Journal of Information, Law and Technology

Reconciliation Online: Reflections and Possibilities

Siobhan McCann, Graham Greenleaf, Philip Chung, 
Daniel Austin and Tim Moore 
Australasian Legal Information Institute (AustLII)

Siobhan@austlii.edu.au

Presented at:
second AustLII Conference, Law via the Internet 1999, 
University of Technology, Sydney, Australia, 21-23 July 1999

This is a refereed article published on: 30 June 2000 

Citation: McCann S et al, ‘Reconciliation On-line: Reflections and Possibilities’, 2000 (2) The Journal of Information, Law and Technology (JILT). <http://elj.warwick.ac.uk/jilt/00-2/mccann.html/>

Abstract
Since the beginning of the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project in 1996, AustLII has sought to contribute to the process of reconciliation through the provision of relevant legal and cultural information relating to indigenous people. Two important components of the project have been collecting material as well as making it as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. Another significant part of the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project has been connecting remote Aboriginal communities to the Internet and providing training to them in its use. The history and achievements of the project are set out here and some consideration is given to future directions for the various aspects of the project.

Keywords: Access to legal information, the Internet, connecting remote communities, the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project.

1. Introduction
When AustLII embarked upon its Reconciliation and Social Justice project it did so in the hope that by providing information about indigenous legal issues as well as indigenous culture and history it might make a worthwhile contribution to the process of reconciliation. National reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples requires broad based commitment and support within the general community as well as at the national level. Such commitment and support is, to an important degree, dependent upon the level of knowledge about the meaning and substance of reconciliation, which is in turn contingent upon people having access to information about the history of the relationship between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and about the legal, political and social developments which have affected the relationship and precipitated the need for a reconciliation process. AustLII’s contribution through information provision has become especially significant in a national environment of relative indifference to and lack of knowledge about the process of reconciliation and its meaning.

On 3 June 1999, the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation launched its ‘Draft Documents for Reconciliation’. The launch of the documents marks the beginning of a national process of consultation with communities around the country about reconciliation and in particular about the draft declaration of reconciliation. It is interesting to note that none of the commercial television stations were present at the event. There has also been an apparent reluctance on the part of the government to cast itself as an active participant in or advocate for the process of reconciliation. In the absence of an enthusiastic effort at the government level, to inform the public about the process of reconciliation and about the history of black-white relations in Australia, many of the legal, social and political developments remain either unknown or known in only a fragmentary way. There are many people who remain unconvinced about the need for reconciliation or uncertain about how they might participate or contribute to such a process. In this context, the availability of information from other sources takes on a particular significance.

Since its beginnings in 1995, with the publication of the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, AustLII’s Reconciliation and Social Justice Library has grown into a sizeable on-line resource The library is a rich resource not only for legal researchers, but also for the general public. In the 1997 AustLII conference paper ‘Indigenous people’s issues via the Internet’, a central concern was that collecting materials for publication in the Reconciliation and Social Justice Library on AustLII was a difficult task. Of course the problem of finding material for publication is an ongoing one for secondary legal materials in general, but there is now a great deal more information available generally on the Internet as well as on AustLII. The challenge for the future of secondary materials will be how to provide greater accessibility to the materials both housed and indexed by AustLII. The aim of greater accessibility in the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project is part of a broader aim at AustLII to increase community access to all of the information in the AustLII databases. The particular significance in relation to the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project is its specific relevance to the process of reconciliation.  This paper is, in part a reflection upon what AustLII has done to date towards increasing the quantity and the accessibility of information on the Internet relating to reconciliation and indigenous issues. It will also explore current developments and future possibilities for increasing content and improving accessibility and for including the indigenous community in that process.

2. Background to AustLII’s Reconciliation and Social Justice Project
AustLII’s involvement in providing information specifically related to indigenous issues began in 1995 when the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation approached AustLII to publish the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody on the Internet. In 1996 AustLII and the Council applied for and received a collaborative research grant from the Australian Research Council to fund what became Reconciliation and Social Justice Project at AustLII. The project’s central aim has been to find how best to utilise the resources of the Internet to advance the task of reconciliation. 

