Created by the Australian arts-for-social-change company Big hART in response to the 2005 Cronulla race riots, Junk Theory (JT) provides an example of how a single digital story can be produced by a community and represent certain unexpected notions of multiculturalism and nationhood, in this case, Australianness. While JT is somewhat different from the conventional digital story, it fits within the medium because of key defining factors. These factors include: facilitation of digital skills’ workshops, the collection and use of personal artefacts (e.g. photographs), audio narration and the use of certain kinds of timing, sequence and silence that have come to be recognised as digital storytelling techniques. Whereas digital storytelling projects commonly involve individuals producing their personal stories in isolation, this project merged the participants’ individual creative outputs and stories together to form an overall digital story, approximately 60 minutes long, that became a centrepiece of a moving media installation. How these individual digital stories were collected and framed as an overarching text is a useful exercise that explores how notions of community and diversity are negotiated to coalesce in collaborative digital storytelling projects.

Most community-based arts projects set the stage for ethnic performativity quite clearly, driving the work with particular aims and outcomes. Although it is clear that the JT project wanted to tell the story as told by community members and empower different voices, it is important to consider how this storytelling process was mediated.