Excerpt: This special issue presents a critical approach to working with Indigenous Australian communities and the archive. Since 1788, the archive created in and about the place now known as Australia has been shaped by the process of settler colonialism and its “logic of elimination,” in which Indigenous people have been removed from their territories through violence, segregation and/or assimilation. The creation, preservation and interpretation of public historical records has been almost entirely in the hands of settlers and their descendants, making institutional archives a highly fraught space for many Indigenous people, as well as a significant space for creative resistance. Part of this resistance has included insisting on a broader definition of what should be considered evidence of the past, and thus here we take “archive” to have many meanings and forms, from texts, institutions, digital platforms and the environment to the intangible.
