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.