AIATSIS

Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies

A Sea of Hands outside the AIATSIS building on Acton Peninsula. The Sea of Hands was created in 2014 with the help of local communities, to commemorate the sixth anniversary of the National Apology to Australia's First Peoples, 2008.
Established	1964
Location	Acton, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
Employees	170
Website	www.aiatsis.gov.au

The Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS) is an independent Australian Government statutory authority. It is a collecting, publishing and research institute and is considered to be Australia's premier resource for information about the cultures and societies of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. The Institute is a leader in ethical research and the handling of culturally sensitive material and holds in its collections many unique and irreplaceable items of cultural, historical and spiritual significance. The collection at AIATSIS has been built through over 50 years of research and engagement with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and is now a source of language and culture revitalisation, native title research and family and community history. AIATSIS is located on Acton Peninsula in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory.

In the late 1950s, there was an increasing focus on the global need for anthropological research into 'disappearing cultures'. This trend was also emerging in Australia in the work of researchers of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, leading to a proposal by W.C. Wentworth MP for the conception of an Australian Institute of Aboriginal Studies (AIAS) in 1959.

The proposal was made as a submission to Cabinet, and argued for a more comprehensive approach by the Australian Government to the recording of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and cultures.

In 1960, a Cabinet sub-committee assessed the proposal and formed a working party at the Australian National University (ANU) to consider the viability of the proposal. One of their first actions was to appoint W.E.H. Stanner to organise a conference on the state of Aboriginal Studies in Australia, to be held in 1961 at the ANU.

Academics and anthropologists in the field of Aboriginal Studies attended the conference, and contributed research papers published in a conference report in 1963. No Aboriginal people were present at the conference.