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NLA News - home June 2003 Volume XIII Number 9
The Potentialities of Oral History: The 'Seven Years On' Project
A black & white photograph of an Oral History staff member Kevin Bradley briefs interviewers Peter Read and Jackie Huggins for the ‘Seven Years On’ project

Oral History staff member Kevin Bradley briefs interviewers Peter Read and Jackie Huggins for the ‘Seven Years On’ project
Pictures Collection

Ruth Nicholls discovers that there is more to the Library’s oral history holdings than some may initially think

Oral history can teach researchers a great deal more than they may initially anticipate. Scholars are trained to approach historical material using a variety of skills, developed at school and during the course of a tertiary education. However, working with primary sources, such as oral history, opens up many new doors.

The National Library preserves an immense range of oral history material including folklore, social history and interviews with eminent Australians. The ‘Seven Years On’ material made it clear to me that form, as well as content, is pertinent to the interpretation of historical sources.

The idea behind ‘Seven Years On’ is similar to that of the well-known television documentary series Seven Up, filmed in the United Kingdom. However the scope of this project (in terms of the number of lives being traced) is much bigger, and the material is purely oral rather than visual. Every year since 1995, two historians, Jackie Huggins and Peter Read, have interviewed around 10 people from various parts of Australia. The project is now in its eighth year, which means that Huggins and Read are presently interviewing people from the first round, seven years on.

The collection records the continuing life histories of about 80 emerging and emerged Indigenous leaders—people who have revealed notable ideas, attitudes and actions within the course of their lives—talking about their experiences and their hopes for the future. ‘Seven Years On’ is still at a relatively early stage, and will grow to become even more fascinating as it progresses.

A portrait of Jackie Huggins, both an interviewer and interviewee for the project, November 1996 by Andrew Stawowczyk Long

Portrait of Jackie Huggins, both an interviewer and interviewee for the project, November 1996
Photograph by Andrew Stawowczyk Long
Pictures Collection

The purpose of my research was to learn more about the natural leaders within the Indigenous community. I was interested in those who were not strictly defined by high political exposure, but more by their engagement with community and by their outlook on life. I wanted to explore the relevance of leadership to theories that discuss strengthening communities’ capacity to solve social, economic and cultural challenges. The ‘Seven Years On’ interviews explore this notion of leadership in an exciting way. Not all of the interviewees are ‘high profile’ or famous. Some are still at school or university. Some work as community educators, or in the creative arts. But they are people who were chosen by the interviewers because they have, in some sense, demonstrated qualities that good leaders possess: creativity, the desire to build new skills and ideas, impressive problem solving skills, skill in mentoring, or an understanding of community and cross-cultural issues.

What makes working with oral history records different from using other primary sources is that the material is immediate, raw and spontaneous. During the process of listening to the tapes, researchers can also learn something about themselves as interpreters. My approach was to simply listen to the recordings, rather than simultaneously consult the transcripts as the tapes rolled. Listening to a human voice proves a different experience to reading a life history. I became conscious of the cognitive, emotional and cultural nuances that differentiate the aural experience from the visual one. When someone tells a story, they own it. It has not been altered or filtered by editing, writing or interpretation. This spontaneity of thought, idea and verbal expression makes oral history a very exciting area to work in. In the case of the ‘Seven Years On’ collection, you can hear the tone of the speaker’s voice, their pace, the way in which they use Aboriginal English, or render place names. You hear a cough, a laugh or giggle, an affirmative ‘yeah’, or someone singing the words to a song they have written. All of these things are impossible to convey perfectly in a simple transcript. 

Oral history also enables researchers to quickly divine the impact that their own culture and background have  on interpretation. Oral history challenges the researcher’s relationship with historical material. You become more self-conscious of cultural point-of-view. Oral history is very much ‘alive’, compared to working with other sources. The most obvious example of this is the authorisation process that the researcher must go through to seek permission to listen to or write about the material. When planning the scope of a research project, the scholar needs to take into account the conditions that may be placed upon use of the material—making you more conscious of the vibrancy, dynamism and pertinence of the recordings.

A portrait of Aden Ridgeway, Australian Democrats Senator for NSW, and currently the only Indigenous member of the Federal Parliament

Portrait of Aden Ridgeway,
Australian Democrats Senator for NSW, and currently the only Indigenous member of the Federal Parliament
Courtesy of Senator Ridgeway

It is also important to remember that the interviews are a product of a combined effort on the part of the interviewers and the interviewees. The style and type of question posed inevitably mirrors the perceptions of the interviewers. In the case of ‘Seven Years On’, the interviewing technique used was informal and localised. It involved getting the interviewees to discuss their family history and their schooling, early memories, and current interests. This enabled the participants to open up and reveal a great deal about their lives and their communities. Having both an Indigenous and a non-Indigenous person on the interview team provided an excellent way of probing the interviewees’ cultural perspectives. The questions reflected both interviewers’ cultural backgrounds and intellectual interests.

Oral history can be provocative. As mentioned, it enables people to be heard in a form which empowers them, because it is not culturally filtered or altered, until the point of historical interpretation. Oral history can therefore be used for social and political purposes, as well as historical ones. It enables otherwise unheard communities to be recorded. It renders the researcher as first point of historical interpretation.

The ‘Seven Years On’ collection, for example, has the very powerful ability to break through stereotyping. While many of the challenges facing the Indigenous community (such as discrimination) are shared, it is also evident that the life experiences of Indigenous people are by no means homogenous. The interviewees within this collection are contributing proactively to their communities by gaining further education, expressing themselves articulately and being proud of who they are, not only in terms of their Aboriginality but through all their interests and experiences.

Even without listening to the tapes you can see the diversity of life experience simply by consulting the catalogue: the interviewees include archaeologists, writers, footballers, public servants, nurses, health workers, social and youth workers, historians, park rangers—and students of physiotherapy, speech pathology and journalism. In terms of learning from leaders, it becomes apparent that recognising not only the potential of people, but also the variety of their existing contributions to their community, is important. In terms of community development, it is a useful reminder that people within the target community will have the skills and potential to implement development. 

And again, ‘community’ is not a homogenous identity. People’s points of view and wishes for the community do not always fit nicely together; sometimes they are antithetical. It may be difficult to obtain community consensus on how to solve problems, and even to define the desirable community outcomes. For example, some people are passionate about expressing themselves politically, while others prefer to be recognised without a ‘label’. 

The perspective of the ‘Seven Years On’ interviews impressed me strongly. This is an extremely empowering collection. These leaders, and potential future leaders, are determined to break through the stereotypes created by the non-Aboriginal view of Aboriginality. It is a positive collection, full of strength, stoicism and resilience. These people express themselves through their interests and actions, and many of them do so with the benefit of their community as one of their main motivations. 

The ‘Seven Years On’ collection, in its raw, spontaneous, unedited form, presents an Aboriginal view of contemporary Australian society. It also succeeds in terms which oral historian Gary Okihiro has expressed in the following way: ‘Besides being a tool for recovering history, oral history … has the potential for raising social consciousness and can provide strategies for social change.’

RUTH NICHOLLS was a scholar under the National Library’s Norman McCann Summer Scholars Program for 2003

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