Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I am Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first?

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country.

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times.

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land.

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won.

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

What if the voices that shaped Australia were lost? What if Dame Mary Gilmore never spoke of the lash scars she saw as a child, disconnecting us from our brutal convict past? What if we could no longer hear Essie Coffey, a proud Murawari woman, fighting in her youth to expose the truth of the Stolen Generations? What if Sir Howard Florey’s reflections on penicillin, a discovery that saved millions of lives, were forgotten? What if May Gibbs never told us how Australia’s most beloved children’s book characters, the gumnut babies, came to life? These aren’t just stories. They’re our living history. And they came dangerously close to disappearing forever. But one woman changed that. She pressed record and Australia spoke.

Bought to you by the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes. I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson. In this series, we explore the people and moments that shaped Australia, through the voices of those who were there. Today, we begin with the woman who gave Australia back to itself, one recording at a time.

Over 1,290 Australians. Indigenous change-makers. Poets. Migrants. Artists. Dreamers. Captured on fragile reels of magnetic tape before their voices could fade. This is a story of how one quiet revolutionary preserved a nation’s soul, one voice at a time. Her name was Hazel de Berg.  

She wasn’t the first to understand the power of storytelling. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been sharing oral histories on this continent for millennia. But Hazel de Berg was the first non-Indigenous Australian to fully grasp the power of the recorded voice to inform, to move and to inspire. She believed that stories, even the quiet ones, could shape a nation and should be preserved and kept for future generations. And so, with a clunky reel-to-reel tape recorder and extraordinary persistence, she set out to build something that didn’t yet exist: Australia’s first oral history collection. A collection that would record stories and experiences from this continent.

For nearly 30 years, Hazel sat down with people across the country—writers, poets, actors, artists, scientists, migrants, Indigenous people, feminists, musicians—people from all walks of life. She asked them about their lives, their hopes, their work, their pasts. But you won’t hear her voice on the tapes. Tape was expensive. So, Hazel asked her questions before she pressed record. What remains are uninterrupted monologues. They are deeply human reflections, full of emotion and insight.

She began in 1957, at a time when reel-to-reel tape recorders were still new in Australia. The very idea of preserving memories this way had only emerged a few years earlier, at Columbia University in New York. No one in Australia – and few in the world – were doing what Hazel was doing. But she saw its value and she knew the recordings belonged to the nation. She donated them to the National Library of Australia. And for almost three decades, she helped build its first oral history collection.

That humble project, which was started by one woman in a very different Australia, has now grown into one of the world’s largest collections of oral history. Today it sits at more than 58,000 hours of recordings. This is the story of how it all began, with a silent revolutionary and her reel-to-reel recorder. And today’s episode is just the beginning.

Throughout this series, we’ll take you on a journey through the incredible voices and histories the National Library’s oral history collection has helped to preserve, in all their variety and richness. We’ll revisit the big moments that shaped our country. We’ll hear the voices of those who lived through them.

We’ll travel from cities to remote communities. We’ll hear from creatives, visionaries, change-makers. And we’ll listen, really listen, to the voices of First Nations people, whose stories always have and always will continue to shape this land. This is a story of resilience, of creativity, of dreaming big. It’s a story of all of us—in all our diversity. And it begins here.

It was 1957. Hazel de Berg was 44 years old. She’d grown up in Deniliquin, New South Wales—the third child of a Methodist clergyman. After earning her Leaving Certificate from the Methodist Ladies’ College in Burwood, Hazel took an unconventional path. She trained as a photographer at Paramount Studios, then worked in the studio of Noel Rubie. He was an acclaimed Australian modernist painter, portrait and commercial photographer, a playwright and pharmacy proprietor who worked in Sydney from the 1920s.  

She married Woolf de Berg at the Great Synagogue in Sydney, converting to Judaism before their wedding. Together they happily raised three children. Even as a devoted mother, Hazel remained endlessly curious: she studied radiography and learned Indonesian. She welcomed international students from South-East Asia who came to study at Australian universities from the 1950s as part of the Colombo Plan into her home.

But in 1957, she bought her own reel-to-reel recorder, a bulky, heavy Nova machine, after she was invited by her friend Ken Bruce, a pioneer of recording books for the blind, to read books aloud for those who couldn’t see. At first, she recorded herself reading.

Hazel de Berg: 

I thought that it would be rather nice that as I knew Dame Mary Gilmore that I should read her Old Days, Old Ways.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Hazel de Berg had enormous appreciation for Mary Gilmore and her literary approach. In the only radio interview that exists with Hazel speaking, she says:

Hazel de Berg: 

I think the main thing that has emerged from Dame Mary Gilmore's literary work, especially her verse, is the fact that she is a humanist. She sees the human element in everything. She doesn't have to describe a thing by long, sentimental passages. She comes straight to the point. The Aboriginal people, she felt very keenly their position here. With the convicts, she felt their position too. And with everyone she meets, it's the feeling that she has.

I remember she told me that when she was little, she didn't even like to walk on the grass for fear she'd hurt it. And when her father took her to King's Cross, when she was just a little girl. There was, of course, all bush up there, and down below, there was a stream, and the kangaroos used to come there and drink at evening. And one of her poems ends with, 'I saw the beauty go, the beauty that could not be tamed, but before it went, it looked at me with the eyes of the maimed’.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

It made sense that Hazel de Berg would read Dame Mary Gilmore’s poem. But then came the moment that changed everything. What if, Hazel wondered, instead of reading someone else’s words, she asked Dame Mary Gilmore to speak her own words?

