Wongatha Heritage Returned: The Digital Future and Community Ownership of Schoolwork from the Mount Margaret Mission School, 1930s–1940s

1 The “From Mount Margaret Mission to Melbourne – And Back Again” Project

The first phase of the project centered on the objective of returning the schoolwork to the former students of the school at Mount Margaret Mission, and descendants of their families. Funded by a grant from the University of Melbourne entitled “From Mount Margaret Mission to Melbourne – and back again: reconnecting family and community links to mission children’s schoolwork held by University of Melbourne Archives,” the project addressed some of the challenges posed by the physical dislocation of the Mount Margaret Mission school records from the Wongatha community. After a process of consultation and outreach led by Sharon Huebner, including one visit to Western Australia, we made contact with former students from Mount Margaret and their descendants. This phase culminated in providing copies of the records to the community, after UMA digitized the collection.

In 2020, the project team began working on the next phase of the project: the creation of a new digital archive using the Mukurtu platform to continue the process of connecting these records to the previously silenced and omitted community of origin. As archivist Hoyle writes, digital archives can transform the histories that can be produced from records, making it possible to tell new stories that include the “memories, lived experiences and present feelings of the people and movements they relate to” (Hoyle 2017, 1). This phase of the project, currently underway, is an opportunity to sidestep the confines of archival tenets of original order and provenance and tell new stories in which Leeper and the Victorian Aboriginal Group will be decentered. The new digital archive aims to disrupt the traditional archiving processes that Trish Luker has described as privileging the “creators” (or collectors) of the records and relegating the subjects of the records to a subsidiary role, reflecting “the essentializing paradigm of Western intellectual thought in which subjects of knowledge are objectified” (2017, 113). Critical archival theorists such as Drake contend that “provenance… is… a relic of the colonial and imperial era in which it emerged” (2016, n.p.). Narrow conceptions of provenance leave no room to recognize the rights and moral ownership of subjects of the records. The Mukurtu platform has the capacity to expand upon the traditional archival notion of provenance by acknowledging Mount Margaret School students as creators and subjects, and their records as the Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) of former students and descendant families. Lynette Russell has argued that such processes of reclamation can transform archival records “within which Indigenous people were the object (and subject) of the gaze of colonial authorities and “experts”” into Indigenous knowledge (2005, 16). The practical steps we have taken, eventuating with the development of an online platform for handing back digital control of the schoolwork to the Mount Margaret community, have played an integral role in re-orientating the authorship of archival records.

2 Consultation: Bridging the Distance Between Melbourne and Mount Margaret

In 1989, Fourmile wrote that “for Aboriginal people, the key to our historical and cultural resources and therefore to our cultural and historical identities is firmly clasped in a white hand” (1989, 7). She discussed the masses of information and heritage held within various Australian cultural institutions, the existence of which Aboriginal people “remain widely ignorant … because the holding institutions have never informed them” (3). Some 30 years later, mainstream cultural institutions have done valuable work to locate and publicize the existence of Indigenous cultural heritage in their custody. Despite these efforts, the vast majority of First Nations cultural heritage in archives remains under the custodianship and control of record holding institutions. As Huebner and Marr observe, “This kind of archival system supports and reinforces the primacy of colonial histories and, in the case of records relating to Koori people at UMA, affords no recourse, or right of reply. Koori records, therefore, languish under archival systems of description that have proven inadequate to incorporating Koori perspectives and knowledge” (Huebner and Marr 2019, 115). Audre Lorde famously observed in 1979 that “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (2007, 110). Engaging with this astute perception, it could be said that decolonization of the archives therefore requires a ceding of control, and a centering of First Nations people. Placed at the center, rather than at the fringes, First Nations meaningful participation in archiving, and archiving decision-making process has the capacity to re-right the imbalance, by ensuring First Nations people are part of making decisions about what archives collect and preserve, and how material is made accessible. The Mount Margaret School records project attempted to address these big questions by focusing on a small batch of records within the collection at UMA.

