An example of AIATSIS leading best practice in culturally appropriate collection management is the reattribution of Jimmie Barker’s audio recordings and the belated recognition of his groundbreaking innovation in developing sound recording technology with his brother Billy Barker.
Jimmie Barker (1900–1972) was the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Australian to use recorded sound as a tool to preserve and document Aboriginal culture. As early as the 1920s he recorded King Clyde of the Barwon Blacks. In the first decades of the 20th century Jimmie came into contact with Muruwari elders at Aboriginal reservations at Mundiwa and later at Brewarrina Mission.
Through these connections Jimmie had direct exposure to pre-contact knowledge systems and cultural practices reaching back deep into the early part of the 19th century and beyond. Many of Jimmie’s recordings include detailed descriptions of, and reflections upon, what he often refers to as ‘the old ways’. They represent a crucial link with pre-colonial Muruwari and Ngemba culture.
As featured in last year’s AIATSIS annual report, we have been working with Barker’s descendants to review the recordings he made in northern New South Wales in the 1960s and 70s that had been deposited by Janet Mathews, with the aim of appropriately attributing Barker for his parts of the collection that had previously been attributed to Mathews. This year, after a thorough investigation of both the content and the circumstances in which the recordings were made, it was determined that the naming and other associated rights for the majority of these recordings should be attributed to Jimmie Barker.
It became clear not only that Barker was the first Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander Australian to use recorded sound to document Aboriginal culture but that with his brother Billy he had independently developed a technique
to make sound recordings, without prior knowledge of the work of Edison and others in the development of sound recording technology. The collection documents have been found to include detailed descriptions of their experiments, with their first successful recording taking place in 1909.
AIATSIS invited Jimmie Barker’s grandson, Roy Barker Jr, to present the Alice Moyle Memorial Lecture at the 2019 Australian Sound Recordings Association Conference in Canberra in November. This was the first public announcement of Jimmie Barker’s claim to have invented sound recording in Australia, and caused quite a sensation, potentially rewriting the history of sound recording in Australia.