Methodologies: Histories

My imagination was reworked some winters ago, while in the northern Lake District, in north west England. It would be easy to write of the Lake District, or of Keswick, the town where I was staying with my sister, as a bundling of different social stories with different spatial reaches and differing temporalities. Longstanding farmers, the grey-stone country houses of the aristocratic incomers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, poets and Romanticism, ancient mining, middle-class cottage owners, Roman remains, an international tourist trade, a focus of a discourse of the sublime … But just out-side the town looms Skiddaw, a massive block of a mountain, over 3000 feet high, grey and stony; not pretty, but impressive; immovable, timeless. It was impossible not to consider its relationship to this place. Through all that history, it seemed, it had presided.

It is evident, of course, that much of the landscape here has been etched and moulded into its present-day basic shape by the glaciers of ice ages, the last of which retreated some 10,000 years ago. The traces are everywhere: in the U-shaped valleys inherited and reused in the last advance of the ice, in the hummocky landscape of moraines (material dumped by ice as it passed), in so-called roches moutonnées (rocks which have been scraped smooth and striated as the ice ground over them then plucked into jagged shapes on the downstream – down glacier side), and in drumlins, of which there are many in these parts, egg-shaped hills deposited under the ice as the glacier passed on and over, from what is now the valley of Derwentwater north to Bassenthwaite. The hotel where we were staying stands on a graciously sweeping road which takes its shape not just from some designer’s preference for curvaceous avenues, but from following the foot of a drumlin. Ancient ice ages plainly readable in the human landscape. One thing it might evoke is the antiquity of things. But another is almost the converse: that today’s ‘Skiddaw’ is quite new. I knew, too, that the rocks of which Skiddaw is made were laid down in a sea which existed some 500 million years ago. (They are composed from the erosion of still older lands.) And ‘not long’ afterwards (in the same -Ordovician – ;geological period) there was volcanic activity. There are reminders of that tumultuous era too in the present-day landscape. Today’s mountains bear no relation to the ancient volcanoes, but these more resistant volcanic rocks to the south give rise to a markedly different scenery of cliffs and waterfalls. And for those who know how to spot them, there are outcrops of Javas and tuffs. Some volcanic rocks form the cores of drum-linshaped hills: the remnants of volcanic activity from over 400 million years ago, plastered millions of years later by debris deposited by the retreating glacier (Boardman, 1996). A long and turbulent history, then. So much for timelessness… But it’s not merely a question of time: that history had a geography too. Sitting in our room at night, hemmed in by the (apparent) steadfastness of nature in the dark outside, and poring over local geology, the angle of vision shifted. For when the rocks of Skiddaw were laid down, about 500 million years ago, they were not ‘here’ at all. That sea was in the southern hemisphere, about a third of the way south from the equator towards the South Pole.

Doreen Massey, ‘Migrant Rocks’, For Space, pp. 130-133

 

In her book For Space, from which the excerpt above is taken, Doreen Massey calls for a new definition of space (and place) beyond the cartographic imagination that saw space simply in terms of a horizontal surface through which we move. Massey also contested what she saw as a fixation with the study of time in philosophy and social sciences (you can listen to Massey explaining her position here) to the detriment of a critical understanding of space. What she proposes instead is an understanding of space that includes (among other things) a temporal dimension. This means any given space is never ‘finished’ or immobile, but always changing in time because it is being shaped by and shaping multiple histories (think for instance about the suburb where you live: is it the same as it was five years ago?). The passage above illustrates this point well. Here Massey describes a trip to the Lake District, the largest national park in UK, site of multiple social and cultural formations and histories, from Roman settlements, to slate mines, to global tourist destination. The region has also been passionately written about by Romantic poets, so that as a place it is overlaid with a particular imagination as the prototypical English landscape. These multiple trajectories, she writes, would be easy to describe. Then she introduces a new element: Skiddaw, one of the most iconic mountains of the region. She traces back its history and geography to millions of years ago, revealing that Skiddaw, firmly entrenched in UK and global imaginary as a symbol of the Lake District, is a ‘migrant rock’: it arrived in the course of geological movements to its current location from the southern ocean, where it began to form, somewhere close to the south pole.

This story is an important way to rethink how place is not a fixed feature: its elements, even those that seem to be inert, are on the move. It is also important because Massey introduces us to the possibility of reading the histories of place that considers non-human elements, such as rocks.

