NOHANZ news N O H A N Z October 2001 is the 15th anniversary of the establishment of NOHANZ. We are going to have Newsletter a small celebration on 13 November at the National Library in Wellington to mark the occasion. Claudia Orange, Judith Fyfe and Jock Phillips who were involved in the early days will take part in a Volume 15, number 3 panel discussion, along with Taina McGregor, the newly-appointed Maori oral historian at the Oral SEPTEMBER 2001 History Centre. If you are going to be in Wellington, we do hope that you will attend and help us celebrate. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE We are also in the process of setting up our web site and hope to be able to launch it at the 13 November President: function. Once it’s working, we will publicise the address. Linda Evans Oral history in New Zealand Committee: Dunedin From the Community History Programme The next Introductory Oral History Workshop is Marie Burgess scheduled for February 2002. The two-day Joce Chalmers workshop will be held in Dunedin and tutored by Heeni Collins Helen Frizzell. Dates are yet to be confirmed. Jacqui Foley The workshop will cover: choosing the best Helen Frizzell equipment to record interviews and achieve clear Anna Green recordings; project planning and funding; Lesley Hall improving interview techniques; processing oral Gillian Headifen history interviews and making the recorded material Megan Hutching available for use. There will be practical exercises during the workshop and discussion of ethical and Alison Laurie legal issues in oral history. Bronwyn Officer Rachael Selby Further information & enrolment from Helen Frizzell Anaria Tangohau Tel: 03 477 7115 (office hrs); Anne Thorpe Fax: 03 479 2020; Email: [email protected] Wendi Wicks Shirley Williams Otago District Law Society Oral History Project – Stage II Calling all members… The Otago District Law Society (ODLS) has recently received funding to continue recording oral We would like to hear what you are working histories with legal practitioners and staff. The on. Please share your stories, successes, project began in 1996 and is being carried out by proposed projects, challenges, etc., with us. Helen Frizzell. Send to: The first stage of the project, funded by the NZ Law Foundation, involved interviews with nine senior NOHANZ members of the profession – both retired and still P.O. Box 3819 practising – and one staff person. The interviewees, WELLINGTON selected by the ODLS Council, represent a mix of experience and background - for example, rural and Or e-mail to: urban, ethnic, different periods at which people practiced and different areas of law practiced. The [email protected] resulting 55 hours of recorded material contain an enormous wealth of information, including anecdotal and commentary on the profession, its past and its likely future. Late 1999 a function was television footage of the developing landslip and the held at the Otago Settlers Museum, where devastation of the major slide on 8 August 1979 the tapes and accompanying which destroyed 69 family homes. The documentation are deposited, to mark the presentation is structured around a recreation of the completion of the first stage of the project. streets that were ‘lost’ as a result of the slip, with every building and family chronicled as well as Since then ODLS has been making efforts ‘before’ and ‘after’ photographs. Abbotsford ’79 to secure further funding to continue the runs at the Museum until 10 February 2002. project, in particular to explore contemporary women lawyers’ Auckland perspective on the practice of law in Ruth Barton and Willie Smith of the University of Otago which remains a gap in the Auckland have been working on a project on Society’s historical record. This year the "Institutional Change in New Zealand Science". ODLS Williams Trust granted funding for Willie Smith, a science policy analyst, has been two women - a lawyer and a former interviewing scientists who were involved in the ODLS secretary – to be interviewed. The restructuring of New Zealand science through the interviews will build on three interviews late eighties and early nineties. Ruth Barton, a recorded in 1994 for the Otago Woman historian of science, has been talking to people Lawyers Society suffrage year project. whose careers go back further, some to the 1930s, many to the 1940s. Some of the men interviewed It is planned that the recorded material worked on radar research in New Zealand and then would be incorporated into a major on nuclear projects in north America during World public exhibition, undertaken in War II. A range of sciences have been included, but conjunction with the Otago Settlers th her emphasis has been on human nutrition and Museum, to celebrate the 125 applied mathematics - chosen to represent quite anniversary of ODLS in 2004. different areas of science. Otago Settlers Museum The interviewing began in 1997. Transcribing has On 8 August Dunedin’s Otago Settlers been time -consuming as the material is often Museum opened its exhibition technical and has required careful