Digital Futures for Bilingual Books

In dozens of Indigenous communities in the Northern Territory, thousands of books in Indigenous Australian languages were produced for use in classrooms, with illustrations by local artists, usually published on site and with a small local distribution. The production of these resources involved a blending of Indigenous knowledges with Western technologies bringing previously oral-only stories into a written mode, enabling a different means of transmission and a different degree of permanence, as well as a radical redefinition of text and representation. The digitisation of this body of literature in the Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages extends these shifts even further, creating new audiences, contexts and opportunities for the transmission of Indigenous knowledges contained in these books. This chapter addresses some of the implications of the changes associated with the shift from oral to paper to digital modes.