In addition to this, thinking about place as historical and spatial trajectories and how these are made visible and knowable, or not, implies taking into consideration multiple categories such as gender, class, work, ethnicity and migrations, and the implicit and explicit power relations these categories generate. As an example of how place can be read as gendered histories look at the project The Women’s Hall: celebrating the East London Federation of the Suffragettes. The Women’s Hall in Bow from 1914-1924 was the headquarters of the East London Federation of the Suffragettes, a radical organisation promoting working women’s rights, a women’s social centre, and the home of the organisation’s leader, Sylvia Pankhurst. The project, including an exhibition and a series of events, explores East London through the histories of women activists.

If you are in Sydney you can read or download the app and walk the City of Sydney history tour of women’s histories Skirting Sydney. To think about other trajectories in Sydney the website Barani provides histories of Sydney’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities about people, places and events in the City of Sydney area. Other walks in the same series are also useful to understand migrant and community histories, colonial trajectories, and working class histories.

Histories and Placemaking

One of the questions arising from this understanding of place as constructed through historical as well as through spatial trajectories, is how and why histories become constituent parts of a place or are erased from a place, through institutional settings such as museums, libraries, archives, galleries, public art, monuments, but also ceremonies, commemorations, and festivals. This kind of official placemaking through the visibility given to some histories and not others is regulated by what societies in different historical periods consider useful or worth remembering. In this way remembering becomes a political act entangled with factors like power, class, race, gender and sexuality.

To make these ideas – that place is also made of historical trajectories, and that some of these trajectories are made visible or invisible depending on social, cultural and political factors – come to life, here is another example: Wiradjuri/Kamilaroi artist’s Jonathan Jones barrangal dyara (skin and bones), a 2016 installation stretching across 20,000 square-metres of the Royal Botanic Garden. This work brings together official placemaking in a historical context (the 1879 Garden Palace International Exhibition in Sydney), its material destruction by fire, and its recovery through a contemporary art project.

In 1879 Sydney hosted the first Australian International Exhibition, known as ‘the Garden Palace’. The building of the exhibition was located in today’s Royal Botanic Gardens. As with other international exhibitions the Garden Palace presented artefacts, technology, arts, tools, crafts, and produce from Australia and from many other countries organised in national ‘courts’. National courts, or pavilions, were displays of items from one particular nation shown together in the same space. The Garden Palace also included an ethnological court, exhibiting objects from Indigenous Australia, the Pacific and the Americas together with material culture from prehistoric Europe. The building burned down in 1882, and all its contents with the exception of some stone artefacts were lost.

barrangal dyara retraced the histories of the Garden Palace with an installation consisting of 15.000 gypsum shields marking the palace’s 250-by- 150-metre footprint in the Royal Botanic Gardens. Jonathan also planted native kangaroo grass and made a sound installation in Aboriginal languages along the perimeter traced by the shields. A crucial component of the project was a series of symposia and a public program that brought together historical and contemporary trajectories intersecting on the site. This example is significant for those who want to study place because barrangal dyara made visible the lost historical trajectories of this particular site. It showed how place is constituted through what is (various types of documentation, textual and visual narratives) as well as what is not (artefacts, the building) in the archive. The installation also recovered the Garden Palace as a place made of material objects (the shields that marked the perimeter of the burnt down building), and narratives (the sound installations at different points of the installations, the public programs). You can listen to Jonathan Jones’s podcast here. Leyla Stevens, another artist using still and moving images as a historiographic platform to tell counter histories of the archive, also speaks of her work as recovering hidden historical trajectories in Bali.

Place as Palimpsest

To think about place historically scholars have used different lenses. Using landscape as an interpretative category, cultural geographers have produced accounts ranging:

From structural semiotics in which the researcher is an expert decoder of landscape to post-structural studies of historical and cultural differences in meaning, emphasizing ambiguity, multi-vocality, instability of meaning practices, the productive slippage and interplay of unpredictable power relations. (Duncan and Duncan 2010, p. 226).

One of the recurrent ideas in cultural history and geography is to consider landscape and place as a palimpsest, as a material text overlain with patterns and meanings that can be read as histories. Cultural theorist Andreas Huyssen writes: ‘The trope of the palimpsest is inherently literary and tied to writing, but it can also be fruitfully used to discuss configurations of urban spaces and their unfolding in time without making the architecture and the city simply into a text.’ (Huyssen 2003, 7) In his book Present Pasts Huyssen looks at the ways in which writers, architects and artists have engaged with issues of memory, history, forgetting and trauma in three cities, Berlin, Buenos Aires and New York. To do this pays attention to the materiality (the architecture, objects, landscape, images, monuments etc) of the cities he studied in order to understand their temporality. Similarly, Megan Heyward in her podcast draws on cultural theorist Michel De Certeau and media arts practitioner Jeremy Hight to talk about cities as agitated by layers of histories and haunted by narratives becoming alive through interactions, such as walking.

