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AFRICA

KENYA Students record pandemic oral testimonies Peter Wasamba, a professor of literature and a former dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Nairobi, reports on an oral testimony assignment undertaken by postgraduate oral literature students during the first national partial lockdown to reduce the transmission of Covid-19.

‘The Covid-19 pandemic has caused massive disruption leading to unprecedented loss of lives and livelihoods. At the time of writing this article, there is a second wave

that looks more vicious and unforgiving than the first one. Africa, initially spared the plague’s lethal sting, is suffering casualties at worrying rates in the second wave.

‘As we bank on science and resilience to overcome the pestilence, fieldworkers have devised innovative research methodologies to collect data while adhering, as much as possible, to World Health Organization (WHO) Covid-19 containment protocols. At the University of Nairobi fieldwork is mandatory for postgraduate oral literature students in their final year. Students are expected to visit

specific communities as a class, conduct interviews, participate in performances and then stay with adoptive families for several days learning by observing. Initially, we had planned to document the healing poetry of the Digo community along the Kenyan coastline, but obviously, this could not go on due to WHO directives and the partial lockdown by the government. Instead we decided students could record oral testimonies within their own communities, to document

INTERNATIONAL WORK

Student researcher Justin Kavita recording an interview with Mueni Mutuku in Machokos County. Photo: Justin Kavita.

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Kenyans’ perceptions of pandemics during the last fifty years.

‘Students selected their narrators based on location (proximity to their own residence), age and gender. The interviews focussed on what narrators remembered of pandemics in the past, how these were managed, what worked and what did not work. Regarding the Covid-19 pandemic, the interviewers captured the narrators’ recollections of how it started, the plans they had at the beginning of the year, what had changed, how they coped, measures that had worked for them and what could be done better. The students funded the entire fieldwork and the university provided IT infrastructure in the form of Google Classroom. Siobhan Warrington of Newcastle University’s Oral History Unit supported the assignment, working with us to develop guidelines for the student researchers, and then joining an online seminar at the end of the assignment to discuss the students’ interviewing experience and lessons learned.

‘On a sad note, Marian Ismail, eighty years old, a narrator who gave her testimony to Mbaabu, a student researcher, on her experiences with pandemics, including Covid-19, in Mombasa, succumbed to the virus on 9 November 2020, two months after the interview.

‘The approach was not without challenges. These included students’ difficulties accessing narrators given local hierarchies and politics, technological challenges, curfew limitations, fear of infection and some narrators not taking the interview seriously due to their existing relationship with the student interviewers.

‘In total, our fifteen student researchers documented forty-two testimonies over a period of four weeks. Each researcher interviewed three narrators. It was the first such research at the University of Nairobi in which Google Classroom was used extensively to support data

collection, organisation and archiving of oral testimony. A quick review of the video clips reveals diverse perspectives of narrators based on age, gender, education, religion and exposure. Each student has produced an analytical report concerning the interviews they each recorded and we are currently looking for a grant to support the analysis of the overall collection of testimonies.

‘What remains memorable, based on our experience, is that oral testimony will remain a methodology of choice by cultural scholars who are keen to give voice to those on the fringes of society, in the midst of a challenging public health environment.’ l Further information: email pwasamba@uonbi.ac.ke

MOROCCO AWAL – ‘The Word’ Filmmaker Nadir Boumouch and cultural programmer Soumeya Ait Ahmed introduce a project they designed to preserve and celebrate the unwritten history of Morocco’s indigenous oral traditions.

‘The French colonial administration divided Morocco into “useful” and “useless”, the latter being used to refer to the most marginalised rural, mountainous and desert regions. The Ait Atta are a confederation of Amazigh tribes from the south-east of Morocco, one of the so-called “useless” regions. There is an Ait Atta proverb, tar izli urtamou, which translates as “an event without a poem is an event which never happened”. If the poem disappears, so will the event, memory and history which inspired it. AWAL (meaning “the word” in Tamazight language) is an artistic, cultural and social initiative designed to deal precisely with this question. It is an attempt to rescue and valorise both the unwritten histories of what the colonial administration had called “useless Morocco” and the indigenous oral art forms by which many of these popular histories were and continue to be “written”.

‘AWAL thus subscribes to the observations of Ahmed Bouanani, who in 1966 wrote, “Classical historians and biographers discredit everything that is not written in classical literary Arabic. They relegate those vulgar and illiterate poets into oblivion. Yet, it is they who have expressed the deepest feelings of the life of our people.”

