The Australian Women’s Archives Project: Creating and Co-curating Community Feminist Archives in a Post-custodial Age

The Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) was established in 2000 by the National Foundation for Australian Women (NFAW) as a response to the mounting problem of what to do with Australian women’s records in a digital and post-custodial age. This article traces the AWAP’s development within the changing context of archival science over that period. Using the insights of feminist archival theory it explores how a feminist approach to archival practice can inform thinking about how to manage community archives, empowering those who create them to participate in societal memory with their own voice and values. It shows how the AWAP is a fledgling example of where distinctions between archivist, records creator, subject and user are blurred in the quest for a space that facilitates co-creation of archival infrastructure.