'Life is long. When you're forty-eight, there's been a lot of stuff that's happened (laughs). It's got elements of comedy and there are elements of heartache and drama and thriller and it's got so many things in it.' Rhonda King, born 1965 'I really like the idea that in maybe a hundred years someone could listen and hear about my life to learn about what living in 2012 or 2013 was like. Think that's really cool.' Adam Farrow-Palmer, born 1988 Australian Lives: An Intimate History illuminates Australian life across the 20th and into the 21st century: how Australian people have been shaped by the forces and expectations of contemporary history and how, in turn, they have made their lives and created Australian society. From oral history interviews with Australians born between 1920 and 1989, fifty narrators reflect on their diverse experiences as children and teenagers, in midlife and in old age, about faith, migration, work and play, aspiration and activism, memory and identity, pain and happiness. In Australian Lives you can read and in the e-version of the book listen to the comedy, heartache and drama of ordinary Australians' extraordinary lives. As our interviewee Kim Bear (born 1959) explains, 'Stories are a great way to inform people about what it is to be human. Even if you say one thing that resonates... there's that connection made.'
Anisa Puri is a professional historian and a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies at Monash University. Her work explores oral history and memory, Australian social and cultural history, and the intersection between oral history and digital technology. She is also the President of Oral History NSW.
Alistair Thomson is Professor of History at Monash University in Melbourne and was previously Professor of Oral History at the University of Sussex in England. His books include: The Oral History Reader (1998 and 2006, with Rob Perks), Ten Pound Poms: Australia's Invisible Migrants (2005, with Jim Hammerton), Moving Stories: An Intimate History of Four Women across Two Countries (2011) and Oral History and Photography (2011, with Alexander Freund).
The books value for scholars and public historians is unquestionable and will help feed an enormous global appetite for social history and the details of everyday lives being sought by ordinary people thinking historically
Engaging, emotional but also academically rigorous in its production, Australian Lives deserves to reach a wide general audience, in Australia and far beyond. Lets hope it encourages similar projects in different national contexts so that scholars and others might compare and use this enormously rich data over time. - Tanya Evans, Macquarie University, The Public Historian, Vol. 40, November 2018, No.4
