Howitt & Fison's Archive

Insights into Australian Aboriginal Language, Kinship and Culture

Digitisation and Transcription

Curators dealing with the legacy of the Howitt/Fison/Morgan correspondence, which is distributed across libraries and museums the United States and Australia, have been rightly anxious over the fragility of these documents. One of the key objectives of this project is to see this material digitised and then transcribed in the interests of preservation and also in order to enable better access and closer analysis of the materials.

Digitisation and photography of the Howitt papers at the State Library of Victoria commenced in 2017 and much of Museum Victoria’s Howitt papers will be re-photographed for this project. In 2018 we envisage that digital copies of the Fison papers at the National Library and at the St. Marks Theological College will be produced. All of this digitised material, omitting any culturally sensitive or restricted information, will be presented on the Howitt and Fison website in due course.

Creating transcriptions of this will also be crucial to enabling easier access to the linguistic, ethnographic, cultural and historical information embedded within them. Having better access to this information will enable Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people to assess the information collected by Howitt and Fison and to offer their own interpretations or context. If you would like to assist with this transcription process please visit our From the Page site.