“Wagga Wagga is the first stop on a national tour for the Australian War Memorial’s (AWM) Ink in the Lines exhibition, which examines the tales told by military tattoos. The Director of the AWM, Matt Anderson, will be in the city at 11 am on Saturday 20 November to officially launch Ink in the Lines, which is the centrepiece of three new exhibitions at the Wagga Wagga Art Gallery.” Read more here.
Blog
Saving Stories
“In this latest edition of WUKY’s award winning history program, Saving Stories, Nunn Center for Oral History Director Doug Boyd, highlights a whale of a royal tale from Mark Thornewill. In this 2018 interview, conducted at the request of a family friend.” See full story here and scroll down to see other stories in this series.
Oral History Workshop, Brisbane
Oral History Queensland is holding a face-to-face workshop on 27 November 2021 at 12 Payne Street, Auchenflower. The workshop will be run by OHQ President Elisabeth Gondwe who has a Master of Arts in Anthropology and Archaeology from James Cook University. Elisabeth has worked as an oral historian for 30 years and brings a strong oral history focus to her role as the curator at the North Stradbroke Island Museum on Minjerribah. She has designed and delivered many community oral history projects.
This is an introductory workshop and would suit people who are commencing an oral history project. It will provide an overview of an oral history project, ethics and permissions, an introduction to interview techniques and recording, file management and transcribing. Anyone with an interest in oral history, family and local histories would benefit from this workshop. Find out more about the workshop and registration here.
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum
This museum has many oral history interviews and includes a guideline for conducting interviews.
“Conduct an Interview – The Museum’s Oral History Interview Guidelines (PDF), last updated in 2007, is a unique reference guide to aid members of the public interested in conducting interviews. The guide contains step-by-step suggestions for making initial contact with an interviewee, conducting research and preparing questions for the interview, and producing transcripts and summaries to help make the interview(s) accessible to researchers.”
Oral History for Teachers
“In the Behind the Scenes at the Center for Folklike and Cultural Heritage session, educators shared how your classroom can participate in the Smithsonian’s folklife and cultural heritage programs throughout the school year. Events and resources include: the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (and their new learning pathways!), and a very robust cluster of international cultural sustainability projects. They also shared a guide for conducting oral history interviews, allowing students to turn members of their own families and community into key sources of history, culture, and tradition.” See the full story here.
Windrush Generation Interviews
“Audio recordings of people who arrived in Birmingham as part of the Windrush Generation are being made available online for the first time by Birmingham Museums. The oral histories, which were recorded in the 1990s, feature the life stories of 4 people who came to the UK from the Caribbean in the 1940s to the 1960s.” Read more here.
Australian Picnics
“The National Library of Australia has been searching through its oral history collection to find memories of outdoor picnics from the early 1900s to the 1950s.” Listen to an interview with Dr Shirleene Robinson here.
Survivors of Tuam Mother & Baby Home
A podcast series, narrated by Irish actor Cillian Murphy, allows survivors of the Tuam institution and their families to tell their own life stories. The three-part podcast series was released in July 2020 by NUI Galway’s Tuam Oral History Project and is still relevant today when it comes to educating ourselves on the atrocities that took place in the Irish Mother and Baby Homes. Read more here and see links to the podcasts.
German Refugee Project
“Tahar is one of 42 refugees who recount their life stories in interviews lasting several hours on the “Archive of Refuge” digital platform. The archive is a form of oral history that helps others understand history from a purely biographical perspective that rarely finds a place in history books.” Read the full story here. Click on the link above, Archive of Refuge, which will take you to the videoed interviews, which are translated into English.
Pandemic Voices
“More than 18 months into the coronavirus pandemic, there’s already been a bumper crop of books about COVID-19 that have focused primarily on the policy failures that allowed the virus to spread. Eli Saslow’s “Voices from the Pandemic” instead draws attention to the people who have been affected by the virus.” Read the full review here.