Biennial OHA Conference - reflections

We asked Rhonda Povey, recipient of the Oral History NSW conference bursary to tell us about her experience attending the Biennial Oral History Australia Conference held in Brisbane last month.

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The 2019 Biennial Conference of Oral History Australia was held between 10-13 October on Yuggera Country at the State Library of Queensland, with a theme of ‘Intimate Stores, Challenging Histories’. I was fortunate enough to receive a bursary funded by the NSW OHA to attend the conference, presenting my work on proper-way research, that is research using ethical research methods and methodologies in a remote Aboriginal community. The conference ran in 3 strands across 2 days; I was privileged to attend several thought-provoking presentations interrogating intimate stories and challenging histories.

The opening plenary presented by Katrina Srigley set the tone by speaking about relational storytelling and story listening; an unlearning and learning journey with Nipissing First Nation of the shorelines of Lake Ontario. Perspectives about true listening, ‘listening with the heart’ and interpretation permeated the conference as presenters and attendees considered the means in which oral history can speak back and assume its rightful place in mainstream history. 

Awareness of the ongoing attempts at colonial erasure of Indigenous experiences and perceptions in history held a prominent place in presentations, provoking consideration of the impact of silencing and silences in oral historiography. For example Skye Kirchauff asked us to consider the perceived silence about Aboriginal people in public and private spaces of her hometown in South Australia. The notion of silencing also presents in the realm of memorialisation; specifically in the ways frontier violence and Aboriginal massacres in Australia became part of our colonial forgetting. Through discussion based on two public monuments in the East Kimberly Cameo Dalley, Ashely Barnwell and Sana Nakata explored the ways contemporary Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal communities think about each other in terms of how wars are commemorated. 

Sites of attempted silencing in history reach into the disability narrative and Penny Harrison suggests oral history has a significant role to play in developing a more intimate and inclusive understanding of disability, challenging the established narrative of marginalisation. Diasporic stories from Cambodia, presented by Naomi Frost, reminds us that in the transmission of family narratives silence may not be forgetting, but rather deeply nuanced by personal, temporal and spatial distances. 

Several presentations focussed on the ethics of research in making Aboriginal history, be it in Aboriginal Art (McHugh, Neale and McLean), proper-way research in remote communities (Rhonda Povey) Aboriginal stories about ‘The Reserve’ in Broome (Elaine Rabbitt), or Gaja Kerry Charlton yarning about life on Benarrawa. The plenary ‘Indigenous Oral History: challenges and opportunities’ was a fitting close to the conference. Panel members Lorina Barker, Gaja Kerry Charlton, Sadie Heckenberg and Katrina Srigley raised questions such as how do we navigate the inquiry space so as to ensure custodianship of stories? How do we as historians decolonise ourselves and historiography? And how do we overcome the invisibility of the obvious? What does reciprocity truly mean? Katrina Srigley asked “How do we do this with love?” Speaking from the standpoint of a Yuggera woman, Gaja Kerry Charlton reminded the audience the challenges to opportunity involve “precariously stepping over the edge into our world”. 

Many thanks to all those involved in organising the conference. I know I don’t speak only for myself in saying many wonderful stories were shared, both in presentations and amongst the conference attendees!

-Rhonda Povey

2018 - Oral History NSW Excellence in Community History Award - Carol McKirdy

Carol McKirdy receiving the NSW Excellence in Community History Award from Scott McKinnon, Oral History NSW. History House , Macquarie St, Sydney 8/9/2018

We asked Carol McKirdy - last year’s recipient of the Oral History NSW Excellence in Community History Award, to tell us about her winning entry The Egyptian Life Stories of the Sutherland Shire Oral History Project.

Thank you Carol!
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Oral History NSW has an annual award for community-based oral history projects -  the Oral History NSW Excellence in Community History Award. The $500 award is designed to acknowledge the work of individuals or community groups who are recording the histories of their communities. I am the very proud recipient of the 2018 award as oral historian of The Egyptian Life Stories of the Sutherland Shire Oral History Project.

This project was funded with a Cultural grant from the NSW Government Office of Environment and Heritage, administered by the Royal Australian Historical Society. My winning entry in the competition was chosen by a committee of three oral historians from Oral History NSW based on the project’s contribution to understandings of community history and the quality, originality and/or significance of project outputs.

The Egyptian Life Stories of the Sutherland Shire Oral History Project was conducted in 2017 to 2018 to record the history of migration of Coptic Egyptians into the Sutherland Shire area of Sydney. This cooperative project was conducted within the Local Egyptian Coptic community under the guidance of the Very Rev Fr Tadros El-Bakhoumi and facilitated by Jenny Grey, the manager of Multicultural Services, Gymea Community Aid and Information Services located in Gymea.

Ten oral histories were collected. The project created digital oral history interviews with accompanying field notes and technical and narrator data. As well, a photo story/video based on the histories was made that summarises the project’s key understandings. The photo story/video uses narrator audio excerpts with images and Pharaonic music supplied by the Egyptian Coptic community. It summarises the project making the full oral histories easily accessible to a wider audience. entire project is stored at Sutherland Shire Library and the library also transcribes all the interviews.