 

 

In a different discipline artist Mark Dion works at the intersection of art, sciences, and archaeology He explains his methodology in this video.

 

To ‘poke around the history of place’ he starts by visiting museums, looking at the vernacular design, the way people dress, sketching and generally trying to immerse himself into the social history of the place he researchers. In one of his works, The Thames Dig, he and a team of volunteers dug up artefacts buried in the Thames mud near the Tate Gallery in London, and curated them in a cabinet of curiosity, thus making a contemporary archive of discarded objects (Mark talks about the project here).

For example, if we apply the idea of the palimpsest locally, to understand the way in which Sydney is structured today on unceded Aboriginal land, we need to study Sydney’s Aboriginal history, places, travelling routes, and how they are present in the structure of the city. The three videos on Gadigal Sydney created and directed by Jonathan Jones show how Gadigal culture has shaped and continues to shape the city. In turn, these histories need to be understood also in relation to the environment – waterways, animal and fish movements, plant distribution and so on, to determine how the location of present day Sydney was inhabited and cultivated before colonization, as a colony, how it grew in the last century and up to the present.

The temporal elements of place are also part of the debate that has animated historical geography. We tend to imagine the past as anchored to the local, but the local in the past also included connections and relations to other places. This map makes us rethink our assumptions by showing the multiplicity of roads, paths and tracks across Europe, Africa and Asia in the Middle Ages.

To make sense of the different historical trajectories traversing and embedded in any place we can use a number of different historical methods, including archival research, genealogical research, and oral histories.

Archival Research

The first step to research the histories of a given place is often libraries and archives.

Access to libraries and archives varies greatly, and it depends on their type, location (in some countries it might be easier than others), and nature of the material they hold. Libraries, either public or academic, generally are collections of books and other materials available for consultation in person or through digital copies. Archives are also collections available for consultation, but their access, regulations and materials can be quite different. The Society of the study of the geographies of the past and how the past shapes geographies of the present. As an example, consider this map of medieval trade routes and how they may have influenced contemporary road systems American Archivists (there is also an Australian Society of Archivists) introduces archives in a handy how to guide as:

Archives can hold both published and unpublished materials, and those materials can be in any format. Some examples are manuscripts, letters, photographs, moving image and sound materials, artwork, books, diaries, artefacts, and the digital equivalents of all of these things. Materials in an archive are often unique, specialized, or rare objects, meaning very few of them exist in the world, or they are the only ones of their kind (Schmidt 2016, n.p.).

This definition of what an archive is and what it may contain is a good starting point for a critical reflection. One of the reasons why archives vary so much both as types and as content is that they are not generated simply by people with particular interests, but also by historical, cultural and social contexts. In other words, it is necessary to take into consideration how the culture, society and power dynamics – as well as individual choices – of a given moment structure what is in the archive.

The quote above points also to the emergence of digital archives and resulting new research methodologies. The shift to digitization of cultural heritage is significant because it also opens up new questions on how we think, study and produce knowledge about archives, as well as on what an archive is. These matters are central to the research of the network Archivefutures in the context of the relation between the materiality of archives and their digitization. The questions they ask are important if we consider archives as places:

  • What are archives and what can they do?
  • What can we do in and with archives?
  • What happens to the stubborn materiality of archived documents in the face of new digital storage and distribution technologies?

Some more questions to keep in mind: who decides what is worth remembering and keeping and what it is not? What can be understood from the omissions in the archive? How can a researcher study the histories of those people and places that are not recorded or are partially recorded? Should a researcher treat archives as repositories of sources, or also as the subject itself of their research? If we can study the archive as a subject, as a place in itself, can a place be an archive? and: what effects have digital archives (for instance the information embedded in Google maps) on the way place is constructed and understood?

 

Archives of protests may not be officially kept. Yet, they are important to many places.