In 2018, the project team took its first steps in establishing a relationship with the Wongatha Community.^[3] Within this community were elderly people who had been students at the Mount Margaret Mission school. The community with a connection to the Mount Margaret Mission School were unaware of the materials held at the UMA. The project aligned with a process already underway at UMA to identify Indigenous knowledge and ICIP within its holdings and recataloguing such material to make it more discoverable. In collaboration with the UMA, the authors explored the custodianship of the Mount Margaret heritage materials, and Beth Marsden undertook research into the provenance of the schoolwork. This was shared with the UMA, with the intended aim to support UMA in efforts to shift Valentine Leeper as the main protagonist and narrator of these archives. The UMA contributed to the project by creating preservation-quality digital copies of the schoolwork. The institution’s policies and processes only allow for digital repatriation of Indigenous heritage. The project team undertook a process of consultation and engagement with the community in Western Australia to facilitate the digital return of the schoolwork from the UMA and back to the community. This process relied upon Sharon Huebner’s extensive Indigenous engagement experience and already established and trusted community relationships held with members of the Western Australia First Nations community.

Sharon Huebner was introduced to a senior family member of the Mount Margaret community through Ezzard Flowers. Flowers is a Wirlomin-Minang Noongar from the Great Southern of Western Australia. Flowers and Huebner have collaborated for nearly a decade as part of efforts aimed at restoring within living history the memory of Flowers’ ancestor, Elizabeth Bessy Flowers (Huebner 2015; Huebner and Flowers 2016). Ezzard made the introductions between the Sambo family and Huebner. Flowers had met the Sambo family in Kalgoorlie in 1972 when, as a 15-year-old playing football, he stayed with the Sambo family on weekends, and in the 2000s, Flowers studied alongside Sambo in Perth. Huebner’s initial phone call to Fay Sambo about the heritage material belonging to the Mount Margaret community was supported by Flowers’ cultural introduction, and the practical exchange of contact details. Flowers and Sambo belong to a large network of First Nations families in Western Australia, and it was important that cultural protocol was followed, particularly in the case of outsider researcher introductions to Elders and senior community members. In telephone conversations with Sambo, Huebner created a place from to which to start a dialogue about the UMA Collection and also an understanding about the social dynamics of the Mount Margaret community.

Understanding kinship connections and responsibilities between people related to care of cultural heritage played a significant part in the process of the project’s engagement, particularly when deciding how the return of heritage records would take place. For example, it was important to understand the custodian role and rights of the families being asked to take part in the project. As traditional custodians, Wongatha people claimed Native Title rights over 160,000 square kilometers in this country in the mid 1990s. In 2007 the Federal Court dismissed the Wongatha’s case (Muller 2014, 59, 61). These findings by the Federal Court may have disenfranchised Mount Margaret families and on legal terms extinguished rights of traditional cultural ownership and ties to ancestral country. However, legal determinations as to whether Native Title rights and interests existed for the Wongatha people have failed to dilute the significance of connections to country for Wongatha Elders and senior family members from the Mount Margaret community. Wongatha families continue to keep strong the legacy of their ancestors and are committed to maintaining cultural heritage for current and future generations. In 2016 the Western Australia Museum’s Repatriation Program facilitated the reburial of ancestral remains kept within museums in Australia and throughout the world. Placing headstones and a memorial at the burial site, Elders and leaders of the Wongatha community were able to lay their ancestors to rest on country (ABC 2016). Understanding the physical landscape of the Mount Margaret community, as well as the cultural and spiritual terrain, was central to Huebner’s first visit to Kalgoorlie and face-to-face conversation with Fay Sambo.

In November 2018, the streets of Kalgoorlie were quiet. Huebner was there at the beginning of the week and had missed the Sunday fly-in and the influx of mining crews from other parts of Western Australia. Kalgoorlie is situated in the heart of the goldfields region, on the western fringe of the Nullarbor Plain and the Great Victoria Desert. Huebner and Sambo met in a café. They chatted about their shared friendship with Flowers. They talked about the local area and about Sambo’s connection to the Mount Margaret Community. Together, they looked through the printed book of schoolwork compiled by Marsden. This experience opened a discussion about the students who had authored these works in the 1930s when students at the school on the mission. Sambo shared that only three of the students were still living, and that many of their descendants remained living in the area today.

