Current Projects

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Clan Ludowyke Project

Jay Ludowyke

Clan Ludowyke is an oral history project and the basis of a creative non-fiction work exploring writing, history and family.

The interviewees are the remnants of a family of Sri Lankans who immigrated to Australia in the 1960s and '70s, with focus on family background, Sri Lankan life, the effects of the civil war and the Sri Lankan immigrant experience.

The project is the work of a creative writing undergraduate student and granddaughter of one of the interviewees. Her grandmother was born into a privileged class with wealth and servants; the mayor of Colombo was her guardian and she shares a great grandmother with Sirimavo Bandaranaike, the world’s first female prime minister, yet she married a man of lower caste and came with him to Australia where she worked in an ice cream factory.

This history, and the others recorded in the Clan Ludowyke project, will feature as vignettes in the creative non-fiction work and will include:

•    The incomparable widow and the prince.
•    The Portuguese governor's daughter's elopement.
•    A love story that defies caste.
•    Paradise lost.
•    From master to servant.

At the completion of the project, a website with online audio and video content will provide a complementary digital experience to the creative non-fiction work.

The project is currently in the planning stages of a trip to Sri Lanka to undertake further research, create more digital content and form part of the creative non-fiction experience.

There is a strong Sri Lankan community in Australia, many of whom came to escape the decades long civil war. This project is particularly relevant since it's been just one year since peace was declared.
 

For more information, Jay can be emailed.

The Artful Life Story: Fictionalising Oral History

Ariella Van Luyn

In 2009, I began work on a practice-led PhD project investigating how oral histories could inform fiction. The outcomes of the project will be a novel based on a number of oral histories I have conducted around Brisbane and an accompanying exegesis, investing the theoretical aspects of the project.

Throughout 2009, I conducted ten interviews with a diverse range of people about their memories and stories of Brisbane. The people I interviewed included a journalism student; an architect; a funeral director; a retired nurse; a brother and sister whose family had owned land in Newstead and Kelvin Grove for many years; a boat builder; an art teacher and a retired business man.
In conducting the interviews, I hoped to establish sense of a particular time and place. I had attended the Talk about Town: Urban Lives and Oral Sources in 20th Century Australia conference held in Melbourne from 27th to 28th August last year. Carla Pascoe, in her presentation, City as Space, City as Place, described how she used interviews to elicit sensory and emotive memories of a specific place. In her interviews, she encouraged the participants to draw ‘mental’ maps of the area as they knew it as children. Like Pascoe, I planned to ask my participants to draw maps of the places they had grown up, and to take about the significance of each of the places they drew.

I also asked questions about sensory and emotional details of there memories, such as what smells, sights and tactile sensations they associated with the area.

I was lucky enough to have my short story, ‘Evelyn on the verandah,’ accepted into the One Book, Many Brisbanes anthology. The story is based on an interview I conducted with a 21 year-old woman who grew up in New Farm. One Book, Many Brisbanes will be launched in June this year. Copies will be available for loan at all Brisbane City Council libraries. 

I’m currently in the process of editing a paper on fictionalising oral history for the OHAA journal; all going well, it should appear in an upcoming isse of the Newsletter.  I am also presenting a paper at the IOHA conference in Prague in July 2010, as well as presenting a joint paper with Dr. Helen Klaebe at the Life Writing and Intimate Publics conference held at the University of Sussex at the end of June 2010. I will be taking notes, for those that can’t make attend the conferences, and will share them in a future newsletter.

For more information or interest in participating on this project, Ariella can be emailed  or by visiting her blog.

Dunstan Foundation Project 

The Don Dunstan Foundation (DDF)  was established in South Australia in 1999 to continue the advocacy and social leadership role of the former state premier who died that year. Voluntary DDF Chapters undertake activities in Queensland, Victoria, and NSW. 

The Queensland Chapter of the foundation has started an oral history project covering key events in the lead-up to the election of Wayne Goss in 1989 as the first Labor Party premier in 32 years.  The project, Decades of Division, was inspired by the DDF Queensland Chapter’s first president, the late Tom Burns, who served as deputy premier to Mr Goss. 

Project coordinator and DDF member Lindsay Marshall said Tom Burns had wanted the foundation’s Queensland Chapter to undertake a political history of the Bjelke-Petersen era. 

“Sadly Tom died in 2007 but we are determined to undertake this project as a tribute to him,” Lindsay said.  “The oral history will be based on audio and, where possible, video interviews of people with first-hand knowledge of the key political trends and events from 1969 to 1989. The project is intended to cover the period beginning shortly after the August 1968 selection of the late Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen as then Country Party and later National Party state premier, and ending prior to the December 1989 election of the Goss Government.  We have drafted a list of potential interviewees featuring politicians of all parties, political activists, civil libertarians, unionists and others. All those we have approached so far have expressed great interest in participating.  Several of our members have undergone training in interview techniques and editing courtesy of our Chapter’s membership of the Queensland branch of the Oral History Association of Australia.”

The Decades of Division title reflects the common theme running through political events in the period covered. Interviews will flesh out four subject areas: 

1. DIVIDE AND CONQUER:  Covering the confrontationist approach of successive Coalition and National Party governments and their attacks on civil libertarians, environmentalists, trade unions, and individuals who disagreed with their policies or decisions.
2. A GOVERNMENT DIVIDED: Covering the internal divisions evident within Coalition governments that led ultimately to the 1983 split and the National Party governing alone.
3. DIVIDING THE STATE: Covering the distorted electoral system that gave the Country Party/National Party a head start in electoral contests at the expense of the Liberal and Labor parties.
4. DIVISIONS IN THE LABOR PARTY: Covering the often bitter divisions and personal or factional disputes within the Labor Party and their effect in lessening the party’s ability to present itself as a credible alternative government.

“The DDF Queensland Chapter is partnering with the National Library of Australia and in July we signed a memorandum of understanding covering the conduct and funding of the project,” Lindsay said.  “All full-length original interviews will be lodged with the NLA and [will] form part of its oral history collection. We hope to conduct about 20 interviews over 12 months.  We will also create a Decades of Division website as part of the Don Dunstan Foundation’s website that will contain abbreviated versions of the full interviews and promote the use of interviews lodged with the National Library. The DDF website will also host a section dedicated to Tom Burns consisting of comments about Tom by those interviewed for the larger oral history project.” 

For more information

Mossman Project

Pam Willis Burden in Port Douglas, on behalf of the Douglas Shire Historical Society, is soon to publish the sequel to her book Port’s People which featured memories of the village of Port Douglas.  The new book, with the working title of Memories of Mossman, will focus on the agricultural area of the community, centred around the town of Mossman.

Again it’s a collection of extracts of oral histories recorded with a diverse group of people such as descendents of pioneers, farmers, immigrants, the former matron of the hospital; a lady who grew up at the Daintree mission; and the men responsible for computerising the sugar mill.

The Historical Society has been awarded funding from the Gambling Community Benefit Fund to pay for the printing.

Pam believes this is the best way of sharing all these stories, publishing a small book that’s accessible to the families, local residents, new-comers to the area, and tourists.  It is a permanent record of a way of life which is quickly disappearing as the farms are divided and sold as smaller blocks and the memories of the immigrants’ children lose their links with the homeland.