 

Geographer Sarah Mills (2013) argues in favour of considering archives as subjects of research in their own right rather than as a source. According to her, this reframing of the archive as research topic may lead to more imaginative, and ‘animated’ research methods, which are useful to answer the questions at the end of the previous section. To illustrate some of these methods she thinks of archives in three large categories: as fragments, objects and ghosts. Archives, she explains, are always fragmentary because they are one version of the past, and because the personal or organisational agendas of their creators is always reflected in the choice of what is archived. To overcome the fragmentary nature of the archive one solution has been to collect many fragments, from many different sources (for instance letters, diaries, photos, newspaper clippings and so forth). The other to look for and interrogate the cracks (what is missing) in the archive. A third one to piece together a story like a detective from scraps and clues. Archives, Mills, continues are not just textual sources, they are also made of material objects which carry an affective value, bear witness to past events and cultural practices, and are a tangible connection with past webs of social and cultural relations. Conversely, Mills describes archives as inhabited by ghosts, and the work of the researcher as finding and bringing back hidden voices (2013, pp. 701-713).

Tim Cresswell (2012) extends the argument about materiality by considering a geographical site, Maxwell Street Markets in Chicago, as his archive. Cresswell argues that this particular archive is made of three categories of sources. First formal archives and documents (such as the plaques on the history of the place). Second by apparently not important, often discarded, things collected by people, and third by the site itself. This definition is useful to study place:

Here I use archive in a broad sense to refer to collections of documents and artefacts collected by experts and enthusiasts in, around and about Maxwell Street. I also refer to the place itself as a kind of living archive. (2012, p. 166)

Cresswell offers several methods to read the archive. The first one is to accept its incompleteness and messiness and read it ‘against the grain’ to find unofficial stories hidden in its gaps. This means mapping what is not included in the archive and understanding what these gaps mean (for instance why the histories of a particular social group are not included in national histories). The other is to read it ‘along the grain’, to understand the historical power structures that shaped the archive (such as the politics that determined the choice of what to collect in colonial archives). Cresswell also suggests that it is possible to create an ‘inverse’ archive, collecting what is left out and discarded, for instance when a place is refurbished or demolished (2012, p. 169). This process is similar to gleaning, the 19th century practice of collecting leftovers from harvests (a rural version of the more recent practice of dumpster diving).

Leyla Stevens’s work Of Love and Decomposition reads ‘against the grain’ a bunyan tree near her family home in Bali as an archive of political history animated by ghosts. Leyla writes:

Not far from my family home in Bali there is large banyan tree that marks the intersection between a football field and the village temple. Situated between two streams of endless traffic, this site is a rare communal space that quietly resists the mindless growth of south Bali’s luxury hotels and nightclubs. What is known but never openly talked about, are the rumoured bodies from the 1965 mass killings that lie buried beneath the stretch of road running beside the banyan tree. The whispered presence of these bodies marks a silent history that underscores a topography known predominantly as a tourist destination.

When an effective regime by the state has silenced a collective trauma, what becomes forgotten and what traces remain? To conceptually situate the banyan tree site within the densely urbanised geography of south Bali is to delineate between a series of counterpoints in the history of the island.  Of Love and Decomposition deals with two historical trajectories that continue to inform and contest the social geography of Bali today. It references the troubling legacy of Indonesia’s 1965-66 mass killings of alleged communists and the haunting residue of having unacknowledged grave sites lying underneath or alongside current day geography. As a countering narrative the exhibition draws from the romance of the early surf odysseys that occurred in the 1970s. It was the start of surfer tourism that eventually led into the development of mass tourism in south Bali.

Rather than attempting to directly address the violence of 1965 and its current political aftershocks, I wish to locate this event spatially, to pick it up as a heavy stone and observe its trajectory as it is thrown across the unfolding of contemporary Bali. This banyan tree site sits as a counterpoint to state endorsed histories and, as an event, exists as a counterpoint to the surfer romance in the 70s, one that continues to inform the aestheticisation of the island as paradise.

