Kimberley researchers explore AI as a tool for returning oral knowledge to Country

A new research project working with Traditional Owners in Western Australia’s Kimberley region is testing whether artificial intelligence could play a role in returning decades of archived cultural knowledge to the communities it belongs to and challenging the assumption that ancient cultures and emerging technology cannot work together.

The project, described in a paper published in The Conversation by University of Western Australia researcher Elizabeth Vaughan and Dambimangari Traditional Owner Francis Woolagoodja, centres on the legacy material of the late Sam Woolagoodja – a senior cultural figure whose knowledge of Wororra law, language and Country was documented by researchers over more than 40 years. Those recordings, field notes, and translations now sit in institutions across Australia, thousands of kilometres from the community they came from.

Vaughan and Woolagoodja argue that conventional archives (designed around Western text-based knowledge systems) are ill-suited to the way oral cultures actually hold and transmit knowledge. Wororra, a language of the Kimberley coast, has no written form. Laws, kinship records, and cultural practices are encoded in songs, ceremony, art and dance.

The question the project asks is whether AI tools could serve as a more appropriate vessel for returning that material: one that preserves the relational, spoken, context-dependent qualities of oral knowledge rather than flattening it into searchable text.

For communities managing Country, the stakes are practical as well as cultural. Genealogies determine who speaks for Country in native title proceedings. Heritage records shape decisions about land use and development. When that information lives in distant institutions in inaccessible formats, Traditional Owners can find themselves unable to counter assertions about their own Country.

The researchers frame AI as a tool in community hands, not a solution imposed from outside. The project adds a new dimension to the ongoing national conversation about First Nations digital inclusion, data sovereignty and the conditions under which new technologies serve communities rather than extract from them.