Comments made at the launch of the 
Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Resources in Endangered Cultures
(PARADISEC)

Phillip Jones, Acting Director 
Research Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences (RIHSS) 
The University of Sydney

1 October 2003

One of the interesting by-products of the recent war in Iraq was the need for the United States to send a couple of positive signals to the UN, and so a year ago President Bush announced the US’s return to membership of UNESCO, which his father’s predecessor had withdrawn from in the mid-1980s.  So yesterday saw Mrs Bush in Paris raising the US flag at UNESCO headquarters, saying all the right things about how important UNESCO is to the world in these troubled times.  The problem is, I think, that this University has a bigger budget than UNESCO, and it is up to such countries as the US, UK and indeed Australia to put UNESCO on a substantially more solid and practical footing.

I recall a UNESCO article in its glossy magazine from a couple of years back.  I was struck that of the world’s 6,000 languages, about a third are in our Asia and Pacific region.  A great proportion of these are in considerable danger of extinction – UNESCO estimates that over this century maybe three-quarters of the Asia-Pacific languages will die out.

PARADISEC is all about preventing this from happening.  We all know about the marvellous work that has been done over the past fifty or more years in recording the languages, stories, songs, instrumental music and dances around the region.  Often this work has been done with the enthusiastic support of local communities who knew all too well what was happening with the march of modernity and the onslaught of English as a lingua franca. 

The problem we’re faced with now is that not only are there hundreds if not over a thousand languages in our region in danger of extinction.  A very great number of the recordings made to preserve them over the past half-century are themselves in danger.  Mould and dust make tapes unplayable. Recording formats become obsolete, especially analogue sound recording formats.  Archived material all too frequently outlives those who collected it, and so the time comes for a grieving family to clear the junk out of the garage, all those dusty old tapes that couldn’t be of any possible use to anyone.  You even hear of the odd head of department clearing out the storeroom in a University music or language department after the demise of a champion of preservation – again for much the same reason: who could possibly make use of or even sense of this decaying heap of …. ?  I’m not certain where the reputation of eccentricity comes from, but there it is.  But I suppose if you’ve ever met David Fanshawe of African Sanctus fame you might get a clue – genius or madman?  People never seem able to decide.

Well, this is what PARADISEC is all about.  This happy acronym stands for the Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures.   We kicked it off here at the University of Sydney with, I might say, the enthusiastic and practical backing of RIHSS.  The University of Melbourne and the Australian National University are now our active partners, and I’m delighted to say that the University of New England is also coming on board this year.  PARADISEC has benefited enormously, too, from the support of ANU’s Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing National Facility as well as ANU’s Internet Futures Project.

It’s all a bit virtual.  Here at Sydney Frank Davey and Amanda Harris work on audio preservation and project administration, while at Melbourne you’ll find Nicholas Thieberger pulling the strings as the overall Project Manager – not to mention the groups at ANU lending their support.  It’s a delight for them, I’m sure, when they get the rare chance to meet up face-to-face (as with this week’s very successful workshop) along with the steering committee led by Linda Barwick, with Jane Simpson, Allan Marett, Nick Evans, Steven Bird, Stuart Hungerford, John Bowden and Ewan Maidment.

It’s also a bit virtual in that PARADISEC is a digital archive.  It simply cannot store the recordings in physical form – and perhaps this is a good thing, in that the originals quite rightly belong somewhere back home.  

We know that for Australia some of our major cultural institutions are actively working to ensure the preservation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island materials.  But that is where their brief really ends and where PARADISEC comes in with its regional focus and scope.

There is still so much to do.  This is why the support PARADISEC is now getting from the Australian Research Council’s Large Equipment Infrastructure and Facilities (LIEF) Program is so very important, as is the matching funding from ANU, Melbourne and Sydney.  Beyond that, we have to bring our ingenuity into play.  I looked down the list of well-funded national research priorities, and this sort of thing didn’t leap out.

Preserving cultural heritage, making it available back in home communities, fostering and supporting research, stimulating cultural renewal, providing teaching and training, and bringing relevant partners together – this is all about why we have universities.  I wish Brendan Nelson were here tonight to do the honours.  But one particular honour and pleasure for me is to make some symbolic presentations now: 

•	CDs of digitised field recordings made by researchers from ANU for Andrew Pawley of ANU;
•	CDs of digitised field recordings made by researchers from the University of Melbourne for Nick Evans of Unimelb;
•	CDs of music from PNG for Don Niles and Vincent Palie from the Institute of PNG Studies;
•	CDs of Vanuatu language and music for Ambong Thompson from the Vanuatu Cultural Centre.

Anyone launching anything except a ship is quite uncertain of what to actually do, unless they give you a plaque to unveil.  So, let’s just rejoice in the establishment of PARADISEC, express our congratulations and very real appreciation to Linda Barwick and everyone involved, and collectively do our bit to ensure its success.  So, with PARADISEC now officially launched, I would like to call on John Byron, Executive Director of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, to say a few words.  Thank you very much.