The project has set itself the following research goals:

1	to determine what are the significant historical materials concerning parliamentary, constitutional and legislative matters of relevance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders since the constitutional conventions of the 1890s;

2	to develop further innovative techniques pioneered by AustLII for large-scale hypertext mark-up integrated with text retrieval over the World-Wide Web, so as to create a completed ‘Reconciliation and Social Justice’ collection freely available on the Internet, and in a form which makes these texts easy to use by facilitating sophisticated research uses;

3	to develop and test other Internet-based means of communicating information concerning the reconciliation process, so as to integrate the ‘Reconciliation and Social Justice’ collection into a comprehensive resource which meets the needs of widely differing audiences, indigenous and non-indigenous; and

4	through a pilot project of Internet connection and training and usage monitoring, to test the value of these resources to one important audience, remote indigenous communities.

While collecting materials is still an important part of the project, it is increasingly important to make resources on AustLII and elsewhere as accessible as possible. 

3. Collecting Materials
The Reconciliation and Social Justice Library now contains around 170 MB of text and is still the largest secondary resource on AustLII and one of the largest in the world. It is also the most popular secondary resource on the AustLII site with over one million hits per year. The contents of the library come from a wide range of sources. Major library holdings include:

•	The Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody;

•	The Review of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act;

•	The National Inquiry in to the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (the ‘Bringing them Home’ Report). 

Recent Additions to the Library include two Forum editions of the University of New South Wales Law Journalone dealing with the Wik decision, the other with the Stolen Generations. The library also contains the published personal and parliamentary apologies to the Stolen Generations on the occasion of National Sorry Day on May 26, 1998. Soon to be added to the Library’s collection will be the Indigenous Law Bulletin and the Indigenous Law Reporter.

4. Accessibility
There is a great deal of literature on the Internet relating to accessibility and usability of information on the Web. Much of this material focuses upon page design, careful use of graphics, appropriate use of HTML, and technical solutions for users with particular needs. These are all very important considerations however, in the context of this paper, accessibility has a more particular meaning and relates to the ‘discoverability’ and the comprehensibility of the information itself rather than the construction of the Internet pages presenting the information. This means accessibility in terms of the cogency of the information presented from the point of view of an audience without legal knowledge or training. It also refers to the organisation of the material so that it can be easily found by users, without requiring of them any special legal or Internet knowledge. These kind of accessibility issues are clearly issues for consideration in relation to general community access, dealt with to some degree by the paper to be presented by Madeleine Davis at AustLII’s Law via the Internet ‘99 Conference, titled ‘AustLII’s role in Community Legal Information: an indexer’s perspective’. In an important sense, access to the materials in the Reconciliation and Social Justice Library is an issue of general community access to legal information, since unless both indigenous and non-indigenous users can benefit from the materials, it will not be a resource which has achieved its full or intended potential. There are a number of different ways in which AustLII has sought to assist users to find the information they seek; by providing training and tutorials for new users; by developing more friendly and facilitating interfaces and by increasing the number of ways in which the information can be accessed. 

4.1 Training the user
An important part of making legal materials accessible to the community is providing guidance to first time users. AustLII does play a limited role in teaching; first year law students at UTS are taught Internet legal research by AustLII staff and AustLII holds tutorial courses from time to time for members of the community and the legal profession. Specific training in the use of materials in the Reconciliation and Social Justice Library has been provided by AustLII staff to first year indigenous students at the University of New South Wales through the indigenous education programme and to remote communities as part of the remote communities project, which will be discussed in greater detail later in the paper.

