Category: Uncategorized

Bill Bunbury’s new book

A former broadcaster, Mr Bill Bunbury presented an oral history program for many years on ABC Radio National. He came to the conclusion that people and place are one and the same. "Social history is environmental history," Mr Bunbury said. In the 1980s, while working on a social history program about the life of foresters before mechanisation, Mr Bunbury was struck by the deep reverence these men had for the forest, which provided their livelihood. "They felt the forest had a beauty that they wanted to preserve. I learned more and more that farmers have the same feeling. We valued land, but we hadn't learned all its lessons." Mr Bunbury's book is Invisible Country.  For full story click here.

Italian Market Gardeners

There will be a presentation on February 3 from writer and oral historian Madeleine Regan, on a project which has grown from a single idea to a substantial archive of interviews held at the State Library and a website with audio, transcripts and photos. In more than 70 hours of recorded interviews, Regan has traced the stories of a group of northern Italians, and their descendants, who came to Adelaide from the Veneto region and took up land in adjoining 10 acre allotments near the River Torrens in the Frogmore and Findon Rd areas in the city’s west. As Regan says, until she began work on the project, she, like me, believed that the Italian community who worked the market gardens here in Adelaide and elsewhere across Australia were post-Word War II migrants who joined the great wave of European-born “new Australians” who had such a profound effect on our Anglocentric culture.  For full story click here.

Holocaust Interviews (USA)

Patricia Iannaci always liked history and TV production — both her parents were teachers in those subjects — but she readily admits to never being the best student.  But when she took an honors class at Bayonne (N.J.) High School during her junior year, everything changed. That class was about the Holocaust. The teacher, Gene Woods, would interview and record Holocaust survivors, and Iannaci was quickly fascinated not just by the subject, but by the very method of archiving these histories. Eventually, Woods, Iannaci and her father worked together to make a handful of documentaries to display at Bayonne City Hall each year. “All of them had really incredible stories,” she said. “I didn’t even know I wanted to do documentaries before then.”  For full story click here.

StoryCorps Thanksgiving

In the span of just three minutes, NPR broadcasts excerpts from often deeply personal and frank conversations, allowing listeners to get a feel for what moves their fellow Americans, otherwise perfect strangers. Started 12 years ago by Dave Isay, a radio reporter, the project recently launched its smartphone app, StoryCorps.me, in the hopes of making it easier for people to participate.  For full story click here.  

 

 

 

“When Silence Falls” Exhibition

When Silence Falls provides a voice for those who have been silenced. Encompassing painting, video and sculpture, the collection-based exhibition presents the work of contemporary Aboriginal artists alongside contemporary international artists. It considers the violence and loss of often-unacknowledged historical events––cultural displacement, political oppression, ethnic cleansing and massacres.  For full story click here.

Robert French – LGBTI Activist

Robert French’s proudest moment as an LGBTI rights activist came after police raided and arrested 27 people at a sex club called Club 80 in Paddington, Sydney. The year was 1983, just one year before NSW decriminalised homosexuality. “Twenty-eight of us signed statutory declarations to say we had done the same things. Lex Watson and myself were the first two to present our declarations to the vice squad,” French said. “We said, ‘we’ve done the same things you’ve arrested these people for, arrest us’.” They weren’t arrested and French went on to help form Australia’s first police gay liaison group, based on the San Francisco model. For full story click here.

Schoolchildren interview their elders

High school students across the country (USA) are making oral history this week by recording interviews with their elders in an unprecedented effort to stockpile wisdom for the ages. The Great Thanksgiving Listen was conceived by leaders of the nonprofit oral history project StoryCorps. They're encouraging kids to send their audio recordings to a Library of Congress archive, using a free smartphone app available online at StoryCorps.me. StoryCorps president and found Dave Isay hoped to double, in one weekend, the 65,000 audio recordings StoryCorps has collected since 2003. Read full story and take the links to listen to the interviews here.

Oral history interview about Bill Clinton

Sandy Berger, Bill Clinton’s most trusted foreign policy adviser, died on Tuesday, December 2, at the age of 70 after a yearlong battle with cancer. Berger served for all eight years of the Clinton presidency at the National Security Council, in the first term as deputy national security advisor and in the second as national security advisor. His relationship with Clinton went back to George McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, when he met a “dashing figure … in a white Colonel Sanders suit … full of life and joy,” who was Arkansas to the bone. Berger never wrote a memoir, but he did spend two days in March 2005 recording a confidential oral history about his experiences with Clinton for the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center. Read the interview here.

Charlie Chaplin oral history

Charlie Chaplin once said that all anyone needed to make a funny film was "a park, a policeman and a pretty girl". Chaplin failed to mention the "Tramp" costume that made him world famous. You can see one of the women — among four Chaplin married in the course of his 88 years — in a glistening, outsized black-and-white picture of Paulette Goddard with a stolen bunch of bananas from "Modern Times" in "The Chaplin Archives", a hefty book whose author calls it a "Blu-ray" high-definition tribute to the legendary comic actor and filmmaker. Produced by the specialist German-based publisher Taschen Books, this 560-page tome weighing 7 kg (15 lb) and roughly the dimensions of a small television set, can hardly be read in bed and overwhelms many cocktail tables. "What I wanted to do was make it an oral history, so it's actually Chaplin and his collaborators talking as you read the book, you're reading about the events of his life and how he made his films," Duncan told Reuters in an interview.  For full story click here.