Amulet Atlas

organizationsAustralian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

also: AIATSIS · Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies · AIAS

organizationAustraliaAustralianeeds checking

This one is not fully ours to publish

AIATSIS holds material that is secret or sacred to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and restricts access to it: restricted visual media are stored apart from the rest of the collection, audio and moving-image items are not played until cultural requirements are checked, and depositors may set access and use conditions on what they deposit. This atlas prints those conditions and stops. It does not reconstruct restricted Australian designs, objects or rites from other sources, and does not fill the gap with a neighbouring tradition's practice. — AIATSIS, in its published collection-management protocols and its Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research (2020) source

The atlas prints the restriction and stops. Why.

Australian Government statutory authority in Canberra, founded in 1964 as the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies and renamed under the AIATSIS Act 1989. It collects, publishes and researches, and it holds over a million cultural items — roughly 42,000 hours of audio, around 700,000 photographs and about six million feet of film. Part of that collection is secret or sacred, and AIATSIS publishes the rules for handling it. Those rules are why this atlas leaves Australia largely blank.

cited

When

established June 1964; renamed under the AIATSIS Act 1989 still carried cited

Period1964 to now
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

The founding purpose was salvage, in the vocabulary of its time: to record language, song, art, material culture, ceremonial life and social structure before those traditions perished in the face of European ways. No Aboriginal people attended the 1961 conference that planned the institute. Before 1970 there had never been an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander member on its council. The 1989 Act changed the arithmetic: a council of nine, of whom the Act requires that at least five be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, with one of the Minister's appointees a Torres Strait Islander.

The collection was built by donation, gift, purchase and fieldwork, and also by deposit — an arrangement that permits the original owners to assign access and use conditions appropriate to the cultural information in the items. That clause is the hinge. It means an item can sit in a national collection and still be governed by the people it came from.

The handling rules follow from it. AIATSIS holds material that is sensitive and/or secret/sacred to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, and under its founding Act adheres to strict protocols when processing it. Restricted visual media are stored separately from the rest of the collection. Audio and moving-image items are not played until cultural requirements have been checked. Restricted material is digitised in secured conditions such as enclosed booths, by staff who can meet the protocols of the item being digitised. The institute also supports the protocols of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Library, Information and Resource Network.

On the research side, AIATSIS published the Guidelines for Ethical Research in Australian Indigenous Studies in 1999, updated them in 2012, and replaced them in 2020 with the AIATSIS Code of Ethics for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Research. The Code rests on four principles: Indigenous self-determination, Indigenous leadership, impact and value, and sustainability and accountability.

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Now

A new precinct, Ngurra, is planned on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin at a stated A$316.5 million, to include a resting place for ancestral remains of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that cannot be returned to Country. AIATSIS Central Australia opened in Alice Springs / Mparntwe on 2 February 2024. The institute's Australian Indigenous Language Collection is registered in UNESCO's Memory of the World programme — a different UNESCO instrument from the intangible-heritage lists.

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What is on record about it

What this is near

storyWhat this atlas does not printthe long read this record is the citation behind — the reason Australia is mostly blank on this map is published policy, not an oversightstoryWho owns a charmthe long read on ownership; the deposit clause here is the clearest model of a collection held under somebody else's conditionsparallelMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewathe other national institution in this atlas that works to the terms of the people whose material it holdscontrastThe Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Actthe American statute doing part of the same work by law rather than by protocol, and covering only remains and named categories of objectcontrastThe Pitt Rivers Museumthe Oxford museum that returned the remains of 17 Aboriginal Australians to the Australian government in 2022contrastWikimedia Commonsthe opposite arrangement: a repository whose whole premise is that anyone may reuse anything in itcontrastUNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritagethe UNESCO instrument this institute is often assumed to work under; its language collection is on a different UNESCO register

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

contrastThe Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Actthe Australian counterpart, working by protocol and deposit conditions where this works by statute and fundingcontrastUNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritagethe Australian institute often confused with this programme; its language collection sits on UNESCO's Memory of the World register insteadcontrastWikimedia Commonsthe opposite premise: a collection where access conditions travel with the item and open reuse is not the defaultorgWhat this atlas does not printthe body whose Act and Code this rule is modelled on, and whose wording is quoted here rather than paraphrasedorgWho owns a charmthe body running Australia's Return of Cultural Heritage programme since 2019

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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