At this time, Dame Mary Gilmore was one of the most famous Australians alive. She was a poet. A journalist. An activist. A lifelong advocate for women, children, and Indigenous Australians. Born in 1865, before Australia was even a nation, Dame Mary had lived through wars and had been part of a utopian social experiment. And she carried that century in her voice.

Hazel de Berg: 

So, I went up to her flat at King's Cross, and I said, now, I think it would be rather nice if you were to say something in the front of this for the blind people. And she said, well, supposing you announce me. And I said, oh no, you announce yourself. So, she said, “Well, this is Mary Gilmore. I wrote Old Days, Old Ways.”

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And so, in a quiet room, with the tape rolling for the very first time, Hazel pressed record.

Dame Mary Gilmore: 

This is Dame Mary Gilmore speaking. And I've been asked to read a piece of my verse. It's called Old Botany Bay.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And Dame Mary didn’t just explain. She gave a history lesson: personal, painful and full of purpose.

Dame Mary Gilmore: 

And I wrote it because when I was a child, there were so many ticket-of-leave men about that some of them worked for my father. And I can remember, if they took their shirts off in the hot weather, how their backs were ridged and ridged from the cat. The cat was the name of the whip used to flog them. And there were people so cruel, they'd be blood from the neck to the heels almost from it. There were people so cruel. One was Captain McAllister, who lived out of Goulburn, and he wanted the points of the cat with more steel on the end of them than they had. He wanted inches more, which would cut deeper and deeper and deeper. Well, these men, who were so flogged, some of them almost innocent of any crime at all. They hadn't committed crimes, only misdemeanours. They were the ones who made the way easy for us in later times. And I think that we should still feel, remember them and be grateful.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Then, she read the poem.  

Dame Mary Gilmore: 

So here it is.  

I'm old  
Botany Bay;  
Stiff in the joints,  
Little to say.  

I am he  
Who paved the way,  
That you might walk  
At your ease today.  

I was the conscript 
Sent to hell  
To make in the desert 
A living well.  

I bore the heat 
I blazed the track— 
Furrowed and bloody  
Upon my back.  

I split the rock;  
I felled the tree:  
The nation was— 
Because of me! 

Old Botany Bay 
Taking the sun  
From day to day …  
Shame on the mouth  
That would deny  
The knotted hands  
That set us high!

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

It was just one voice. One story. It lasted just 1 minute and 21 seconds. But for Hazel, it was a revelation. She’d sat across from a woman who had witnessed history and captured her story in her own words. This wasn’t just a reading. It was a record. A memory. A living piece of Australia. And Hazel realised: there were more voices. Many more. Writers. Artists. Activists. Indigenous Australians. Migrants. Dreamers. People who had shaped the country, but whose voices were vanishing. So she made a decision. Not to wait, but to start collecting voices before they disappeared. She focused first on poets.

Hazel de Berg: 

Well, from that I went on and I collected Dorothy McKellar, reading My Country. I collected various other poets, Kenneth Slessor with some of the Five Visions from Captain Cook. And it went on and on until finally I had collected about 60 poets. It really wasn't as simple as that. When I'd ring up and start stuttering and saying, 'I want to record the poets saying their own verse and reading their own verse so that in a few hundred years if we put it in the archives, people will know just what we thought and what we wrote in our day.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The National Library of Australia saw the value of what she was doing. Sir Harold White, then National Librarian, had recently visited Columbia University and saw the potential of the emerging oral history movement.

From 1960, the National Library transcribed all of Hazel de Berg’s tapes, and in return, she placed a complete set in the Library. By 1971, she was formally contracted to do sixty interviews per year. She carefully selected each of the people who were interviewed and used her personal charm to convince them to be recorded and she researched thoroughly to prepare.

Her early recordings were often short and with eminent individuals. But over the decades, she recognised the growth of a more distinctive Australian national culture and the importance of collecting its creators and change-makers. There was no field of endeavour that she wouldn’t record.

Hazel didn’t just record creatives, she recorded visionaries. In 1967, Jessie Street, diplomat, feminist and campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians, warned what happens when we sideline women and argued for greater inclusion.

Lady Jessie Street: 

If you’re going to shackle the women—as they have been in the past and to a certain extent still are—you’re going to hold up the progress of the whole of our society.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1973, Dame Peggy Van Praagh, who had taken up a role in 1962 as the founding artistic director of the Australian Ballet, tried to explain how exciting the development of ballet was in Australia at this time.

Dame Peggy van Praagh: 

There was a wonderful job and something lying wide open and I felt that it would be so fascinating to try and see what one could do in a country where ballet was a new artform.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1977, Hazel recorded Nancy Bird Walton, who born in 1915 and was a pioneering Australian aviator. She was the first woman in Australia to fly for a living rather than for recreation. Walton operated a flying medical service in outback New South Wales—and later in Queensland—named the Royal Far West Children’s Health Scheme. She told Hazel of her childhood determination to fly planes from as soon as she could walk.