4.2 User interfaces
While AustLII has endeavoured to design an interface which is universally accessible, we recognise that the existing layout of the site as well as the terminology used assumes a certain level of knowledge about the legal system. The Community legal information project on AustLII has endeavoured to address this obstacle by developing a section of AustLII’s index which uses plain English subject headings to make material more comprehensible to users. AustLII is also attempting to discover and to meet some of the specific needs of indigenous audiences and to consider some of the ways in which the interface might be tailored to meet those needs. This is an ongoing project, informed to some degree by the experience gained from the remote communities in which Internet connections have been installed and training has been given. To date, interface development has been limited to the inclusion of selected embedded searches on the home page of the Reconciliation and Social Justice Library. It is hoped, however that further changes will be made in response to feedback from remote users.

In an important sense, secondary legal materials themselves, (once located) provide an explanatory interface to AustLII’s primary materials. AustLII’s mark-up scripts link the explanatory materials and commentaries on primary materials such as Mabo (No.2) or the Native Title Act back to the relevant primary documents so that users can have the articles and commentaries to inform them as they read the primary texts themselves. In effect this adds the legislative and case law materials in AustLII’s databases to the resources in the Reconciliation and Social Justice Library and increases the accessibility of this material by providing added guidance to its meaning and various interpretations.

4.3 Increasing and improving the points of access
There are a number of Internet sites and bodies looking at creating plain language sites explaining the law in lay terms. This kind of editorial work goes beyond what AustLII can deliver, however making the ‘gateways’ to information as obvious and as identifiable as possible is something which we have sought to deliver both generally and in the specific case of the Reconciliation and Social Justice Project. The principal examples of this are AustLII’s World Law Index which provides a library of links to information relating to indigenous people both national and international, and the time-line of legal developments affecting indigenous people since federation which is still being developed. 

4.4 A library of indigenous links
AustLII’s World Law Index is an ever expanding library of links to legal resources compiled by AustLII’s indexing staff and organised by subject area as well as by type or source. For the most part the index catalogues legal information not housed by AustLII; The Australian Law Index is a library of national legal resources which sits within the World Law Index. Under the subject heading,Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders in the Australian Law Index and under Indigenous Peoples in the World Law index is a growing list of Australian and World indigenous legal resources. 

Indigenous Peoples and Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders are the only subject areas where AustLII has indexed sites of general cultural interest as well as those of legal interest. Among the sites of particular legal interest are The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission’s home page, and Australian Indigenous People and the law’, an index by Martin Flynn, of AustLII’s legislation and case law relating to Indigenous people. Sites of cultural interest include the Internet Library for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Languages International cultural sites include the site of the Nisga’a nation, indigenous people from British Colombia in Canada. The Nisga’a site contains cultural as well as legal and historical information about the Nisga’a and their relations with non-indigenous Canada.

AustLII’s targeted web spider is already being sent to a large number of these Internet sites in order to index them for searching purposes. A targeted web spider is a robot which only visits sites which have been selected by AustLII’s indexing staff. When a site of high value legal content is found by AustLII’s indexers, it is placed in the index under the relevant subject or category area and the web spider is send to it. The information is then downloaded and indexed by AustLII’s Sino Search Engine. AustLII’s ‘limited area’ search means that the user can choose to search only over one particular area of the index structure, so that, for example a user can go to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander part of the World Law Index and search for materials on native title within that area alone. ( See Figure1. below)The results of searches done over AustLII’s world Law Index, will be links which take the users to the original sites.

Figure1: Limited search over AustLII’s links

4.5	Legal/Constitutional Time -line
In its key issues paper ‘Sharing History’, The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation gives emphasis to the importance of understanding the history of indigenous and non-indigenous people in Australia, of understanding the many ways in which indigenous people have been either excluded from non-indigenous society by the law or had their rights and freedoms substantially restricted by non-indigenous law. 

Part of ‘sharing history’ with Aboriginal people is recognising the effect which non-indigenous law has had upon Aboriginal lives and freedoms throughout the history of non-indigenous people in Australia. To this extent, the provision of a resource which documents these developments in an accessible electronic and searchable format is an important part of the process of understanding and sharing history and thus a useful contribution to the reconciliation process. It is also an important way of making some legal information which is already on AustLII or elsewhere on the Internet more accessible by providing what is in effect, an interface which organises the information within clearly identified parameters.

