What is Australian Indigenous Oral History?

The concept of Australian Indigenous oral history has been variously defined and maligned; used and abused. Terminological tensions abound and we ask if the current multitude of definitions are all referring to the same thing, or if there are subtle differences? For many the notion of Indigenous Oral history is unnecessarily narrow, confined to Dreamtime stories, creation histories, myth and legends, etc. In this paper we investigate definitional and terminological aspects of Australian Indigenous Oral History and relate these to questions of methodology. We hope to broaden existing definitions and argue for an encompassing definition, which extends to the transmission of knowledge orally, through to the recordings of Indigenous knowledge (writing, audio or video, and pictorially). Such a process should take us beyond the limitations of academic language and western epistemological frameworks and ensure a better understanding of (and concomitant respect for) the nuances, subtleties and complexities of Australian Indigenous Oral History