I’ve listened twice to Alessandro Portelli’s keynote address to the 2024 Oral History Association of Australia biennial conference. I’m sure I’ll listen again. It speaks to many important aspects of oral history as a practice and discipline. If you’re at all interested in why oral history is important I urge you to listen yourself. He describes an interview he recorded with a holocaust survivor. One of his students had said, you should interview my uncle. It was a ’tell me about yourself’ interview rather than a ‘tell me what happened interview’: story rather than testimony as Portelli categorises it. And in the course of the interview Portelli learned how the man survived the holocaust. It is a deeply human story that the interviewee didn’t disclose during an earlier interview for the Shoah Foundation oral history project which followed a more structured format. During his analysis Portelli speaks about silence. It reminded me again (I often think of it) of a fabulous keynote our own superstar oral historian Judith Fyfe gave on silence at a NOHANZ conference in  Wellington. Silence in audio speaks volumes. Silence in text begs questions. Here’s the link