Retorno a trazos de mil historias [A Return to the Traces of a Thousand Stories]

The online project http://historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au, now based at the University of Western Sydney, takes the educational and digital initiatives of today in a new direction. Dividing the city of Sydney into six geographic regions, we created a site based on the history of the Aborigines of Sydney since the invasion by the English colonisers. The site incorporates new forms of tagging, time line and digital maping to present multiple pathways of information in textual, video and photographic form. After seven years of investigation, we can offer our website balanced between unearthing lost knowledge and discovering new sources of information. We have incorporated all these into the site while exploring the potential for digital mapping and animation for purposes both of education and research. After carefully consulting professional Aboriginal educational groups, we believe that we have created a digital Indigenous history of Sydney, while at the same time returning to the Aborigines the history of which they have been deprived for so long.