The main purpose of Huebner’s trip was to hand over digital copies of the records, together with the hard copy printed books compiled by Marsden, to be shared by Sambo in her own time with the wider Mount Margaret community. Huebner also shared a “context pack” created by the project team to tell the story of the records’ journey from Mount Margaret Mission to a repository in inner-city Melbourne. This resource was an attempt to contextualize and describe the Mount Margaret records in a different way to the UMA’s catalogue, written for the audience of descendant families. Consideration was given to how the records would be curated for their return to participating Wongatha individuals and families.

As expected, the conversation with Sambo drew Huebner’s attention to the often-fraught territory of academic research involving First Nations families. Nearing the end of lunch, Sambo turned to Huebner and said: “You’re a researcher and I haven’t asked you what you want from me.” Understanding the sensitive nature of the schoolwork, Huebner responded to Fay’s question, stating that there was nothing that the University of Melbourne needed, or would require from Fay or other members of the community at this time, and without their consent and full knowledge of the project. Put another way, there was no research transaction to be had, unless directed and led by the Wongatha community. Huebner reassured Sambo that the schoolwork had been returned to her to share with other family members connected to the school. There was to be no record made of these interactions. The thoughts and actions of the families involved were to be private and kept separate from the research agenda. This first face-to-face conversation also gave insight to the decision-making processes that were important for understanding the schoolwork, as meaningful heritage material for current and future generations. The decisions made about the schoolwork included digital reproduction at a hi-resolution, transfer of digital copies to multiple USB devices, and the production of printed hard copies in a book form. Reflecting on this, Sambo commented that the process needed to be carried out slowly, and carefully, ensuring those with a connection to the historical school studies felt comfortable about their involvement in the collaboration of securing a cultural place for the returned heritage. Sambo took responsibility for asking of her community how the process would be navigated: when talking to people of the schoolwork held at UMA, “Tell me how we’re going to do this.”

As far as the project was concerned, the digital return of the heritage materials was something that would take place in person, and after that the life of the digital files and the books holding printed copies would be the business of the families. The project team’s intention was to prioritize the sovereignty of the families and communities who had a connection to the records, and to de-emphasize the traditional academic checklists of outputs such as recorded interviews or visual evidence. A key aim was to redefine UMA’s framework of authorship and access rights by listening to the decisions made by the Mount Margaret families. Part of the conversation with Sambo was to determine if this was at all possible from an individual and family perspective. What did the families want to happen with the collection of schoolwork that was Mount Margaret community heritage? Ethics, consent, and permissions in our conversation became important and relevant. The return of heritage materials is often a documented event. However, with Sambo representing the wider community of families, our interaction was intimate, honest, and about transferring the power of decision-making to the community with the authority to govern the safekeeping of cultural heritage. Over the following year, Sambo shared information with the Sharon Huebner relaying what was needed from a family perspective. The relationship and the consultation process continued in this way, with an expectation engagement might expand as awareness grew about the records at UMA, helped by Sambo’s knowledge and willingness to initiate a conversation about the Mount Margaret records.

In early 2020, the UMA invited four members of the Wongatha community to travel from Western Australia to Melbourne, in order to visit the archives and see first-hand the original school records. Representing their families were Denise Colbung, Aunty Laurel Cooper, who was a former student of the Mount Margaret Mission, and Sambo. Aunty Laurel was able to see her own schoolwork, a story about a dog, for which she had won a prize of fresh cherries.^[4]

These initiatives have been successful in making the existence of the Mount Margaret schoolwork records known to senior members of the community in that digital surrogates were returned for community sharing and circulation. The project objective to decolonize these archival records, by collaborating with the community and coming up with new ways of managing the collection, raised further issues about the intrusion by academics and archivists on this process.

Huebner and Marsden planned to travel to Western Australia and undertake in-depth conversations with descendent families, to enrich knowledge about the records. In early 2020, the project team received funding from La Trobe University’s Internal Research Grant Scheme, a grant that we originally planned to spend on fieldwork, sending two researchers to Kalgoorlie to continue the work of engaging and collaborating with the community about how they wished to look after these records in the future. This plan was interrupted by the outbreak of COVID, and the closure of Western Australia’s borders. Faced with the possibility of ongoing restrictions, the project team investigated alternative options for continuing the consultation and the process of returning heritage materials from the archives. The barriers created by COVID, and the ways that the research was slowed down, became an advantage. The situation decentered, even further, our role as researchers without First Nations heritage. It allowed the project team to detach from the pressures and expectations of institutional requirements, publishing benchmarks, and reporting timelines.