‘It is no coincidence that our project is inspired not by a historian but rather a filmmaker and novelist. Indeed, AWAL can be differentiated from other oral history programmes in the sense that it does not aim to collect historic accounts uniquely for the purposes of academic research.

One of several programmes at LE18, a multidisciplinary art space in Marrakesh, AWAL goes beyond archiving by encouraging further oral transmission, organising oral art performances for indigenous artists, commissioning and exhibiting artistic adaptations of oral art through contemporary artistic mediums (i.e. cinema, graphic design) and attempting to foster public discussion on the subject.

‘AWAL thus combines artistic and academic approaches,

Illustration depicting a scene from ‘The Cadi and the Blacksmith’, an oral tale told by a Hakawati in Marrakesh and rendered by Moroccan artist Ayoub Abid.

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bringing artists and researchers together to treat the same subject in different ways. In its artistic approach, AWAL recognises the indigenous oral arts as potent bases for new artistic forms, aesthetics and narratives which aim to decolonise a North African art still affected by European tendencies.

‘Our current project, a book called Dakira 20 (Memory 20) is the result of an open call for submissions asking young Moroccans, locked in during the Covid-19 pandemic, to record their parents or grandparents telling oral stories. We then invited academics, filmmakers, graphic designers and visual artists to study and artistically experiment with the submitted stories. Thus adopting art-research as a method, the book includes articles, illustrations and graphic representations of oral stories which explore how these can be used to create visual narratives and aesthetics which speak to our specific cultural and historic contexts.

‘In its scientific and ideological approach, AWAL assumes that these oral arts are not only carriers

of historic narratives “from below” but also of local knowledge, whether agricultural, cultural, environmental or political (that is, the division of resources, tribe/village democratic procedures, etc). This makes the oral arts a rich ground of study for pretty much any academic discipline. Students of agro-forestry, for example, may find Izlan poetry to be an important resource for understanding why indigenous forest management techniques were far more successful than the ones introduced by the colonial administration and maintained by the state until this day.

‘To this end, AWAL’s primary objective is to construct the first accessible public oral art and history archive in Morocco. It does this by empowering students from disenfranchised rural regions in the south-east and Atlas regions by offering them training, funding and equipment to develop and conduct an audio-visual archive and research project based on the oral arts. The North Africa region currently lacks both the ecosystem of institutions, researchers and

artists but also the infrastructure to develop an audio-visual archive which truly represents the vast diversity of peoples, cultures and histories which make up our region. We hope that our initiative can be a seed for the establishment of oral history archives in both academic and cultural institutions across North Africa.’ l For more information: website https://le18marrakech.com/awal/, Instagram instagram.com/awal. andam

ASIA

CHINA Oral histories of frontline medical workers in Wuhan The China Memory Centre (CMC), established in 2012 at the National Library of China, uses oral history and video recording to keep a full record of China’s important contemporary events and permanently preserves the memories in the library. Tian Miao, deputy director of CMC, and Zhang Bikan, librarian at the National Library of China, introduce its latest oral history campaign.

An oral poetry and musical performance by Asnimer, a women’s traditional oral art troupe from Ait Bougmez (High Atlas region), organised by AWAL at LE18 in Marrakesh. Photo: AWAL.

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‘Covid-19 continues to rage rampantly, adversely affecting billions of people. In China, almost every citizen is involved in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. At CMC we launched China’s memory bank of fighting the Covid-19 pandemic to record this collective memory. The project invites citizens to donate excerpts of their stories, diaries, texts, photos and artefacts to present their life and psychological changes during the pandemic, and to ensure their personal experiences of an exceptional time will not be forgotten. These archives will be a treasure for generations to come to be able to reflect on what we lost and what we achieved during our fight against the pandemic.

‘We have also, as of November 2020, conducted twenty-four oral history interviews (fifty-three hours of recordings in total) with those who have witnessed the pandemic: the medical staff at the forefront of the prevention and control of Covid-19. We interviewed doctors and nurses from the TCM (traditional Chinese medicine) national medical team and Beijing’s Dongzhimen hospital who travelled to Wuhan on 27 January 2020 to provide medical assistance.

‘We designed different interview schedules according to

the interviewee’s work and duties, position and post, family background and personality. For example, talking to a doctor from the infectious diseases department, we prepared questions including those related to infection control, ward layout and protective equipment (the type of masks and suits used); talking to a doctor from the medical imaging department, we needed questions concerning the pulmonary changes in the patient’s computed tomography imaging; and talking to a nurse, we concentrated on their intensive care to the patients and their daily operations in the ward.