checking. The Abbotsford ’79: the human dimension of topics covered include early education and career a natural disaster. Over 200 people choices, employment options, the organisation of gathered to mark the occasion, which scientific institutions in New Zealand, as well as the coincided with the twenty second individual's research projects and achievements. anniversary of the slip night. This Both men and women, senior administrators and included many residents and former researchers have been included Many of the tapes residents of Abbotsford as well as Civil and transcripts are now available in the Oral History Defence personnel who were at Centre of the Alexander Turnbull Library. Abbotsford in 1979. There was much laughter, and a few tears, as former neighbours met up again and shared Oral history around the world memories of their old neighbourhood. United States The core of the exhibition is an oral From Columbia University, NY comes the news of a history project conducted by the Museum contemporary oral history project. The National since the Abbotsford disaster’s twentieth Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded Columbia anniversary in 1999. It provides an University a $US90,000 grant to conduct an oral insider’s perspective of the landslip history project on the World Trade Centre attacks of experience and conveys some of the September 11. Over a two-year period, researchers emotional impact of the disaster on the will collect and analyse life-stories of individuals Abbotsford community. Former both in New York City and around the country who residents’ memories of the slip are were affected directly and indirectly by the attack. presented via five listening posts, with Called "Narrative Networks: The World Trade excerpts on CDs arranged in a Centre Tragedy," the project was initiated by Mary chronological sequence and interspersed Marshall Clark, director of Columbia’s Oral History with a linking narrative. Care has been Research Office and one of two principal taken to ensure that exhibition visitors investigators on the project, which researchers hope can listen to the oral history sequences in will create a valuable historical resource for future comfort and many visitors are taking the researchers and the public. time to do so. The exhibition also contains dramatic contemporary "As oral historians, we know that people the field quickly, an essential element for project make sense of their experiences through success." stories," said Clark. "We want to give people affected by this tragedy the (About Columbia University’s Oral History opportunity to offer their own Research Office: Each year, more than 2,000 interpretations of this historical event. scholars consult Columbia’s Oral History Research Through doing so, we will provide the Office, which boasts interviews with such notables public and generations of future scholars as formerPresident Jimmy Carter, former Supreme and researchers, a record that represents, Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, Dorothy Parker, to the fullest extent possible, the and Fred Astaire. Founded in 1948, the collection uniqueness and diversity of responses to is second only to the Library of Congress in scope, this tragedy." with 15,000 hours of tape and 8000 interviews.) Using both video and sound recordings, Australia Just released. Mission Girls: Aboriginal the researchers will capture more than 300 Women on Catholic Missions in the Kimberley, personal accounts in the immediate Western Australia, 1900-1950, UWA Press, 2001, aftermath of the tragedy and then conduct by Christine Choo follow-up interviews with the same individuals after six months and again Mission Girls examines the situation of Aboriginal after two years. Since the scope of the women who lived on the Catholic missions of project will extend beyond New York, Beagle Bay and Kalumburu, in the north-west of Columbia will recruit oral historians Australia, between 1900 and 1950. Drawing on oral across the nation. and archival sources, Christine Choo explores the effects of European colonization on these women, Columbia researchers intend to investigate and the politics of race, gender and class in the the extent to which individuals’ life- colonizing process. While highlighting the stories are shaped by the World Trade government's and missions' attempts to control the Centre tragedy. Of special interest is how sexuality and reproduction of Aboriginal women, the event emerges as an important turning she also reveals the covert ways in which the point. In addition, they hope to understand 'mission girls' subverted such efforts to control their how narratives of the tragedy are shaped lives. by, and shape understandings of, immigration status, race, social class, and Christine Choo is a consultant historian and ethnicity. independent scholar, and an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Western Australia with a Also involved in the project as the other PhD in History and degrees in Social Work and principal investigator is Peter Bearman, Australian Studies.