Category: OHAA QLD Blog

Archibald Prize winner, Ben Quilty, spent a month in Afghanistan as official war artist capturing the people and scenes around him.  They include a sketch of an Australian special forces soldier with the unmistakable 1000-yard stare of one who has seen and knows too much.  Historian Peter Pedersen accompanied the artist, recording the experiences of soldiers for the War Memorial’s oral history program.  “I interviewed a search team soldier who has been blown up twice by IEDs (insurgent improvised explosive devices),” he said.  That interview is now preserved in the memorial’s sound archive, but Quilty got something different. “Ben got what he looked like,” Mr Pedersen said. Full story click here.

Anna Funder’s debut novel All That I Am, has received glowing reviews in Australia and the UK. All That I Am, which is based on real events and characters, is a masterful and devastating novel set in the early 1930s which honours the real-life bravery of those who challenged the Nazi regime. Funder’s oral history recorded with Ruth Blatt, a German refugee, is transformed into an intense story that reflects the gradual assertion of the Nazi’s grip on Germany. For full story click here.

Strathearn folklorist Margaret Bennett has been treated to a civic reception hosted by Perthshire Provost John Hulbert.  Earlier this year Dr Bennett, who is a lecturer at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, was honoured in Canada with The Prix du Québec, an award regarded as the most prestigious attributed by the government of Québec in all fields of culture and science. It is presented annually to “individuals whose creative or innovative work has contributed to the influence of Québec around the world”.  Over the last 35 years Dr Bennett has been back and forward over the Atlantic to Québec, making unique fieldwork recordings.  For full story, click here.

Michaelangelo Matos pitched The Daily a feature on the oral history boom of the last few years. He had a cultural idea: it’s happening at the same time that blogs are making first-person writing so popular and accessible. After he sent his pitch, he thought, “I should have just pitched an oral history of the oral history. Somebody’s going to do it eventually.”  For full story click here and there is a link to Matos’ story.

Dr Michelle Winslow, Research Fellow, Academic Unit of Supportive Care at the University of Sheffield has interviewed dying patients which she says has a “cathartic element.”  She said she is careful to dissociate her team from the clinical team as they don’t want patients to think they are part of their care, but she accepts “there can be a therapeutic element”.  She added “Though this is probably the case for oral history in any setting.”  You can read her paper “Recording lives: the benefits of an oral history service” featured in the 2009 “European Journal of Palliative Care. 

Orange has been shaped by world events, disasters and achievements and a new book is set to reveal the memories of those that lived through it all.  Helen McAnulty’s History Talking is a collection of personal experiences and reminiscences gathered from about 70,000 people across western NSW. For full story, click here.

Academics from The University of Queensland have launched a new website, Queensland Speaks, which through audio-recorded interviews, presents the personal and political perspectives of over 60 Queensland legislative decision makers.  Professor Peter Spearritt and Dr Danielle Miller, from the Centre for the Government of Queensland and UQ’s the School of History, Philosohy, Religion and Classics, led the oral history project, which includes interviews with former government ministers, and a number of senior public servants. For full story click here.

Four staff members from the Kigali Genocide Memorial Center in Rwanda recently traveled to Los Angeles to learn techniques on how to best preserve the oral history of what happened in Rwanda 17 years ago. As many as one million people lost their lives in the Rwandan Tutsi genocide of 1994. Many people did survive the horror, and their stories are waiting to be heard. For full story with video, click here.

A surveyor once referred to the Canning Stock Route, the 1850km cattle track that runs across three deserts from Wiluna to Halls Creek, as “dismal, heart-breaking country”. Often portrayed as one of the most remote and rugged tracks in the world, it bisects the ecologically diverse lands and dynamic cultural networks of 10 different Aboriginal language groups. Their stories have finally been gathered together for the first time and told through the multilingual, multi-layered and multimedia vehicle of the Canning Stock Route Project. For full story click here.

While recovering from a serious illness just over 14 years ago, local man Ken Loiterton realised that the stories and oral history his father and grandfather had handed down to him, could have been lost if he hadn’t survived.  As a result Ken set about collecting information, collating memorabilia and writing his recollections of those legends passed on from generation to generation. For full story click here.