TIM PALMER: While different Aboriginal communities around the country are struggling with the disappearance of their languages and stories, students in one remote Indigenous community have begun experimenting with digital story telling.
The students, from Hermannsburg in Central Australia, are learning how to use digital media to record and share their stories online, part of an initiative of the Northern Territory Library.
It's an attempt to reinvigorate old ways of passing down oral history through the generations and traditional leaders believe it is working.
Maisie Cohen reports.
(Sounds of birds chirping)
MAISIE COHEN: It's about nine in the morning and the sun is already beating down, heating up the dry desert air.
We've just been driving through the stunning landscapes outside of Alice Springs, red dirt and wide floodplains spotted with scrub, surrounded by the craggy peaks of the MacDonnell Ranges. All the river beds and creeks around here are bone dry.
A team of researchers from the University of Western Sydney have travelled here to Hermannsburg, a small Aboriginal settlement about an-hour-and-a-half out of Alice Springs. They've chosen this place to bring the art of Aboriginal storytelling into the 21st century.
The research team will be asking a group of children to write and record a story about themselves or their family to upload to their branch of the Community Stories database.
(Sound of Mark Inkamala speaking in Arrernte)
Mark Inkamala lives in Hermannsburg, also known as Ntaria. He introduces the concept of digital storytelling to the students in Arrernte.
JUAN SALAZAR: So what we gonna do the rest of today is that you need to start writing your stories and taking your pictures. You can use drawings and you are very lucky that you speak more than one language.
I'm almost finished, don't go, please.
STUDENT: (laughing) Okay.
MAISIE COHEN: Communications lecturer Juan Salazar has conducted programs such as this in communities around the world, from Western Sydney to Chile to Antarctica.
JUAN SALAZAR: Digital storytelling is a way of telling stories that uses still images and sound in a very simple way. What's important about it is that it allows people to have a voice, people that usually don't have access, to have a voice in the mainstream media, to have the opportunity to create their own stories and tell their stories to a wider community or a wider audience.
MAISIE COHEN: This workshop is the brain-child of Dr Hart Cohen, who's had an ongoing relationship with the Hermannsburg community since the late '90s.
HART COHEN: When one's working with Indigenous people in particular, we know that their culture has primarily started as an oral culture. So oral cultures tended to communicate their knowledge and information, their vital knowledge and information, via stories, songs, et cetera.
MAISIE COHEN: Traditional owner Mark Inkamala is a big supporter of maintaining the traditions of storytelling in his community.
MARK INKAMALA (translated): Yes, we want to keep those old stories. We don't want to lose things, we want to hang onto them and that's how people used to do things. They used to pass things along. We want to keep it going like that.
MAISIE COHEN: By the end of the workshop, eight stories have been completed, and the class gets together for a screening to view the results.
STUDENT: My grandfather he always look after us, he always tell story about eagles and he always sing songs about eagles. Yeah, he's my grandfather's dreaming and when I grow I'll tell my story to my kids and I will still remember him, keep thinking about him and thinking about eagles.
STUDENT 2: And it's getting dark.
GROUP OF STUDENTS (reading together): ...shout at us cause she saw a bogeyman behind the rock. We all ran down so far, shouting. We jumped into the four-wheel drive and when they drop us back to the camping ground...
MAISIE COHEN: This workshop has been an opportunity for everyone involved in the storytelling project to get to know one another.
Now the kids have one story under their belt, the idea is that they'll be encouraged to keep telling stories about themselves and their environment, recording their traditional language in the process, in the face of many Indigenous languages that are in danger of disappearing.
TIM PALMER: Maisie Cohen reporting there.