This presentation addresses appropriate methods of representation of Aboriginal cultural heritage concepts and practices which derive from traditional notions of “pathways” in legends, stories and song and from actual historic routes of travel employed by resident groups in pre-settlement Australia - for trade, resource utilisation or similar events. Such concepts are problematical and difficult to represent in normal data-base programs utilised in heritage agencies. Consequently, they have been largely ignored by relevant agencies, although practitioners and recorders have historically sought to record the relationship of discrete landscape features within these “cultural pathways”.

Heritage agency recording programs are generally focussed on the discrete representation of particular places and areas as “dots” or bounded areas, isolated from their associated “travelling” stories or other traditional concepts. Aboriginal concepts of such “pathways” are consequently not appropriately reflected in agency data bases. These current methods of recording have been the subject of complaint from representative Aboriginal groups concerned about this inadequate level of recording and representation and at the inadequate provision of information, derived from existing data bases, to contemporary non-indigenous land users by heritage agencies.

The presentation will report about a collaborative project conducted with Adnyamathanha people which examined alternative means of spatial representation of linear data derived from Adnyamathanha tradition and custom.