The project team instead pursued the creation of a digital archive and have developed a partnership with the Jumbunna Institute, at the University of Technology in Sydney.^[5] This partnership is about creating a new online community archive of the schoolwork records using the Mukurtu Content Management System (CMS), an open-source platform for Indigenous communities to manage and share their cultural heritage (https://mukurtu.org/). The designing of digital infrastructure for community content must apply ethical and cultural considerations (Bernholz and Ormond-Parker 2018). These considerations are embedded in the new direction for the project, that has the potential for Wongatha families and those families linked to the Mount Margaret Mission to have control of the records. It also effectively frees the material from the context of the UMA, where the physical records remain named and described as part of the collection of Valentine Leeper and displaced from the community.

This next phase of the project is another opportunity to ensure that digital control and ownership of the records is with the Wongatha community. Creating the new online archive for the Mount Margaret records is an attempt at the “transformative praxis” called for by Kirsten Thorpe (Thorpe 2019). Mukurtu provides an opportunity for the descendants of the Mount Margaret students to re-contextualize the misinformation of the past and become their own storytellers, to paraphrase the words of Benjamin Barnes of the Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma (Barnes 2017, 217). The new community archive will redefine the records as part of their living family and community stories and give the community control and “ready access to assist … elders in their recollections of [their] history” (Fourmile 1989, 2). The new project will not be bound by the constraints of UMA’s institutional policies and practices, or by core tenets of traditional archiving such as original order and provenance. This process of rewriting the provenance of this collection includes the role played by the UMA, as well as the project team, following Michelle Caswell’s suggestion that provenance is “an ever-changing, infinitely evolving process of recontextualization, encompassing not only the initial creators of the records, but the subjects of the records themselves; the archivists who acquired, described and digitized them (among other interventions); and the users who constantly reinterpret them” (2016). In the new Mukurtu online archive, copies of the records will be otherwise separated from UMA’s collection, an institutional archive system structured by creator entities. Archival frameworks, processes, and systems are instruments of power, and require transformative praxis if communities are to achieve archival autonomy and self-determination (Evans 2015). The Mount Margaret records will constitute their own archive, not a curiosity which ended up by happenstance within the papers of Valentine Leeper.

Being involved in the creation of the Mukurtu archive presents an opportunity for the research team to confront what Agostinho describes as the “intersected problematics raised by the encounter between the colonial, the archival and the digital” (Agostinho 2019, 145). Agostinho takes up Caswell and Cifor’s call (2016) for an approach to archiving that is driven by “radical empathy” and a feminist ethics of care and examines it in the context of postcolonialism to critique the notion of archivists as caregivers (159). She explores the entanglement of care, colonialism, paternalism, and archives, and cautions that – however well-meaning the intentions of researchers and archivists – not having reflection and an awareness of privilege can end up reproducing the unequal power structures of the archive (Murphy 2015). This entanglement is particularly relevant to our project working with digitized records from the collection of Valentine Leeper and other twentieth-century humanitarian do-gooders and the assimilationist agenda of the Victorian Aboriginal Group. The project is fertile ground to consider how we can “unsettle” the notion of care in archiving projects with Indigenous communities (Murphy 2015, 721). Lewis introduces a term to name the discomfort of archivists confronted with proximate damages of their own work – archival fragility, taking her cue from Robin Di Angelo’s writings about white fragility. She writes that “archival fragility might be a joke, if the need for such words were not serious: – archives and archivists do tend to push back when forced to confront the truth about the injustice of the inherent biases of the archive” (2018, 52). Archival fragility results in an unwillingness to change (or to relinquish control) and falling back on unquestioned acceptance of fundamental tenets of the profession, like original order and respect des fonds.

Repatriation of archival records, even digital surrogates, can trigger paternalistic responses in archivists, who display care and concern for the safety and integrity of the archival records. As Lewis points out, “[i]n equating survival with archival preservation, archivists implicitly disparage and depreciate the capabilities of people outside the profession to preserve records in meaningful ways” (2018, 52). Agostinho likens the paternalistic care of archivists to the notion of care in colonial discourse “that constructs the colonized other as a disempowered subject in need of guidance and protection” (2019, 149). The very same power dynamics are evident in the circumstances behind the creation, collection, and preservation of the Mount Margaret records at UMA, and the institution’s inability to return the records to the community.

