Aussie broadcasters introduce oral history methods

Aussie broadcasters introduce oral history methods

By Santi W.E. Soekanto

JAKARTA (JP): From a tape-recorder placed on a table in the
center of a small auditorium at the Australian embassy came the
voices of several women, breathless and full of reminiscence.

"It's getting dark and every 10 minutes there was a sound of a
siren....the radio gave warnings.

"Suddenly there was a gust of wind...and the sky turned red,
and we heard cracking sounds."

The women kept on talking amid the sound of sirens and
cracking noises which vividly gave the impression of a natural
disaster occurring during the time the conversation took place.

The sirens and cracking noises were simulated. The women,
however, were the real survivors of Cyclone Tracy which
devastated the Australian city of Darwin on Dec. 25, 1974,
killing 50 people and destroying more than 12,000 homes. Around
30,000 people had to be evacuated by airlift after the disaster.

The women were respondents of two experienced Australian
broadcasters, Tim and Ros Bowden, who were giving a practical
seminar on the use of oral history techniques for radio
documentaries here last Thursday.

The Bowdens, both from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation
in Sydney, demonstrated how the techniques of interviewing people
involved in certain historical events can lend drama to the
reporting.

Both believed that the use of the techniques in broadcasting
would provide a more human view of history, which is more
interesting than a mere recounting of historical facts.

"What we are doing here is essentially telling the stories of
ordinary people, their views of certain events involving them,"
Tim said.

Ros, for instance, played a recording of her interview with a
woman about her struggle in nursing the wounded during World War
II.

"It was so cold...the eggs were frozen, and we needed to peel
them first before boiling them," was how the respondent described
her experience, giving a vivid picture of the biting wintertime
and the horror of war.

Tim played a part of his oral-history-based series of
documentaries on the life of people in Papua New Guinea, which he
called the colony of Australia.

From Tim's recording came a young woman's voice haltingly
recounting her feelings and experiences as a person of mixed-
blood, Australian and Papuan.

"I like to think of myself as a Papuan...but mostly I feel
like I'm an in between....in between feels so like....in
between." the girl said, her voice a mixture of sadness and
acceptance.

Flavor

The Bowdens gave several practical suggestions for
broadcasters wishing to use the techniques, including the need to
cross-check for accuracy, seek for background information as well
as ways to "catch the flavor" of history being retold.

"When you interview people involved in certain historical
events, ask them the same question: Why did you survive?" Tim
suggested. "And they will tell you human stories."

For some of only the handful who attended the seminar, the
tapes had indeed given them a more vivid and interesting
description of the history being told.

"If broadcasters at the state-owned Radio Republik Indonesia
station used the techniques, their news reporting would be more
interesting," said a young man. "Right now, news reports from RRI
are so dull."

For others in the audience, who happened to be employees at
the Indonesia's National Archive Center, the seminar gave
"nothing new".

"We are also trained to interview people involved in
historical events or historians," said Aat, a woman employee at
the Center.

The seminar was part of the Australia Today Indonesia '94, the
biggest trade and cultural promotion program to date. An officer
at the Cultural Department of the embassy, however, expressed
regrets that, despite its usefulness, the event was attended by
only a small number of people.

Tim Bowden, a Sydney-based journalist and author, has recently
completed an oral-history-based series of programs called
Crossing the Barriers. The series deal with experiences of Asian
students who came to Australia from the 1950s and 1960s under the
Colombo Plan.

Tim joined the ABC in 1963 in Tasmania and was posted in
Singapore as a foreign correspondent in 1965, with assignments in
Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines as well as the
Vietnam war. In 1974 he joined the ABC's Radio Drama and Features
Department and began making radio documentaries.

Among his published books are One Crowded Hour-Neil Davis,
Combat Cameraman, The Way My Father Tells It-The Story of An
Australian Life and Antarctica and Back in Sixty Days.

Tim's wife, Ros, also worked as a producer for a public radio
station and has taught radio documentary techniques to Aboriginal
students in the Northern Territory.

She has produced a number of oral-history-based documentaries
for the ABC beginning with a four-part series on women, Work of
Equal Value, a program on The Australian Women's Land Army and on
Early Women Aviators.

Ros won the Human Rights Award for a Radio Documentary in 1987
with Being Aboriginal in which Aboriginal Australians describe
their feelings about their own history.