Alison Atkinson-Phillips

Oral historians regularly use photographs, personal artefacts, or the landscape to access a fuller range of personal feelings and meanings of the past. Yet while archival films are regularly used to stimulate community reminiscence, little has been written about the potentialities of audiovisual elicitation as part of oral history methodology. This paper explores the value of film elicitation methods to revisit a largely forgotten public campaign aimed at halting the closure of shipyards in North East England. We used two short documentary videos as memory prompts for union activists and film producers. The films elicited strong emotional responses, prompting participants to reflect on the gaps between their memories and the ways events were portrayed at the time. In a region where the loss of the shipbuilding industry has significant ongoing social, cultural and economic impacts, the closures are often remembered as a historical inevitability. In contrast, revisiting the films with those who participated in their production offered an opportunity to visit a moment of possibility. We argue that film elicitation is a powerful tool for oral historians who want to explore marginalised histories while avoiding some of the pitfalls of ‘recovery’ oral history.

Australian history has undergone major transformations over the twentieth and twenty first centuries. Started by small groups of antiquarians and novelists, it is today practised in a myriad of ways by millions of Australians. Local, community and family historians spend huge amounts of time and resources investigating the past. The Stolen and Forgotten Generations seek connection and healing through history. The digital revolution has democratised history making and its production and consumption. In the academy, land settlement, politics and great men have been supplanted by Indigenous histories, immigration stories, gender and memory perspectives, cultural, environmental and public history. Through 22 readable chapters by leading practitioners, this book explores the complex, multi-roomed house of Australian history.

This article considers a shift in public memorialization towards the remembrance of experience, rather than death. Drawing on research into Australian public memorials to lived experiences of loss and trauma from 1985 to 2015, I compare the trends identified in that research with similar memorial projects internationally. I have found that the emergence of memorials to lived experience is an expression, and an expansion, of the kinds of knowledge that can be remembered publicly, and is influenced by discourses of trauma, human rights and transitional justice.

Executive Summary

Oral histories provide insights into how welfare policy has impacted people over the last 100 years.
Working-class traditions of social solidarity and mutual aid are recurring strategies by which people respond to hard times.
A place-based sense of connection continues to provide an important starting point for practices of solidarity and effective care.
Policymakers must listen to the life experiences of those who are living with, or have lived with, poverty and their wider support networks.
DWP policy and state welfare provision must be ‘proofed’ to support citizens who experience life shocks and sudden changes in circumstances.

This article considers the commemoration of the institutional abuse of children within Australia. National inquiries have drawn public attention to experiences of childhood loss and trauma associated with institutional abuse, and memorials are increasingly seen as a way such experiences can be acknowledged and that survivors can be provided with a space for 'healing' of some kind. Drawing on extensive research into the memorials to lived experiences created in Australia since 1985-2015, this paper will outline the different processes and power structures that have led to the creation of memorials to survivors of childhood abuse. This includes the entanglements of national inquiries and their recommendations; the move towards public memorialisation of experience; and the complexities of decision-making about location and place. I compare examples of memorialisation at sites of former orphanages and care homes with others created in public spaces and with direct government input. I argue that in the creation of memorials that acknowledge childhood trauma, good intentions must be matched by good processes that centre the needs of survivors.