As a practical example of how these suggestions on how to think the archive as historical and material construct, fragments, objects, ghosts and practices of gleaning may play out in research Ilaria draws on her own experience as a doctoral student. As part of her PhD thesis she wrote about the exhibition Australian Aboriginal Art, held in 1929 in Melbourne. She was looking specifically for the museum director’s correspondence and newspaper cuttings (articles cut from newspapers and ordered in albums chronologically) about the exhibition, and she reasoned that the most likely place to start her research would be the archive of Museum Victoria. But the archive was not there. The museum was in the process of being refurbished, and the archive was temporarily housed in a ‘room under the stairs’ (this is not a metaphor, it was in a cupboard under a staircase). There was no order in this room: just piles of albums of newspaper cuttings, all with the same green cover. It was cold, dusty, dark, and discouraging. Ilaria looked at a few shelves, unable to even understand how to search for the elusive 1929 album. So, she gave up and left, and on her way out she literally stumbled upon the 1929 album, which was on a small pile on the floor. The album contained several interesting articles that told stories of how people reacted to the exhibition, images of objects on show and people, including portraits of two Aboriginal performers, Jack Noorywauka and Stan Loycurrie, of whom she did not know much. The Museum was able to show her the letters relating to the exhibition written by the director in 1929. From these letters, she learned that the Protector of Aborigines from an area near Lake Eyre was responsible for organising the performers’ travel. She found out that the Protector’s correspondence was archived in the State Library of New South Wales, and she read it against the grain and along the grain. She gleaned the scraps and fragmentary stories told in 1929 newspapers, the institutional stories in the museum director’s letters, clues from objects – such as the album she stumbled upon, the files, the letters, the physical space of the archive under the stairs, to listen to the hidden voices of her two ghosts, Jack Noorywauka and Stan Loycurrie.

You can listen to Andrew Toland describing his ‘forensic’ methodology to examine place. He describes this process as gathering evidence and comparing different archival sources, including textual and visual materials, and combining this evidence with landscape and architecture methods such as site observation, drawing and mapping.

Tips for First Timers
  • First of all, identify your archive. To do so: look for websites dedicated to the place you are studying: do they mention any archives ? Are archives mentioned in any other text, like articles, books, films, about the place you are studying? Visit a local council library and speak with a librarian: they will know. Check if there are historical societies in the area. If your place is a private place there might be a private or organisational archive (for instance department stores have their own archives).
  • Organise access to the archive: do you need a reference letter? A pass?
  • Organise your archival research kit: notebook, soft pencils (generally pens are not allowed), your phone with a good scanning app, such as Adobe scan, perhaps a camera if you are studying the archive itself as place.
  • Follow the archive’s rules. Because some archival materials are rare and fragile, access to archives is regulated, and each archive has a particular set of rules. These rules depend on the type of archive (for instance public, private, civic, corporate, organisational, of historical societies, of foundations, museums, galleries, shops, professional societies, religious organisations…and so on), on their location, and on their specific cultural and historical context. This means that access is different in every country, or even among cities and organisations in the same country: an important element to consider when planning archival research. As an example, Australian state libraries and the National Library require people to wear white cotton gloves to handle archival materials. The British Library, on the other hand, thinks wearing gloves is dangerous because it increases clumsiness and the possibility to damage manuscripts, as explained in this blog and video.
Genealogies

Genealogical analysis is a way to interrogate how taken-for-granted truths (for example scientific knowledge) beliefs, ideas and ways of knowing are historical constructs based in specific social and political agendas (Saukko 2003, p. 115). The term genealogy comes from Foucault, who defined it as a history of the present, or a historical analysis to understand ‘an aspect of human life by showing how it came into being. The narratives may be more or less grounded in facts or more or less speculative, but they are always historical.’ (Bevir 2008, p. 263).

As a place-based method this means to explore the historical contexts and origins of the meanings of a certain place and to focus on how certain meanings constitute that place. Going back to the example of the Garden Palace a genealogical analysis would explore the political and social agendas that led to the organisation of an international exhibition in Sydney and to the construction of the Garden Palace building. Instead of asking what were the meanings of the Garden Palace, doing genealogical analysis we would ask: which historical processes and events led to an international exhibition in Sydney, one where there was a dedicated ethnological court? The answer to this question would be that towards the end of 19th century the Australian colonies, and in particular NSW, wanted to be recognised as modern, rich and brimming with progress. The exhibition was a way to visualize history as a spatial representation (the scientific and technological progress of modern nations) and as a scene to be enjoyed at glance, as national courts were all grouped under one roof. The Ethnological Court constructed Indigenous Australia as prehistoric by exhibiting Indigenous objects together with prehistoric artefacts, and functioned as the backdrop to better illustrate colonial Australia’s progress. Placing Indigenous Australia in a different timeframe (in a vague prehistory) also legitimised colonialism as the bearer of civilization.

