Reconstructing Australian
Aboriginal Governance by
Systems Design
Peter Radoll

Peter.Radoll@anu.edu.au | Jabal Indigenous Higher Education Centre, Australian National University

[1] “United Ngunnawal
Elders Council
2008.” Department
of Disability, Housing
and Community
Services, Multicultural,
Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander Affairs,
updated 13 May 2008.
< http://www.dhcs.act.
gov.au/matsia/atsia/
ngunnawal_issues>

The way in which Western European societies organize themselves reflects other aspects of their world. The governance structure of a community is one example. The small rural community where I reside in Australia has a population of 1,200, but the shire itself has approximately 11,000 residents. Recently, we voted for our local government representatives, who then voted in a mayor of the shire. Federal elections are conducted in the same manner: We vote for federal representatives, and the governing political party votes for a leader, the prime minister, to govern Australia. This is all very neatly ordered and assumes a particular hierarchy of governance. But what if a society were not structured in such a manner? What if it did not have a leader but rather were led by a council of the wisest and sometimes oldest members of the society with perhaps a single, alternating spokesperson but not one leader? What if that society were a subculture within a structured hierarchical society? This is how Australian Aboriginal communities are structured.

Having a council of elders to govern a community is how Aboriginal communities are organized. Historically, Aboriginal communities are led by a council of elders, among whom the power is distributed. Usually, all family groups in that community are represented. While Australia has been colonized for more than 200 years, Aboriginal communities are for the most part still governed or represented through some form of Aboriginal council of elders. Even in urban areas, elders councils exist to represent the indigenous people of the land. One example of this is in Australia’s capital city, Canberra, where the Australian Capital Territory’s (ACT) government recognizes and supports the United Ngunnawal

Elders Council. The purpose of the council is to advise the ACT chief minister on matters associated with indigenous issues across the ACT [1].

In recent times Aboriginal culture and traditional knowledge have come to the forefront. Aboriginal elders want to continue passing on their traditions, knowledge, and culture to younger generations, but it is difficult to do so in a globalized, modern, multicultural society like Australia. Elders are concerned about the younger generations growing up without their culture, about a lack of interest in their language, dance, and traditions. To prevent its extinction, the elders want to preserve Aboriginal culture— family histories, traditional language, and customs— for their descendents.

With the onset of the technological age, it has been suggested that information technology can preserve Aboriginal culture and traditional knowledge in a format that can be distributed easily and for many years to come. Moreover, this technology enables the digital repatriation of traditional artifacts from major museums around the world, the recording of rock art sites, and the digital management of cultural heritage. This material is also attractive to anthropologists and linguists for research purposes. Interestingly, the nation’s scientists also want to preserve Aboriginal traditional knowledge, but for reasons like carbon pollution management, which is associated with global warming.

Information technology may offer a solution to the storage, distribution, and retrieval of Aboriginal traditional knowledge through databases and Web technologies. Databases in their architecture assume a western European governance hierarchy—in that there is a single database administrator who holds the systems