The Aboriginal volumes of The Dictionary of Western Australians

WA Museum Records and Supplements | Updated 7 years ago

INTRODUCTION – Sylvia Hallam, together with her friend the late Lois Tilbrook, made a major scholarly contribution through her work on Aborigines of the Southwest Region, 1829–1840, the first of four Aboriginal volumes in what later became the Bicentennial Dictionary of Western Australians series, which were initiated in the mid-1970s after a conversation with its general editor, Rica Erickson, and Dr Pamela Statham, editor of Volume 1 (Statham 1979). A sub-committee was subsequently formed to help complete the first volume and oversee the production of two further volumes with funding assistance from the Australian Institute for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) and a fourth volume was produced by Neville Green and Susan Aguiar with AIATSIS assistance. To the New Norcia volume, which was initiated by Lois Tilbrook and completed by Neville Green, Sylvia also contributed an important analysis of the detailed Aboriginal census material collected by Bishop Salvado (Hallam 1989). In what follows, Neville Green provides a brief account of the history of the Aboriginal volumes project and then both Sylvia Hallam and Neville Green talk about their modus operandi. Inevitably, there are some inconsistencies between recollections of events for which records no longer exist, but this is a minor issue in a timely and revealing account of what continues to be a unique Aboriginal biographical undertaking. In addition to the four published volumes, the 31 unpublished annotated indexes of names extracted from specific primary sources, such as The Perth Gazette and the Colonial Secretary’s Office (CSO) fi les, now deposited with AIATSIS and the Battye Library, constitute an invaluable set of research tools for a broad range of studies in Aboriginal history in Western Australia, 1829–1892. Some of the card indexes produced in the project have also been deposited in the Battye Library, together with the tape-recording of interviews on which this paper is based.