Digital Technologies Award, History Council of South Australia

Edmonds, Penny (Recipient), Barnett, Tully (Recipient), Burke, Heather (Recipient), Allen, Margaret (Recipient), Kowlessar, Jarrad (Recipient), Noack, Denise (Recipient), Smith, Claire (Recipient), Kotarba, Ania (Recipient) & Lawry, Fiona (Recipient)

Prize: Honorary award

Description

Team award for the website Martindale Stories: Walking Through the Backdoor of History. martindalestories.org

This year’s Digital Technologies Award recognises a team whose innovative use of digital tools has transformed regional storytelling. Through photorealistic 3D models, immersive reconstructions, drone mapping and interactive online platforms, they have pioneered a ‘slow digitisation’ approach that emphasises depth, care and community engagement. Central to their success was the meaningful inclusion of Ngadjuri voices and local partnerships, resulting in layered, accessible histories that honour both place and people. Their work provides a model for sustainable and sensitive digital heritage practice, reshaping how we connect with the past. The 2025 Digital Technologies Award goes to the Martindale Stories Website Team.

Awarded date	2 Jun 2025
Degree of recognition	Regional
Granting Organisations	History Council of South Australia (HCSA)

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Documents & Links

Like people, objects come into the world, they travel, and they tell us something of the times in which they were made. ‘Object biographies’—in which objects themselves are used as ‘doors’ into the past—allow us to see the economies that produced them and the labour of the workers that enabled the upper-class leisure pursuits, such as hunting and horseracing, that demanded them. Martindale Stories is a collaborative project run by a team of scholars at Flinders University. By placing the Mintaro region in the context of national and imperial histories, the project seeks to ‘re-world’ Martindale Hall and show the connections between family, nation and empire. The artefacts and objects in the Hall’s opulent Smoking Room are portals to new stories that take us through, in Delia Falconer’s words, the ‘back door of history’.1 These new ways of looking at Martindale Hall seek to show the hidden material relationships of class and race that underpinned the wealthy lifestyles of its inhabitants.