Nancy Bird Walton: 

I did spend my childhood in the heights of Collaroy looking out into the wide Pacific Ocean, and I think that perhaps that's where I was inspired to fly, that distant view, that great arc of the sky, and so vividly in my memory is the aeroplane that made a forced landing on the beach at Dee Why and the magnetic attraction this aeroplane had for me. Of going to school at Brighton College and looking up and seeing a little tiny speck in the sky, skywriting. And that to me is the most vivid memory because once again there was this magnetic attraction to this aeroplane from me, and something in me just cried out to learn to fly.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And in 1978, William Liu, a man of Chinese and Scottish descent who was born in 1893 and had lived with anti-Chinese immigration policies and attitudes for the majority of his life, reflected on a pivotal moment with Hazel de Berg.

William Liu: 

After the election, and the normalisation of diplomatic relations, Prime Minister—Former Prime Minister—Whitlam and his mission made a visit to Peking and when he came back, he said, ‘We have so much to learn from China.’

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

These were voices from all walks of life. They were voices of change, recording not only their past, but the future they believed in. Hazel de Berg acknowledged Australian society benefited enormously from the contribution of First Nations people.  

In 1959, she made her first recording with an Indigenous Australian, Shirley Fish. In 1971, she recorded Wiradjuri man and playwright and activist, Kevin Gilbert and Jack Davis, Noongar writer, poet and playwright. In 1976, she recorded Oodgeroo Noonuccal, who was also known as Kath Walker, a Quandamooka artist, advocate and the first Aboriginal Australian person to publish a book of verse.

She interviewed actor, Brian Syron, of Biripi heritage, who studied acting in New York with the legendary acting couch Stella Adler and was enjoying growing success internationally when he made the decision to return home. He told of that night in America when:

Brian Syron: 

“Not only I changed, but the place changed around me. And there were the stars, and there were the night sounds of Australia, and there was the land. And it called me home. And I realised that in my heritage, somewhere for me, that I was an artist of this country, of this land, that there was a lot of the Aboriginal people in me, the love of the land. And I knew then I must come home and create in my own country.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: One of the most difficult interviews for Hazel de Berg to obtain was with May Gibbs. Hazel’s daughter, Diana Ritch, remembers Hazel had called her every day on the phone for a month to convince her to be recorded. And with persistence, she eventually succeeded. May Gibbs told her that she was much more comfortable speaking outside, so they did. And May Gibbs told her about her childhood and where the inspiration behind her gumnut characters, as well as her drawing talents, had come from.

May Gibbs:

But I just loved the children liking my books. It was that, which always in the background, gave me the greatest love and strength to make the books.  

I used to go down to the country and stay with an uncle, and the children loved me to tell them stories. And we used to lie on the floor in the hot weather, fan ourselves, and I would tell a story. If we walked out in the bush, I noticed all the little flowers. I used to say, this is such and such a thing, and that is something else, and give them names, and that's how I started telling the stories. That really is the way I started my gumnut work.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

One year later, May Gibbs died. The recording that Hazel de Berg made is the only recording of her voice that exists.

Similarly, Nobel Prize winning pathologist, Sir Walter Florey, whose work on penicillin, saved millions of lives, died one year after being interviewed by Hazel. Again, her recording is the only recording of his voice that exists.

Sir Howard Walter Florey: 

People sometimes think that I and the others worked on penicillin because we were interested in suffering humanity. I don't think it had ever crossed our minds about suffering humanity. This was an interesting scientific exercise and because it was of some use in medicine, is very gratifying, but this was not the reason that we started working on it. It might have been in the background of our minds. It's always in the background of people working in medical subjects that it might be of use in medicine, but that's not the mainspring of why they do their research. They're very gratified if it's of use, but it's not essential. And the same thing would apply to penicillin.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

He did provide some colour though, describing the first Nobel Prize ceremony that had been held since the War.

Sir Howard Walter Florey: 

Well, perhaps you'd like to know something about the Nobel Prize which everybody thinks very highly of. The three of us got it together. That's to say, Chain, Fleming and me. And it was the first prize-giving after the war. So the Swedes put on a tremendous occasion. Of course, it's in December and there's snow about in Stockholm. And they ring the city bells while you're propelled to the town hall which is one of the pride and joys of, not only of Stockholm, but of Europe.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And then there were the other stories. The voices and histories that had been silenced by racism and exclusion. Hazel recorded important perspectives.  

Among them was a proud young Murawari woman, Essie Coffey, from Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales. A brilliant filmmaker. An activist. A fierce advocate for Indigenous people and speaking the truth of the Stolen Generations. She didn’t speak in abstractions. She spoke of lived reality. Of survival. Of dignity. Of what it meant to fight for your culture in a country that was built on silence.  

Essie Coffey: 

Now this is what I'm going to say the truth about 30 to 40 years ago, 35 years ago. My people were brought out of the bush by troopers, policemen, state police. They brought out of the bush and also welfare officers went in there. Mission managers and all that, state police, grabbing the young children at the mother's arm while they were breastfeeding them, took them away from their mother and put them in homes and institutes. Even now today, them people that were taken away over 30 years ago, 35 years ago, some of them are still alive now. They've got memories. They're about 40 or 50, some 60 years of age. They still ask where they come from, who they are, what they are, who their mother was and who their father is. They don't know because it's only in this generation also, over 35 years ago, that it's still happening. Then, at that time, that shorter time.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Essie Coffey’s voice was fearless. She spoke truth rooted in survival. But Hazel’s work also captured the more complicated corners of humanity. Stories not just of justice, but of creativity mixed with contradiction.  

In 1974, she met playwright Jim McNeil. A man whose greatest plays were written from a prison cell. A man who found companionship and artistic collaboration through communicating through the plumbing in Bathurst Gaol.