‘As interviewers we strove to handle the interviews with reasonable rationality. However, for some of the medical staff we interviewed, the memories brought them to tears in front of the camera. They reveal a vast display of emotions: the fear of death, the stress of an exceptionally hectic working life, the physical fatigue, the loneliness and helplessness. All in all, however, optimism triumphs over these negative emotions. As a result of their persistent efforts, during the fifty-nine days the medical staff were in Wuhan over eighty patients they were caring for were safely discharged.’ l Further information: website http://www.nlc.cn/

INDIA Oral histories of the Narmada struggle Nandini Oza, researcher, writer, chronicler and archivist, is also president of the Oral History Association of India (2020) and secretary of the Zindabad Trust, an organisation that provides financial support to environmental and human rights work across India. Formally an activist with Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) – the people’s movement spearheading the struggle against the Sardar Sarovar (SSP), a large dam-based irrigation project in the Narmada valley in western India – she introduces her initiative to record the oral histories of the people who have been at the forefront of this struggle.

‘The people’s struggle challenging the SSP is considered an important mass resistance movement in the history of independent India. Although this struggle has made significant contributions to the development discourse, the voices of the people who form the backbone of this struggle are mostly absent from the pages of history. This absence of the voices of the people who are victims of development is also because, unlike other forms of displacement, development-induced displacement is considered essential for the national interest and economic growth. Lately, however, there has been a growing interest in understanding the impact “development” has had on people and the environment as well as in the study of people’s resistance around development projects.

‘I recorded the oral histories of over eighty senior members of the movement, totalling 400 hours of digital recordings in seven different languages and dialects. These include voices of tribal and farmer leaders and activists of the struggle. Currently I am engaged in bringing these oral histories into the public domain. The Oral History Narmada website, launched in 2019, includes interview excerpts and oral history

CMC interviewer Xie Zhongjun interviewing Dr Ye Yongan at the National Library of China. Photo: CMA.

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recordings on different issues related to the struggle, including its early history, the strategies of the movement and the impact of the project on the environment and the cultural, social, religious and economic life of the people. The website continues to be upgraded with excerpts from these oral histories in a phased manner. Another output of the oral histories is a book in the Marathi language titled Lada

Narmadecha (Struggle for Narmada), based on the oral histories of two senior tribal leaders of the NBA, Keshav Vasave and Kevalsingh Vasave. This book is likely to be available in English by the end of 2021.’ l Further information: email nandinikoza@gmail.com, website https://oralhistorynarmada.in/; to find out more about the Oral History Association of India, see https://ohai.info/

EUROPE

IRELAND Recording the Irish experience of Covid-19 in Ireland and abroad The Irish Covid-19 Oral History Project at Dublin City University (DCU) is a joint project led by Dr Caitriona Ni Cassaithe from the DCU Institute of Education and Dr Pierangelo Rosati and Professor Theo Lynn from DCU Business School. Dr Pierangelo Rosati introduces the project:

‘The Irish oral tradition is one of the oldest in the world, tracing back to the Celts over 2,000 years ago. Similarly, there is a long history of recording the impact of epidemics and disease, from the sixth century, to the bubonic plague in the fourteenth century, and the Spanish Flu in the last century. The project was launched in June 2020 to record the experiences of both those living in Ireland and the Irish diaspora around the world during the current pandemic. The findings are intended to be used by historians, researchers and policy-makers in years to come to inform responses to future pandemics. Caitriona Ni Cassaithe states, “The Irish Covid-19 Oral History Project reflects the times we are in. While social distancing presents its own challenges, the massive adoption and use of digital technologies, including smartphones and even Zoom, presents us with new opportunities to record oral histories in a format that can be easily stored, analysed and shared in the future.”

‘The project is seeking to crowdsource as many oral histories as possible, providing the general public with a simple interview guide and instructions for recording themselves on their smartphone or PC and submitting on line via the project website. Alternatively, people can request an interview or submit text-based histories. Although we have received hundreds of submissions, we were probably over-optimistic about the number of people who

Nandini Oza recording an oral history interview in a tribal village in Gujarat, India. Photo: Shripad Dharmadhikary.

A senior tribal leader of NBA, Chamaben Tadvi, sitting for her oral history recording. Photo: Nandini Oza.

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would self-submit their oral histories. However, some of those who have self-recorded their accounts have told us that they found it easier to speak to a phone rather than be interviewed; some stating that they found it therapeutic. Our experience demonstrates the value in offering alternative means of sharing one’s account of Covid-19.