In brief ‘To formulate this specificity of the genealogical method in more general terms, one can say that it is characterized by a careful reading of historical details, not in terms of the truths that they tell… but in terms of the truths that they constitute’ (Saukko 2003, p. 118). In our example this means to understand that the narratives in the existing documentation on the Garden Palace does not mean it was a masterpiece of architecture, technological achievements, wealth of produce, but that it was imagined and constructed as such by these narratives. Narratives of a future based on advancement, and also atmospheres, affects and emotions of success, optimism, abundance and progress were created by the spectacle and organization of the Garden Palace, or in other words by its spatial, material and conceptual organization. These narratives contributed to shape a national imaginary of Australia as a young and modern country. For instance, the State Library of New South Wales uses their records to tell a specific story of the Garden Palace in this slide show. The focus on the fire that destroyed the buildings is a result of the press and public imagination and interest in the fire, which led to the documentation of the disaster in articles, drawings and photographs.

A genealogical analysis of place would start from historical documents, ‘tapping into moments when particular statements begin to recur, thereby producing a discourse’ (Saukko 2003, p. 133). For instance, we would be looking at archival material in the years before the Garden Palace exhibition to map the recurrence and emergence of statements on wealth, national imaginary, progress. This would allow us to make connections between different sets of statements, such as modernity, Indigenous Australia, colonialism, nation and so on. The connections among sets of statements would help us to establish that the emergence of particular places is the result of particular histories and that broader social and political agendas play a role in the way certain statements develop.

 

Practical Tips for First Timers

  • Identify your place.
  • Identify any archival source about your chosen place. To do this search for local libraries, museums, societies, universities, professional organisations, private firms, families and so on, and visit them.
  • Speak with librarians and archivists, explaining what you are looking for. You may need to make an appointment in larger library or archives to speak with archivists.
  • Skim read first the material you find to identify moments when particular themes seem to emerge.
  • Identify the recurrent themes in different periods and make notes.
  • Do a second more in-depth reading and map recurrent sets of statements. You can find map templates online, or make your own using postits. Using postits is easier because you can move them around. Sage Research methods has a good model, which you can access via UTS library here.
  • Write down the emerging sets of statements.
  • Can you relate these statements to wider social and political histories of the periods you are considering?
Oral History

Storytelling is a natural part of the human experience. Human beings communicate meaning through talk. Oral historians have harnessed this tradition of transmitting knowledge and created an important research technique that allows the expression of voice. (Portelli 2005, p. 149)

Oral history is a method based on participatory storytelling. As Alessandro Portelli, a prominent oral historian, outlines in the quotation above, oral history harnesses storytelling to make the storyteller’s voice heard. In practice oral history is an extended and repeated interviewing technique, organised loosely around a specific topic. Unlike in-depth interviews (which are structured) the format of an oral history interview is unstructured and meandering: it involves many tangents, it does not necessarily follow a chronological order, it produces large quantities of data of varying importance and quality, and they require plenty of time. Listen to Portelli on oral histories in this video.

Oral histories are a useful method to study place to understand the layering of meanings, experiences, relations and of processes that generate a place. For instance, the project Belongings on migration memories in New South Wales, uses oral histories to reveal how migrants settling in Australia make place using everyday objects. These objects, brought from different countries to Australia, help to recreate a sense of place and of home. In Belongings objects are also used to prompt storytelling, as they trigger memories. This is significant because it enables participants to tell their stories.

Oral historians often refer to the potential of oral histories to tell hidden stories, or stories of people who would not otherwise be included in historical accounts. In relation to place oral histories can illuminate the complexities of place and the diverse identities that a place can have for different people. They can also illuminate scale and bring to the fore the relational character of place to reveal how local experiences are entangled with by larger formations: ‘localized as place can be to the individual, there are political, social and economic elements that connect individual places to a wider network of activity present at a larger scale.’ (Ward 2012, p. 139) The issue of scale is highlighted also by Harvey and Riley, geographers who have written extensively on how oral histories can be used in geographical research, in particular in projects on landscape conservation. For Harvey and Riley:

The issue of scale is important here, as place-specific, local, personalized and practice-based oral accounts are used to disturb the longitudinally expert driven metanarratives of countryside conservation. On one level, therefore, oral histories act to provide an alternative strand of knowledge; that of the ‘place- and practice specific insider’, that can be utilized to inform conservation practice at a local scale. On another level, however, these oral histories of the rural landscape act to disrupt unproblematic and one-dimensional accounts of the landscape, reminding us of the importance of the personalized and lived experiences of individuals. (2007, p. 349)

Harvey and Riley stress important elements of the use of oral histories to study place: first, they provide non-mainstream knowledge on localised issues that can inform policy decisions with a point of view ‘from below’. Second, oral histories can inject critical voices in debates on landscape conservation dominated by superficial mainstream narratives. In summary, oral histories can both challenge superficial narratives about place, and animate narratives of the past (Harvey and Riley 2005, p. 19). As an example, in Belongings, some participants recollect the bleakness of Sydney in the post-war years through personal accounts, and question the mainstream narratives of Australia as the land of milk and honey.

