The Wire

A Cape York digital recording project is breathing new life into museum relics and reviving traditional knowledge. For the last three years, the Balkanu Cape York Development Corporation has been recording traditional knowledge from elders in the Lakefield region. Project Manager Victor Steffensen recently had the opportunity to travel to the Australian Museum with elder Tommy George Snr to record knowledge about items taken from the Cape York region one hundred years ago. Mr Steffensen says 79-year-old Tommy George and his 84-year-old brother George Musgrave are the last two Kuku Thaypan-speaking elders in the Cape York region and are the mentors and leaders of the traditional knowledge recording project. The obvious next step would be to have the artefacts returned to country – but that may be difficult to achieve. Mr Steffensen says that ironically, they are now grateful to W.E. Roth for taking the artefacts, because they have been preserved for the current generation despite cultural influences. W.E. Roth was a medical doctor who was made the Protector of Aborigines on the Cape.