Geeking out: quick and easy oral history.

• Author: Blackburn, Fiona

Alice Springs Public Library and ABC Radio Alice Springs, both serving a community of nearly 30,000 people in Central Australia, are collecting oral histories together. The products' will be short, focused, multiformat, and available on the web as well as for loan from the library. They will address a common theme and will not be the extended interviews" which normally constitute oral history. The process is' organic and serendipitous', avoiding problems of previous projects. The library will gain resources suited to our time; the ABC will increase its' audience, and the community's sense of place will be enhanced by insight into lives lived out of the limelight.

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The lives of ordinary people are threaded through the momentous, or more public events, of history. What keeps them out of the limelight, the confluence of factors and motivations that results in prominence for others is hard to identify with certainty--and probably does not matter much for the project described in this paper. Illuminating ordinary lives can, however, through glimpses and recognition of similar experiences, build connections between the subjects and other ordinary people, between ordinary people and where they live, between themselves and the momentous times they have lived through. Or the illumination can simply shed interesting perspectives on the folklore of a place. Or it can heighten understanding of situations, events, historical legacies by revealing points in a story through which ordinary people can enter, following other people like themselves who have recounted where they fitted.

This paper describes a project which is recording ordinary life in Alice Springs during the second half of the last century.

The Alice Springs sense of history

The complex of fiats where I lived in Alice Springs is bounded by Bradshaw Drive, Bloomfield Street, Tilmouth Court and railway land. Bradshaw was the first operator at the telegraph station north of the town, from 1899-1908, Bloomfield and Tilmouth were stockmen and pastoralists, coming to the region in the late nineteenth century. Bloomfields and Tilmouths still live here, some of them prominent indigenous citizens.

My suburb was Gillen, one of seven Alice Springs suburbs named after early nonindigenous settlers. Three others have indigenous names. If I walked to work along the Stuart Highway (named after John McDouall Stuart, the first European explorer of that company of possessed individuals to cross the country here), eight of the twelve streets I passed are named after European settlers. The other four have indigenous names, including local dreaming animals. Any route I took is pretty much the same. Alice Springs is fundamentally an historically self conscious place. The history is very close to the surface, imbued in the nomenclature of the town and countryside--a nomenclature created by indigenous and nonindigenous people. Each system names things differently but they are combined to describe the town.

There are two historical societies in Alice Springs. There are at least five museums, keeping one freelance historian in work and a number of amateur historians busy. Two of the latter are compiling a substantial database of photographs taken by residents and visitors to the town, during the last 100 years. The Lutheran and Uniting Churches have each in the last three years sought to commemorate their missionary role and to connect it to the present.

The Alice Springs Collection, one of Alice Springs Public Library (ASPL)'s special collections, has evolved from being the Central Australian reference branch of the Darwin based Northern Territory Library and Information Service, to being a record of change in the history of the Central Australian region. The collection is about the people of Central Australia. It is also to a significant degree by the people of Central Australia. Local authors are well represented throughout but particularly so in the historical biographical and autobiographical sections. European experience and reminiscence predominate, but indigenous voices are strongly present too.

The Alice Springs Town Council commissioned a general history Alice Springs: its history and the people who made it from Peter Donovan in 1988. A second work...