Portelli describes another significant aspect of oral history as the ‘work of relationships’ between past and present, memory and narrative, interviewer and interviewee, and orality and written or recorded narrative.’ (2009, p. 21) Most importantly oral histories are participatory and collaborative processes. This means that they are based on a collaboration between interviewer and interviewee based on storytelling and listening (listen to Jonathan Jones’s podcast on ‘respectful listening’) to generate knowledge through ‘moments of realization, awareness, and, ideally, education and empowerment during the narrative process… Oral histories allow for the collaborative generation of knowledge between the researcher and the research participant. This reciprocal process presents unique opportunities, continual ethical evaluation, and a particular set of interpretive challenges.’ (2005, pp. 150, 152). Portelli also notes that oral histories allow the study of a process (p. 153). Because we understand place as made through relations and processes these characteristics of oral histories outlined by Portelli are important. In other words, oral histories are a valuable method to study the temporal elements of place, or as described in the introduction to Histories, place intended as a palimpsest. The following example explains in practice the pros and cons of oral histories.

Mapping Edges used oral histories in a project in partnership with the NSW Inner West Council to research Haberfield residents’ practices and attitudes towards their environment, focusing on gardens and gardening. Over a period of 7 months we conducted 7 oral histories. These interviews were then transcribed and edited by the researchers. They were then sent back to the participants for further editing to make sure that they would feel comfortable with their ‘voice’ as well as with the content of their stories. In this sense oral histories are a collaborative effort. During our interviews the relational character described by Portelli came to the surface as we walked around gardens and plants spurred conversations and brought into focus memories going back and forth in time. Gardens offered a platform to remember other places, or past histories of the suburb, but also social relations among different demographic groups arrived at different times and from different backgrounds in Haberfield. Gardens, of course, also made present a variety of environmental concerns and attitudes. For instance, the presence of historic trees was linked to wildlife conservation, while certain plants were identified as belonging to a specific cultural tradition. The garden as a whole, and particular plants, prompted stories around broader historical contexts, such as Italian migration to Australia in the post-war years, the current gentrification of the suburb and the destruction of heritage to make room for a new highway.

 

Tips for First Timers

Any study that involves other people must be based in the understanding of research ethics. Undergraduate students usually do not need a formal application to a university Human Research Ethics Committee, however it is a good idea to read the National Statement on ethical conduct.

You will find a detailed explanation of how to do oral histories here.

  • Do your preliminary research using archival and genealogical methods to formulate your questions.
  • Plan: what is your main research question? Who would best help answering it? How will you contact this person (s)?
  • Write an information sheet (sample attached at the end of this document) explaining your project.
  • Write a list of interview prompts. Prompts and not specific questions.
  • Contact your participants, including your information sheet and prompts.
  • Assemble your kit: what will you need? What will you use to record your oral history? A phone + a microphone do a good job. Is the phone charged, is the mike working?
  • Print out your prompts in multiple copies, one for you and others for your participants. Practice asking questions: how can you make them open, to get ‘essay’ answers rather than yes/no? For instance, instead of asking: Do you remember this school? Ask: Can you describe this school in your memory, and if and how it has changed in time?
  • Confirm the appointment a couple of days before.
  • Make sure you know where you are going, and how to get there, check your map app.
  • Check your tech is working.
  • Interview and record in a quiet place.
  • Listen respectfully and allow for silence: silence is important.
  • Start with general questions, and follow the narratives.
  • Ask one question at a time.
  • Follow up your current question thoroughly before moving to the next.
  • Limit the interview to two hours.
  • Wrap up with light conversation and thank participants.
  • Make field notes about the interview.
  • Send a thank you note.
  • Transfer your file into a cloud.
  • Transcribe your file. There are some free apps that help doing this, such as F4.
  • Analyse your interview: what is emerging? Does it answer your question?
  • There are two school of thoughts: one is that interviews should be transcribed verbatim, another one is that they should be written up in a narrative.
  • Give your participant a copy of the either the transcription or the edited version and ask them to make the necessary changes.
  • Consider if you need to schedule a second interview.
  • Store your digital files in multiple locations.
A Speculative Exercise
  • Take your campus as an example.
  • Where would you find documents (official, non-official, newspaper articles, books): when was it planned? by whom? what was its aim?
  • Check local libraries and archives. Does your university have an archive?
  • What else was happening in the place your campus now stands and the world in the same period as the buildings were (or are) built? Can you make connections between these wider agendas and your campus? which type of documentation would you be looking for to explain the relationship with wider historical and political agendas?
  • Could you map social changes?
  • Could you map different styles?
  • Can you do oral histories about your campus? With whom? How would they be useful?
References

