This is a unique collaboration between a historian and four ordinary women who were extraordinary letters-writers, family photographers and memoirists. Taken together, these stories enrich and complicate our understanding of key themes in twentieth century British and Australian women's history. -- .
The Oral History Reader edited by Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson, is an international anthology of the key writings about the theory, method and use of oral history. Arranged in five thematic sections, The Oral History Reader details issues in the theory and practice of oral history. The collection covers key debates in the postwar development of oral history including: * problems posed by interviewing * discussions of the politics of empowerment * analytical strategies for interpreting memories * concerns of archiving, practice, ethics and interpretation. Each section contains an introduction which contextualises the selection by reviewing key isssues and relevant literature. Extensive cross-referencing and indexing provides an aid to research and a crucial comparative dimension. This comprehensive volume illustrates similarities and differences in oral history work from around the world, with examples from North America, Britain, Australasia, Continental Europe, Latin America and Africa. It also details the subjects - such as labour history, women's history, gay and lesbian history, ethnic and indigenous people's history and disability history - to which oral history has made a significant contribution.
Anzac Memories was first published to acclaim in 1994, and has achieved international renown for its pioneering contribution to the study of war memory and mythology. Michael McKernan wrote that the book gave ‘as good a picture of the impact of the Great War on individuals and Australia as we are likely to get in this generation’, and Michael Roper concluded that ‘an immense achievement of this book is that it so clearly illuminates the historical processes that left men like my grandfather forever struggling to fashion myths which they could live by’. In this new edition Alistair Thomson explores how the Anzac legend has transformed over the past quarter century, how a ‘post-memory’ of the Great War creates new challenges and opportunities for making sense of the national past, and how veterans’ war memories can still challenge and complicate national mythologies. He returns to a family war history that he could not write about twenty years ago because of the stigma of war and mental illness, and he uses newly released Repatriation files to question his own earlier account of veterans’ post-war lives and memories and to think afresh about war and memory.
'Life is long. When you're forty-eight, there's been a lot of stuff that's happened (laughs). It's got elements of comedy and there are elements of heartache and drama and thriller and it's got so many things in it.' Rhonda King, born 1965 'I really like the idea that in maybe a hundred years someone could listen and hear about my life to learn about what living in 2012 or 2013 was like. Think that's really cool.' Adam Farrow-Palmer, born 1988 Australian Lives: An Intimate History illuminates Australian life across the 20th and into the 21st century: how Australian people have been shaped by the forces and expectations of contemporary history and how, in turn, they have made their lives and created Australian society. From oral history interviews with Australians born between 1920 and 1989, fifty narrators reflect on their diverse experiences as children and teenagers, in midlife and in old age, about faith, migration, work and play, aspiration and activism, memory and identity, pain and happiness. In Australian Lives you can read and in the e-version of the book listen to the comedy, heartache and drama of ordinary Australians' extraordinary lives. As our interviewee Kim Bear (born 1959) explains, 'Stories are a great way to inform people about what it is to be human. Even if you say one thing that resonates...there's that connection made.'