A Living Collection - Siobhan McHugh

Siobhan McHugh is an award-winning writer, oral historian and documentary-maker. Irish-born, she came to Australia in 1985.

Her first book, The Snowy – The People Behind the Power, about the migrant workforce that built the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric scheme, won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award for non-fiction; the Mitchell Library holds the oral history interviews for the book.

Her book and radio series Minefields and Miniskirts, about Australian women in the Vietnam war, was adapted for the stage. Siobhan has written and broadcast on diverse aspects of Australian society but her main work concerns Irish-Australian history – most recently ‘Marrying Out’, a documentary series for ABC Radio National on sectarianism and family conflict due to mixed marriage between Catholics and Protestants in pre-multicultural Australia.

Siobhan lectures in Journalism at the University of Wollongong.

 

New South Wales Bicentennial Oral History Project, 1987

Interviews with two hundred men and women aged eighty years and over who lived in NSW between 1900 and 1930
Sound recordings (transcriptions available at ML MSS 5163)
Presented by the Australian Bicentenary Authority – NSW Council, 1988
ML OH 48

John Stewart Drummond (b.1903, England)
Talks about stowing away on a boat to Sri Lanka as a child to escape being placed in a boys' home in inner Sydney (Tape Nos. 147–149)

Millie Weston (b. 1893, Balmain)
Talks about her family’s Manly ferry drowning tragedy at Circular Quay, 1906 (Tape Nos. 297–298)

Catherine Schulties (b.1906, Glebe)
Talks about childhood games, ghost stories, naughtiness (looking in window of hotel) and parental discipline (Tape Nos. 73–74)

Alice Moffit (b.1904, Walcha, NSW)
Talks about a Bush Christmas (Tape Nos. 112–113)

This collection of some 200 oral history interviews provides a unique insight into the real lives of ordinary Australians over most of the twentieth century.

I love how oral history lets us hear how people feel about what happened to them, as well as what they did.

Individually, these people led mostly simple, unremarkable lives, but few of us get the chance they had to review and make sense of their experiences. Together, their stories build a vivid and heartfelt picture of what matters most in society: family dynamics, work practice, home life, community, romance and recreation, art, sport, politics, religion and war. The voices convey much more than the printed word could – humour, passion, anger, joy, acceptance, longings, regrets and wisdom.

As James Joyce said, ‘in the particular is contained the universal’. Listen to these intimate and unpretentious life stories and you feel bonded to those who lived here before us.

 

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