Barrett, C. 1929, Australian Aboriginal art : issued in connexion with the Exhibition of Australian Aboriginal Art, National Museum, Melbourne. – Version details – Trove, Published for the Trustees of the Public Library, Museums and National Gallery of Victoria by H. J. Green, Government Printer, Melbourne, viewed 4 June 2018, <https://trove.nla.gov.au/work/25783127?selectedversion=NBD2186344>.

Bevir, M. 2008, ‘What is Genealogy?’, Journal of the Philosophy of History, vol. 2, pp. 263– 75, viewed 24 May 2018, <www.brill.nl/jph>.

Cresswell, T. 2012, ‘Value, gleaning and the archive at Maxwell Street, Chicago’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, vol. 37, pp. 164–76.

Duncan, N. & Duncan, J. 2010, ‘Doing Landscape Interpretation’, in D. DeLyser, S. Herbert, S. Aitken, M. Crang & L. McDowell (eds),The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Geography, SAGE Publications Ltd, Los Angeles London New Delhi Singapore Washington DC, pp. 225–47.

Harvey, D. & Riley, M. 2005, ‘Country stories: the use of oral histories of the countryside to challenge the sciences of the past and future’, INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENCE REVIEWS, vol. 30, no. 1.

Huyssen, A. 2003, Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Stanford University Press, Stanford, Ca.

Jones, J. (ed.) 2016, barrangal dyara (skin and bones), Kaldor Public Art Projects and Thames and Hudson, Sydney.

Kaldor Public Art Projects 2016, ‘Project 32 – Jonathan Jones’, Kaldor Art Projects, viewed 22 May 2018, <http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-32-jonathan-jones>.

Massey, D. 2005, For Space, Sage, London.

Mills, S. 2013, ‘Cultural-Historical Geographies of the Archive: Fragments, Objects and Ghosts’, Geography Compass, vol. 7, no. 10, pp. 701–13.

Portelli, A. 2005, ‘Oral History. A Collaborative Method of (Auto)Biography Interview’, in S.N. Hesse-Biber & P.L. Leavy (eds),The Practice of Qualitative Research, London and Thousand Oaks, CA, pp. 149–94.

Portelli, A. 2009, ‘What Makes Oral History Different’, in L. Del Giudice (ed.),Oral History, Oral Culture, and Italian Americans, Palgrace Macmillan, New York, pp. 21–30.

Riley, M. & Harvey, D. 2007, ‘Talking geography: On oral history and the practice of geography’, Social and Cultural Geography, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 345–51.

Saukko, P. 2003, Doing Research in Cultural Studies, SAGE Publications Ltd, London.

Schmidt, L. 2016, ‘Using Archives: A Guide to Effective Research | Society of American Archivists’, Society of American Archivists, viewed 4 June 2018, <https://www2.archivists.org/usingarchives>.

Vanni, I. 2014, ‘The archive and the contact zones: The story of Stan Loycurrie and Jack Noorywauka, performers at the 1929 Australian Aboriginal Art exhibition, Melbourne’, Journal of Australian Studies, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 314–30.

Ward, A.R. 2012, ‘Reclaiming Place through Remembrance: Using Oral Histories in Geographic Research’, Historical Geography, vol. 40, no. 0, pp. 133–45, viewed 31 May 2018, <https://ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/historicalgeography/article/view/1348/html>.

Websites

Barani, http://www.sydneybarani.com.au/

Belongings, http://www.migrationheritage.nsw.gov.au/belongings/

Jonathan Jones, barrangal dyara, http://kaldorartprojects.org.au/project-32-jonathan-jones

Jonathan Jones, Gadigal Sydney, https://www.youtube.com/edit?o=U&video_id=iY0_mdsoHfs

Mapping Edges, www.mappingedges.org

Mark Dion, https://art21.org/artist/mark-dion/

Sydney Walks, http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/explore/getting-around/walking/sydney-walks

The Women’s Hall, https://eastendwomensmuseum.org/the-womens-hall

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