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Aboriginal women who were sent to the Cootamundra Girls Home are being encouraged to share their story, as a formal oral history.  Organisers of the Home’s centenary next month will give former Coota girls, as they call themselves, a chance to tell their story officially.  For full story click here.

This valuable addition to arts journalism, for its examination of the lives of contemporary artists, is the six-part series Creative Minds, starting 19 July 2012  on pay-TV channel Studio.  Produced by Tristram Miall and Robin Hughes, the documentary project is larger than the 40-minute episodes that appear on screen.  Hughes conducted the interviews and spent up to three days with each of the subjects; the longest session produced about 12 hours of footage. The excess material won’t end up in some cutting-room purgatory but will be made available, possibly online.  Robin Hughes was the interviewer for the excellent SBS series “Australian Biography” – disappointing this series is not on SBS as well.  For full story click here.

Boston College must give police recorded interviews its researchers conducted with a convicted Irish Republican Army car bomber after an appeals court on Friday rejected an effort to stop their release.  The ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeal backed U.S. District Court Judge William Young’s decision last year in the case of bomber Dolours Price, who spoke to Boston College researchers as part of an oral history project. The material will now be handed over to police by next month.  For full story click here.

New Zealand Oral History Awards reflect extraordinary diversity.  Almost $110,000 has this year been awarded to 14 oral history projects that will span a huge range of subjects including workers on the Manapouri Hydro Dam, women living in the Chatham Islands and Auckland’s West Coasters Club – a group of Auckland residents with connections to the South Island’s West Coast.  For full story click here.

Cherstin M. Lyon, Ph.D., Associate Professor of History and Coordinator of the Public and Oral History Program at Cal State San Bernardino, is set to present her book “Prisons and Patriots: Japanese American Wartime Citizenship, Civil Disobedience, and Historical Memory”  in Redlands.  The book provides a detailed account of 41 second-generation Japanese Americans, known as the Tucsonians, who were imprisoned for resisting the draft during World War II.  For full story click here.

For years, Joan Scott delivered scripts and took credit for the blacklisted Adrian Scott. She later had own career writing for Lassie and other TV shows.  In 1950s Hollywood, screenwriter Joan Scott seemed so adept at turning out tough-guy scripts that she became known as “the girl who writes like a man”.  What the studios didn’t know was she wasn’t the writer. Her husband was.  She was married to Adrian Scott, the screenwriter who was blacklisted after refusing to cooperate with the communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee. Cited for contempt of Congress, he went to prison as one of the Hollywood 10.  For full story, click here.

In case you’re not 100 per cent sure what an oral history is, the Oral History Association of Victoria defines an oral history as “the recording of memories of people’s unique life experiences.”  However, collecting an oral history is more than just sitting down with a microphone and ‘having a chat’.  Jill Adams is president of the Oral History Association of Victoria she says the first thing to acknowledge is that the person collecting the history actually knows how to do an interview.  For full story including radio interview with Jill Adams, click here.

On the 5th of January 1975 at 9:27pm the bulk carrier Lake Illawarra collided with the Tasman Bridge which spans the Derwent River and connects Hobart’s eastern and western shores.  Twelve people were killed in the collision, which brought down two of the bridge spans and two of its pylons.  Seven of the ship’s crew died, as did five occupants of four cars which drove over the broken edge of the bridge to plunge 45m into the Derwent River below.  As well as the personal tragedy involved, the incident had a profound and lasting effect on the social and commercial life of Hobart, especially for people living on the eastern shore.  Alan Townsend is History Projects Officer with Clarence City Council, the local government body covering Hobart’s eastern suburbs.   He’s in charge of a project to compile an oral history of the bridge disaster and its aftermath, and is looking to hear from people who have stories to tell from that time. For full story including radio interviews with people who remember that day, click here.

Professor James Goff digs up evidence of tsunamis from the past to find clues that could prepare us for future threats. Recently Goff and his team uncovered signs of distinct periods of interruption during early Polynesian settlement of the Pacific.  “The timing of these coincides with the occurrence of massive earthquakes and tsunamis, much larger than anything that’s happened since we started keeping written records.”  In working closely with local Indigenous populations, Goff has been able to tap into a rich oral tradition that extends back through countless generations. For full story click here.

A research team from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is conducting a case study about the 2010 Fort Detrick cancer cluster investigation and has invited community members to participate.  The goal is to gather a public health oral history, said Beth Resnick, principal investigator and director of the Johns Hopkins Office of Public Health Practices.  “This is a way to profile people’s stories about cancer cluster investigations and how that impacts the community,” Resnick said.  For full story click here.