Barry York describes one of the Library’s pioneering oral history ventures For 15 months during 1985 and 1986, the National Library of Australia administered a project that was one of the biggest self-contained oral history ventures in the world. With a budget of $1.3 million, the Cultural Context of Unemployment Oral History Project (CCUOHP) aimed to create a significant oral record of contemporary unemployment experience in all its variety and complexity. The project was highly innovative in its design and method of implementation. The brainchild of a senior public servant, Dr Keith McKenry, it was funded as a Community Employment Program (CEP) project by the Commonwealth Department of Employment and Industrial Relations. As a CEP project, the CCUOHP was implemented by staff recruited from unemployment registers. The primary aim of the project was to provide the 52 staff with work experience and training in project work. The CCUOHP was a success in this objective and, according to the report written by national coordinator, Kay Chee Lance, the great majority of staff managed to find full-time or part-time employment within six months of leaving the project, and in most cases the employment related to skills learned during the course of the project.
There are many different skills required in the oral history process, including liaison, communication, proper use of recording machinery, interviewing, editing, writing and transcribing. The 52 unemployed people were recruited into teams in five different locations: Fairfield–Cabramatta (the ‘Sydney team’); Southeast Queensland (the ‘Brisbane team’, mainly covering Toowoomba, Perseverance–Crow’s Nest, Gympie and Warwick); the ‘Perth team’ (covering Mandurah, Bunbury, Carnavon, Albany and Geraldton); the ‘Casino team’ (covering the ‘Northern Rivers’ and the Illawarra regions of New South Wales); and the ‘Melbourne team’. Each team focussed on a different facet of the unemployment experience. These were, respectively: Indo-Chinese refugees, the rural unemployed, school leavers, women, and Aboriginal Australians. The team leaders, Judith Winternitz, Susan Pechey, James Fitzpatrick, Inge Riebe and Patricia Jones, played an essential role, given that the staff of interviewers had no prior experience in interviewing. The project was also unusual in that, instead of interviewing people for their long-term memories, which is common in oral history, the CCUOHP sought to capture people’s responses to an immediate predicament in their lives. The key question—‘What is it like to be unemployed in the 1980s?’—was fleshed out with related inquiries concerning family and educational backgrounds, personal relationships, daily routine, work experiences, management of finances, attitudes to work and leisure, and views on government policies and agencies, such as the Commonwealth Employment Service.
The CCUOHP produced more than 650 hours of interviews with 505 interviewees, and is one of the major items within the Oral History Collection. A century from now, the experience of people listening to these recordings will be equivalent to us listening today to recordings of men and women who were unemployed during the economic depression of the 1890s. The interviews, which were also transcribed, are held by the Library subject to various conditions of access, ranging from open access to very lengthy periods of restriction. The Sydney team recorded 86 interviews, mainly with refugees from Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos, and these are a most fascinating component of the project. In addition to the issue of unemployment, the Sydney tapes offer an important record of the refugee experience, particularly the experience of fleeing Indo-China and of initial adjustment to life in Australia. Led by Judith Winternitz, the Sydney team of six interviewers was necessarily multilingual. Cong Van Le and Nhuan Duc Vu recorded interviews in the Vietnamese language, Deth Sysengrath and Bouavanh Houatchantara in Lao, Bee Lee Tan in Mandarin and Bunsean Tor in Khmer. Most of the interviews are with rank-and-file unemployed people, but Winternitz personally recorded leaders of the Vietnamese and Lao communities, Hop Van Chu, Dong Bich Phan and Pinhkham Simmalavong, as well as Nola Randell (a teacher of Indo-Chinese refugees), Frederick Elliot (Town Clerk of Fairfield), and Janice Crosio (local Member of Parliament for Fairfield). The Fairfield–Cabramatta area was a logical focal-point for the Sydney team, as it had high levels of unemployment and a large Indo-Chinese population. An overview of the content of each recording is readily available through the summaries on the Library’s Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC). Deth Sysengrath’s interview with Melinda Changson (a Chinese refugee from Vientiane in Laos) is indicative of the topics covered in many other Sydney recordings. Changson talks about her family background, defection to Thailand, studies in Bangkok, journey to Australia, life in a migrant hostel in Melbourne, reaction to the Australian way of life, move to Sydney, further studies, work experience, experience of racism, living arrangements, lifestyle, search for work, the Commonwealth Employment Service, finances, and her emotional response to unemployment.
