Dynamic Consent (DC) is both a model and a specific web-based tool that enables clear, granular communication and recording of participant consent choices over time. The DC model enables individuals to know and to decide how personal research information is being used and provides a way in which to exercise legal rights provided in privacy and data protection law. The DC tool is flexible and responsive, enabling legal and ethical requirements in research data sharing to be met and for online health information to be maintained. DC has been used in rare diseases and genomics, to enable people to control and express their preferences regarding their own data. However, DC has never been explored in relationship to historical collections of bioscientific and genetic heritage or to contexts involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (First Peoples of Australia). In response to the growing interest by First Peoples throughout Australia in genetic and genomic research, and the increasing number of invitations from researchers to participate in community health and wellbeing projects, this article examines the legal and ethical attributes and challenges of DC in these contexts. It also explores opportunities for including First Peoples' cultural perspectives, governance, and leadership as a method for defining (or redefining) DC on cultural terms that engage best practice research and data analysis as well as respect for meaningful and longitudinal individual and family participation.

The Strathfieldsaye Estate collection at the University of Melbourne Archives is discussed in relation to recognising, protecting and reclaiming Koori (First Peoples of southeast Australia) heritage. The settler collection includes early 1900s photographs of Koori people within two distinct albumsa family album that includes a series of studio portraits of Koori adults and children, and an album depicting Koori families on Ramahyuck Aboriginal Mission Station. In the past, these albums have been defined by, and limited to, traditional archiving practices excluding Koori interpretation, authorship and social context. Restoring Koori ownership and authorship of intangible heritage plays a large part in consolidating ancestor photographs with Koori perspectives of identity and culture.

This article considers the dynamic relationship between Aboriginal Australia identity, western history and the recuperation of lost ancestral memories. In recent decades many Australian cultural institutions have supported Aboriginal community groups in the revival of Aboriginal languages, songs and stories. The reclamation of heritage from archival collections has helped strengthen Aboriginal claim and control of ancestor histories – especially when significant materials are returned to people of a descendant community and given meaningful social context. Often set in place from these interactions are cultural protocols and ethics formulating future material access, return and usage. Looking more closely at intercultural practices of repatriation, this article relates Aboriginal pathways of ancestral memory restoration (and invention of memory) to living story. In particular, it examines the cultural decision-making of two Australian Aboriginal family groups – Wirlomin Minang (Noongar) families from the Great Southern of Western Australia and Gunai Kurnai (Koorie) families from the Gippsland region of Victoria – who characterize kin reactions to the returned colonial historiography of their shared ancestor Bessy Flowers (c. 1849–95), as well as family grief and shame at her absent memory. The difference between the archival material of photographs and letters that represent Bessy and the ways her Wirlomin Minang and Gunai Kurnai families imagine themselves created context for the mixed-media co-production, No Longer a Wandering Spirit. This article explores how intercultural efforts to strengthen family story might widen circles of knowledge about Aboriginal cultural dislocation, historical exclusion and the ever-present action of resistance and recovery.

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