This website was produced between 2017-2020 and contains transcriptions of original notes and papers of Gippsland magistrate A. W. Howitt and Methodist missionary Lorimer Fison. The project was funded by the Australian Research Council (LP160100192) and was managed by Deakin University. The investigators and key local experts and linguists include Russell Mullett, Cheryl Drayton, Sandy Mullett, Harley Dunolly-Lee, Corey Theatre, Helen Gardner, Stephen Morey, Rachel Hendry, Jason Gibson, Patrick McConvell, Philip Batty and Mary Morris. Amanda Lourie was the project officer. Simon Sherrin (Museums Victoria) provided technological leadership. This website has been developed as a collaboration between Deakin University, Museums Victoria, the State Library of Victoria and Victorian Aboriginal Corporation for Languages.

Howitt and Fison carried out some of the earliest anthropological research in Australia and left extensive archival materials on language, kinship, and social organisation. Whilst Howitt and Fison’s work was shaped by their professional roles and ideas such as social evolutionary theory, the papers contain cultural expertise shared by Aboriginal informants. We have treated this material as an artefact of deep and prolonged colonial encounter.

The descendants of the Aboriginal people with whom Howitt and Fison worked are key stakeholders in this collection. The material collected by Howitt and Fison constitutes one of the most important historical and cultural archives available to the Aboriginal people of south-eastern Australia, so it is crucial that the material on this website be handled with respect and care.

Through the course of the project the documents have been enriched with further information on Aboriginal and settler contributors and enhanced with linguistic, botanical and anthropological insights from contemporary scholars and Aboriginal descendants. This website features only a small portion of the materials held in the archives. Many more documents have been transcribed but are not publically available and there are materials that have not been included. Please contact the relevant holding institution for more information. Further Howitt and Fison objects and correspondence can also be accessed via the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.