I recently read the book Australia: Biography of a Nation, by Phillip Knightley and it was a fascinating look into the history of that continent. In particular because it’s colonisation and ‘founding’ happened so recently compared to many other countries in the world. Many of the chapters discuss the horrible ways the First Nations people were treated, so it can make for tough reading, but I would highly recommend reading it.
One of the passages in the book really stuck out to me. It presented Hazel de Berg and her time spent recording the voices of the people of the country. The collection is now accessible from the National Library.
This idea, that you could make a permanent record of the attitudes and ideas of a nation, at a fairly early stage in it’s formation is a really intriguing idea. She started this project back in the mid 20th century, long before social media and the explosion of self-publishing that the web would bring about. Using audio tapes she was able to record an oral history of many prominent figures at the time.
People have kept diaries but there’s something a bit more captivating about being able to hear life stories in an individual’s own voice. Additionally, the idea that one individual managed a project may have made the resulting corpus more accessible than myriad individual writings distributed amongst families’ homes and private collections. The curated nature also makes it more focused on individual topics.
Today we have social media, we have blogs, vlogs, and podcasts, but how much of that is actually visible and accessible in the same way? Is there any means of identifying the character of the nation, the world, in a meaningful way. Or is it too dispersed, inaccessible, or even volatile?
Search engines seem to be going away and we risk them getting replaced by AI-based systems which could result in these personal opinions being transmogrified and summarised, losing that personal touch. Blogs come and go and The Internet Archive’s parent organisation seems perennially to be at risk of collapse on legal fronts. News and other television channels are veering ever more towards pure entertainment than fact and people’s histories.
The ability to listen to these oral stories makes me feel quite sad that many older relatives of mine have passed away, and I won’t hear their stories any more. When my paternal grandfather was still alive I often thought to myself, I should record these stories he’s telling somehow. Not necessarily to publish, but just for the family. I never did, and now I can’t.
Maybe that loss of precise history is normal, and what De Berg managed to do was quite an aberration. I have been reading Ted Chiang recently, and his short story The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling explores on this idea of a sharing of stories, and the inherent corruption remembered storytelling brings might be necessary for society and communities to exist and grow.
There’s probably a need for both. We shouldn’t forget the past, and having concrete records of how things were, and how the people were at the time is really important. Concrete personal truth is less important while people are still alive, but once they’re gone, having a curated snapshot of what was core to them, unadulterated by biography ghost-writers or remembered stories, is vital to remembering them and the time they lived in.
