Voices and Memory: Australian Oral History: 8 March 1997
Oral History - A Complementary Source not a Competing Source / Daniel Connell
My paper reflects my belief that different sources of information - whether the source be print, video, artefact or recorded sound - convey different types of information. If that was not the case and we could get identical information from a number of different sources, then those sources which were more difficult to use would quickly fade away with few regrets.
In essence I am interested in sound recordings and in particular recordings of the sound of the human voice, because I think these recordings provide valuable information not available from other sources. In this paper I argue that electronically recorded oral history is one of the best means of preserving and providing information, for future historians and other users, about emotions, ideas and what it means to be a person living in our time. As such it has an important place alongside the other types of material preserved in our major national collections. I take this position despite the range of objections put forward from time to time by the critics of oral history, many of which I concede have real validity.
When I began thinking about this presentation, my original interest was the debate which took place in the 1980s between some academic historians and some oral historians about the weaknesses of oral history as an archival source. However, I soon began to realise that before I could talk sensibly about whether or not oral history does complement or compete with other sources, I had to deal with the prior question: why do we collect material for preservation at all? I came up with a number of possibilities:
- we want to learn from the past and avoid repeating mistakes
- we want to create a length of record to allow patterns to emerge
- we find events and activities which occurred in the past interesting for their own sake
- we want future generations to know about us
- we want people in the future to be able to answer questions about us, which are important to us even if we cannot be around to hear their answers
- we want to pass on a better record of our times than we inherited from earlier times
- we want to promote the long-term prospects of our cultural group (whatever that is) by maintaining the group memory
- we want to win the arguments that we lost in our lifetime, or we want to make sure that our enemies do not reverse the contemporary verdict against them by skewing the historical record.
However, behind all those possible reasons for collecting, lie other questions. 'But why do I want to do these things? What does it matter what future generations think of us and our society?' There is also the related question, 'Why do we want to know about the past?' We have all heard the common question often asked by bored children, 'Why do you want to know about dead people?'
Commentators much more eloquent than I have floundered in the face of such questions. I take an interest in these subjects because I feel a visceral bond with other human beings in other times and places. I have a strong sense of curiosity about how they have responded to a vast array of both bizarre and banal circumstances. In essence my interest lies in an affirmation of our common humanity. And I believe that oral history is potentially one of the most valuable sources of material for future historians who are interested in this dimension.
To begin my discussion of the role of oral history, I would like to play for you a copy of the oldest preserved sound recording made in Australia, recorded in 1896.
[Recording of a doctor imitating a chook]
That imitation of a chook was recorded by a doctor in the Victorian town of Warrnambool. Maybe if he had known that his recording was going to have such an august place in Australian archival history he would probably have recorded something more suitable, probably something pompous and very forgettable. What we have instead is a recording of a very minor but very human moment. With this imitation of a chook, heard across the decades, I recognise another human being, making a fool of himself, and I feel kinship.
With that recording in mind I turn to a key question: what do we want to preserve in our archives for posterity? I posit that one of the things we want to leave behind is evidence of our existence as people, warts and all, each with our own peculiar characteristics, evidence that we existed as individuals and not just among the masses. This is where sound recording comes into the story. I would like to put forward the proposition that when you look at the full range of potential archival sources and the sensory processes we use to access them - sight, touch, smell, taste and hearing - the sound of the human voice is probably the most powerful in conveying information about those pleasant and unpleasant characteristics that we define as essentially human.
To illustrate my point I will play an extract from a series of recordings I did with people remembering experiences in Australia during the Second World War. The first is a description of the sinking of the Iron Chieftain, a BHP ship that was torpedoed off the New South Wales coast in mid 1942. The speaker is Phillip Brady.
[Recording of Phillip Brady]
For me the trauma of that experience and even a dash of humour - 'Got the overtime book' - comes through that sound recording in a way that I cannot imagine being paralleled by any other medium.
I have been arguing for attention to the particular and perhaps unique qualities of electronically recorded oral history as an historical source, but beyond a certain point that argument becomes self defeating. Just as recorded oral history is important because it captures information which other sources do not, so too do other historical sources have their place as a complement to oral history.
It is here that multimedia collections come into their own. Just as no two voices are the same, neither are any two faces. Furthermore faces, like voices, are shaped by the lives led, and attitudes developed, by their owners. One of the best collections that has brought these strengths together, so that each gives an extra dimension to the other, is the John Meredith collection of folk music, song and oral history, which is held in the National Library. To give you a taste of what that collection contains, here is a song from one of John Meredith's contributors, Sally Sloane:
[Recording of Sally Sloane singing]
John Meredith's collection of sound recordings and photographs does not lend itself to comfortable reflection about the way things used to be. These people have the voices and faces of people who have confronted and endured life. Their stoicism has been hard-won, the result of struggles with hardship, human loss and debt that went on for too long. At the same time, their presence in the collection shows them to have been creative, energetic people who have played an important role in their community, entertaining families and friends on countless occasions.