Unemployed Vietnamese refugee, Nghia Van Le, recorded by Cong Van Le, speaks about his family background, the effect of the Communist government on his family, attempts at escaping Vietnam, eventual escape to Malaysia, Malaysian treatment of refugees, the journey to Australia, studies, learning English, agricultural studies in Australia and Vietnam, his finances, student lifestyle, comparison between life in Australia and Vietnam, being unemployed, living arrangements, domestic violence in Vietnamese families, personal aspirations and his opinions of Vietnam. The Indo-Chinese refugees emerge from the interviews as a people with a well-developed work ethic, confident that their unemployed status would be temporary, and keen to improve their English language skills as a means to advancement. Concern was sometimes expressed about educational qualifications not being recognised by Australian authorities. Of the Sydney interviews that were transcribed, some carry English language summaries. All the interviews, however, were indexed by team members, and the 331 pages of indexing are in the English language. In her coordinator’s report, Kay Chee Lance noted that ‘strong prejudices were expressed by many informants against immigrants, especially Asian immigrants, and against Aboriginal Australians. Migrants were commonly seen as taking away jobs while receiving special privileges.’
Lance’s report offered other observations derived from the interviews. While insisting that no generalisations should be made about the unemployed on the basis of the observations in the report, they were nevertheless useful in outlining some of the problems faced by unemployed people, and possible solutions, from the perspective of the unemployed interviewees themselves. Young unemployed people, for example, tended to feel that schools could better prepare them for post-school life, and rural dwellers felt disadvantaged by isolation from the educational and training opportunities available in the cities. Financial difficulties were common across the groups and ‘the most commonly observed mental states were loss of self-esteem, insecurity and depression’. All interviewees felt stigmatised by their unemployed status. Perhaps the most hopeful observation related to the ‘instances of human dignity and resourcefulness [that] came through strikingly in many accounts as the informants tried to provide for themselves and their families, and to increase their chances of obtaining employment’. The main outcomes from the project have already been mentioned: 650 hours of taped interviews and 18 500 pages of transcripts. However, some additional outcomes are worth noting. Interviewer synopses of interviews accompany the transcripts, and the Perth and Sydney teams compiled elaborate indexes as a guide to the transcripts’ contents. There are also data sheets, which contain information about the interviews and about the individual interviewees. Glossaries of unusual terms were compiled by the Sydney and Perth teams, and useful bibliographies were also created. A small number of posters were collected, mainly made by unemployed youths at the Fremantle Praxis Poster Workshop, and the Sydney team collected more than 100 photographs relating to refugee conditions and cultural life. Forty pages of poetry written by the unemployed were collected by the Brisbane team.
The CCUOHP was also important as a model for another large-scale project of national significance: the ‘Bringing Them Home’ Oral History Project. Funded by the Federal Government to the value of $1.6 million in December 1997, ‘Bringing Them Home’ aimed to record the memories of Indigenous people who, as children, were separated from their parents, along with the memories of others involved in the process of those removals. Both projects are a tribute to Australia’s democratic culture: a case of national governments generously funding projects that dealt with issues that were (and are) politically embarrassing to them. The high levels of unemployment during the 1980s were an embarrassment to those in power because, during the preceding three decades, Australia had experienced very low levels of unemployment. During the 1980s, the concept of ‘structural unemployment’ became part of public discourse. Governments now seemed to accept that there would always be a substantial pool of unemployed people, that this was part of the nature of economic life during a period of rapid technological change and the integration of the national economy into the global economy. The CCUOHP recordings, with their insights into the economic, social and psychological impacts of unemployment on individuals in the 1980s, have become a historical resource with the passage of time. They will be even more valuable in the future. BARRY YORK writes regularly for National Library of Australia News. His email address is: garocon@pcug.org.au |
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