Playwright Jim McNeil remembers rallying against the sensationalism against homosexual relationships in prison in the play he wrote at Bathurst. He was inspired by Robert McKinnon, an artist in a cell next door. He remembers draining water from their toilets so that he and Robert could exchange ideas.

Jim McNeil: 

He would pump the water out of his and I would pump the water out of mine just shoving a lavatory brush into it and then we’d have a clear pipe, and we’d talk to each other through the toilets.

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

It’s not a voice you’d expect to find in a national library. But Hazel believed every story mattered, even the ones that were unfamiliar to her. Hazel didn’t just preserve voices. She honoured them. And in doing so, she created space for Australia to hear itself fully, sometimes for the very first time. Her recordings changed over time too.

By the end of her life, Hazel de Berg had recorded over 1,290 Australians. And in doing so, she created something that had never existed before: Australia’s first, and now one of the world’s largest, oral history collections. But for Hazel, it was never about numbers. It was always about the voice.

While institutions overseas, like Columbia University, used tape simply to create written transcripts, often re-recording over the original audio, Hazel kept everything. She believed the voice itself held something no page ever could.

In her papers held at the National Library of Australia, she wrote: “It is the voice and the hesitant searching for words that brings a closeness when you hear it. I wish everyone could share my moment of recording—but it’s still there when I hear the voice again.”

And she imagined a future no one else could see. In 1963, she wrote: “These recordings are meant to be as if they are in the room talking to them. I see a time when just by pushing a button, a voice will come out.”

That future is now. Today, Hazel’s recordings can be heard across the world—at the touch of a button—through the National Library of Australia’s website.

Hazel wasn’t just capturing stories from one corner of society. She was documenting the nation—in all its contradictions and complexity. From scientists whose discoveries saved millions to First Nations women fighting for justice and recognition, to the brilliant but deeply troubled playwright who spent seventeen years in prison for armed robbery and shooting a police officer.

And she did this all at a time when Australia was undergoing significant social and cultural transformation. When the nation was thinking about who and what it aspired to be.

By the late 1970s, Hazel’s interests had shifted from the well-known and elite amongst Australian society. She was more interested in recording the voices of people from regional Australia. Her last two projects were in Cowra and Young, but she still found remarkable stories in the unlikeliest of places.

In May of 1983, she recorded George Pardey, who was a photographer in Cowra. George casually told Hazel that he had taken the most important photograph of his life nearly four decades earlier, on 5 August 1944. This was the day of the Cowra breakout, a mass escape by Japanese men who were forcibly kept in an internment camp in Cowra. Their attempt to break out of the camp was the biggest mass escape in the Second World War and one of the bloodiest in the history of attempted escapes in wartime. 234 Japanese prisoners died, 108 were wounded and three Australian guards were killed.

George Pardey: 

The town was agog with the news of that outbreak, and on reaching the studio, lo and behold, there’s four very large Australian soldiers waiting for the door to be opened, and what they required was a photographer immediately to go to the camp to photograph the actual break, and to show that it was authentic, and the Japanese prisoners were not mowed down in cold blood. Well, they were in a desperate hurry and I had to go into the darkroom accompanied by the four soldiers, sergeants they were, very big gentlemen I believe.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

George was not particularly experienced or trained with cameras at this time and he always wondered how his images turned out. He told Hazel the answer came to him in a very unexpected way.

George Pardey: 

A program came on about the Japanese outbreak, which lasted for, I suppose, an hour and a half, and right at the tail end of the program was George's photographs that he'd taken of the Japanese outbreak. There they were, clear and bold, and I thought, well, I've seen them at last after 35 years.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Finally, in April and June of 1983, Hazel de Berg made her last recordings in the New South Wales town of Young. In 1984, Hazel de Berg died. She had been interviewing right into the very last months of her life, assisted near the end by her daughter Diana Ritch, who became a talented oral historian in her own right.

On the 8 March 1984, the Australian Jewish News carried an article on her passing that noted: “Hazel de Berg was not a woman who cared for greatness qua greatness but she cared very much for those who contributed to the greatness of Australia. Because of her conviction that Australia’s artists, poets, scientists and musicians were of fundamental importance to the history of this country, she began 27 years ago to record their voices on tape. Completely self-financed in her early days, her work came to the attention of Sir Harold White, then the Federal Parliamentary Librarian and National Librarian, who offered her a Commonwealth Literary Grant to continue her work. What Hazel de Berg began in 1957 is now the basis for one of the finest collections of oral history in the world.”

In giving space to forgotten voices, Hazel de Berg redefined what counts as history. Not just the names in textbooks, but the spoken, human moments that stay with us and shape who we are. Hazel de Berg believed that even the quietest stories mattered. That a voice, once heard, could change how we see a person or a country.

Subscribe and if you can, leave a review. Tell somebody about Hazel de Berg and the extraordinary oral history collection held by the National Library of Australia. Help others hear these incredible moments that shaped Australia, enriched us, challenged us and inspired us.

I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson. Thank you for listening to The Memory Tapes. This has been a National Library of Australia production 

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

This introductory episode includes excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection:

• Hazel de Berg interviewed by Tom Jacobs

  Hazel de Berg speaks about Dame Mary Gilmore when being interviewed on the radio program, "News Magazine".

