Jarjums Life Museum

Welcome to Jarjums Life Museum (JLM) - a museum where you won't see dinosaurs, butterflies, King's crowns or Queen's capes. It is a museum made by jarjums - Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children of Queensland.

Developed by Inala Wangarra in collaboration with QPAC's Out of the Box Festival, JLM has worked with over 260 jarjums from 6 communities sharing, telling and interpreting their own stories - within their community, and to the wider world. The jarjums, together with professional artists, families and Elders, work to create contemporary pop-up museums to present their stories, experiences, ideas, hopes, dreams and opinions. Overlaying this work was Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander ways of being, working and living.

JLM challenges traditional representations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people as existing as they were in pre-colonial times and presents the jarjums as they are now - their hopes, ideas, dreams and experiences. It moves beyond the traditional representation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and presents a contemporary and, in part, urban experience of Aboriginality.

JLM is both a museum and a model – a model of practice that engages with children and their communities to interrogate, agitate and explore who they are and what they are thinking. The JLM has applicability to First Nations communities internationally with the Festival of Pacific Arts and Culture providing a platform for both sharing this work as well as the jarjums of Queensland.

The JLM model and process provides a unique opportunity to interrupt colonial concepts of being and to, using First Nations principles, ideas and knowledges, imagine new possibilities through the children’s perspectives. Through imagining, creating, yarning, sharing and dreaming the JLM process provides space for children to claim space, to explore ideas, to be heard. Traditionally underrepresented and overlooked as part of mainstream processes the JLM framework positions, prioritises and provides a platform for First Nations children as co-creators, story-tellers and an opportunity to steer the course of their future.