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If journalism is the first rough draft of history, then oral histories come in a close second. Listening to the thoughts and recollections of someone who lived through history can be eternally fascinating or interminably boring, but unquestionably useful. More than 30 years ago, a young woman named Miriam Breckenridge walked into the Community Library in Ketchum and handed over a box of cassettes. On each one were recorded interviews she had done with 18 sheep ranchers of the Wood River Valley.  For full story, click here.

The Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives (ALGA) were established in 1978 at the Fourth National Homosexual Conference. It sprung from a small core of people who had just witnessed the riots at the first Sydney Gay Mardi Gras.   Two people who have been instrumental in preserving the history are Liz Ross and Helen Pausacker. Pausacker was involved from the early days too. From the late 1970s to the early 1980s, she was heavily involved in transcribing scores of oral history interviews.  Pausacker has also taken on other special projects for the Archives, including the Photo History Project in 2001 that was designed to get people to contribute photos of special significance to them.  For full story click here.

The Shadowcatchers: A History of Cinematography in Australia, has just been published by the Australian Cinematographers Society.  The Shadowcatchers is based on oral history collected from people who really knew the business. It is accessible, readable history with personal quotes and anecdotes. The specially researched text includes individual biographies of significant cinematographers combined with a pictorial record of more than 380 photographs of cinematographers at work on film sets. Beresford describes the beautiful glossy coffee table book as “a triumph of research, both in its text and photos”.  For full story click here.

Klaus Hueneke may be one of Canberra’s rarest species – a successful small publisher in the digital age.  After a number of career moves – environmental planner, academic, ski instructor and teacher – he set up Tabletop Press in 1984 in a spare room in his house, with the aim of publishing and promoting books on the cultural history and ecology of the Australian Alps. He also began collecting interviews with ”old timers who had lived in and around” the Alps, with a view to collating this oral history into a book. In 1982, the Australian National University Press published Huts of the High Country, which documented the history of more than 100 huts and homesteads in the Snowy Mountains of NSW. The book became an unexpected best seller and is now in its sixth printing. For full story click here.

A new exhibit dedicated to Cook Inlet Beluga whales opens Friday June 8 at the Alaska Sea Life Center in Seward. To highlight the exhibit, an oral history of the white whales, commissioned by the Kenai Peninsuala Borough, is now available.  As KSKA’s Ellen Lockyer reports, authors of the history gathered anecdotal reports of sightings dating from the mid twentieth century to the present, and one thing is clear from the compilation….. there’s not many belugas swimming in Cook Inlet these days.  For full story including short interview excerpts, click here.

Television viewers in Estonia will soon learn about the unique history of local Estonian Americans through insight offered Monday at the Seabrook Educational and Cultural Center (SECC).  Editor Mati Kirotar, of Independent Video Media in Estonia, interviewed Estonian Americans with Seabrook roots as cameraman Peeter Ulevain captured an oral history, shared in Estonian, of starting anew in the U.S. after leaving displaced persons camps in Europe.  For full story click here.

Now 90, Don Roberts believes he is the only serviceman still alive who was on duty the night Sydney was last attacked. It was a Sunday, May 31, 1942. Australia had been at war for three years, but the Japanese had been ”neutral” until Pearl Harbour five months earlier.  That night they were bringing the war to Sydney Harbour, smuggling three mini-submarines through the Heads in an audacious attack on the US cruiser Chicago. This time, there had been a warning. Unfortunately, it had been ignored.  For full story, including a video interview with Robin Hutcheon, click here.

Having grown up in an affluent white area of New York, Ramona Battle of Lynchburg remembers the “unspoken” view of educators in her public school that black students would not advance to college.  Her father, a World War II veteran and the first in his family to attend college, would not stand for that.  When she was a teenager, Martin Luther King, Jr. came to speak with her activist father’s group about peacefully protesting – she was so in awe she could only utter a few words to him.  Ramona’s story was one of many collected during a “School Desegregation: Learn, Preserve, and Empower” oral history event at the Lynchburg Public Library. A crowd of about 50 people gathered, many to go on the record about their own experiences with desegregation of public schools and to show photographs or documents bearing witness to the social change.  For full story click here.

This year marks 150 years since the U.S.-Dakota War. The war, fought in southwestern Minnesota in the late summer of 1862, ended with hundreds of people dead, the Dakota people exiled from their homeland and the largest mass execution in U.S. history: the hangings of 38 Dakota men in Mankato on Dec. 26, 1862.  The Minnesota Historical Society has recorded dozens of oral histories from descendants of those touched by the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. To gather the stories, Minnesota Historical Society staff conducted interviews in homes throughout the Minnesota River Valley and in tribal community centers on Dakota reservations.  For full story  which includes link to web site, click here.