• Jessie Street interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  Lady Jessie Street, diplomat, feminist and campaigner for the rights of Indigenous Australians, warned what happens when we sideline women and argued for greater inclusion.

• Peggy Van Praagh interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  In 1973, Dame Peggy van Praagh, who had taken up a role in 1962 as the founding artistic director of the Australian Ballet, explains how exciting the development of ballet was in Australia at that time.

• Nancy Bird Walton interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  In 1977, Hazel recorded Nancy Bird Walton, who born in 1915 and was a pioneering Australian aviator, the first woman in Australia to fly for a living rather than for recreation.

• William Liu interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  In 1978, William Liu, a man of Chinese and Scottish descent who was born in 1893 and had lived with anti-Chinese immigration policies and attitudes for the majority of his life, reflected on a pivotal moment with Hazel de Berg.

• Brian Syron interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  Brian Syron, of Biripi heritage, who studied acting in New York with the legendary acting couch Stella Adler and was enjoying growing success internationally when he made the decision to return home.

• May Gibbs interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  One of the most difficult interviews for Hazel de Berg to obtain was with May Gibbs. Hazel’s daughter, Diana Ritch, remembers Hazel called her every day on the phone for a month to convince her to be recorded. And with persistence, she eventually succeeded. May Gibbs told her that she was much more comfortable speaking outside, so they did. And May Gibbs told her about her childhood and where the inspiration behind her Gumnut characters, as well as her drawing talents, had come from.

• Howard Florey interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  Nobel Prize winning pathologist, Sir Howard Florey, whose work on penicillin, saved millions of lives, died one year after being interviewed by Hazel. Again, her recording is the only recording of his voice that exists.

• Essie Coffey interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  Essie Coffey, a proud young Murrawarri woman from Brewarrina in north-west New South Wales. A brilliant filmmaker, activist and fierce advocate for Indigenous people and speaking the truth of the Stolen Generations.

• Jim Mcneil interviewed by Hazel de Berg

  Playwright Jim McNeil remembers rallying against the sensationalism against homosexual relationships in prison in the play he wrote at Bathurst. He was inspired by Robert McKinnon, an artist in the cell next door. He remembers draining water from their toilets so he and Robert could exchange ideas through the pipes.

• George Pardey interviewed by Hazel de Berg  

  George casually told Hazel that he had taken the most important photograph of his life nearly four decades earlier, on 5 August 1944. This was the day of the Cowra breakout, a mass escape by Japanese men who were forcibly kept in an internment camp in Cowra. Their attempt to break out of the camp was the biggest mass escape in the Second World War and one of the bloodiest in the history of attempted escapes in wartime. More than 234 Japanese prisoners died, 108 were wounded and three Australian guards were killed.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

This is the National Library of Australia's The Memory Tapes and I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson. This episode includes discussion of the Stolen Generations, the forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children and distressing experiences at institutions including Kinchella Boys Home. It also contains the voices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, some of whom have passed away. We acknowledge this material with care and respect. 

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Within the National Library of Australia's vast oral history collection, there is an interview recorded in July 1987, in the lead-up to the bicentenary of the First Fleet in 1788. A woman named Gladys Ardler speaks. She talks about her grandmother. And her grandmother's grandparents. And what they saw, from a ridge above Kurnell, on the shores of Botany Bay, when a ship appeared in 1770. 

That voice connects to more than two centuries of living memory.  

In this episode, we are exploring the National Library's extraordinary First Nations oral history collections, voices that document everything from that first moment of British colonial contact, through to the violence and dispossession that followed, to the political struggles and the resistance and the resilience that runs through all of it. 

I am joined today by a very special guest. Theresa Ardler is a Gweagal woman of the Eora Nation, her mother's Country. She also has cultural connections through bloodlines to the Gumbaynggirr and Yaegl people. She grew up on her father's Yuin Country in the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community, in Booderee National Park at Jervis Bay. She is a respected Elder, a cultural educator and a person with a deep background in constitutional law. And she has a very personal connection to the collection we are exploring today. I'm honoured to call her a friend. Theresa, thank you so much for joining us. 

Theresa Ardler: 

Thank you. In my language, I will say “didgerigura” , which means 'thank you.'  

Dr Shirleene Robinson:  

And thank you so much Theresa. And I will begin by acknowledging that I am joining everyone from the lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation today and pay my respects to elders past and present and extend that respect to any Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who might be joining us today.  

Theresa Ardler: 

Thank you. And I'm also coming to you from Dharawal country. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Theresa, something amazing that you shared—you have a very personal connection to the National Library's oral history collection. Would you mind telling us about that? 

Theresa Ardler: 

Oh, yes, most definitely. My grandmother Gladys, her maiden name was Ryan, then she married a Waddy, and then she married an Ardler, my granduncle, so my nan married three times. But Gladys Ardler, she was born in 1922 and she passed away in 1989. And she did an interview with Catherine Johnson for the Bicentennial Oral History Collection. And I remember listening to those old tapes, you know, of her voice and all that. Because my nan went blind in her old age, and I used to play all the tapes for her. And then I lost the tapes. And it was only a couple of years ago that I got sent, from the National Library, the actually online sort of take on my Nan’s voice. And it took me a while to catch on that that was my grandmother talking, because I forgot the sound of her voice. It brought me to tears actually. It was quite comforting. And, she was indeed our matriarch. Built with knowledge, and strong—yeah, cultural knowledge from her mum, Mabel Irene, and also her dad as well. Her Dad was Irish, actually, but he was a great fisherman. But my nan, she was a strong cultural woman of her time from La Perouse down to Wreck Bay. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And one of the wonderful things about your family is that it shows the power of oral history within First Nations communities and how well it has endured. Let's start by hearing your grandmother speak in her own words. This is Gladys Ardler, recorded as part of the NSW Bicentennial Oral History Collection. 

