After I installed the CD-ROM at Lajamanu school in August 1998, a controversial community meeting led the Council to decide that the program was very good for the school but should not be commercialised outside the community: culture was too precious to become a commodity. A year later, another big meeting was organised in my presence with the Council which decided this time to release the CD-ROM for display, but only in museums and research libraries, like universities. The idea was to attract persons willing to learn and with an earnest approach to research. The confidence in institutions which aim at educating large audiences is based on the hope of creating new conditions for cultural sharing. It is in this spirit of exchange that twelve Lajamanu men accepted an invitation to visit Paris in 1983 and to dance and make a gigantic ground sand painting,7 and that artists continue to travel to different cities to dance and paint for the launch of their canvas paintings in galleries and museums.
The challenge with the CD-ROM was to find a solution for the distribution that would respect the wishes of the community and the cultural property rights of the artists. In 2000, UNESCO Publishing signed a contract with the Lajamanu Art Centre, Warnayaka, to co-publish the CD-ROM and to share the copyright and the benefits through licences granted to institutions and individual orders addressed directly to UNESCO. The new version which came out in French and English under the title Dream trackers: Yapa art and knowledge of the Australian desert (Pistes de Rêves) was presented by Jimmy Robertson Jampijinpa, a Warlpiri artist, then manager of the Lajamanu art centre, during an international conference.8 In an interview with the UNESCO journal (Source June 2001), he noted that ‘This CD-ROM brings everybody to the mind’.
Access to technology
A question for the future is: what means do Indigenous communities have to control the chain involved in the transmission of knowledge? Multimedia technology can only be advertised so long as it does not threaten to become a mode of fixing a culture which is a dynamic process, evolving through social transformations, individual and collective experiences, community art and personal styles. The Warlpiri have shown that they master this dynamic aspect of their culture even when traditional transmission is not restricted to the old ways. Writing about oral cultures has already questioned the vitality of orality, but it has not stopped people from continuing to invent stories or reinterpret the old ones. Books on anthropology and oral history are not bibles because the written text does not serve as the core of the cultural and spiritual beliefs; it is still the ritual action and the exchanges between people which lead the control of knowledge in, and between, Aboriginal communities. In this sense the power of the elders cannot be threatened when initiations continue to be performed and children learn from the land.
7    Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord by Peter Brook, the ARC and the Musée d’Art Moderne. Part of the exhibition ‘D’un autre continent—l’Australie, le rêve et le réel’, organised by the Festival d’Automne 1983.
8    2001 UNESCO Symposium, ‘Indigenous Identities: oral, written and new technologies’, co-organised by the author at UNESCO in Paris; see the report available at <http://www.unesco.org/culture/indigenous>. The multimedia version of the 2001 symposium promoting the 2003 Charter for Cultural Diversity has since become available as: L. Pourchez et al (eds) 2004 Cultural diversity and indigenous peoples: oral, written expressions and new technologies, CD-ROM, Unesco Publishing, Paris.