Growing up in Melbourne, Arrernte man Joel Liddle never learnt his language.
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander viewers are advised that this article contains images of people who have died.
From a young age, he struggled to feel connected to the culture of which he knew so little.
"I always wanted to know, but I didn't have anyone to teach me," he said.
A few years ago, he moved to his family's country of Mparntwe – Alice Springs – and with the help of his extended family, he gradually learnt to read, write and speak Ikngerrepenhe, the Arrernte dialect of his ancestors.
The process unlocked a deep sense of identity Mr Liddle had never previously experienced.
"It's actually given me a sense of pride and it's made me change the way I thought about life and responsibility," he said.
Now working as a research associate at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs, Mr Liddle knows firsthand the power cultural knowledge has to change young men's lives.
He hopes a new on-country ethnographic collection in the outback town will help to do just that.
'It's like a huge museum'
The Strehlow Collection is one of the most significant audiovisual archives of Indigenous ceremonial life in the world.
Featuring more than 400 reels of film and more than 1,000 audio recordings, it provides a priceless archive of Central Australian ceremonial acts and language, stories and songs.
This week the collection was officially returned to country.
A new studio has been built by the National Film and Sound Archive at the Strehlow Research Centre in Alice Springs.
It will allow the collection, which has now been completely digitised, to be freely accessed by senior men in the community, enabling them to revitalise cultural practices and pass them on to younger men for generations to come.
"It's like a huge museum, but about the identity of Aboriginal people, Central Australian blackfellas," Strehlow Research Board chair Michael Liddle said.
Efforts to digitise collection
It all started in the 1930s, when German-Australian anthropologist, linguist, and ethnographer Theodor George Henry Strehlow returned to Central Australia, the place of his birth.
He was armed with a government grant to study the Indigenous communities he had grown up alongside.
Over the next four decades he made detailed recordings of their ceremonial lives.
Since the 1990s, this vast collection has been safeguarded in a climate-controlled setting by the National Film and Sound Archive (NFSA) in Canberra.
But the recordings — made on reel-to-reel tape, stainless steel wire, and lacquer discs — were beginning to perish and in 2019 the NFSA decided it was time to pair up with the Strehlow Research Institute to digitise the collection.
"There was becoming a real risk of losing the knowledge and information that the recordings contained," NFSA chief executive Patrick McIntyre said.
"So we really wanted to digitise all of that material before it was lost forever."
Sacred men's business
But given the sacred nature of the collection, the digitisation process was anything but simple.
The majority of the archive contained audiovisual recordings of "men's-only" sacred and secret ceremonies.
That meant there were strict cultural parameters around who could handle the archives.
"The National Film and Sound Archive was really aware that to do this project correctly, they needed to work with the local traditional owners," NFSA Indigenous connections manager Gill Moody said.
Senior men from the community travelled to Canberra to advise on the development of a set of protocols to ensure the materials were handled and stored in a culturally safe manner.
Two restricted preservation areas were also established, limiting access to staff who had been approved by senior community men to view and handle the content.
"Those men were given the authority by the senior men from up here to be able to view or touch any of the items and hear any of the material," Ms Moody said.
'Really empowering'
Now, at last, the collection is back in Alice Springs and traditional owners will finally be able to access it on country in the new digital studio.
"A lot of these people will never have seen this material before," Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory director Adam Worrall said.
"They're learning about new stories, they're seeing their grandfathers, and people from long genealogies from many years ago."
It is hoped this process will be just one of many repeated across the nation and the globe.
"Sometimes traditional owners don't even know institutions have this material that might be really important for them in terms of revitalising language and cultural practice," Mr McIntyre said.
The NFSA has also trained a number of local men in audiovisual conservation, preservation, digitisation and archiving.
They are using these skills as Aboriginal heritage officers at the Strehlow Research Centre and working to share vital cultural knowledge with the next generation.
"It's really important to desert men that we maintain these knowledges and we maintain our traditional identity," Joel Liddle said.
"It's actually really empowering."
