In 2016, a team of academics from the University of Sydney and the University of Queensland, together with curatorial staff from the Queensland Museum, began drafting a research project to investigate the heritage of Australian South Sea Islanders in full co-operation with the stakeholder communities. Led by James Flexner, the team held preparatory meetings with Australian South Sea Islander groups to test the feasibility of the project, to develop project aims that reflected their cultural, social and political aspirations, and to draft a methodological approach fully integrating Australian South Sea Islanders as research experts and partners.

Conceived within the decolonising model of maximal participatory research (Gonzalez, Kretzler & Edwards, 2018), early drafts of the funding proposal identified Australian South Sea Islander community groups as partner institutions and outlined a flexible methodological framework to include research approaches and outcomes authentic to the stakeholders. Over the course of its development, however, the research grant document transformed in response to the requirements of the Australian Research Council (ARC) and its Linkage Projects scheme. Responding to the ARC’s funding rules and research advisers’ feedback on the eligibility of our application, successive iterations of the draft proposal saw the participatory role of Australian South Sea Islanders in the project downplayed. Only the researchers with formal academic qualifications or roles at the Queensland Museum were listed as Chief or Partner Investigators (CIs and PIs), while the methodological outline for the project became focused on conventional, academically recognised approaches and outputs.

Using our experience of writing the ARC funding application, this chapter explores the tension between scholarship that aspires towards a culturally democratic, shared-authority research model and existing funding frameworks still tethered to hierarchical notions of research expertise. By analysing documents and correspondence generated in the development of the research grant application, this chapter provides a rich description of the grant application writing process, including analysis of the sequence of decision-making that underpinned the transformation of the project from its initial objectives into its final submitted form.

To be clear, we are not singling out the ARC specifically in this chapter. The problems we encountered in framing the funding application for this particular project resonate far outside of the Australian context. Despite decades of calls for ‘decolonising’ research (Tuhiwai Smith, 2012), there are still tensions between the limiting structures of the academic research environment and the ideals of a community-led paradigm. The ARC has a history of funding community-oriented archaeological research, particularly involving Aboriginal groups (e.g. Veth et al., 2019),1 but a narrow understanding of researcher expertise persists in the structural and discursive norms of funding proposals.

This chapter was written at the commencement of the research project, which gained ARC funding approval in 2018. It is divided into sections that document each phase in the development of the grant application. As part of our commitment to reflexive practice, our narrative captures a snapshot of the temporal, methodological, political and institutional challenges of merging academic research with community expectations and the implications that these challenges may pose for the life cycle of the project.

​First draft

In 2000, Queensland Premier Peter Beattie’s preamble to his government’s Action Plan for Australian South Sea Islanders called for special consideration of the needs and goals of the Australian South Sea Islander community, based on a history of unequal opportunity and lack of recognition (Queensland Government, 2000). The ability of the community to participate fully in the cultural life of Queensland was seen as integral to the Action Plan, reflecting the interconnectivity between cultural self-expression and broader economic, political and social participation. As expressed in the plan, the Queensland government’s desire to support Australian South Sea Islander culture and identity was instrumental to the extent that it regarded improved understanding of the community’s cultural needs as a pathway to tailoring the delivery of government services, building capacity within the community and highlighting significant Australian South Sea Islander contributions to Queensland’s economic and social development. To some extent the plan was also a conciliatory gesture in recognition of the role played by historical legislation in formalising discrimination against the community, and subsequent legacies of disadvantage (Beattie, Hollis & Borbidge, 2000).

Within this political context, part of the rationale for our project was to galvanise official efforts to redress Australian South Sea Islander experiences of systemic inequality (including those historically caused by the actions of government bodies) by challenging conventional, academic-led notions of research. We wanted to develop and trial a new model for research founded on the principles of genuine participation and self-determination on the part of the community. From the outset, we recognised the irony (and potential) of developing such a model within the framework of the ARC’s Linkage Projects Scheme, with the opportunity to enact change from within a prescriptively academic and institutionally focused program.

