For their new book, just published, editors Anna Green and Megan Hutching asked contributors to present substantial extracts from interviews to show how oral histories can contribute to historical understanding. They were interested in the way oral history can fill in information that’s difficult to reach in other ways, challenge or reframe the ways we think about the past and connect past and present. The published collection includes chapters on adoption, intergenerational memory, sex work and consent, children in care, rural life, class, Treaty of Waitangi claims, the Dawn Raids, war service, biography and domestic life. 

My long time colleague Helen Frizzell and I wrote about Phyllis Aspinall who Helen interviewed for a project about domestic life in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s, Mrs Schumacher’s Gems. The extract from Phyllis’s interview is about her kitchen, the working environment from which she catered for 100’s of farm workers at Mt. Aspiring Station, deep in the southern Alps. We looked at how Phyllis talked about her workplace and work, her feelings about her situation and the value others placed on what she did. Spending a lot of time with an interview like this was very satisfying. I’m grateful for the chance to do it. 

The book will be launched at the National Oral History Association of New Zealand conference in Auckland in November.

Reviews by Paul Diamond on RNZ, Elizabeth Bowyer in the New Zealand Journal of Public Histor and NZ Booklovers.