Audio books are one of the best remedies for boredom on long Kimberley car trips. They're a way to engage the mind without getting distracted from the road, a way to imaginatively travel around the state, the country and the world from your own car. But for people who prefer to be fully present in the landscape that they're living in, or travelling through, sometimes audio books from faraway places aren't ideal. Broome Public Library has been gathering and recording oral histories from Broome and the Peninsula, eleven of which are currently available as audio books. Oral historian Elaine Rabbitt says all the stories are gripping, but what's even more impressive, is the willingness of local people to share them. For full story including a radio interview with Elaine, click here.
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Australian Gay & Lesbian Life Stories
A group of researchers from around Australia have come together for the first time to deliver an oral history of LGBTI Australia. The group, in conjunction with the National Library of Australia is seeking to collect and record the experiences of different generations of the Australian LGBTI community. The project is a first of its kind and the researchers hope to reveal the changing social attitudes to LGBTI Australians and document our history and achievements. For full story click here.
Students in Brisbane learn from Holocaust Exhibition
Brisbane Catholic Education has facilitated the staging of an exhibition on the Holocaust to help school students realise the importance of good people standing up in the face of bad situations. "Courage to Care", an initiative of the not-for-profit Jewish community organisation B'nai B'rith aims to educate visitors to understand the role of bullies, bystanders and victims using stories of the Holocaust. For full story click here.
Haiti Earthquake
In this audio clip, Nunotte Zama talks about how she almost changed her daughter into a vegetarian. Due to the tremendous generosity of the people from their village of L'Asile, Rebecca was given many chickens as presents. Her mother encouraged her to name all of them. Read more: http://www.wickedlocal.com/medford/news/x273426430/HAITIAN-ORAL-HISTORY-PROJECT-Nunotte-Zama-speaks-to-the-Haiti-earthquake#ixzz2Y24n1qWY
Boeing Wichita Oral History Project
The “Boeing Wichita Oral History Project” features hours of videotape from 21 people ranging from politicians, Boeing employees and others in the community affected by the plant’s closure in a city that has long defined itself the Air Capital of the World. Friday night’s presentation will be a discussion of how the project came about and what was learned in the process. For full story including video overview click here.
Wisconsin veterans remember
Adam Holton's memories of Iraq are still fresh, even though it's been nine years since he served as commander of a Marine Reserves company. He vividly remembers the days during Golf Company's 2004-'05 Iraq deployment when five of his Marines were mortally wounded, and he recalls the tedium and excitement of living in a war zone. Holton wanted his memories, and those of his men, preserved for posterity. Because as long as he remembers his five fallen comrades, others will, too. "Keeping their memories alive is really important to us," Holton said. That's why Holton participated in the Wisconsin Veterans Museum's oral history project. More than 1,800 oral histories of Wisconsin veterans, dating back to the program's start in 1994, are on cassette tapes, CDs and now digital recordings. For full story click here.
Boston College decision
Boston College has won a significant victory in its legal fight to keep sensitive oral-history records confidential. A federal appeals court ruled on Friday that the college must hand over only 11 out of 85 records subpoenaed by the U.S. government on behalf of British authorities. For full story click here.
Veterans OH Project – Uni. of Oregon
Every year, hundreds of thousands of U.S. veterans die without having fully told their stories, taking with them rich experiences of military service that haven’t been formally preserved. For Sgt. Josh Yates, that’s a tragedy. Yates, 27, who served six years in the U.S. Marine Corps in Iraq and Japan, has a deep respect for history. He’s majoring in this field as an undergraduate at the UO, and it’s possible he’ll someday be at the head of a classroom himself, teaching history at a university. For full story click here.
Tales of the luggers
The Cairns Museum is collecting oral history of all luggers. Jon Burnett is curator of the Cairns Maritime Museum, the contents of which are now in storage, and is a conservation scientist and maritime trainer in MER (Marine Ecology Research & Training), who has taken trips to the Reef to check out its acidity. The HB, originally named for its builder Harry Bowden, and dubbed by Jon as the History Boat, may be the couple's current home but it is also a valuable piece of Far North Queensland history and it hasn't been all plain sailing restoring her. For full story click here.
World War Z
Inspired by The Good War (1984), Studs Terkel's Pulitzer Prize-winning oral history of World War II, World War Z is an unusually intelligent piece of genre fiction, in which author Max Brooks uses the familiar idea of a virus causing a zombie outbreak to examine pressing contemporary issues such as government competence and corruption, racial prejudice, religious intolerance and American arrogance. Even before publication of the book, whose full title is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, it sparked a bidding war over the movie rights, with Brad Pitt's company Plan B slugging it out with Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way for the rights to the big screen. The movie version has moved far from the original story. For full article click here.