Partnerships

DIA works in partnership with Native Title Representative Bodies, other government departments and external agencies to create improved access to Indigenous records. The Department has entered into various partnerships to enhance its family history service, including:

Family Information Records Bureau

The Family Information Records Bureau (FIRB), in the Department for Child Protection (DCP) works together to help Aboriginal people access their personal records. FIRB holds 5,539 personal history cards containing extracts from personal files. These cards contain information pertaining to parentage, employment, marriage or de facto relationships, removal of children, health and police records. For more information, visit the DCP Aboriginal family history website.

Daisy Bates collection

The Daisy Bates collection is available to Aboriginal people as part of the family history database and contains data obtained from individual Elders (informants) and includes genealogies, languages, moieties and the totems of Aboriginal families.

Daisy May Bates was an Irish-Australian journalist, welfare worker and lifelong student of Australian Aboriginal culture and society. She was known among the native people as 'Kabbarli' (grandmother).

Norman Tindale Collection

DIA entered into an agreement with the Board of the South Australian Museum to transfer the Western Australian portion of the Norman Tindale Collection to DIA to encourage Aboriginal people to research their family histories.

Norman Tindale's contribution to Aboriginal Australia was to collect and collate data from numerous expeditions culminating in the 1974 'Tribal Boundaries' map and accompanying catalogue 'Aboriginal tribes of Australia, their terrain, environmental controls, distribution, limits and proper names'. The information is a valuable source of information for both general and native title research.

Part of the collection is an extensive photograph collection, held by DIA.

Other partnerships

New Norcia Mission

Berndt Museum UWA

Battye Library/State Library

University of Sydney

Archives Canberra

Uniting Church