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Joy Suliman
Project Manager
Collections Australia Network
I am a storyteller. I come from a long line of storytellers. As a child, I sat at the feet of my Grandmother Josephine, watching and listening as she wove her tales in a mix of Arabic, English, song and actions. On those long evenings in the living room of the Bankstown house where she still lives, I found myself transported into the mythical and magical land of “A Thousand and One Nights”, where genii’s can incite a raging storm, and the dove at your windowsill could be a handsome and kind prince from a faraway land waiting for you to break the spell which enchants him.
My grandmother always starts these stories in the same way. She says “These are the stories that my great, great, great grandmother Meriam told me when I was a girl, and now I am going to tell you”. Great, great, great grandmother Meriam came from the town of Aleppo in Syria. They were forced to leave there in the 1890’s and settled in Sudan, North Africa. In my mind’s eye it easy for me to imagine them in the courtyard of the family house in El-Obeid, Sudan, the older woman speaking of the home to which she can never return, and the wide eyed young girl at her feet. Neither of them with any knowledge of a place called Australia, or the form that these stories would take in that country half a world away.
My favourite story is one in which the most everyday of objects becomes a magical communication device. In this story, the heroine uses a brass mortar and pestle to call forth her lover so that they can talk each evening. She plucks a hair from her head, puts in the mortar and strikes it three times, each strike accompanied by a the ringing sound of brass striking brass.
As I got older and I heard the story a few more times, I began to see the mortar and pestle in different ways. My grandmother’s mortar and pestle which she had brought to Australia with her, and which she still uses, connects me in Sydney Australia through the stories to my great great great grandmother Meriam, via El-Obeid Sudan, to the town of Aleppo in Syria. Stories are one of the strongest lines through which culture travels.
And while it may not be exactly same sound as brass striking brass, in the telephone’s ring I can hear the call of a faraway land in the same way in which the hero in my grandmother’s story heard his lover’s call. Technology is a powerful tool through which we can record, preserve, transmit and tell our stories.
Statements of Significance are the powerful stories. They follow a specific structure. Their unique form makes them modular and flexible, recognisable to the specialist audience, but their stories of people and place are universally engaging. They are very cool. Powerful stories make good content.
I’d like you to imagine Statements of Significance as the building blocks for many future online projects. Our most significant stories, in new ways, for the audiences we have only just begun to imagine.
In an online environment, what would make them cooler and more useful as content?
- Specific and accurate location details for mapping so that we can map collections with applications like google maps, and to encourage new ways of relating to the material.
- Good quality photographic images, not just conservation/preservation images. People like them, they speak to an audience, and are essential to websites.
- High quality metadata, including people, places and firms so that information can be linked across sources with ease.
- Proper referencing and documentation protocols so that published statements can be checked and referenced by others, contributing to the reference and research culture of our sector.
I’d like to end with another story.
A few months ago, my grandmother was visiting for the day, to cook with me, so that I could write up some of her recipes for my blog about homecooking. She wanted to know about this “computer” and what exactly it was I did all day that earned me my living, and she asked “what’s so good about all of this anyway?”
I said “You can find anything you want to know!” She got a bit interested, and said to me “find me my father’s house on the street of the Coppersmiths in El-Obeid, Sudan”. In a matter of minutes I had found it on google maps, but when I showed it to my grandmother, she wasn’t very impressed. “That’s just a street full of buildings” she told me. “Find me something interesting”. I think I know what she meant. I was closer to that place in the fantasy world of my grandmother’s stories than that google map could get me.
Where collection records are the everything, Statements of Significance are the interesting, lending narrative to the datasphere.