‘The combination of digital submission and storage with crowdsourcing introduces its own challenges, not least compliance with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). There are particular privacy issues when people share their Covid-19 experience. Recordings often involve insights into their health, and indeed potentially mentions others. This poses data privacy challenges and one of our early decisions was to bring a data privacy and protection specialist on to our team. We believe our experience with GDPR and oral histories will be one of our contributions to the oral history community.

‘Ireland has recently gone into a second Covid-19 lockdown and the project is about to launch in the Middle East, home to many Irish workers. Theo Lynn remarks, “This is not just a unique moment in Irish history, but a series of moments. It is transforming society and how we interact with each other. Covid-19 has impacted Irish people wherever they are in the world, and we need to make sure we are following them. The launch in UAE and Saudi Arabia is just the start. From our perspective, we are still at a very early stage in the project and have possibly another two years of data collection. At some point, all of these oral histories must be transcribed, anonymised (if appropriate), analysed, published and ultimately archived. This is not a small commitment!”’ l Further information: email covid19oralhistory@dcu.ie, website https://covid19oral history.ie, Twitter @IrishC19History

LATIN AMERICA

BRAZIL Documenting the Covid-19 experience in Rio Grande do Sul Rodrigo de Azevedo Weimer, historian at the Public Archive of the State of Rio Grande do Sul (APERS) and history professor at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), together with Carla Simone Rodeghero, history professor at UFRGS, and Clarissa Sommer Alves, historian at APERS, introduce a multi-institution initiative to document the experience of Covid-19.

‘The project “Documentando a experiência da Covid-19 no Rio Grande do Sul” aims to document, for the future, the subjective experience of citizens in the southernmost state of Brazil in the face of the current pandemic. The work started from the understanding that the available records on the Spanish Flu pandemic in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century are few. In the current context, the proliferation of digital records does not guarantee that they will be

preserved for future studies. Hence the need for an organised effort to produce, catalogue and disseminate documents on the experience of the pandemic and policies of social isolation, in dialogue with similar initiatives developed in other countries, especially in North America and Europe.

‘The project is coordinated by professionals from the Public Archive of the State of Rio Grande do Sul (APERS) and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), but also brings together researchers from twelve other teaching and research institutions in the state. The project is organised in two parts: the first is the application of a survey form that records socio-economic data, together with a questionnaire encouraging respondents to document their emotional wellbeing. The application of this part of the project is broad and voluntary and the practice of self-documentation among participants is encouraged, through the writing

Vila Formosa graveyard in São Paulo, April 2020. Photo: Amanda Perobelli/ Reuters.

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of diaries, production of videos, photographic records etcetera.

‘The second part is based on oral history interviews. The interviews are conducted remotely and through digital platforms. A general script of questions is used by teams from the fourteen institutions, but each one of them is committed to producing oral testimonies from specific social segments. The Public Archive’s team, for example, is in charge of interviewing state public managers, and the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul is interviewing low-income students. Health professionals, sportspeople, religious leaders, industrial workers, business men and women, teachers, social movement activists are some of the target groups that will be interviewed by the teams involved from other institutions. This broad panorama will allow us to understand the impacts of the pandemic in Rio Grande do Sul in a multifaceted way, focussing on the subjective perception of people who belong to different social segments.

‘The interviews are being carried out by professors, students and other university and archive staff (all MA or PhD graduates), which enables the exchange of knowledge and the training of a new generation of researchers. It has been challenging to carry out all stages of the project remotely and digitally and to define technical and ethical parameters for the archiving and dissemination of the interviews. Considering the Brazilian political context, the

project aims to contribute to combatting the negationist interpretations that have been widely disseminated despite the fact that, by November 2020, over 160,000 people have died as a result of Covid-19 in Brazil.’ l For more information: email documentandoacovidrs@ gmail.com, website www.apers.rs. gov.br/documentando-covid19-rs

My Pandemic Diary Lucas Lara, historian and museology director at the Museum of the Person, introduces the museum’s ‘My Pandemic Diary’ campaign to record everyday memories of the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘The Museum of the Person (Museu da Pessoa), a virtual and collaborative museum, has, since its origin in 1991, been concerned with the appreciation of the history of every individual. Through the registration, preservation and dissemination of personal narratives, it seeks to demonstrate that each person is unique. Over the twenty-nine years of its existence, the Museum of the Person has built a collection with more than 18,000 life stories and about 60,000 digitised photos and documents.

