Alistair Thomson

Anzac Memories: Living With the Legend

n this highly original book, Alistair Thomson poses salient questions about the Anzac legend and its effects on those who lived under its shadow. How was the legend created and what form has it taken since Charles Beans seminal work? What was its changing significance for Australianpolitics and society? Most crucially, how has it served the men whose lives it represents - the survivors of the Great War?

Making the Most of Memories: The Empirical and Subjective Value of Oral History

Oral history, defined by Ronald Grele as ‘the interviewing of eyewitness participants in the events of the past for the purposes of historical reconstruction’, is an invaluable and compelling research method for twentieth-century history. It provides access to undocumented experience, including the life of civic leaders who have not yet written their autobiographies and, more significantly, the ‘hidden histories’ of people on the margins: workers, women, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities and members of other oppressed or marginalised groups. Oral history interviews also provide opportunities to explore particular aspects of historical experience that are rarely recorded, such as personal relationships, domestic life, and the nature of clandestine organisations. They offer rich evidence about the subjective or personal meanings of past events: what it felt like to get married, to be under fire, to face death in a concentration camp. Oral historians are unique in being able to question their informants, to ask the questions that might not have been imagined in the past and to evoke recollections and understandings that were previously silenced or ignored. We enjoy the pleasures – as well as the considerable challenges – of engaging in active, human relationships in the course of our research.

Introduction - Sharing Authority: Oral History and the Collaborative Process

Oral historians have a unique, personal relationship with the men and women whose life stories provide their source material. In his path-breaking book, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History, Michael Frisch urged oral historians to consider if and how it might be possible to create a “shared authority” between historian and narrator in oral history research, interpretation and presentation. This collection of articles and commentaries continues the discussion about the collaborative potential and dilemmas of oral history.

‘Tied to the kitchen sink’? Women's Lives and Women's History in Mid-Twentieth Century Britain and Australia

In the decades after World War Two, women in Britain and Australia lived with—and sometimes against—a compelling expectation about womens role: they should marry and devote their lives to suburban domesticity and childcare. This article considers how the life stories of four women—born in Britain between 1928–38, and living in Australia from the 1950s to the 1970s—can illuminate and complicate our understanding of the experience of the postwar suburban dream. It shows how women sometimes articulated imaginative responses to limiting circumstances and thus stretched the boundaries of possibility.

Digital Aural History: An Australian Case Study

Abstract Digital technologies and tools are transforming the presentation, interpretation, and use of oral history. Using a case study of the Australian Generations Oral History Project, this article focuses on how we have documented interviews and are presenting and interpreting them through writing in online formats that integrate aural material. I consider the interpretative opportunities and challenges posed in four elements of our digital oral history practice: the online discussion forum though which interviewers share their account of each interview; the searchable timed summaries that are linked to the audio recording for each interview; the ZOTERO database that we use to access, search, and share the material generated by the project; and an aural history book that will combine text and audio.

‘History is a conversation’: teaching student historians through making digital histories

Abstract This article introduces a digital history course taught in partnership by Monash University historians and Museum Victoria curators, and explores the opportunities and challenges of history teaching with digital media and of producing good history using the three-minute digital storytelling format. We assess student learning that is applicable to all forms of history-making: the discovery that history can be found in intimate stories as well as grand narratives; the critical use of sources including photographs, objects, archives and oral histories; awareness of subjectivity and the historian’s role in constructing history; the value of focussed and disciplined writing and of developing a distinctive historical voice; the potential and perils of emotional engagement; and the importance of audience. Through web-links in the online iteration of this article, readers can watch the student videos discussed in the text. This article has been peer reviewed.

Australian Generations? Memory, Oral History and Generational Identity in Postwar Australia

Australian media pundits and popular sociologists write blithely about generations such as the Baby Boomers and Gen X, but what they are really writing about are birth cohorts who share some common life experiences and attitudes but do not necessarily share a generational identity. Drawing upon oral history interviews conducted with 300 Australians, this article argues that while a birth cohort may share historical reference points, it will not necessarily be conscious of itself as a distinctive generation. Generations are forged by dramatic shared experiences and emergent generational awareness in youth. Generational self-consciousness is then fashioned and consolidated in memory by individuals who draw upon collective representations of generational identity in making sense of their lives. This article argues that in post-Second World War Australia there has, thus far, been only one such generation, the so-called ‘60s generation’, and illuminates that argument though a life history case study that also highlights the significance of gender and intergenerational relations.

Biography of an archive: 'Australia 1938' and the vexed development of Australian oral history

Between 1979 and the mid-1980s, the ‘Australia 1938’ oral history project, undertaken as part of a Bicentennial History Project, produced just under six hundred interviews about Australian lives in 1938. This article presents a biography of that project and its archive, and it illuminates a critical phase in the development of Australian oral history. By examining the methodological challenges and intellectual debates, both local and international, which shaped the ‘Australia 1938’ interviews, the article aims to guide future researchers as they search the archive and interpret the interviews, which are now available online. I argue that although the ‘Australia 1938’ interviews were affected by the constraints of the Bicentennial History Project, and also by what could be termed ‘conventional’ attitudes to historical evidence, together they comprise an invaluable yet under-utilised source for the social history of the first third of Australias twentieth century.

Oral History and Fragments in Southeast Asia

This book offers a view from Southeast Asia, where oral history is embryonic and state led but is also being socially contested and redefined. The book began as a conference in Singapore in 2010, organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) and the Singapore Heritage Society. ISEAS had hosted a similar event 20 years ago, which resulted in the publication Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method (1998).1 The interim years have witnessed significant changes in Southeast Asia that are transforming the practice of oral history.

Introduction: Oral History and Photography

This book is about the “photographic turn” in oral history. Historians’ interest in photographs—their “discovery of old photographs”—dates back, according to Raphael Samuel’s observations in Great Britain, to the early 1960s.3 Historians back then evaluated their visual evidence much less critically than their traditional textual sources, treating photographs, as Samuel criticized, as “transparent reflections of fact.”4 Cultural and family historians as well as archivists seized on photographs in the 1970s, concentrating on their assumedly self-evident informational value.5 Over the last two decades, the use of photographs has come under greater critical scrutiny. In turning the object of its research into a category of analysis, the discipline of history has moved toward a “pictorial turn,” a “visual turn,” an “iconic turn,” or, more focused, a “turn to photography.”6