As project oral historian I worked within the Egyptian community to empower them, build capacity and ensure ownership, authenticity and community engagement with the project. We worked together to decide the essential focus, historical questions that needed to be answered and project parameters. Copyright remains with the interviewee. We also interviewed people who needed an interpreter. A community launch was celebrated at the end of the project.

A very significant aspect of the project was safety for interviewees because of the current political situation in Egypt. The Egyptian Coptic community settling in the Sutherland Shire are Christians and most left Egypt because of varying degrees of persecution because they were part of the Christian minority in Egypt. There was genuine angst and fear for participants because of potential repercussions for family and friends still living in Egypt.

In the timeframe of the project extreme violence happening in Egypt directly affected some Sutherland Shire interviewees. Safety for interviewees shaped the project. Anonymity was essential for 50% of interviewees. The project was designed to offer safety and secrecy to interviewees and capture their histories.

Sutherland Shire Libraries archives all documentation gathered in the project, transcribes the full oral histories and accessions the project for interested researchers and the general public - listeners (full oral histories), viewers (photo story/video of the project and readers (transcriptions and field notes).  

Carol McKirdy
History Herstory     Retell Record Retain

Frances Rush - OAM

Oral History NSW congratulates long time member Frances Rush on being awarded an Order of Australia Medal (OAM) last week for work with communities. Frances first worked in oral history in the early 1990s. She was a committee member of Oral History NSW from 2005 to 2011. 

Her oral history projects include People of the Cross (with Gina Lennox) held at the State Library of NSW, interviews on the social impact of polio in Australia held at the National Library of Australia, Stuff Happens – an oral history project on squalor and hoarding for the NSW Public Guardian & Catholic Community Services and interviews for the Forgotten Australians and Former Child Migrants Oral History Project.

NLA - New head of Oral History

Hearty congratulations to Oral History NSW & ACT President, and prominent oral historian, academic, author and public commentator Dr Shirleene Robinson, who will be taking up one of Australia's most senior oral history posts as the Senior Curator Oral History and Indigenous Programs at the National Library of Australia (NLA).

Dr Robinson starts at the Library in mid September 2018. An Associate Professor, she comes to the Library from Macquarie University where she has been the Vice Chancellor's Innovation Fellow in the Discipline of Modern History since 2011. She was a Rydon Fellow at King's College, London in 2013 and has also spent time in Hohhot, China as a Visiting Professor of Australian Studies. 

Dr Robinson has managed or participated in a long list of significant oral history projects, including some in partnership with the National Library, such as the very successful, The Past in the Present: Australian Lesbian and Gay Life Stories.

Her work has extended across a range of areas in social history, public policy and contemporary Australia. Her PhD was in the field of Indigenous history after which she worked in the Queensland Department of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy. 

She lists her research interests as:

• the history of sexuality (including the construction of homosexual identities and homophobia)
• histories of HIV/AIDS (including volunteering)
• the history of LGBTIQ people in the military
• the history of childhood in national and transnational context (including the experiences of Aboriginal children)
• oral history as a method and practice.  

Ruth Melville - Oral History conference, Belfast 2018

Ruth Melville was the recipient of Oral History NSW's grant, which enabled her to attend the Oral History Society and Network Ireland Annual Conference in Belfast in June 2018.
She shares with us her experience of attending and presenting at the conference:

Preserving memory is a stubborn act.  So said Rama Lakshmi, journalist for ThePrint, India, in her plenary address at the 2018 Annual Conference of the Northern Ireland Oral History Society and Oral History Network. Rama was speaking about the Bhopal Museum, a site dedicated to preserving the memory of thousands of people who died and the estimated half million others exposed to toxic gas from the Union Carbide gas leak in 1984. Why must we remember Bhopal? Because, Rama said, the cost of not remembering is enormous.

The two day conference in June was held at Queen’s University, Belfast and took as its theme Dangerous Oral Histories: Risks, Rewards and Responsibilities. 

I was fortunate to be the recipient of an Oral History NSW grant which enabled me to travel to Belfast and present a paper about my work as a writer with the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. In my concurrent session Tamara Kennelly described her experience working with students involved in the Virginia Tech shooting tragedy. And Trisha Logan reflected on oral histories of the Indian residential school system in Canada. 

In several sessions throughout the conference the theme arose of oral history abutting other interests, including those of government and other institutions. Rama worked with others to prevent ‘the official hijacking’ of Bhopal memories by those keen to present an image of India’s positive economic and social growth. This survivors’ museum is seen by some as inconvenient to the public perception the government wishes to convey. 

Many delegates throughout the conference returned to the question of ownership of interview and story in oral history. Just because we can – investigate, interview, publish – should we? Issues of consent, the right of interviewees to amend, retract, redact, and withdraw their consent at any time presented practical and ideological challenges for many projects.