‘In the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, actions that show that all lives matter have become even more necessary. Concerned with serving society in the midst of this critical moment, but also thinking about how we can look at it in a few years’ time, the museum launched “My Pandemic Diary”, a campaign for recording everyday memories for the construction of a collaborative history for the future.

‘To carry out the project, the museum ran a communication campaign on its social networks, encouraging the public to participate. In addition, to ensure the documentation of a diversity of realities and perspectives, the museum invited partner institutions to join and conducted a survey of community groups that might be interested. To receive the recollections, the online questionnaire tool VideoAsk was adopted, which allowed the public to send their stories in using text, audio or video.

Institutions involved in the project.

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‘A few months after the project launched, the Museum of the Person launched “My Pandemic Diary Journey”, as a way to further encourage participation. For seven days, users received specific themes for the stories they were invited to share: How do you see yourself ten years from now? How has your routine been? Which people are important to you at the moment and why? What are your biggest fears? These and other questions led the public to reflect on their lives in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic.

‘Between June and October 2020, the museum received 582 stories, an average of four per day. Although most of the stories came from large urban centres (such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro), the campaign had records coming from all parts of Brazil and all age groups, from thirteen year-old children to men and women aged over eighty. Due to a partnership already signed with PIQL, a Norwegian data preservation company, the collected stories will be deposited in the Arctic World Archive (AWA) in Svalbard, North Pole.

‘Now, in a partnership with the Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts, and with the support of the Consulate-General

of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, the initiative will also reach audiences in the Netherlands. A virtual exhibition will be created, comparing the lived experience of the Covid-19 pandemic in the two countries.

‘With this project, the Museum of the Person affirms its belief that it is possible to build a collaborative history of the future that takes into account not only official documents, studies and journalistic articles, but also the memories of people who experienced these moments.’ l For more information: email lucas.lara@museudapessoa.org, website museudapessoa.org

NORTH AMERICA

USA Observing change in Alaska’s national parks Leslie McCartney, associate professor and curator of oral history, University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), introduces the latest oral history collection of the Project Jukebox initiative.

‘Circumpolar communities are seeing changes in their environments at an unprecedented pace. The United States National Parks Service (NPS) recognises this and in 2016 called for projects looking at environmental changes in two Alaska coastal national parks. NPS granted funding to the Oral History Program at UAF. Ten oral history interviews with thirteen people began in Skagway in 2018. UAF researcher Karen Brewster interviewed long-time residents of Skagway, Alaska about their observations of environmental change in and around the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic Park (KGRNHP). Located in the south-eastern Alaska rainforest, the KGRNHP commemorates the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s. Established in 1976, the park is 12,996 acres and includes the towns of Skagway and Dyea.

‘Eleven interviews with eleven people were conducted by Leslie McCartney and Katie Cullen in

2019 and 2020 with long-time residents, subsistence hunters/fishers, scientists and NPS employees in Anchorage, Nome and Fairbanks about the changes they had observed in and around the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve (BELA). Located on the northern side of the Seward Peninsula, this park is a remnant of Beringia. Established in 1978, the park is 2,697,391 acres of tundra underlain by permafrost.

‘The interviews reveal a myriad of observed environmental changes: vegetation succession; differences in plant and animal species; retreating glaciers; vertical advance of tree lines; changes to coastal lagoons and formation of sea ice; shoreline erosion; thawing permafrost; and shifts in phenology. Highlighted are the impact of such changes on the flora, fauna and humans, and the adaptations all are making to these changes. In KGRNHP, interviewees noted how the winters were once colder and snowier. Glaciers are significantly smaller due to melting and new species of birds are now seen as well as new caterpillars, aphids and worms. In BELA, again warmer air temperatures and significantly warmer Bering Sea surface temperatures make freeze up come later and break up occur earlier. The sea ice is thinner and not forming as close to shore, causing shore erosion and perilous conditions for subsistence hunters/fishers. The permafrost is thawing, causing lake drainages which turn lakes once used by migratory birds into grasslands. Beavers are now present and creating their own lakes and inhibiting the salmon from coming upstream as they have done for millennia.

‘This collection of oral history interviews, as a whole, speaks to the effects on the human connection to the resources found in the parks. Through the online ‘Observing Change in Alaska’s National Parks Project Jukebox’ audiences can gain an

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understanding of these changing environments.