This document will be an annotated searchable chronology of important legal developments affecting indigenous people since around the time of federation. As such it will operate as an interface to primary material and to secondary explanatory material. It will be an important Internet ‘gateway’ to indigenous information both on AustLII and elsewhere on the Internet.

As far as AustLII is aware there is currently no collection of documents on-line or elsewhere which chronicles the major historical events effecting indigenous people since around the time of federation. There are, of course, many detailed scholarly histories of black-white relations in Australia. John McCorquodale’s Aborigines and the Law: A Digest provides a very thorough compilation of case law, legislation and a bibliography of material relating to indigenous people and the law from the time of settlement until the mid-1980s. There are also time-lines which provide general outlines of major events which have affected indigenous people for the past two centuries. AustLII is seeking to draw upon the work made available in these works to provide an on-line searchable chronology of the significant historical events since federation until the present time. 

There are other indigenous time-lines already on the Internet, many of them very graphic intensive and content limited and without any particular legal focus. The time-line being developed at AustLII will attempt to be a detailed and searchable chronology which is accessible to all users. The time-line will be viewable as a comprehensive year by year set of entries or in a more selective way, by searching for events or documents or by viewing the time-line by jurisdiction, or by type of document. There will be links not only to the relevant documents where they are available, but also to secondary materials and commentaries on the documents. Much of the later materials, particularly legislation and case law is available either on AustLII or on other Internet sites. It is anticipated that key documents which are not currently available electronically will eventually be scanned and added to the time-line.
These various additions to the Reconciliation and Social Justice library collection and developments in approach to accessibility all contribute to the delivery of the first three project goals, which leaves the fourth to consider, the pilot project of Internet connection in remote indigenous communities. This is the part of the project which has required far more involvement at the community end of AustLII usage in order to make our resources available to a particular audience with quite a specific range of needs.

5. The Remote Communities Project - a specialised use of AustLII’s legal resources
AustLII’s remote communities project has provided a different kind of challenge in delivering an accessible legal resource to a particular audience with its own specific needs. In an obvious sense, the mere connection of remote communities to the Internet increases accessibility. Without accompanying instruction and ongoing support, however, the existence of a physical connection is of limited value. During the period of the remote communities project, AustLII has endeavoured to provide both connections, as well as instruction and support. 

5.1 Background
AustLII first became involved in providing access to the Internet in remote areas in 1997. The Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation was concerned that an Internet resource being built to further the reconciliation via the Internet should be made available to as many indigenous people as possible and were particularly concerned that remote communities have the opportunity to access the material. A number of remote communities were contacted and responses were received from five in the Northern Territory. Some investigations were made into potential ISPs in the area and Big Pond was settled upon as the most universally accessible ISP with the greatest number of dial-in points. 

5.2	The connections
In mid 1997 five communities were connected to Big Pond in the following locations:

•	The Ramingining Homeland resource center in Arnhem Land; 

•	The Wardaman Aboriginal Corporation in Katherine; 

•	The Munupi Arts and Craft Center, on Melville Island; 

•	The Mabunji Aboriginal Corporation, in Boroloola and 

•	The Ngali wurru wuli Association at Timber Creek.

These communities were connected to Big Pond, given an email account, a list of Internet book-marks of sites of interest were provided and the communities were signed on to a discussion group dealing with issues relating to reconciliation and also to a news clippings list providing a daily round up of news of specific relevance to indigenous affairs. Instruction was given as to how to access and browse the Internet and email and how to access AustLII’s Reconciliation and Social Justice Library. In August 1998, a further connection was set up at the Mutawintji Aboriginal Land Council in Wilcannia, New South Wales. The connection was used during the Council’s negotiations with the New South Wales government for a lease back arrangement of the Mutawinji national park. Negotiations over the specifics of the lease were, in part conducted by email. The Land was handed back to the traditional owners on 5 September 1998. The lease was made available via the AustLII site. In January 1999 a further connection was made in Kununurra for the Mirriuwung and Gajerrong Families Land and Heritage Council. The Mirriuwung Gajerrong Council became the largest successful mainland Native Title claimants in November 1998, when the Federal Court decided in their favour in Ben Ward & Ors v State of Western Australia & Ors [1998] FCA 1478. The Mirriuwung and Gajerrong Families continue to live according to traditional Aboriginal law and custom and extensive consultation with the members of the families was necessary before the case went to court. This necessitated multiple trips to Kununurra by solicitors from the Aboriginal Legal Service in Perth. As the case has subsequently been appealed to the High Court, it is hoped that more of the correspondence and consultation can be done via email now that the council has an email connection.