The collection presents people from rural Australia as it was in the middle years of the century. In many respects their lives were similar to those of their grandparents, back around the turn of the century. Whether he was using a tape recorder, camera or notebook, John Meredith paid as much attention to the people he was working with as he did to the material he was ostensibly collecting. The John Meredith collection conveys a sense of the individuality of normal people, a dimension which is difficult to record when you are trying to capture it directly. It makes us aware of the complex, often quirky human qualities of people in an earlier age, and it helps us resist the never-ending pressure from fading memories and inadequate records to simplify the experience of living in the past.
In the case of the John Meredith collection the different sources have been brought together to emphasise the personal, individual dimension. However, oral history can also be used to complement other types of archival sources. There are many examples of this. The National Library's 'Law in Australian Society' project is one with which I have had personal involvement. In this case it is hoped that the recorded interviews can be used to supplement legal records and other traditional sources and, where this is appropriate, the interviewees' private papers.
The interviews are being conducted with prominent members of the legal profession throughout Australia. The focus is not on legal judgements, nor on the public activities of the profession, because such matters are covered in detail in written judgements and in professional publications. The aim has been to document those aspects of the profession which provide the context for its operations, but which are rarely recorded in any detail in other sources which will become part of the archival record.
The major themes of the 'Law in Australian Society' project include:
- legal education, personal background and significant influences
- day-to-day operation of the different areas where the profession operates, whether it be a busy practice at the bar, the internal workings of the courts, or the operations of legal officers such as the Solicitor-General within a government and public service context
- the interaction of law and politics
- relations and connections between different areas of the profession - the courts, private practitioners, academic law, the legal sections of the public service and those sections of the political system which deal regularly with legal matters
- operation of a wide range of bodies with a legal dimension, but which are not courts as such, eg. the Industrial Relations Commission, the Broadcasting Tribunal, law reform commissions and royal commissions
- regulation and internal organisation of the profession
- controversial issues related to the law, constitutional reform and possible future developments in the relationship between the profession, the law and society in general.
Another example of oral history broadening its ambit comes from the Murray-Darling Basin Commission, my normal place of work. We have helped fund a project undertaken by the CSIRO, in combination with some of the New South Wales state government agencies and community groups in the Lachlan Valley, which has involved the use of an oral history project as part of a larger scientific study into the impact of European carp on that river system.
This oral history project is described in the book Listening to the Lachlan, which was published late in 1996. Emphasising people's observations, memories and descriptions, rather than interpretations, the book is meant to be a primary data source for researchers working on the river. Subjects such as water clarity, fish caught and insects and plants observed are mingled with stories which reveal the important role the river has played in people's lives.
Reaching back to the early 1900s, the material in the book is organised into five themes: water quality, fish, river channels, water plants and river life, and is illustrated with a fascinating collection of photographs, many of them from private collections. The book is organised according to chronology and area so that changes over time and between places can be easily discerned.
Conceived because the scientific literature contains little information about the state of Australian rivers in the past, the book brings together reminiscences describing particular places and activities related to the river in a way designed to reveal change over time.
The editors - they refuse the title of authors, reserving it for the people they interviewed - are Jane Roberts, a research scientist in aquatic ecology and a project leader at the Griffith Laboratory of CSIRO, and Geoff Sainty, who grew up in western New South Wales and has a particular love of that area. They emphasise the way the book contributes to the scientific study of the area, but it is interesting to reflect that this project has been undertaken at a time when organisations wanting funding from bodies such as the Murray-Darling Basin Commission are being strongly encouraged to form close partnerships with community groups interested in the management of natural resources. Drawing on the knowledge of the community is now both good science and good politics. I am also aware of other proposals being developed for similar reasons, elsewhere in the Murray-Darling Basin; in the Barmah Millewa forest, for example.
As these examples and the other seminar papers all show, oral history is now being used for an increasingly wide range of purposes. However, in welcoming the expansion I think we should also remember what oral history does best and that is to convey a sense of the individuality of people through its capacity to present their feelings, ideas and responses, in relation to what is going on around them. To fulfil this responsibility we must make sure that our oral history archives cover the widest possible range of human experience.
In these times, when everything which is not defined as core function seems to be under threat, it is important that we be vigilant to preserve and protect the pluralist collection policies that have become a feature of major archives in the recent past.
When Maynard Keynes responded to a comment about the long term by saying that in the long term we are all dead, he was affirming the obvious fact that the sweep of history through the ages is made up of a multiplicity of individual finite human lives. People are at the centre of all historical processes and oral history is particularly suited as a source to make future generations aware that when they study history they are not looking at abstract forces shaping the fate of anonymous masses. When they look at the big picture they should never be allowed to forget that the masses they observe are composed of a vast number of idiosyncratic individuals, each and every one struggling to find their own way through the storm.
Oral history can play a vital role in keeping us aware of the centrality of the individual experience in history and in the midst of all the funding debates that bedevil our lives it is important that we all continue to argue the case, maintain the good fight, and defend the cause.
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Last updated 5 November 1997
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