Family and country: Accounting for fractured connections under colonisation in Victoria, Australia

The Koori Health Research Database (KHRD) began in 2000, as a partnership between the Bunjilaka Aboriginal Cultural Centre at Museum Victoria and the Onemda Koori Health Unit at the University of Melbourne. Its purpose is to reconstitute the Aboriginal population of Victoria under colonisation, using family histories, genealogies, civil registrations, and other historical records of the colonising state. The KHRD is unique internationally as a cradle-to-grave dataset documenting from the mid-nineteenth century the demography and health of an indigenous people under colonisation. This paper discusses the historical context of the database, our changing understanding based on recent enhancement of the data and new research by other scholars, and the light it sheds on the official strategies of alienation from country and family and their demographic consequences. It demonstrates the paradox, that while concentration of the remnant Aboriginal people into government reserves was destructive to their health and wellbeing, it enabled those Victorian Aboriginal people to preserve the knowledge of their lineages, languages and culture.