The Mulka Archive

At the core of The Mulka Project resides a growing, living digital archive of unique and valuable Yolŋu knowledge, ceremony and cultural-history. The curated and publicly accessible collections contain over 80,000 photographs dating back to the 1920s, more than 35 days of audio recordings dating back to the 1940s and over 14 days of videos pertaining to Yolŋu culture dating back to the 1930’s. We record, catalogue, store, and disseminate this sacred knowledge of current generations whilst scouring the archives of anthropologists to return the captured knowledge of generations past. This keeping place also holds a deeper cultural archive which has accumulated over 64TB of cultural content and is growing weekly with newly produced media and repatriated media from national and global institutions.

As the older generation of knowledge holders approach the end of their lives it is crucial that The Mulka Project maintains a safe and secure keeping place so we can continue to record their stories, traditions and languages. Therefore one of our most crucial duties is the preservation and maintenance of this rich cultural digital archive of national significance as it is vital to ensure the voice/vision/language of seven-generations of Yolŋu be conserved and passed down to all future generations.