Following the Trade Routes

‘Following the Trade Routes’ is a promising, country centred learning project to revitalise critical cultural practices and vital networks that once brought together Aboriginal groups from three States of Australia.

Existing anthropological research recognises a long history of Aboriginal peoples travelling on country, following deeply spiritual song lines and exchanging significant items or tools. However the evidence is incomplete and Aboriginal elders with lived experience of the trade routes have not been brought together to share their cultural knowledge nor to compare it with contemporary practice.

This project will fill the knowledge gaps and thus empower the cultural bosses to reinvigorate fundamental and foundational cultural governance systems. 

• The project will bring together for the first time Aboriginal Elders from WA, NT, and SA with deep cultural knowledge of the trade routes and objects from country and across diverse language groups. Elders will attend bush camp workshops in Central Australia to transfer custody of this knowledge to an emerging generation of senior leaders, known as the Red Shirts - thereby revitalising culture, informing contemporary practices and expanding the existing archive of knowledge and governance.
• The Red Shirts are a significant cohort of initiated men, practitioners of law and custom, many of whom already have influence within their communities. Red Shirts are ‘new bosses’, an emerging modern generation of Aboriginal leaders. The project will formally recognise their authority and empower them to appropriately participate in the development of policy and governance.
• The Elders will impart knowledge and ceremony relating to the engraved pearl shells [Riji] from the north-west Kimberley coast and the stone tools originating from the central desert. The workshops will explore these ceremonies and the deep spiritual significance and value the objects assumed as they traversed between coastal and desert communities.
• The bush camp workshops will be semi-structured and safe, held on traditional homelands. They will include day trips to significant socio-cultural sites on country, providing context and place, and affirming identity. The Elders and Red Shirts will participate face to face, with demonstration and imitation, sharing both the most mundane aspects of camp life and also the most secret and sacred ceremonies of cultural practice.
• Where appropriate, Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association and the Australian National University will prepare audio-visual documentation of the project including song, story, and cultural maintenance in order to expand the archive and to assist emerging cultural practitioners.
• The project will include the creation of new objects, recognising significant artistic preparation and practices in collaboration with the SA Museum for a major exhibition of pearl shell pieces, once traded, to be held at the SA Museum.
• Source material currently held by AIATSIS will inform practice. Project partners ANU and SA Museum will interview anthropologists and will document practice on country.