The Mukurtu online archive provides a way to remove these records from the “captivity” of UMA and hand back control to the descendant families, as well as the power to describe and manage the records as they choose. The project team is aware of the need for us to remain aware and reflective of our privileged positions throughout this phase of the project. Otherwise, there is a danger that the unequal power relations of the archives, the mission, the VAG will only be reproduced in our new online archive. We aim to follow what McKemmish, Faulkhead, and Russell call “reconciling research,” which “involves a respectful and carefully negotiated partnership between researchers and community; the sharing of control; allowing all voices to contribute to the overall outcomes; self-reflectivity; open discussion of methods and issues specific to the research being undertaken; and consideration of the emotional and physical well-being of all participants, including all members of the research team” (2011, 221). As Nicholls et al. acknowledge, decolonizing the archive and meaningfully engaging with Indigenous communities is a slow process made up of many small steps (118).

3 Histories: Glittering Webs and the Colonial Archive

We now turn to exploring how paying attention to the provenance of records can contribute to more ethical and truthful engagements with the archive by historians and other scholars who interested in colonial pasts. Settler colonialism relied upon mapping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander knowledge and then overwriting First Nations knowledge, cultures, and traditions with European knowledge, values, beliefs, and intentions for future construction of their societies. There is a disjuncture between the practice of controlling First Nations people and of coming to understand and know them on cultural terms. Settler archives were created without the consent of the people whose lives they detail, and they were created in order to control them, not to help them. Many archives are dispersed, separated from community, making it a painstaking (and sometimes impossible) task to reconnect the records back to their community of origin. They represent, in many ways, stolen knowledge. They detail painful and intimate events, and they depict and describe people in racist and coldly bureaucratic language. Aboriginal scholars have written about their own experiences in these archives, which have the power to hurt as well as to provide information about dislocated families. Kath Apma Penangke Travis describes her experiences in the archives as “both chilling and intimate… a snapshot into my own and my families lives lived under extraordinary surveillance” (2021, 4). Natalie Harkin has described her experience of travelling “through these archives that offer up new stories and collections of data, and a brutal surveillance is exposed at the hands of the State… These records are our memories and lives; material, visceral, flesh and blood” (2014, 4). Stephen Kinnane, writing about his visit to archives in Westminster, highlights the limitations of archival research: there are no relatives to greet me here. … Written traces of ancestors and their stories to be pieced slowly together Bones lying within graves to be tracked and paid respect” (2003, 54). Tony Birch has highlighted the sinewy connection between the surveillance of the past and the professional historian of the present day in the fourth of this “Archive Box” series of poems, entitled “VIII. The Director of Surveillance Committee (in relation to “the Professional Historian”)”: “The future availability of the material contained within the Archive will be restricted to just one person. He will come to us at a time in the future. He will be known as the Professional Historian” (2006, 32).

The ethical use of archives by historians is a project that is still in the making.^[6] We suggest in this article that one means by which historians can take a further step in decolonizing their archival work is to pay attention to provenance and to work more proactively with archivists and archival institutions. Michelle Caswell says, “humanities scholarship is suffering from a failure of interdisciplinarity when it comes to archives” and argues that humanities scholars of the “archival turn” and archival studies scholars “are largely not taking part in the same conversations, not speaking the same conceptual languages, and not benefiting from each other’s insights” (2016, n.p.). We are not the first to make this point. As Jeannette Bastian has formulated it, while “academics are discovering the limitations of … records … archivists are beginning to recognize that archival theory offers a way of placing records in a broader, more comprehensive context, of seeing them through a wider but finer ground lens” (2006, 269). Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook have also argued that a “recontextualization” of the records, and sense of the communities that created them and the communities that they were created about might point the way towards more ethical histories (2002, 3–4). Rachel Buchanan puts it this way: “Objects are surrounded by fragile hidden webs, like spider webs between trees. These webs are easily broken, but if you look for them, and follow them, those webs glitter, animate, teach, and speak to the past and to the future” (2018, 141). Untangling provenance is key. Laura Millar argues provenance should include creator history – “the story of who created, accumulated, and used the records over time” – records history – “the story of the physical management and movement of the records over time” – and custodial history – “the explanation of the transfer of ownership or custody of the records from the creator or custodian to the archival institutions and the subsequent care of the records” (2002, 12–13). By following these webs, historians can find new ways to deepen their understanding of how the transmission of knowledge underpinned the settler colonial project, and infuse their work with a recognition of the communities connected with the records they study—those which they document and those that created them. In the next section, we show how tracing the silk strands which link the Mount Margaret School to the University of Melbourne Archives gives us a new understanding of the assimilationist networks which existed amongst non-Aboriginal people in the middle of the twentieth century.

