2024/07/02 by Alison L. Mount, Jimmie Barker, Roy Barker +5 · 2 voices
Social Sciences · Arts and Humanities · #Australian Indigenous Culture and History #Diverse Musicological Studies #Language and cultural evolution
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/07268602.2024.2380689
openalex publication_date 2024/07/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
Jimmie Barker (1900–1972) was a Muruwari Elder, Cultural Knowledge Holder, linguist, historian, ethnographer, inventor and sound engineer who produced over 113 h of audio recordings using reel-to-reel tape recorders between 1968 and 1972. Jimmie was supported in his endeavours by Janet Mathews and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) (formerly, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies). The “Barker Collection” of audio recordings is now housed in the AIATSIS Collection. Jimmie initially set out to record a Muruwari-English dictionary, but this expanded into documenting Muruwari language and culture, as well as personal, family, domestic and international history. Much of the collection comprises self-elicitation, metalinguistic analyses, oral histories and reflections. It includes some of the earliest recordings and language documentation by an Aboriginal person of other Aboriginal people, observations of typological properties and language change in Aboriginal languages, and critical analyses of linguistic and anthropological research. Since 2021, Roy J. Barker, grandson of Jimmie and Muruwari Cultural Knowledge Holder, has overseen a team of linguists designing a time-aligned ELAN corpus of Jimmie’s recordings for language revival outcomes. The recordings are transcribed, annotated with metadata and coded with cultural and language tags with consideration to the FAIR and CARE Principles.