Ara irititja exemplifies how indigenous ontologies are reshaping the technologies of information and cultural heritage management. A project that began in 1994 with the digital repatriation of photographs, oral histories, film recordings, and documents to remote communities in central Australia, Ara irititja is transitioning from an object-based FileMaker Pro database into a multimedia knowledge management system. in this article, i build on two years of anthropological fieldwork to interrogate three tools of knowledge preservation and transmission often taken for granted and/or presumed neutral-databases, archives, and the internet-to argue that they can and must be actively reworked as contemporary Aboriginal people imagine, produce, and safeguard their own cultural futures. 1

In 2008, an Aboriginal Australian artist based in Melbourne, Australia, created a kangaroo-teeth necklace, revivifying an art/cultural practice for the first time in over a century. She was inspired to do so after viewing an 1880 photograph of an ancestor wearing such adornment. In this article, I bring the necklace and the photograph into the same analytical frame, arguing for the photograph as an archive itself. I consider the trajectories through which the 19th-century image has been replicated and circulated in various productions of knowledge about Aboriginal people, and how a 21st-century artist is mobilizing it not just as a repository of visual information, but also as an impetus to creative production. She produces objects of value and is making culture anew, in a context in which Aboriginality has long/often been presumed absent, extinct or elsewhere.

In this article, four women engage, talk, and write about Indigenous sovereignty in Australia's southeast-the region of Australia most devastated by colonial incursion and the site of vibrant cultural activism in the present day. We are two non-Indigenous academics (Sabra Thorner and Fran Edmonds) working together with two Indigenous artist-curators (Maree Clarke and Paola Balla) in a process of collaborative, intercultural culture-making. We mobilise two ethnographic examples-Maree Clarke's backyard and the 2016-2017 Sovereignty exhibition at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art-to assert that decolonising is an ongoing process which requires that non-Indigenous peoples acknowledge their own privilege, learn Aboriginal histories, imagine both difference and coexistence; and that the goals of decolonisation are as diverse as the activists calling for it. In both contexts, art/culture-making, alongside storytelling, are crucial forms of Indigenous knowledge production, led by Aboriginal women via their engagements with the artworld(s) in Melbourne and beyond.

There has been wonderful work animating vectors of relatedness, negotiation, and collaboration between museums and "source communities"; foregrounding the significance of objects, what they can/might do, and how they act in museum anthropo lo gy

Photography has long been central to the construction of Aboriginal peoples in the Australian national imaginary. In the last 20 years, the social role of photography has shifted: from origins in scopic regimes that racialized and dispossessed Aboriginal peoples to an era of contemporary reappropriation, recontextualizing colonial archives, and producing new Indigenous high art photography. Photographs are no longer stable, visible testimony of Indigenous peoples' presumed imminent decline or innate savagery but are, rather, colonial objectifications now available for resignification as evidence of kinship networks, land claims, and local knowledge systems. In July 2006, two exhibitions were spearheading these important transitions. “Colliding Worlds” opened at Melbourne Museum, and “Michael Riley: Sights Unseen” premiered at the National Gallery of Australia (NGA) in Canberra. Together, these exhibitions destabilize historical legacies of the visual in Australia's national imaginary, resignifying photography as a medium of new knowledge production, aesthetic expression, and social change.