4 Provenance: The Victorian Aboriginal Group, The “Depot,” and The Mount Margaret Mission School

This is a small, pilot project, which may or may not build towards more long term, co-authored collaborations between the authors and the Wongatha community that engage in more historical explication and re-telling of past events than take place here. We spend this next part of the article arguing for the importance of historians and other scholars who work in the colonial archive staying attentive to the provenance of the records with which they work. We describe the colonial, scholarly, and institutional contexts which have led to the housing of Wongatha-owned material in the UMA. In establishing how the schoolwork ended up in the UMA archives we illustrate one of the ways that Indigenous-authored archives were collected, used, stored, and archived as part of a broader network concerned with Aboriginal education, made up of educators, philanthropists, and missionaries. In particular, we explore the role of Valentine Leeper and establish how it came to be that these archives were in her possession. Histories of white women, like Valentine Leeper, who involved themselves in Aboriginal people’s lives have been the subject of significant scholarly attention in Australia (Cole, Haskins, and Paisley 2005; Cruikshank and Grimshaw 2019). We contend that the archives of white women assimilationists must be approached with the same critical lens that scholars use when examining records created by government, and that critical attention should be given to the networks in which they participated, the material they collected and the preservation of “their” archives. Leeper’s records were collected, acquired, and preserved in institutions as “belonging” to Leeper because of her race, class, and privilege.

The Mount Margaret Schoolwork held at the University of Melbourne Archives is just one small part of the papers of the Leeper family. The UMA also holds papers of Leeper’s father and brother, with the family connection of her father—Alexander Leeper—in particular to the University of Melbourne being well known and documented and emphasized in the UMA’s listing of the Mount Margaret Schoolwork. More archival collections in Valentine Leeper’s name exist in the collections of the State Library of Victoria and Leeper’s former school, Melbourne Girls Grammar. These three collections, taken together, are testament to Leeper’s influence, as well as the priorities of archival institutions that see Leeper’s legacy and papers as something that should be both preserved and made accessible to the public. Established in 1933, the Victorian Aboriginal Group (VAG) was just one of several non-Aboriginal philanthropic groups operating out of Melbourne during this period. Along with issues of educational access, the Group grappled with state government legislation and policies as they sought to advocate their views on Aboriginal rights and education, evidenced in the prolific letter writing of Valentine Leeper, as treasurer, and Amy Brown, VAG secretary. In addition to lobbying state governments, VAG participated in a national discursive network through which ideas about Aboriginal education were shared, along with resources, curriculum, and pedagogical advice (VAGc 1938; VAGd 1939; VAGe 1942). It was this network through which the schoolwork came to be in Melbourne and were then later bequeathed to the University of Melbourne Archives by Leeper.

Understanding how schoolwork from Mount Margaret came to be held at the UMA was key to the early stages of this project. The team determined that material came to be in the possession of Leeper through the relationship of the VAG with Mary Bennett, who was the teacher at the Mount Margaret Mission School from 1932 to 1942. Initial contact between the VAG and Bennett may have been facilitated by Helen Baillie, also a founding member of the VAG, or through the VAG’s connections with Christian organizations such as the United Aborigines Mission, although Bennett herself was not a missionary (Sherlock and Grimshaw 1997, 87; Taffe 2018, 206). Many items of the schoolwork have been annotated with the initials “H.B.” and some “Helen Baillie,” and given Baillie’s closer political and ethical alignment with Bennett’s position, it seems likely that the material was shared through this relationship.