‘This project is a snapshot in time of environmental changes observed in and around two national parks in Alaska. With further funding support, it would be interesting to revisit the areas every few years to see what other changes have transpired and to compare results to create a longitudinal study.’ l For more information: email lmccartney@alaska.edu, website http://jukebox.uaf.edu/site7/ akparkchange

UCLA in LA: the coronavirus years The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Library’s Center for Oral History Research (COHR) has been documenting the history of the Los Angeles region for over sixty years, with collection areas in arts, politics, ethnic communities and social movements, to name a few. Jane Collings, interviewer and principal editor, had been interviewing craft workers in the film and television industry at the time the Covid-19 pandemic emerged. She describes what happened next for COHR.

‘With the resulting immediate shut-down of film and television production, the focus of interviewing quickly shifted to the topic of the pandemic itself, collecting a wide range of responses. Some narrators reported stockpiling supplies at home in order to manage self-sufficiently, while other reactions included: becoming more attune to

the inter-connectedness of society, expressing great anger at a perceived government mishandling of the situation, and cutting off contact with friends and family who rejected the science of the pandemic. All of these narrators were sheltering at home, with many speaking of the eerie invisibility of the event, the sense of living in an historical moment of

Map of Alaska showing the two national parks where oral histories were recorded.

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crisis that is simultaneously strangely monotonous, with the timelines of one’s life hanging on one word, “vaccine”.

‘Subsequently, COHR has recently initiated and launched a project called “UCLA in LA: the coronavirus years”, putting out a call to students, staff, faculty, alumni and other UCLA community members. The project aims to record the pandemic experience of a global city as seen through the eyes of a university community that is highly diverse from the standpoints of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and age. Those who have responded to the call include students who, for example, wish to speak about changing educational norms at the college level in the wake of online learning, or about the struggle to stay engaged while working from a crowded home environment as a first-generation student. Some are experiencing loneliness and disconnection, while international students face closed borders, separation from their families, separation from loved ones who have died beyond closed borders, and cancellation of student visas. Staff and alumni wish to speak about their work in healthcare, their work in the city’s pandemic response, their work in retail or what it means to be a parent in a pandemic and how close relationships are affected. A number of alumni will speak about their work as teachers, with children who are digital haves and have-nots.

‘More generally, narrators have expressed a desire to bring their experience into the realm of historical memory, stating that they would like those in the future to know their story. They find that their experience of the pandemic has changed them forever and they want to talk about that. They find that the future is different now, and they want to talk about that. They wish also to contribute their story specifically to the UCLA Library, and in so doing participate in an act of community building and solidarity.

‘We expect that there will be two interviewers working on this initiative over the next two years, who will record oral history interviews with at least seventy individuals during this period. The recordings and accompanying material will appear on the oral history programs collection website.’ l For more information: email jcolling@library.ucla.edu, website http://oralhistory.library.ucla.edu/

OCEANIA

AUSTRALIA Collecting the Curve Rebecca Carland, senior curator, History of Collections, at Museums Victoria, introduces the ‘Collecting the Curve’ project documenting the pandemic from the strictest lockdown in Oceania.

‘Greetings from day six of zero cases in Melbourne. It’s now 5 November 2020 and the last time we had zero cases was in March. It’s been quite a time for everyone who lives here. Melbourne went into lockdown in late March, and as Museums Victoria closed its campuses, we, along with the entire country, transitioned to working from home. Soon after, we started shaping “Collecting the Curve”, a multidisciplinary contemporary collecting project documenting the experience of the pandemic for the people of the state of Victoria.

‘How does one collect a pandemic? We started with a solid collection development plan with five well-defined themes: flattening the curve (medical research and public health responses), living the curve (communities surviving the stay-at-home orders), adapting the curve (economic, digital and social pivots and impacts), remembering the curves (previous epidemics in Victoria), documenting the curve (capturing our work collecting during this extraordinary time).

‘The project has benefited from diverse expertise, with more than twenty specialist curators, collection managers, conservators, community engagement specialists

and photographers from across Museums Victoria. Senior curator of human biology and medicine Johanna Simkin tapped into her existing networks to document and collect the first images of the virus isolated outside China, a development here in Melbourne

Isol-Aid poster, edition 1, 21-22 March 2020. Design: Sebastian White.

Alana, Joel and Wolfie in quarantine at the Novotel, Melbourne, 13 May 2020. Photo: Ben Healley.

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that expedited research around the world. Engineering curator Matilda Vaughan began documenting the work underway to reverse engineer the only remaining mask-making machine left in Australia. Supported by the Australian Defence Force, the first new machine was in operation within sixty days, ensuring the capacity and safety of frontline workers.

