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Scholarship helps researcher explore 'connections to place'

July 19, 2006

Lorina.thumb.jpgAn Associate Lecturer and researcher at The University of New England has won a scholarship that will enable her to broaden her documentation of oral history – and her understanding of people’s connection with the land – in the small rural community where she grew up.

Lorina Barker (pictured here), from UNE’s School of Classics, History and Religion, grew up in Weilmoringle in far north-western NSW. Her postgraduate research includes a study of the extent to which people like herself, who have moved away from Weilmoringle, are able to maintain a feeling of connection with the land. Most of the participants in her project are Aboriginal members of the community, but she is hoping to involve non-Aboriginal people as well.

Ms Barker has won the inaugural Minoru Hokari Memorial Scholarship, which honours the work of a brilliant young scholar who died in 2004 after making outstanding contributions to cross-cultural understanding and the development of a respectful collaborative research strategy with Indigenous Australians. The scholarship was established by Dr Hokari’s family and colleagues in the Australian Centre for Indigenous History in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. Ms Barker travelled to Canberra earlier this month for the presentation ceremony, meeting Dr Hokari’s father (from Japan), his sister (from the United States), and the Japanese Ambassador to Australia. “It was a very special and moving ceremony,” she said.

Ms Barker said she had great admiration for Dr Hokari’s work, and felt honoured and grateful to be the first recipient of the scholarship. She explained that she would use the scholarship money to extend by several weeks her planned field trip to north-western NSW at the end of the year, and to hire a four-wheel-drive vehicle to negotiate some of the outback roads she plans to travel. “I’ll be able to collect much more data than I had originally thought possible,” she said.

She will be visiting members of the Weilmoringle community who now live and work in Bourke, Brewarrina, Enngonia, Goodooga, and Lightning Ridge. “A lot of us moved away because of education,” she said. “There’s no high school in Weilmoringle, so many families moved to bigger places – such as Bourke – when their children reached high-school age.”

One focus of her interviews is the sense of “belonging to Weilmoringle” that many of its former inhabitants are able to retain. “I don’t have it myself,” she said. “I haven’t returned often enough to feel that I still belong there. But it’s a connection that I would like to regain. Many of the participants in my project have managed to maintain the connection by regular visits and by being involved in reunion events, and I’m hoping that my connection will be renewed through my work in recording the community’s oral history. I believe such a connection is very important to people, but won’t have a complete picture of how it works within their lives until I analyse my data.”

Posted by Jim Scanlan at July 19, 2006 03:21 PM