The idea for a collaborative project on Australian South Sea Islander heritage through the lens of archaeology and museum collections first came up in 2014 when James Flexner travelled to Brisbane to undertake a study of New Hebrides (Vanuatu) objects in the Queensland Museum (QM) collection in connection with his ongoing archaeological investigations in the Vanuatu region. During this trip, Flexner met Geraldine Mate and Imelda Miller, both from the curatorial department at QM, and they began discussing what kind of project might be possible.

Australian South Sea Islander communities have long worked on their own projects in historical research and community development, not least in connection to the official recognition of Australian South Sea Islanders by the Queensland government in 1994 and the commemorations that accompanied the 150th anniversary of the first arrival of South Sea Islander labourers in Queensland in 2013. Both the recognition and the 150th anniversary were watershed events in which the QM, and specifically Miller, were intimately involved. There was a sense that in spite of these incremental steps, more could be done to explore and educate the public about Australian South Sea Islander pasts in relation to lived identities. The development of such a project was not just intellectually engaging, but of personal interest to Miller, who is of Australian South Sea Islander background.

In 2016, Mate, Miller and Flexner revisited the idea of applying for ARC funding for the project. Supported by funding from the University of Sydney and QM, a preliminary meeting was held at QM Southbank, followed by an initial field trip to Mackay, Ayr, Rockhampton and Joskeleigh to examine promising sites and meet with community organisations. During this trip, Flexner and Mate were introduced to Australian South Sea Islander organisations including the Mackay and District Australian South Sea Islander Association (MADASSIA) and the Rockhampton Area South Sea Islander Association (RASSIC).

Following the initial field visits, a workshop was hosted at QM Southbank in November 2016. It was attended by a number of Australian South Sea Islander community leaders, as well as researchers and representatives of potential partner organisations. The first day of the workshop focused on identifying the community’s research priorities, while the second day was centred on research development from an academic and institutional perspective. Also joining the team during this workshop were Thomas Baumgartl, an environmental scientist, and Andrew Fairbairn, an archaeobotanist, who could expand the scientific capacity of the project as it related to reconstructing past environments in central Queensland. Jonathan Pragnell was also brought into the team as the leading expert in the historical archaeology of Queensland (e.g. Prangnell, 2013). Representatives from the State Library of Queensland expressed their interest in being involved in the project at this point, particularly in relation to their immense and varied collections of documentary sources relating to Australian South Sea Islander history. Following the workshop, Mate and Miller returned to central Queensland to gain further direction and feedback from stakeholder groups. The Australian South Sea Islander community was very excited and looked forward to the possibilities of moving towards a full funding proposal.

​Developing the application

A community-led approach to cultural research aims not only to recover and disseminate the heritage of specific groups, but also to build skills for sustaining research activity in the community by offering community members experience in scholarly research methods. This means that Community-Led Research (CLR) does not stop at extensive community consultation, but also remains fundamentally committed to a shared research experience. In our case – and similar to initiatives that have been trialled in the context of capacity building around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage management (Smith & Jackson, 2006; NSW Government, 2010; Greer, 2010) – we envisaged Australian South Sea Islander communities becoming more self-reliant in the practice of cultural heritage research as one of the key outcomes of our project.

The ideal of co-produced and co-managed research is not new, but there has been a lag between conceptualising changes to practice and converting that intent into tangible modifications to actual research processes. Our project began with what we hoped were the right intentions, but as we moved from the scoping stage towards translating our initial conversations with the Australian South Sea Islander community into a formal ARC Linkage application, we sensed the pressure to move away from an expressly community-led articulation of the project.

The wording of a 2016 draft of the ARC application reveals that, from the outset, the research team was conscious of the tensions between the demands of conventional scholarly research design and process – which usually includes the articulation of a research philosophy, a research question and listed aims for the study, followed by an account of recognised strategies for data collection and analysis – and the need to defer methodological closure so that the Australian South Sea Islander community could fully participate in the development of the project. The team was likewise aware that it would be contradictory to the community-led aspirations of the research to predetermine and limit its outcomes to conventional scholarly outputs that might have little relevance or direct benefit to the Australian South Sea Islander community:

The potential ‘messiness’ of CLR as an emergent process of collaboration and negotiation between communities and researchers over time does not, however, sit easily with bureaucratic and, arguably, conservative ARC specifications for Linkage Project applications, nor the advice we received from research advisers at the University of Sydney about how to make our proposal more competitive.

