Albury Library Museum's new exhibition Bungambrawatha: Stories of Albury.

Co-curator Kat Kitch speaks about a special part of the Bungambrawatha: Stories of Albury.

Transcript

00:00So my name is Kat, I'm the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander curator, also

00:04known as the First Nations curator. What we have here today is a bunch load of

00:09different soil samples all taken from all different places in Australia that

00:14were collected by First Nations Albury community members to kind of show where

00:18they came from and how they got here as well. There was all these wonderful

00:23stories of how they came here during the resettlement scheme, the different

00:28stories that came from that about like how some of the families absolutely

00:31thrived but how some of them didn't, much similar to a lot of the Bonnet-Gillers

00:35stories that we hear as well. And the amount of effort it took because

00:39originally these soil samples were in a set of drawers and you wouldn't inherently

00:43go into a museum and think to open drawers so we decided to put it up on the

00:47wall and we had to get this panel particularly made with the holes cut out

00:52of it, the soil samples taken out of the drawer, put into the containers, sealed and

00:57then attached the panel and then attached the soil samples to the wall behind the

01:02panel. It was a whole deal and having to write like the words that go with this

01:06panel as well as the words that go with the resettlement scheme and the rest of

01:10the panels in here, getting those looked at by the Deer-Malunga-Bang group as

01:14well, the Raghurri elders group, to make sure that what was being said was both

01:18factual and also had the voice of community in it. And of course we added the

01:23Goenna Inn as well being the totem for the Raghurri people in Albury. Oh yeah

01:28so my background is actually in archaeology not museum so getting to

01:32handle these soil samples and going like oh like the the redness in the Alice

01:38Springs compared to like the darkness of Mount Pilate compared to like the

01:42grittiness of Dural Day? I haven't gotten the town names down correctly as well as

01:49like the smoothness from the Mung Marino Reserve. So it was so interesting to look

01:54at that and with my archaeology knowledge behind me and environmental

01:59science knowledge behind me being able to go like oh you know what would thrive in

02:03like this kind of soil like nice sandy soil and all these trees you probably

02:06would have seen it in this area. It was a lot of fun.