Flying into the archive

Civil aviation heritage is a popular form of national memory culture in Australia in both official places and collections and in community-based, volunteer-run museums and historical societies. Digitised archives of photographs and other forms of visual culture are a significant component of this heritage and an important way in which it is shared, engaged with and researched. ‘Heritage of the Air’, an Australian Research Council Linkage project, set out to explore the transformative social and cultural impact of civil aviation in Australia through its material and digital cultural heritage. In particular, the project aimed to consider what these sources might reveal of the lived experience of aviation for marginalised groups, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who are generally considered bystanders to nationalistic aviation narratives of heroic pioneers and technological progress. In this chapter, Australian aviation heritage is framed as a colonial archive that can be read both along and against ‘the archival grain’. Drawing on the experience of doing research for this project, we consider the ethics, affordances, capacities and limitations of these digital archives and their use in creative and anti-colonial heritage-making.