5.3 Developments in approach
One of the things which became clear from the first round of connections was the importance of having sufficient time in each community to give adequate training to the members of the community. In 1998 when follow up phone interviews with each of the communities were conducted, it became clear that in most cases, community members were less than confident about using the connection to its full potential. Follow up phone support has been given and in September 1998, training was done in the Wardaman community in Katherine and the community was left with a basic manual in the use of Internet and email and they were also given guidance in how to find legislative and case law materials on AustLII.

When the new connection was provided to the Mirriuwung and Gajerrong Council in Kununurra, 4 days of training were provided and a basic Internet and email manual was left with the community.

A training priority in all communities was building the awareness within the communities of the kinds of resources available generally on the Internet as well as the specific resources on AustLII. It became evident that unless topics which were directly relevant to community members were identified, interest waned and it became more difficult to teach Internet skills and navigation. This applied also to the resources on AustLII, unless materials which were actually and immediately required could be identified, community members would remain unconvinced about the usefulness of the resource or its relevance to them and were reluctant to participate in training. Opening up the resources on the Internet and AustLII therefore required a reasonable level of knowledge about the community and the various activities of its members and some consideration of the various sites which might be of interest and the kinds of cases, legislation or secondary materials to which they might want access. The Mirriuwung and Gajerrong Council’s interest was in some respects very clear since it had just won a significant native title claim and was facing a High Court challenge to that decision. The federal court decision was available for them to view via AustLII as was a related Canadian case, Delgamuukw v. British Columbia via AustLII’s world links. There were also a number of agreement acts in Western Australia and the Northern Territory containing negotiated access to mining and pastoral leases which were also of interest to some members of the Council. What was not clear until training began, however was that a number of the younger women who participated in training had a keen interest in university course information from universities in Western Australia. It became clear that the more information that could be discovered about the community and its members before training began the more relevant the training could be made to the specific needs of the community.

5.4 Difficulties
The difficulties encountered during the remote communities project have related both to the remote location of the communities and to a variety of cross cultural issues. In the majority of cases training was provided to people indigenous and non-indigenous, who had very little experience using a computer and no experience using the Internet. The amount of information imparted in a few days was, therefore quite considerable and not all of it was retained. Basic guides to Internet and email were used in the follow up training undertaken in Katherine and during the training done in Kununurra in the hope that these guides could be used as memory aids once training was finished. 

Ongoing support has been provided via phone and email, but this has not always been satisfactory and there have been problems which phone consultations have been unable to remedy. An example of this kind of problem was experienced on Melville Island by the Munupi Arts and Crafts Centre. The Centre’s modem was destroyed on a number of occasions by lightening storms during the wet season. Their attempts to reconnect have been frustrated by problems with the phone connections between the island and the mainland and also, inevitably by the difficulties of fixing this kind of problem by phone. Even in the absence of particular technical problems, often it has been apparent that regular personal contact and face to face support would be the most desirable way of ensuring that the connections were used to their full advantage by the communities. 

In several cases, staff turnover in community centres has resulted in Internet expertise being lost if that knowledge is not passed on. In the absence of a trained person to guide users through using the Internet, the facility is unlikely to be used. This has been the experience of the Mabunji community in Boroloola and, to some degree in the Ngaliwulu wuli community in Timber Creek where, although phone support has been provided, the connection has remained largely unused
Language and literacy has been an impediment for some indigenous users. During training in Kununurra, a translator was required from time to time and English literacy levels impeded some users’ capacity to explore the Internet. In these cases graphic intensive sites did not seem to be the answer, in fact it appeared that users were often completely thrown by graphics, particularly animated graphics, which often left them completely disoriented and unsure about how to navigate the site.