‘Immersed in the experience of the pandemic ourselves means we have been well placed to capture the zeitgeist. Collection manager and local musician Marita Dyson, herself caught up in the devastating impact pandemic restrictions have had on live music, has documented Isol-Aid, a weekly Instagram music festival. Now in its thirty-third week, the festival has brought together the Melbourne music community, maintaining a sense of belonging and raising much needed financial support for musicians and music workers. Community engagement expert Lisa Hilli is interviewing residents, relatives and allies of the public housing towers, locked down without warning under heavy police presence, and documenting their lived experience.

‘The museum photography team, issued with essential worker status, was able to travel across the state to document the first wave of panic buying, followed by empty airports, shopping centres and

business districts. It also responded to curatorial requests to document families in isolation and children adapting to home schooling, providing a rich visual archive of the lived experience of the pandemic that will enhance material culture and oral histories for future exhibitions and acts as a resource for future generations.

‘While the national rhetoric around flattening the curve has focussed on “the numbers”, it has been policy that has most impacted the people of Victoria. In the early days of the national lockdown I documented a young family as they returned from New Zealand, entered mandatory hotel quarantine and collected their detention paperwork. My documentation included the poignant drawings their son made to communicate with other guests during their fourteen-day detention and a Zoom oral history, a first for our state collection. I was also granted permission, along with a photographer, to document the field-hospital-like set-up and interview medical staff.

‘This documentation became more significant months later, as a breach of hotel quarantine evolved into one of the strictest lockdowns in the world, and Victoria became a pariah state. As cases soared, “hotspot” suburbs were “ring-fenced”, a policy that cut invisible lines through streets and communities. The building tension

and unease were captured in the acquisition of an anonymous creative response, “Checkpoint Barkly”, posted in Barkly Street, Footscray. Within weeks Melbourne was under curfew, masks were mandatory and the Australian Defence Force was patrolling state border checkpoints, making the sign eerily prescient.

‘The extraordinary nature of a project such as this is the combination of the exhaustion and energy that comes from feeling the pulse of the moment and truly understanding the emotion of the lived experience. It’s not over (we could go into lockdown again), but whatever happens the collection will continue to evolve and adapt, just as the people of Victoria have.’ l For more information: https:// museumsvictoria.com.au/collections-research/collecting-the-curve/

Covid Kids Oral History Project Way Back When Consulting Historians is a team of professional historians (Lucy Bracey, Fiona Poulton, Sarah Rood and Katherine Sheedy) in Melbourne, Australia. While in the midst of some of the toughest Covid-19 lockdown restrictions in the world, they decided to turn their attention to a problem they have frequently experienced: the relative silence of young people in archival collections. Acutely aware of the impact of the pandemic on children, they decided to act quickly to collect stories and ensure that children’s voices and perspectives would be preserved for the future. The team reports on this initiative.

‘Lockdown in the state of Victoria, and particularly in Melbourne, has been relatively unique within Australia. At the height of the second wave of coronavirus cases, stage-four restrictions included a five-kilometre travel limit, no more than one hour of exercise outside the home per day, bans on gatherings of any kind, and only four permitted reasons to leave home.

Protest art, anonymous artist, Footscray, June 2020. Photo: Lorenzo Iozzi.

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The closure of playgrounds and schools particularly impacted children.

‘We knew we had to capture stories quickly. Restrictions were due to ease and we wanted to speak to children and record their experiences and musings before lockdown ended and their memories of that time began to fade. The temporality of the situation was one of our biggest concerns. We knew that life would change very quickly once restrictions eased. This presented both a challenge and an opportunity.

‘As a small four-person team, we were able to respond rapidly. However, while we were motivated to act quickly, we didn’t want this to be at the expense of a thorough approach that took ethical considerations into account. We set about creating a strong methodology and process, preparing a risk management strategy, information statements for children and parents, and consent forms tailored to different ages. When we began interviewing, we were careful to gain clear consent both verbally and in writing from participants and their parents.

‘Using our personal networks as a starting point, we were able to find participants relatively easily in Melbourne and regional Victoria. Because of the restrictions in place, all interviews were conducted

remotely. While not necessarily ideal for capturing oral histories, we decided to use Zoom as a platform to both interview and record.

‘So far, we have carried out fifty interviews with children and young people from four to nineteen years of age, ranging from kindergarten to first-year university students. The interviews cover topics including understanding of Covid-19, the reasons for restrictions, engagement with media and information, and changes to home life, schooling and relationships.