Gladys Ardler: 

She talked about her grandmother who was here when Captain Cook landed and she told us about that and they still talk about that today. 

Catherine Johnson: 

“What sort of stories would she tell you.” 

Gladys Ardler: 

“Well, she'd tell us how that they was on the beach at Kurnell on the ridge and Captain Cook came in and landed and how they shot a couple of them on the ridge. She'd tell us about grandfather and her great-grandmother and that's all history down Botany Bay. But that's what we was just told, that our grandparents saw Captain Cook landing." 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Theresa, this is a remarkable thing to hear. Your family carries a direct oral account of that moment of contact at Kamay, Botany Bay in 1770. Can you tell us a little more about what that means? 

Theresa Ardler: 

Yes. On both sides of my family, my mum and dad’s, you know my mum is the daughter of Gladys Ardler. My great-great-grandparents on my mum’s side, witness Captain Cook coming to Kamay, Botany Bay. And also on my dad's side was Cooman, that belongs to my great-grandmother, you know. So, he was my great-great-grandfather. And my great grandmother was Biddy Giles, his daughter. And she plays a really significant role in our history of Botany Bay in the early years after her father who was actually holding the Gweagal shield with, you know, one of his family members beside him and saying: ‘Warra Warra Wai’, and that was to say, 'Go away.' You know, they didn't want the Ghost people coming. And they thought they were ghosts when they come through the heads, they thought it was a big white bird. And so, when, when they got closer, they was a bit smelly. So, they thought they were dead, you know, ghosts. And in our language, we call them goonjas [dead]. And, so yeah, that was passed on to me as a child. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

It is extraordinary to hear of Cooman, a Gweagal warrior who fought to protect his people when James Cook and his crew arrived at Botany Bay or Kamay. Cook’s diary entry records him firing at two Aboriginal men. And through Theresa and her grandmother, we are able to learn more about what exactly happened and what their ancestors experienced.   

And what's so striking is that this transmission of knowledge has continued because we know that First Nations peoples have the oldest continuous oral history tradition in the world. Stories that speak of climate change, of megafauna, of things that happened tens of thousands of years ago. Deep history.  

And here is a direct oral account of that first contact. It's an extraordinary gift that Gladys Ardler gave us by choosing to record this story at what must have been a charged and difficult moment, with the Bicentenary approaching. 

Theresa Ardler: 

Yes, that's right. And I remember that year. I was in Year 11 I think at school. And I remember when the ships came out. Everyone on my community at Wreck Bay—we ran down to the beach and out to the headland just off our cemetery, and we could see the tall ships coming over the horizon, because they were coming up the coast to go into Sydney Cove for the Bicentennial. They actually was a day or two in Wreck Bay. 

I remember that so very clearly you know. What was my great-great-grandfather ... Cooman—was he witnessing this... and those emotions and that was coming out of that... Witnessing the tall ships coming across the horizon and into Wreck Bay. Wreck Bay means, because we had several shipwrecks from the early days. So that’s why it’s called Wreck Bay, because our ocean is unpredictable. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

What also comes through in Gladys Ardler’s interview is the richness of the cultural traditions she was part of and that she carried forward. Let's hear another moment from the recording. 

Gladys Ardler: 

"and he made boomerangs and she made a bit of shell work which they used to sell.   

Catherine Johnson: 

How did she know how to do the shell work? 

Gladys Ardler: 

Oh, well it was sort of a traditional thing that was handed down from my mother. My mother did it and her sister did and she did. They did it when they were kids. 

Theresa Ardler: 

Yeah. I come from a long line of shell work traditions. I remember as a child, on the different seasons, bringing the different shells, you know, from the oceans. I remember the Gooramool wind, you know. that's the big west wind that brings change in, with the seasons and stuff like that, and changes and gets ready for the new season to come. And I was always forever, from a baby, you know, until when I lost my nan in 1989, yeah, learning about the different shells. And I remember when I was ten years old, making my first jewellery box. And it was a heart jewellery box—we had to put the shells around. And back then they made their own glue out of flour and water to make it stick, and it turned out sort of brown and there was a little bit of salt and that in it, and then you know from the cardboard clip-outs, they’d been used for years, long before I came along, you know. It was nan’s mother, Mabel Simms from La Perouse. So, I got to learn about the different shell works.  

It wasn't only the love heart jewellery boxes. It was the little boomerangs, the little baby slippers, and also, um, little baby shoes as well. And also, with the Harbour Bridges... that's a well-known, strong tradition from La Perouse community in Sydney. Families like the Timbery’s, the Simms’, they had their own particular style of pattern. And I was fortunate enough to actually grow up with that cultural knowledge that was passed on, which is now a slowly dying-out trade. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Shell work from La Perouse has gone all around the world. And when you think about the span of your grandmother's life, born in 1922, doing this interview on the eve of the Bicentenary. She was alive when 150 years of colonisation was marked in 1938 and then interviewed to mark 200 years. Do you ever wonder what made her decide to share her story? 

