAIDOC yarn, prompting the decision to create this book for UQ staff and students.
The book contains images of items from the Fryer Library collection and responses to those items by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander academics, researchers, and professional staff, as well as from non-Indigenous colleagues. Professor Sandra Phillips explains the project to evoke the Fryer Library collection aims ‘to illuminate the collections through Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s experience of them, with the intention being to spark joy and contribute to Reconciliation’.
The Fryer Memorial Library Collection
The Fryer Memorial Library of Australian Literature was founded in 1927 in memory of John Denis Fryer, a student at the University of Queensland who passed away in 1923 of WWI-related injuries. Established through a donation of £10 made by members of the UQ Dramatic Society in 1926, the Library was listed by Philanthropy Australia in 2013 as one of the top fifty philanthropic gifts to the nation. The Collection includes extensive literary papers of Australian authors including David Malouf, Peter Carey, Herb Wharton, and Oodgeroo Noonuccal, as well as architectural plans, photographs, recordings, rare books, and records of the University of Queensland Press.
The Fryer Library’s collecting focus is on materials whose form, function and content are likely to advance scholarship, teaching and learning in the fields of book history, Australian literature and drama, Queensland architectural history, anthropology, and Australian cultural and social history. The holdings contain significant collections that preserve Indigenous history, language, literature, and culture, including papers and records detailing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ struggles for civil and political rights. Along with the UQ Archives, the Fryer Library also plays a key role in documenting the history of The University of Queensland.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Collections: Decolonising the Archive
UQ Library’s Senior Manager, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services and Collections, Mia Strasek-Barker (Gamilaraay) notes:
Cultural institutions play a pivotal role in the Western notions shaping our understandings of the histories, knowledges, and stories of places and peoples. Galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs) are often described as guardians of cultural heritage material, responsible for collecting, describing, evaluating, exhibiting, and preserving cultural and environmental material to ensure lasting value to the organisation or public they serve.
At the same time, it is important to recognise that the sector is ‘deeply embedded in the colonial project, in that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander records are rarely told through a narrative of their own’. Strasek-Barker’s essay sets out the need for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to ‘challenge the colonial legacy and tell our own stories using materials in galleries, libraries, archives and museums’.
This book serves that aim.
Yet as Strasek-Barker also points out, understandings of collecting institutions must capture the complexities and nuances in those competing definitions. Some items in the Fryer Library provoked feelings of shock in contributors responding to them, while for others, the items held by the Fryer Library are inspiring, serving to bring back joyful memories of people and places they have known and loved. The works our contributors responded to often serve to document progress towards justice and the growth of the political and civil rights movements for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Many contributors highlighted the important role played by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists, artists, and story-tellers in contributing to the movement for recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ rights to land and the right to preserve and maintain languages and cultures. Items held by the Fryer Library serve to document that history of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s struggles for postcolonial justice.
While the 2023 Referendum to recognise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples failed to enshrine a Voice in the Australian Constitution, the political struggle towards postcolonial justice continues. A postcolonial settlement that includes Treaty (or Treaties) and a truth-telling commission (Makaratta) as set out in the Uluru Statement remain important political aspirations for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
As Professor Megan Davis highlighted in UQ’s NAIDOC Week Keynote Lecture on 10 July 2024, the Referendum was a modest proposal asking non-Indigenous Australia to recognise that “decisions affecting First Nations peoples should always be informed and influenced by First Nations peoples” in the form of a Voice to Parliament. That proposal built on decades of political work, including Constitutional Conventions held around Australia culminating in the 2017 Uluru Statement From The Heart.
Professor Davis referred to post-polling evidence showing the proposal for a Voice was supported by the overwhelming majority of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and by 6.2 million Australians overall. That was not enough.
The work, she said, must continue and a just and fair postcolonial settlement must be co-created by all Australians working together.
We hope this book inspires readers to contribute in some way to that project for justice.
Structure of the book
Whether documenting Dreaming stories for children’s books, getting elected, or living through a plane hijacking, the political activists, artists, writers, painters and story-tellers whose works are collected in the Fryer Library have been hugely influential in Aboriginal Australia.
Some are household names.
Others, less well-known, illustrate historical injustices including the incarceration of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on church-run missions and government reserves during the periods when so-called Protection and Assimilation policies were in effect. The destructive effects of those policies were recognised in Australia’s formal Apology to the Stolen Generation on 13 February 2008.
This book honours the memories of all the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heroes and sheroes whose lives are recorded in the Fryer Library Collection. It begins, as so many books about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people must, with the colonial project, and with images of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people living on missions and reserves. It tracks Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activism after those policies ended, with the works our contributors respond to telling stories of the impacts of those policies and of the continuing work towards achieving political equality in the settler-colonial state. The achievements and experiences of the activists, artists, painters, writers and story-tellers collected in this edition have inspired the current generation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander activists, writers, scholars and educators whose work continues to act as a practice of freedom 1 and of hope 2.
References
- hooks, bell. (1994). Teaching to Transgress : Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge.
- Freire, P., & Freire, A.M.A (2021). Pedagogy of Hope : Reliving Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Acknowledgements
This book was produced through extensive collaboration between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander researchers and academics, professional staff, community members and our non-Indigenous colleagues at UQ. Images, stories, poems, paintings, and documents by and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Elders, heroes and sheroes contribute greatly to the Fryer Library’s Collection, and it is important that these works are seen and interpreted through decolonising and critical lenses. We thank all our contributors for their responses to the items they found in the Fryer archives.
We also thank Linda Justo, Kirsty Rickett, and Fryer Library staff for their work in making the Collections available and for their help in documenting and finding the items that sparked the responses that form this work. In particular, we thank Simon Farley for his invaluable assistance and for continuing to steer this work from its inception in 2022 through to its eventual publication in 2024.
Wherever possible, we have sought copyright and cultural permissions to use images of the items held for preservation in the Fryer Library. We thank the families for providing cultural permission to reproduce the images that make up this book. We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Library’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Services and Collections team, particularly Lesley Acres and Mia Strasek-Baker, and to Thomas Palmer and Marianne Sato from the Library’s Digital Learning team for their attention to the myriad of details that go into creating a book of this nature. From following up copyright and cultural permissions requests to author agreement forms, and tracking this book’s progress, their expertise, advice, and insight has supported and strengthened our work as editors.
A special note of thanks goes to the Fryer Library’s photographer, Andrew Yeo, whose work involves specialist cultural heritage preservation. His preservation photographs accompany the collection items that inspired the authors’ critical contributions. His photographs have brought this book—and the ideas behind it—to life.
Finally, Professor Bunda would like to thank Eastern Arrente artist, Angelina Parfitt, for permission to use a reproduction of her painting as the cover for this book. Angie painted it for Professor Bunda in recognition of the special relationship they share. She is all too often asked to explain the stories her paintings depict, even where there is no story attached to the works. The painting has no story.
But there are many stories inside this book. We hope you enjoy them.
