Organisers of the 2020 Oral History Award, awarded jointly by Oral History Victoria, the Royal Historical Society and Public Records Office Victoria, have announced the shortlisted nominees.
They are:
- Cockatoo: Voices from the Past – Dot Griffin, Jan Shaw, Ruth South and Arthur Wintle, Cockatoo History and Heritage Group
- Memories of the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force 1951-1977 – Jessica Ferrari, Memento Media
- Out of the Madhouse: From Asylums to Caring Community?, Arcadia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020 – Sandy Jeffs and Margaret Leggatt.
See the nominees at our AGM
The shortlisted nominees have agreed to present a brief overview of their work at the Oral History Victoria Annual General Meeting scheduled for 29 October 2020, 5:30pm to 7:30pm. Find out more about our AGM at https://oralhistoryvictoria.org.au/event/29-10-annual-general-meeting/.
Find out more about the shortlisted nominees.
Cockatoo: Voices from the Past
- Dot Griffin, Jan Shaw, Ruth South and Arthur Wintle, Cockatoo History and Heritage Group
- https://www.facebook.com/groups/379089272188869/permalink/2463697657061343
- Based upon oral history interviews conducted after the 1983 Ash Wednesday bushfires, Cockatoo: Voice from the Past is an anthology of memories of a Victorian country town. Past and present residents and visitors offer a multiplicity of accounts about all aspects of the life and times of Cockatoo, from the interwar years until the Ash Wednesday fires swept through the town on 16 February 1983. The fire destroyed 307 buildings and the local archive of documents, photographs and memorabilia, and took the lives of six people. Cockatoo: Voice from the Past documents what might otherwise have been a lost past. With insight and affection, the book combines interviews with surviving photos and records to recall and celebrate a vibrant community.
Memories of the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force 1951-1977
- Jessica Ferrari, Memento Media
- https://mementomedia.com.au/project/womens-royal-australian-air-force-point-cook-airbase/
- This Memento Media web-based exhibition presents the lived experience of women who served in the Women’s Royal Australian Air Force between 1951 and 1977, based at Point Cook near Melbourne. The official record of the Australian air force has tended to neglect the contribution of women, and this exhibition sets that right. Drawing upon archive file and documents, official and personal photographs and, most memorably, vivid interviews with women who served, the exhibition illuminates the women’s service, from joining up, training and graduation, through life on the base and the conditions of women’s service, and concludes with the impact of service upon the narrators and how they ‘spread their wings’ in later years.\
Out of the Madhouse: From Asylums to Caring Community?, Arcadia, Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2020.
- Sandy Jeffs and Margaret Leggatt
- https://scholarly.info/book/out-of-the-madhouse-from-asylums-to-caring-community/
- The ‘madhouse’ was Larundel Psychiatric Hospital, a Melbourne institution from 1953 to 1999. Drawing upon 71 interviews with former inmates, their family and friends, nurses, doctors, allied health workers and other staff, Out of the Madhouse brings to life the shocking consequences of mental ill-health and the equally shocking treatments; a community where inmates and health workers struggled with ill-understood conditions; a place of stigma and fear yet also of asylum and friendship. The authors, a former inmate and writer and a sociologist and occupational therapist, weave their own stories alongside the interview testimony into a profound social history of madness and its treatment. They conclude that ‘forgetting the past may be dangerous because old wrongs are perpetuated and what was good is lost….The lost history of Larundel is lost wisdom.’ This is a book of invaluable wisdom for our troubled times.