According to the ARC’s 2016 Linkage Program funding rules (section A4.1.3), the purpose of the scheme is to ‘deliver outcomes of benefit to Australia and build Australia’s research and innovation capacity’ (ARC, 2016a, p. 11). As a program that is taxpayer funded through the Australian government, the scheme justifiably emphasises the desirability of nationally accessible, useful and high-profile research outcomes that ‘meet the needs of the broader Australian innovation system’ (ARC, 2016a, p. 44). However, for community-led projects (where the benefits of the research logically flow to local and often minority populations) we quickly became aware that the funding application would need to emphasise more widespread return on investment within the rubric of universally recognised, predetermined scholarly methods and definitive outputs. Offering feedback on a draft of the Approach section of our proposal, one faculty research adviser wrote:

Another adviser suggested that the methodological rigour of the project needed to be reinforced in terms of established fields of study, asking us to think first in disciplinary terms and restructure the methodology around ‘finding new ways for ethnographic collections and field archaeology to talk to one another’ (Robinson, 2017c). Ironically, on the basis of Australian South Sea Islander community organisations’ limited research track record (in the context of recognised scholarly research outputs), we were questioned on the capability of the community to contribute to the development of a best-practice participatory research model (one of our stated objectives for the project). Advisers pre-empted likely questions from ARC assessors by asking: ‘What would Australian South Sea Islanders actually do as research partners? What research expertise do Australian South Sea Islander organisations bring to the project?’ (Robinson, 2017c).

In pursuit of efficient and low-risk spending of funding money, the ARC Linkage Program is geared towards facilitating collaborations between universities and non-higher education organisations that have ‘demonstrated a clear commitment to high-quality research’ (ARC, 2016a, p. 44). This prerequisite diminishes the possibility of nominating community organisations as partner institutions in a proposal, not least because communities are not routinely involved in research officially recognised as ‘high quality’ or ‘high impact’. Small community organisations have limited capacity to provide material resources (either in-kind or cash) to a project, as required by the ARC. Neither can they easily muster the resources to ‘enter into arrangements regarding Intellectual Property’ related to a project, or necessarily elaborate how the project ‘fits into each Partner Organisation’s overall strategic plan’ (ARC, 2016a, p. 15). These requirements preclude volunteer-run organisations like MADASSIA – our primary contact with Australian South Sea Islander people – from substantive nomination on ARC Linkage projects. As a result, we found our aspiration to cement the role of Australian South Sea Islander groups in the articulation of the project curtailed, with the University of Sydney, University of Queensland and Queensland Museum emerging as the official research partners according to the ARC’s eligibility criteria.

​Final submission

In our final ARC application, we proposed an interdisciplinary and collaborative approach that would integrate the methodologies of archaeology, museology, critical heritage studies, and environmental sciences. But the methodology had to be outlined according to particular scholarly standards and narrative tropes to satisfy the ARC’s assessors. As a result, the final proposal was less flexible than what had been articulated in our initial drafts. Of course, we retained some capacity to transform our approaches as we go, and indeed we expanded that ability by adding a Chief Investigator from the Australian South Sea Islander community, Francis Bobongie, with a background in education. Nonetheless, the final wording of the proposal did not go as far with the idea of a Community-Led methodology as we had initially thought possible.

The result is a project proposal that sits somewhat uncomfortably with our initial ideals for a community-led approach, but which was satisfying to the bureaucratic organisations that provide research funding in this context. Some of the proposal reflects widely accepted methodologies from the respective fields of the researchers involved. In other cases, we were able to make some recommendations in line with community desires. For example, in the realm of ‘capacity building’, the project will fund Research Assistant positions, with preference to recruitment of Australian South Sea Islanders. However, as the community continues to be underrepresented in higher education, it is possible there will be no suitable candidates. For example, the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) offers a scholarship specifically for Australian South Sea Islander students, but only one, limited to $5000, is offered annually.2