The Northern Ireland Prisoners Memory Archive (PMA) was one such. Its archive dates to 2006 when recordings were made with people who had a connection with Armagh Gaol and the Maze and Long Kesh Prison during the Troubles. Prison staff, prisoners, educators, chaplains and visitors took part in audio and video interviews. The PMA shares ownership of the recordings with participants who have the power of veto over material. This has led to the withdrawal of significant material over the years and highlights how issues of preservation, access and engagement can change over time. The PMA’s stated commitment is to an ethical protocol intended to establish trust in a society emerging from violence where political and personal sensitivities remain tender.

Australians were well-represented at the conference and apart from engaging in the many sessions and social activities could be seen assiduously avoiding the sun while those from cooler climes happily baked. 

To end with the beginning. For those undertaking oral history interviews, the importance of knowing where the story will eventually be stored can guide the way to a project’s starting point and its shape. While it isn’t possible to predict the wide scope of future technologies and the ways in which people’s words offered in one context might be used in another, knowing where the words will live is important. 

What will happen to your material? Who will listen to it and by what likely means? How will it be stored? Is it enough to put your interviews – carefully named and catalogued – on a USB device? Or cloud, server, hard drive, in the National Library. Whether in its entirety or excerpts the material must be thought about and its content – including context and responsibility to interviewees – cared for. 

Asking the question in the beginning goes some way to preventing trouble in the future. 

Doug Boyd from the University of Kentucky writes a blog: Digital Omnium: Oral History, Archives, and Digital Technology. He also leads a team that developed and implemented the open source and free OHMS system, which synchronizes text with audio and video online making work easier to search and thereby open to a wider audience. His website is worth looking at for lots of practical advice and suggestions. It’s at http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu/ 

Seamus Heaney went to Queen’s University. There’s a portrait of him in City Hall. I thought of him during the conference, and in particular his poem A Call which starts like this:

‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I’ll just run out and get him.
The weather here’s so good, he took the chance
To do a bit of weeding.’

Check out the rest of it. Poetry, like oral history, is a stubborn act. 

New president for OH NSW

OH NSW has a new president, Dr Shirleene Robinson. Dr Robinson is an historian and Associate Professor at Macquarie University. She is passionate about oral history and the histories of Australian LGBTIQ people and their contribution to our society. She has published many books, including the co-authored Gay and Lesbian, Then and Now: Australian Stories from a Social Revolution. She is also the President of Sydney's Pride History Group. In 2017, The Conversation named Shirleene as one of Australia's top fifty thinkers.

Departing president Anisa Puri has stepped down as she is relocating to Melbourne. Her calm efficiency, capable management and vision for meeting the needs of the expanding OH NSW community will be greatly missed. In a letter to OH NSW members she writes 'It has been a pleasure and privilege to serve as Oral History NSW's President, and to work with our active, vibrant and diverse oral history community in New South Wales and the ACT. I wish each of you, and the organisation, every success in the future.'

New Oral History NSW award launched - applications open now

Oral History NSW is excited to announce a new annual award for community-based oral history projects, the Oral History NSW Excellence in Community History Award. The $500 award is designed to acknowledge the work of individuals or community groups who are recording the histories of their communities. Eligible projects may include the development of new oral history collections, digital and multimedia projects (including websites or podcasts) and printed publications based on oral history interviews.

The prize is open to community-based oral history practitioners. This includes members of volunteer organisations, professional historians and freelance workers. The winner will be chosen by a committee of three oral historians based on the project’s contribution to understandings of community history and the quality, originality and/or significance of project outputs.

Applications are open now, and close on June 30. All details can be found here.

And the successful applicant is ...

Ruth Melville has been selected as the recipient of the Oral History NSW conference grant of $1200.

'I’m grateful to be the recipient of the Oral History NSW grant, which will enable me to attend the Oral History Society and Network Ireland Annual Conference to be held in Belfast in June 2018,' Ruth says. 'The conference theme is Dangerous Oral Histories: Risks, Rewards and Responsibilities and I will be presenting a 15 minute paper that reflects on writers’ experiences working with the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. I look forward to reporting back to our members about the conference and its many interesting sub-themes.

Queanbeyan Heritage Festival

The Queanbeyan Region Heritage Festival, running April 4—May 6, offers a full and engaging program of events including the Queanbeyan Region Heritage Awards, an open day at the Queanbeyan Museum, family history workshops in different locations and an exhibition of mechanical musical instruments at a farm in Jembaicumbene. Most events are free though in some cases bookings are required. One event that will fill up early is an oral history workshop on Saturday April 28 with a panel of oral historians: ANU's Dr Alexandra Dellios, Bill Stephens OAM who has created many recordings in the National Library of Australia’s oral history collection, John McGlynn of Queanbeyan Museum and Marion Meiske who is currently collecting stories of Gundaroo. Details here; full program here.

New grant opportunity

Oral History NSW is delighted to invite applications for a new grant, designed to support  the use and practice of oral history in regional areas. The Oral History NSW Regional Engagement Grant  offers $1500 biannually, to help successful applicants bring a project to fruition through additional training, meeting project costs or mentoring assistance.  Details here.