All training done by AustLII so far in the remote communities project has been carried out by non-indigenous females. In some situations this appears to have been somewhat of an impediment. For example, in Kununurra the men in the community were reluctant to participate in training. This was, reportedly due to particular feeling that computers were more the domain of women than of men. The view of the council’s secretary was that this may have been different if the trainer had been male. There were also cultural sensitivities to observe such as who was and was not permitted to sit in the same room as one another, brothers and sisters of certain ages, for example are not permitted to sit together nor are mothers-in-law with their sons-in-law. In the absence of a detailed knowledge about Aboriginal law and custom it was crucial that the arrangement of sessions, what was covered and who attended was left in the hands of the community to decide. AustLII is currently looking for resources to employ an indigenous staff member to assist with the research and training in the project.

5.5 Future connections and directions
We are currently in conversation with communities in Port Stewart and Normanton in North Queensland about possible connections and training. We are also investigating the possibility of providing connections in South or Central Australia later this year to complement the existing connections and to achieve a spread of communities to compare approaches and results. We are also intending to set up an email list of all the communities currently involved to facilitate communication between the communities as well as with AustLII to share comments, discoveries and problems. 

5.5.1.	Possibilities for the future - A change in strategy?
Since AustLII began its attempt to increase remote access to legal information other similar projects have emerged. There have been growing efforts to remedy the lack of indigenous training in the use of the Internet as well as the relative lack of Indigenous presence on the Internet. The emergence of other projects in regional areas to provide training and ongoing support has raised the question of whether AustLII’s resources are better utilised co-ordinating or integrating its efforts with these projects.

In January 1999 AustLII was approached by the Australian Libraries Information Service (ALIA) who undertook a similar project in 1998, connecting and training five remote indigenous communities in South Australia and the Northern Territory. Each community was also given the opportunity to and guidance in developing their own web site. ALIA’s funding had run out and they approached AustLII to investigate the possibility of AustLII continuing technical and financial support for the communities. 

ALIA was given some assistance in their project by the library services in both Queensland and Northern Territory and suggested to AustLII that it might be useful to collaborate with these services in the ongoing support of the communities they had trained. Both services have been contacted with very encouraging results. The State library of Queensland has an Indigenous Libraries Unit in Cairns with two indigenous trainers who are involved in a project to provide public libraries in remote areas of Queensland as well as training in Internet access. AustLII is arranging to carry out training in Cairns with these trainers and other librarians from regional areas in the use of AustLII’s materials. Discussions about the possibility of carrying out similar training are underway with the Northern Territory Library Services. 

At the beginning of the project it was anticipated that the bulk of the cost of delivering this kind of facility to remote communities would be hardware and equipment costs and that training costs would be comparatively inexpensive. In reality, the reverse has been true, most of the communities had computers already and the more expensive component of the project has actually been providing face-to-face support and training to the communities. Indeed one of the clear outcomes of the remote communities project is the importance of providing support to the communities at the time of connection and periodically thereafter. A collaborative effort with regional projects to provide Internet access and training could, therefore be a more effective way of achieving this project goal.

6. Conclusion
The Council will reach the end of its term at the end of 2000. By that time it is anticipated that AustLII will have made significant improvements in the accessibility of its on-line indigenous resources. Nevertheless ongoing funding would allow the project to develop in a number of important areas. The further consideration and construction of specific user interfaces is one area in which the project could continue to contribute, not only as it applies to getting the user from the front page to the material they seek, but also in the context of using various resources such as the World Law Index and the time-line. In the context of the remote communities project, ongoing funding would allow us to explore other options for providing Internet resources and training to remote areas, and to pursue in more detail the ‘train the trainer’ model as a more resource efficient way of making indigenous and non-indigenous people aware of the indigenous materials available on the AustLII site.