The Uniqueness of the BlackWords Resource: Memoir of an Indexer (2014)

Since its launch in 2007 BlackWords has enjoyed strong Indigenous leadership and a dedicated Indigenous team, allowing Indigenous storytellers, academics and researchers to determine its look, content, and scope. The BlackWords team of researchers and indexers is a community consisting of individuals from across institutions such as the University of Queensland, the University of Western Australia, Flinders University, the University of Sydney, the University of Wollongong and AIATSIS, each of whom has brought their own expertise and specialist interest to the database (BlackWords; Holt; Kilner 62).In a sense, Indigenous control of BlackWords falls within the context of the traditional Aboriginal kinship system. BlackWords has had many mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, sisters, brothers, cousins and non-Indigenous members, who have nurtured it from its early establishment. Within this relationship, they represent the national team consisting of national coordinators and research assistants. This extended family are those people who are members and/or descendants of diverse Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island groups and communities as distant as Western Australia and the Torres Straits Islands. The non-Indigenous, or those with no blood relations, come in the form of the cross-cultural connection between BlackWords and AustLit. For example, Joan Keating, a Senior Researcher and Content Editor from AustLit, gave valuable help to the BlackWords team. From its establishment in 2006, she contributed her knowledge, guidance, training and skills, providing information on bibliographic protocols, and indexing procedures. Kerry Kilner, in her role as Director of AustLit, has also been instrumental in the establishment and continued development of BlackWords.The BlackWords team both past and present range from celebrated authors, poets, playwrights, activists, and high academic achievers in fields ranging from literature, education, history, political science, philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, communications and cultural studies; it includes those who have dedicated their services to their Indigenous communities. For example, past team members Dr Jeanine Leane, Elizabeth Hodgson and Yvette Holt were all winners of the UQP David Unaipon award for an unpublished manuscript by an Indigenous author; and past National Coordinator Dr Anita Heiss, as a joint nominee with another member of the BlackWords team, Peter Minter, won the Deadly Sounds Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Music, Sport, Entertainment and Community Awards for outstanding achievements in Literature in 2008 as editors for the Macquarie Pen Anthology of Aboriginal Literature (BlackWords 2012). Dr Jackie Huggins, advisor and supporter of BlackWords in the formative years, became a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for her services to the Indigenous community in 2001. It is these people from diverse cultural backgrounds and their diverse areas of scholarship who are the members of this national extended Indigenous family, the brothers and sisters who have not only extended their arms to BlackWords but also their literary and intellectual capabilities, quality of scholarship and influential positions within the Indigenous literary world, national and international.Personally, as a UQ-based researcher for AustLit's BlackWords, my primary purpose is to create biographical, bibliographical and informational database records. This includes indexing works of literature, criticism, and reviews into the database and gathering biographical information about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers. But for me, this unique database has offered more than a catalogue of records. It has also been a powerful research tool, a tool that has offered some incredible findings.In this paper, first I will illustrate how my work as a researcher/indexer led me to discover my own Aboriginal heritage and more about my Grandmother's life story. …