that sooner or later this remote community2 would also have CD-ROM facilities. To produce an interactive multimedia program, the data had to be organised differently from a book or a film. The writing of the script had to be non-linear; that is, it had to have autonomous modules of text, sound and image that could be connected with each other. I wanted these hyperlinks to follow rules and to have meanings that respected the connections that the Warlpiri themselves establish according to their own cognitive logic. Many months were spent arranging the data, according to the Dreaming affiliations of the different local groups. Traditionally these groups used to live around waterholes, hunting and gathering as they travelled between places that were in their spiritual custody. Today, Warlpiri still identify with those places of origin, and they celebrate them in rituals during which they dance, sing and paint their bodies and sacred objects. In the mid-1980s, they also started to paint traditional designs—which always refer to places and their connected totems—on canvas for sale. I chose a sample of such paintings, classified according to the totems they represent and their respective countries, as the organising structure for all the data. I then worked then with a fantastic Warlpiri lady, Barbara Gibson Nakamarra, custodian of the Yawakiyi Plum Dreaming, daughter of deceased ritual leader and herself very knowledgeable, having lived a traditional hunting and gathering life until the 1950s. She helped me with the translations of the many songs and stories I had collected from some fifty Warlpiri and checked the general structure of the information and the way things were connected. All the selected material was classified into fourteen local groups, each identified by the totemic names of the ancestral heroes, animals and plants who travelled and left their imprint in special places. The project was then presented to the community with a press-book and an audio tape. Back in Paris, with the assistance of a computer laboratory (LIA, IRD), I produced a digital pilot with the whole structure and some of the data. I then showed it to the community on my laptop in July 1997. Three months later, after having integrated more data, I organised with Qantm Indigenet, an Australian organisation promoting Aboriginal access to internet and multimedia, a one week workshop in the Lajamanu School which had just received ten new Macintosh computers with CD-ROMs. The workshop was very exciting as the children could show their family how to navigate on the screen to check this ‘Yapa’ (‘Aboriginal people’ in the Warlpiri language) program written in HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Both young and old were very enthusiastic about seeing and hearing their own people in a way that respected their traditional classifications. Elders were especially happy about the ease with which the information could be accessed directly by children or adults who cannot read and write, and the fact that there were three hours of Warlpiri speech or songs by over fifty representatives of the community. It was agreed that I should continue to develop this restitution program for use in the school. 2 The nearest settlements are Wawe Hill, 100 km to the north, and Yuendumu, 300 km to the south.