Underpinning many of the complexities in developing our proposal is the problem of cultural recognition for Australian South Sea Islanders. Indeed, questions of recognition and respect are likely motivators for the generally sceptical stance towards outside researchers taken by many Australian South Sea Islander groups and individuals. The legislative framework in Australia, at state as well as federal level, to some degree feeds into this dynamic as it separates Aboriginal heritage from colonial (usually meaning European) heritage (see Brown, 2008). This produces a tension. On the one hand, it appropriately provides Aboriginal people with the opportunity to point to their special relationship to Country. On the other hand, it creates a wall around Aboriginal heritage that sits out of step with more recent experience; for example, with Aboriginal sites dating to the colonial period (e.g. Byrne, 2003; Harrison, 2004), or with the multicultural communities that included Aboriginal people, such as those who lived in mixed communities with Australian South Sea Islanders.

Within the context of our project, what happens with minority groups, such as Australian South Sea Islanders, who identify as ‘Indigenous’ but do not have the same kind of recognition as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander groups? Archaeologists have frameworks for working with Traditional Owners through Aboriginal corporations and Local Area Land Councils, and there are established ways of articulating these relationships, including in research grant proposals. There are established standards and protocols, and sometimes long histories of archaeologists working alongside particular Aboriginal groups who see the value of having systematic documentation of historical and ancestral ties to Country, dating back millennia.

Organisations like MADASSIA are insistent about the need to document and manage a distinctive Australian South Sea Islander heritage, while community members with Australian South Sea Islander and Aboriginal ancestry may apply a broader context to understanding local sites. Australian South Sea Islanders often lived alongside and sometimes intermarried with Aboriginal people, particularly after the exclusionary White Australia Policy forced them off the plantations in 1908 and people moved to marginal areas along riverbanks and in the valleys. Interpreting these sites exclusively in one way or another would thus be disingenuous, even if it is somewhat at odds with the desire of some segments of the ‘community’ (which, of course, is far from a singular entity). Again, the labelling of sites as Aboriginal or not is a problematic legacy of interpretation, practice and legislation in Australian archaeology. In our project, we had to be sensitive about how the final submission articulated the specificity of Australian South Sea Islander focus in the project, without excluding or marginalising the related Aboriginal heritage values.

These challenges in collaborative research speak to the broader environment of cultural recognition in Australia. Models used in archaeological research, as well as other fields, to work with Aboriginal people cannot simply be translated into an Australian South Sea Islander context. Groups such as MADASSIA (2000) have their own protocols for collaborating with researchers. As our project evolves, there is an imperative to honour these guidelines as well as to forge new ways of working not envisaged within previous protocols, including in our research grant proposal, necessitating a constant process of engagement and negotiation as a new, joint methodology emerges.

The point here is not to bemoan the imperfect nature of doing collaborative research, nor to complain about the grant funding system or the politics of recognition. These are all things that are changing, and can be pushed to some extent, but they remain limiting structures we must work within to do our research at all. Rather, these limits require discussion in order to determine how future research might be shaped in order to move towards a truly community-led environment. Making the strictures of ARC definitions of researcher more flexible and better recognising and accounting for contributions from community groups would be steps in that direction.

​The bigger picture: reflecting on the international context and our motivations for CLR

As a project designed to explore Australian South Sea Islander lived identities via shared authority between academics and community members, our research is nested within international heritage discourses that have been undergoing a process of transformation as the significant role of Indigenous communities in heritage management has gained prominence. The United Nation’s 2007 Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples galvanised international commitments to Indigenous autonomy, affirming that Indigenous groups should not only be ‘free from discrimination’, but also emphasising the link between Indigenous cultures, rights and development as a subset of the right of all peoples to self-determination (UN, 2007, pp. 3–5). Explicitly linking cultural continuity with heritage practice, Article 11.1 states:

The 2007 Declaration shone a spotlight on issues of data sovereignty for Indigenous peoples, including their participation in gathering, and control of, research data relating to their communities (Kukutai & Taylor, 2016, pp. xxi–xxii). The need to reorientate research to serve the development agendas of Indigenous peoples, rather than solely fulfilling government requirements, has adjacent implications for scholarly research. For our project, this will mean continuous reflexive assessment of our work to ensure that there is no ‘implementation gap’ between the intent and realisation of community as leaders and autonomous actors in the research process. The inability to fulfil in a more complete way the ideals proposed by the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples remains an international struggle, including within the very organisation that made the Declaration (Meskell, 2013), thus we do not take these challenges lightly.