Theresa Ardler: 

At that time, for the Bicentennial, different journalists or archivists and that, I think it was from the National Library of Australia. They were actually, for the Bicentennial, they were going around to…interviewing different people from Aboriginal communities. They wanted to get a story to...that had a strong link to how history unfolded for First Nations people from the very beginning.   

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And I think your particular family story—they must have been so grateful and amazed that there was this direct oral account of contact at the landing of Cook. It really is quite incredible that that now lives at the National Library. 

La Perouse was home to one of the reserves established across New South Wales where Aboriginal people's lives were controlled by the Aboriginal Protection Board. For families like Gladys Ardler's, the boundaries of that system could be complicated. Access to the community or mission was not always available to them. Gladys reflects on what survival looked like at that time. 

Gladys Ardler: 

We moved out near the La Perouse church, in the bush. There was a lot of people, they were all moving out.   

Catherine Johnson: 

What caused you to move? 

Gladys Ardler:  

Well, I think better living, in that we built a place or built it more like a house. We had a four-room place. But we still had no water or electricity, but there was plenty of water around. You know, that helped. 

Catherine Johnson: 

How were you able to afford that? 

Gladys Ardler:  

Well, they went to the tips and got tin and timber, and all that. Everybody did the same thing. And built a shack. There were shacks everywhere. Some people were living in buses, some was living in old trams. There was a big place at Malabar, same thing, people were living in trams.  

Catherine Johnson: 

Did anyone stop you from putting up these things? 

Gladys Ardler: 

No, because there was nothing. No one could pay rent. Couldn't afford electricity. Couldn't afford anything. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

There’s great ingenuity and adaptability in that account. But also something that’s difficult to reconcile. This was a country that had the means to do so much more for First Nations people and yet it didn't.  

Theresa Ardler: 

Yeah. My nan's father was Irish, and, you know, where they were living, you know, at a camp near the La Perouse church in the bush at that time. They couldn’t live on the community or the mission in those days. I think when my great grandfather passed away. But he was a great fisherman, you know. And that was what sort of kept him going and putting food on the table, you know. Because in the Depression or even before the Depression, in those early days, there wasn’t much money coming into communities but you know, La Perouse was always a thriving community for fishing. And so, a lot of my family lived off, when they caught fish and that, and selling the fish at the markets and that in the city. Yeah, so they used to take them by horse and cart or cart, you know and take the fish into the markets to sell to make money. And also with my great grandmother—when nan Gladys's father passed away, she married again, and he was an Aboriginal man—La Perouse and that. And he did a lot of cutting out boomerangs and shields and nulla nullas and bundis. So he, sold them, you know. And nan was still making the—great grandmother and that—they was all making the shells and that. That they used to sell them at the Loop. They made quite a lot of money because the tourists. You know, it was a big tourist industry, back in those—the 1920s, right up until the ‘60s, even the ‘70s you know. Like, certain famous people would know about La Perouse because of the shell work and also the different boomerangs and wood technology and stuff like that. Our shell work has gone all around the world. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

What comes through in all of that is a story of enormous strength and determination in the face of very hard circumstances. But I want to turn now to one of the most painful parts of Australian history, the Stolen Generations. The forced removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families and communities, for no reason other than being Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander children. 

This practice, carried out across Australia from the second half of the nineteenth century until the 1970s, directly impacted as many as one in three to one in ten Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children over time. There would be no Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander families who were untouched by this policy. 

[Content note: This section contains distressing material about the Stolen Generations.] 

We're going to hear now from Gurindji man, Japarta Maurie Ryan, who was himself removed from his family at the age of four. He is the grandson of Vincent Lingiari, also a Gurindji man and one of the leaders of the 1966 Wave Hill Walk off, a landmark campaign in the movement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights.  

Japarta Maurie Ryan: 

Now, in 1966 the walk-off of Wave Hill Cattle Station was done by a group of men made up of the Gurindji, Mudburra, Walpiri and Ngarinman stationmen. Lord Vesty's, some of the cruelty that they did was put some of the peoples on the hot tin roof in the middle of the day. They were whipped, and in some cases in Australian history many people were murdered. Some of my people were murdered, they were shot. I can't bring that back. But Australia's history has to be told—the truth. Truth to me is what it's all based on. The walk-off of Wave Hill Station was about 25 k's. They walked off because of the conditions, the payment of flour, sugar and tea. My grandfather moved everybody to Kalkarindji, where I was taken from, the banks of the Kalkarindji, the river, the Victoria River, and then moved to our most sacred place called Daguragu. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

After nine long years of determined action, the Wave Hill walk-off succeeded. In 1975, Prime Minister Gough Whitlam famously poured sand into Vincent Lingiari's hand as a portion of Gurindji Country was returned.  

Gough Whitlam: 

Your fight was not for yourselves alone. And we are determined that Aborginal Australians everywhere will be helped by it. And I want to give back to you formally in Aboriginal and in Australian Law ownership of this land of your fathers. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The Wave Hill walk-off became a defining moment in that movement for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights. Yet, despite his grandfather being such a key figure in the long campaign for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land rights, Japarta Maurie Ryan was a member of the Stolen Generations. He was taken from his mother at the age of four in 1952 and did not reunite with her until 1981.  

