The first issue of the Oral History Australia journal under the new name Studies In Oral History will be based on the theme ‘Oral history, place and environment’.
Journal editors Skye Krichauff and Carla Pascoe Leahy announced the theme of the special 2021 issue while issuing a Call for Papers for peer-reviewed articles.
The journal’s Call for Papers is usually issued late in the year for the following year’s issue. This year, however, the editors decided to bring forward the deadline for peer-reviewed articles to better cater for the review process. A further Call for Papers will be issued later this year for non-peer reviewed contributions. In other news, Alexandra Dellios is to take over from Francesco Ricatti as chair of the journal’s Editorial Board, as of the 2021 issue.
Call for papers
This special issue of Studies in Oral History (formerly Oral History Australia Journal) invites reflections upon the ways in which oral history can illuminate and expand our understandings of place and environment.
To be considered for peer review, articles should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words (excluding references) and are due 30 November 2020. Publication of the special issue is anticipated in late 2021.
Please visit Oral History Austrlia’s website for more details: https://www.oralhistoryaustralia.org.au/article/journal-call-for-papers
The July 2020 issue of the OHV newsletter ‘Rewind’ is now available.
Highlights include:
- overview of our online event program
- annual symposium recording on new OHV You Tube channel
- new OHV membership system
- OHV web manager Jessica Ferrari talks oral history and business
- oral historians among Australian Historical Association prizewinners
- changes to the Oral History Australia journal.
Current OHV members receive the the newsletter by email through the MailChimp platform. If you are not an OHV member you can subscribe. You can also view the latest issue through your browser by clicking on the following link:
Rewind – July 2020
This web page also includes a button for those who wish to subscribe to the newsletter.
If you have any trouble accessing this newsletter or have any feedback, please contact us at contact.oralhistoryvictoria@gmail.com.
After cancelling our first two workshops for the year due to COVID-19 restrictions, Oral History Victoria has staged five online events and has a further two scheduled. The response has been overwhelming.
Online training
Al Thomson conducting the online introductory course ‘Oral history interviewing for beginners’.
Our first online training event, ‘Oral history interviewing for beginners’ sold out and went to a waitlist more than a week before it was due to begin on 30 May 2020. A second round of this training, scheduled for 15 and 22 August 2020, recently sold out within four days (priority was given to those waitlisted for the first event).
Consulting historian Sarah Rood and Alistair Thomson, Professor of History at Monash University, conducted the training, which was run on two consecutive Saturdays to provide the opportunity for participants to conduct an interview in the week in-between.
In consideration of the online platform, the training format was slightly modified to ensure sufficient breaks and opportunities for interaction in small groups. The course was restricted to 16 places to ensure maximum participation.
We are hoping to offer some further online training in coming months.
Annual symposium
Screen shot of OHV video on You Tube.
On 14 June 2020 we staged our first online symposium, ‘Oral history and the environment’, which received almost 100 registrations – a near sell-out, with attendees from throughout Australia and overseas.
Alistair Thomson chaired the three-hour symposium and Peg Fraser, former Museum Victoria curator and author of the award-winning book, Black Saturday: Not the End of the Story (Monash University Publishing, 2018), delivered the keynote address.
The other presenters were:
- Deb Anderson, Monash University
- Lorina Barker, University of New England
- Katie Holmes, La Trobe University
- Scott McKinnon, University of Wollongong
- Karen Twigg, La Trobe University.
The presentations and questions and answer sessions are now available on a new OHV You Tube channel. Go to: https://youtu.be/_nTLmxwy24s. Open the description under the video to access linked timecodes.
Informal catch-ups
In recognition of of the current difficult circumstances with COVID-19 restrictions we have also increased the frequency of our informal ‘Ideas and skills exchange’ gatherings and moved these events online via Zoom.
Alistair Thomson has been hosting these free meetings which to date have been held on 28 April 2020, 26 May 2020 and 30 June 2020. A fourth session is planned for Tuesday 28 July at 5:30 pm. Go to our events section for further information and the meeting link.
The Oral History Australia (OHA) journal is to be renamed Studies in Oral History from the next issue due later this year.
Changing the title was first proposed and discussed at the 2019 OHA Biennial Conference in a session seeking member input in the future direction of the journal.
The journal editors Carla Pascoe Leahy and Skye Krichauff formally recommended the title change to the OHA national committee, which approved it at a recent meeting.
‘The suggestion was to bring our journal in line with other oral history journals around the world which don’t refer to their place of origin,’ the editors said.
‘The idea was that changing our name from the Oral History Australia Journal to Studies in Oral History makes it clear that the journal is not only open to topics dealing with Australian oral history or written by Australian oral historians, but is interested in and engaged with oral history around the world.’
The new title is the latest in a number of significant changes to the OHA’s flagship publication. Other changes include:
- making the journal open access
- expanding the Editorial Board to include prominent overseas oral historians.
Oral History Australia and its predecessor, the Oral History Association of Australia, began publishing the journal for the benefit of its members from the inception of the organisation in 1979.
The publication was previously known as the Oral History Association of Australia Journal and since 2014 has been the Oral History Australia Journal (ISSN: 0158 7366).
OHA ceased printing copies of the journal with the 2016 issue and since 2017 issues have been published in electronic format only.
View the 2019 journal.