‘The impact of the pandemic on the lives of the children we interviewed is evident. All of our interviewees have been learning from home for nearly half of their school year. Some are children of essential workers, several have parents who have lost jobs and most have at least one parent who has been working from home for much of the year. Many are separated from interstate or overseas family and all were feeling the effect of being apart from friends.

‘A permanent home for the interviews has not yet been found. We decided that it was essential to gather the stories while we could, and later find a collection in which to permanently house the oral histories, with the consent of interviewees.

‘The collection is still a work in

progress, and the project has raised many questions for us as oral historians. We are keen to explore these through further research, interviewing and analysis. We would also like to expand the diversity of interviewees to encompass broader cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. But most importantly, we know that these interviews will be invaluable to future researchers trying to understand what we have experienced in Victoria in 2020, and hoping to access the unique voices, experiences and memories of children.’ l Further information: email info@waybackwhen.com.au, website www.waybackwhen.com.au

Cowra Voices Cowra Voices is a geo-locative storytelling app that tells a unique story of peace and reconciliation. The app recently won Oral History New South Wales’s Community History Award, received an honourable mention in the History Council’s Applied History Awards and was shortlisted for the National Trust Heritage Awards. Mayu Kanamori, facilitating artist for Cowra Voices, introduces the project.

‘A rural town of about 10,000 people in the central west region of New South Wales, Australia, Cowra is the site of the famous Cowra Breakout: the only armed confrontation with an enemy on Australian soil during the Second World War. Around 1,000 Japanese prisoners of war (POW) held at the Cowra POW camp staged a mass escape in August 1944, resulting in the deaths of four Australian guards and 234 Japanese prisoners.

‘Despite this violent history, the people of Cowra have forged a close friendship with the people of Japan. The most dynamic aspects of this friendship are ongoing opportunities for people-to-people engagement, including artistic, cultural and educational exchanges. Cowra is also home to the Japanese Gardens, Australia’s first Peace Bell, the only Japanese

Screenshots of several oral history interviews for the Covid Kids Oral History Project taking place via Zoom.

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war cemetery outside Japan and other places of symbolic and historical significance, making Cowra one of the few peace tourism destinations in Australia. Annual celebrations such as the Cherry Blossom Festival provide an impetus for members of the Japanese-Australian community to visit.

‘Despite the breadth and depth of the Japan–Cowra nexus, the stories of the people central to this grassroots peace-building remain virtually unknown. Cowra Voices was created to address this gap by presenting local people and their personal stories in relation to Cowra’s peace and reconciliation efforts. But this app is more than an oral history document. Cowra Voices intends to challenge the dominant narratives of war and ANZAC heroism by exploring the idea of shared sacrifice in conflict. There is a recognition in Cowra that the Japanese also sacrificed and suffered in war.

‘The location or the site of this shared pain is the Japanese and Australian war cemeteries. These sit side by side on the outskirts of Cowra, divided only by a low wall, suggesting a distinct but shared space. The geo-locative functions of Cowra Voices are intended to encourage users to discover for themselves these links between people, place and history. The ultimate aim is that each visitation with this app can also become an act of peace and reconciliation.

‘Other aims of this project were to inspire new transcultural collaborations. University students from Hokkaido visited Cowra to learn about local history. They contributed design concepts that were incorporated into the final app design. This was a way for a new generation of Japanese people to take part in the ongoing Cowra peace story. The app also includes voices and stories of the Wiradjuri people, the traditional custodians of the land.

Their perspectives add another dimension to the reconciliation story.

‘Cowra Voices was partly funded by the Australian government through the Australia–Japan Foundation Grant (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), Cowra Council, the Bruce and Margaret Weir Trust, the Nancy Shelley Bequest Fund, the Cowra Breakout Association and the Japan Foundation, Sydney. Cowra Voices is a community project, and the feeling of ownership within Cowra is strong. Some residents have been raising funds privately to expand the app since its launch in August 2019.’ l For more information: email mayu@mayu.com.au, website www.cowravoices.org/

Left: Japanese design students from Tokai University at the entrance of the Cowra Japanese War Cemetery with Cowra historian and tour guide Laurance Ryan, 2018. Right: Cowra Peace Precinct during cherry blossom season, 2019. Photos: Mayu Kanamori, 2019.

Cowra High School student Anna McLean with Seikei Gakuen exchange student Aoi Nito, at Cowra High School, 2009. Cowra High School and Seikei Gakuen started their student exchange programme in 1970, and 2020 marked its fiftieth anniversary. Photo: Mayu Kanamori.

International Work is edited by Siobhan Warrington who welcomes all contributions by email to siobhan.warrington@ newcastle.ac.uk