Victoria

Vale Gwladys McLachlan OAM

Gwladys accepting award

Community oral historian and broadcaster Gwlad McLachlan passed away recently in Melbourne at the age of 94, leaving a priceless legacy of recorded interviews and activism.

A life member of Oral History Victoria (OHV) since 2013, Gwlad is the only Victorian to date to have been honoured with Oral History Australia’s top award, the Hazel de Berg Award for Excellence in Oral History. She received the award at the OHA Biennial Conference in Launceston, Tasmania, in 2022.

Judges for the award said Gwlad had made a significant contribution to oral history, predominantly as an unpaid volunteer with a community history focus.

Her achievements included three decades creating, preserving and seeking to ensure the public accessibility of hundreds of broadcast interviews about life in Victoria’s largest regional centre Geelong.

‘The large number of projects Gwlad initiated, undertook, and delivered is impressive, but what made her work distinct was also the variety of subjects, and her focus on diversity—by ensuring the interviewee voices of less heard groups (at the time) such as women, migrants, Indigenous people, and people who grew up in out-of-home care were valued and included,’ judges said in the award citation.

Gwladys Olive McLachlan was born in Wonthaggi, Victoria, on 16 May 1931, the fourth child of Elizabeth Evans and Edgar Beard. She died on 1 October 2025.

At her funeral in Geelong, her daughter Helen McLachlan described Gwlad as ‘an incredibly kind and loving person who had extraordinary energy and a wonderful, full life’.

Gwlad grew up on a farm with her grandparents next door and loved doing everything the boys did. She attended the progressive all-girls school Fintona in Melbourne and excelled in both education and sport.

From a very young age she wanted to be a nurse, like her mother. She cared for her grandmother next door and a little boy down the road who had polio. She subsequently trained as a registered nurse, brought up five children with her husband Colin and went to university to study politics and history.

After she and her husband adopted an Aboriginal child, David, Gwlad became active in Aboriginal advocacy and helped her son reconnect with his Aboriginal mother.

Gwladys holding her award
Gwlad McLachlan in Launceston, Tasmania, after receiving the Oral History Australia Hazel de Berg Award for Excellence in Oral History.

As a visiting child health nurse with a keen interest in community and social history, Gwlad began working for 3YYR Geelong Community Radio (later The Pulse) soon after its establishment in 1988. This work included presenting and conducting interviews for a weekly history program, initially focussed on Geelong West but later broadened to Greater Geelong.

The station 3YYR had a brief to provide access to diverse groups in the Geelong community, such as migrants, women and Indigenous people. Gwlad and others interviewed hundreds of local people on topics including daily life, work, growing up in orphanages, education, health, war experiences, social issues, sport and the arts.

The interviews reflected the distinctive characteristics of Geelong’s history and also showed the impact of Australian and world events on the region.

After leaving Geelong Community Radio, Gwlad led efforts to preserve and index the interviews, recorded from 1988 to 2000 and captured on more than 200 audio cassettes. This work became the known as the Geelong Voices Oral History Project.

The project was supported by the Geelong Heritage Centre, the Geelong Family History Group and a small, dedicated committee. Financial support was also received from the City of Greater Geelong, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Deakin University, the Local History Grants Program (administered by the Public Record Office Victoria) and other organisations.

Ultimately, the audio cassette tape collection was copied onto 225 CDs and donated to both the State Library of Victoria and the Geelong Heritage Centre (now part of the Geelong Regional Library) with a view to ensuring public access. The collection also includes summaries, photographs and documents to assist as finding aids. Some of the interviews can be accessed on the Victorian Collections website at:  https://victoriancollections.net.au/stories/geelong-voices.

A long-serving member of OHV, Gwlad maintained an ongoing connection with the Geelong Voices project and collection. Over the years she shared her knowledge and experience, both informally and as a speaker for interested groups. She assisted the State Library of Victoria as it worked through accessioning the collection. Archiving was finalised in January 2020 (accession no: ‘Geelong Voices Oral History Project’ – MS13422).

In a letter supporting Gwlad’s nomination for the Hazel de Berg award, foundation director of the Geelong Heritage Centre and Geelong Historical Society executive committee member (1979-2003) Norman Houghton said Gwlad’s oral history work was the ‘very first of significance that was done in Geelong’.

He said Gwlad interviewed people ‘in a skilful manner with an easy style, drawing them out to impart their cultural outlooks and how they saw their role in the Geelong community’.

‘The radio transmissions, public presentations and placing the results in the Geelong Heritage Centre for permanent preservation ensured the work was placed for ongoing public benefit,’ he said. ‘It enables cultural transmission and recognition of community inputs by the interviewees as another segment in the story of Geelong.’

Gwlad was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2023 for her ‘service to oral history and to the community’.

In recent years she has appeared on a number of television programs including:

Find out more about Gwlad McLachlan:

Article and photos by Judy Hughes, Oral History Victoria

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