Unlike Bennett and Baillie, Leeper herself had little contact with Aboriginal people. The VAG were operating in a space created by the lack of government interest and action in providing formal schooling that addressed the needs of Aboriginal students, yet they were not themselves responding to what Aboriginal people and leaders were campaigning for themselves, even as they were aware of these campaigns. Rather, Leeper, along with Amy Brown, a former schoolmate of Leeper and the VAG secretary, wrote to missionaries and government ministers to put forth their own views about policy, and about what was best for Aboriginal people. The VAG provided some practical help, but politically (and ethically), they were out of step. Leeper and Brown came to view the comparatively progressive views and practices of Bennett and of Baillie as radical and “eccentric” (Sherlock and Grimshaw 1997, 91–93). Tellingly, the VAG accepted AO Neville as a member of the VAG when he retired to Melbourne in the early 1950s (VAGa 1949, 3). Neville had been engaged in regular correspondence with Brown and Leeper on a range of topics, including education of Aboriginal children in Western Australia, prior to his membership of the VAG. As the Chief Protector of the Aborigines, Neville controlled the education of all Aboriginal children in that state. This included at Carollup and the Moore River settlements, established in 1915 and 1918 respectively, as institutions in which Aboriginal children could be “trained” in preparation for low-paid work in domestic service or farm labor. Neville exercised complete authority over the schooling experienced by Aboriginal children forcibly taken to these settlements, and he also sought to control the school operating at Mount Margaret Mission. However, he was thwarted by Rod Schenck, who established the mission in 1921, and by the fierce resistance of Bennett (Taffe 2018, 206). The Western Australian Education Department would not provide curriculum to the school, but Bennett adapted the correspondence courses undertaken by Schenk’s children, and under her lead, the academic rigour and progressive teaching methods meant the school at Mount Margaret was unique among all other mission schools in the state (Taffe 2018, 190, 192). Former students achieved professional successes, although they did have to seek out further education and training interstate (Taffe 2018, 208).

In 1934, the “Outback Exhibition” in the Melbourne Town Hall in September coincided with a visit to Melbourne by Mary Bennett. The VAG had organized a stall, and Bennett arranged a display of schoolwork from Mount Margaret that she had brought with her. The VAG reported that the display showed “that appropriate education is the crying need of the people if they are ever to take their rightful place in the country of which they are the real owners” (VAGb 1934). In making public samples of schoolwork in Melbourne, Bennett sought to disprove the dominant, erroneous views of the time about the educability of Aboriginal children. To this end, she annotated the schoolwork with information about the students’ age and their time in school to better showcase their achievements. Yet there was also a more practical aim too: the schoolwork was displayed in Melbourne at a range of exhibitions and events, with audiences invited to donate money that was used to supply resources to the school. Traces of this function are held alongside the schoolwork in the archives held at the UMA, in the form of two signs reading “Australian Aboriginal Work: Arts & Crafts” and “Put a Coin in the Dilly Bag to help educate Native Children.” It seems likely that Leeper took possession of the Mount Margaret Schoolwork as part of her role as VAG secretary that included keeping account of the sale of goods from the VAG ‘Depot’: a collection of items crafted by Aboriginal people and sourced from missions around the country and held by the VAG. The Mount Margaret Schoolwork continued to feature in displays organized by the VAG for at least the next 10 years with the aim of raising awareness and funds. The records in the Leeper collection are a rich resource to explore the networks of white women who worked with assimilationist groups such as the VAG. The information above is an important context to understand how Indigenous-authored and created material has been collected, distributed, and kept in settler archives, and provides some direction for future approaches.

5 Conclusion

We began this project aware that some team members were part of a discipline—history—that has a problematic relationship to archives and have since learned much about how archivists themselves perpetuate and support the extractive model of research that some (not all) historians practice. And while archival theory has developed frameworks and protocols for projects such as this one, in this instance, we found that institutional constraints at UMA were a significant barrier to meaningful engagement with and returning the records to the Wongatha community. The digitization of archives, and platforms such as Murkutu, provide a pathway by which communities are able to reconnect with their material archives and collections (Thorpe and Galassi 2014, 8). While the digitization process itself is relatively simple, the case of the Mount Margaret Schoolwork has taught this project team that both historians and archivists have fundamental shifts to make in their attitudes towards the paper archive. The way it is historicized and the way it is preserved should privilege the sovereignty of the Indigenous people that authored it.