In crafting our ARC application, we already experienced a disjuncture between authorised research discourses and the intent of a community-led approach. Early drafts of the funding application underscored the centrality of a collaborative research approach in achieving the dual purposes of the project: strengthening Australian South Sea Islander identity and contributing new scholarly knowledge through museum collection research and archaeological investigations. Even though the team was, at this stage, referring to ‘community-based’ rather than CLR (Flexner, Miller & Mate, 2016, p. 1), the project aims were firmly embedded in a commitment to foreground the ‘personal voice’ of Australian South Sea Islanders and a research process that would be ‘driven by community’ (ibid., p. 2). Through the engagement between community and researchers, this approach would honour the Pacific Islands culture of reciprocity.

Responsibility for the dilution of Australian South Sea Islander community agency in the articulation of our project for the final funding application cannot, however, be laid solely at the feet of the ARC. A review of the early draft material betrays an underlying positioning of ourselves as initiators of the project who, based on our scholarly expertise and personal links with the Australian South Sea Islander community, identified an opportunity for research and recognised its instrumental potential to deliver benefits that could help address a range of social and economic inequities experienced by people of Australian South Sea Islander heritage. In addition to providing high-impact scholarly outputs (arguably most beneficial to the chief investigators and partner investigators themselves), the project was designed to ‘provide Australian South Sea Islanders with tools, information and skills which will empower them to have stewardship over their own heritage and the ability to interpret and reinterpret their own histories in the long term’ (Flexner, Miller & Mate, 2016, p. 3, emphasis added). The capacity-building goal inherent in the research was, therefore, rationalised as a potent political intervention, perhaps satisfying researcher-led moral commitments to correcting historical injustices as much as it was directed to fulfilling a community-led desire for the project.

​Next steps (treading carefully)

In 2003, UNESCO officially recognised the value of cultural ‘practices, representations, expressions, knowledge, [and] skills’ (UNESCO, 2003, p. 2) in the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, which underscored cultural performance as an essential ingredient in sustaining cultural diversity, identity and creativity in the face of globalisation. In the context of research, this implies that communities need to be involved in the identification, interpretation, documentation and communication of their cultural practices as a form of living heritage. While scholarly researchers can help facilitate these processes through their methodological and project management know-how, community heritage research that is driven by external ‘experts’ makes little sense if the genuine objective is to support the vitality and perpetuation of lived cultures.

Taking its cue from the efforts of Australian South Sea Islanders to gain official recognition for their community as a distinct and significant cultural group in Queensland, our project emerged through early consultations with Australian South Sea Islander groups and an ethical commitment to sustaining their authority and ownership of the research. Differences between this community-led intent and how we were required to articulate the project for the purposes of ARC funding exposed a disconnect. In the context of CLR, there is a misalignment between the ways in which researchers envisage their professional identities in relation to other stakeholders and how those relationships are described and formalised in the official academic research system. Our project is further complicated through its focus on an Indigenous community that sits outside the remit of special provisions made for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australian heritage-related research.

Taken together, these tensions and discontinuities locate our particular project in a kind of research no-man’s land, as we work with our Australian South Sea Islander partners to forge a fresh collaborative model that (at least ideally) can simultaneously satisfy the needs of academic scholarship and the community’s agenda. How we define the concepts of researcher and research will continue to have profound implications for who benefits from the resources directed towards our project, as well as the new understandings of Australian South Sea Islander heritage that are produced through it. Our partnership with this community remains a work in progress, and the extent to which the wording of our approved ARC funding application will shape our unfolding collaboration is yet to be seen.

​Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Australian South Sea Islander communities and community organisations in Mackay (especially MADASSIA), Ayr, Rockhampton and Joskeleigh for their ongoing participation and patience as this project develops. Research was funded through the University of Sydney Industry Engagement Fund (with contributions from Queensland Museum), and a grant from the Australian Research Council (LP170100048).

​References