Cirrus@Austlit

'My grandmother who lived with my family briefly during my adolescence turned me on to history. Despite having only a basic primary school education she had a keen sense of her place in history, regaling the family with stories of the ex-convict servant who worked on the family vineyard, the ‘bushrangers’ whose visit one night had terrorised her as a young child and her pride in being eligible to vote in the first election after Australian women were enfranchised in 1902. These stories fell on fertile ground, well tilled by the history teachers in my overcrowded high school in the baby boom suburb of Ringwood in Melbourne. In the years before industrial action by the Victorian Secondary Teachers’ Association compelled the Education Department to set minimum standards for teachers, history teachers stood out above a motley crowd. Ambitious men, taking a stint in a school still classified as rural to accelerate promotion, worked alongside female graduates bound to the area by family responsibilities. Their enthusiasm inspired students to extend their vision beyond the usual constraints of the outer suburbs.'  (Introduction)

'The Australian Generations Oral History Project, a collaboration between historians at La Trobe and Monash Universities, the National Library and the Australian Broadcasting Commission ran from 2011 to 2014. By collecting the life stories of 300 volunteers born between the 1920s and the 1980s it aimed to write into history’s big picture the ‘ordinary people’ whose experiences have been too often ignored. The full archive of this project is held by the National Library, accessible either now or later according to the wishes of those interviewed. In Australian Lives: An Intimate History, Anisa Puri and Alistair Thomson draw on fifty of these life histories to bring the outcomes of the project to those who prefer the printed word, and perhaps to tempt them to dip into the larger collection.'  (Introduction)