Japarta Maurie Ryan: 

Some of the effects of removal of all Indigenous people—this is similar, I'll give you my views on it. Now, since the removal, me as a 53-year-old man, I could not participate in the ceremonies of boyhood...now, going through ceremonies as a boy to manhood, knowing the rules, knowing the stories that were handed down generations to generations, the songs and the dances and mixing with my family. What I've lost personally, besides contact with my mother—which is the hardest and the worst thing ever happened, to lose a mother and the rest of my family. I also lost the capacity to learn my language. The language I speak is English—is a bastardisation language as far as I am concerned—it is not my language. I've lost entitlements to my land. I've lost a lot. But the thing is, the most things I haven't lost is my pride or my dignity. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Theresa, how does it feel to hear that? 

Theresa Ardler: 

Yeah, you know, listening to Uncle there. He, um, my heart just shattered you know...and I had a lot of family that were taken...and I remember when I was a child on Wreck Bay Community—all these kids, they used to bring a heap of children's clothes, all they was all white, in the hall for us. And all us kids, we just played under all these children's clothes. And yeah, we didn't know, those kids from Bomaderry Children's Home, they were brought by train from all across New South Wales. And in early days, they was actually being schooled and trained as domestic servants or farmhands for the boys. Through that connection with Wreck Bay Aboriginal Community, all us kids, those older children from Bomaderry Children's Home, they married in with a lot of the local mob around the local area, you know, because some of them just couldn’t find to fit in back in their own Country, and that, where they was from. But they built that bridge between and felt like around the South Coast and Bomaderry and that, that was their home that they only knew. And they got to know the local mob and that, and they married in. There’s several generations now from that.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

You've spoken about Bomaderry Children's Home. And, we also have in the collection the voice of Herb Simms, who was taken from his family at the age of three and placed at Bomaderry. In 1935, he was then taken to Kinchela Boys' Home in Kempsey, a place he found to be far harsher. Let's hear him. 

Herb Simms: 

We were in there, not realising when we went into Kinchela what we were going to. Being in the Home, it was regimental, it was an institution and at the time in 1935, the manager at the time was somebody who was a dictatorial person, he was an aggressive person, and to the extent that, in my first couple of years of being in the Home, there was an investigation carried out to the manager's conduct of the treatment of the children. And as a result of that he was transferred to Cummeragunja to be put out of the road. Because I think there is a difference between a home where you're cared for, as an institution where you're just pushed around from pillar to post or what. And in going in, one of the interesting things of—there was a practice more than a policy at the boys' home, because we came from all over New South Wales. There was a thing that the children's hair was taken off straight away. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Children arriving at Kinchela, having their hair cut off immediately. Theresa, you have a deeper understanding of that place and of what boys who were sent there experienced. 

Theresa Ardler: 

Yeah, Uncle Herbie, he was my great-grandmother's first cousin. So with the Simms line again from La Perouse and then Uncle Sonny Simms and that’s his son and Aunty Barb Simms and that. And they were taken to Bomaderry Children’s Home. And when you look at Kinchela Boys' Home, they wasn't allowed to speak their names. They was only called out as a number. And their heads were shaved. They wasn’t allowed to speak their name ever again. It was actually drilled into them like a military base, you know. Kinchela Boys' Home was horrific, you know, because it was, some of them went from there…Well, Uncle Herbie you know from Bomaderry Children’s Home right up to Kinchela Boys Home in Kempsey.  I had a few Uncles and that that went to Kinchela Boys Home. They were treated that badly the boys, you know. And they were sexually abused badly. And they only, I think, a year ago or two years ago, they found new graves of boys that…skeletal remains of young children that was buried and you know, and they’re still trying to find their DNA and stuff on whose family’s they belong to.  

The worst thing about Kinchela Boys' Home was that when it closed down eventually, they actually opened it as a drug and alcohol place for recovery. So, when you think about, you know, those young boys that were taken from their families and their communities up to Kinchela Boys Home as a child, and because of their traumatisation in regards to what they went through and psychologically damaged, a lot of them went to alcohol to sort of ease that pain, you know...and, when you look at that those same boys as young men, they were sent back to Kinchela Boys Home. Which it wasn’t a boys home anymore, it was a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre, so in a way they had a double impact of psychological problems. Being sent back there where it all started. Yeah. It’s just horrific when you think about it.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

It is. And I want to acknowledge the extraordinary courage of people like Herb Simms, who told their stories as part of the National Library's Bringing Them Home Oral History Project. Over 300 people came forward to bear witness to what they had lived through. And I think it was one of the most important oral history projects that has ever been conducted, due to their courage. And thank you, Theresa, for being willing to speak about this too. It is not always the easiest subject to revisit. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Through all of this history, from the moment of contact, through the era of missions and stolen wages, stolen land, stolen children runs a constant thread of political activism and resistance by First Nations peoples.  

And one of the defining moments of the twentieth century for First Nations Australians was the 1967 referendum, which enabled Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to be counted in the Census and gave the Commonwealth power to make laws for them. There were some extraordinary people involved in that campaign. Joe McGinness, who was born in 1924 and was taken from his mother at the age of five after the death of his father, is one. He served in Borneo during the Second World War and was president of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), the peak body to campaign for Indigenous rights from 1961 to 1977. When asked about his long involvement in the campaign for rights for First Nations people, he was very modest about his motivations:  

Joe McGinness: 

My involvement in Aboriginal Affairs is just what I've always considered to be human reaction, you know? Once you're convinced something's wrong, even at domestic level, you go and do something about it, don’t you? 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Dulcie Flower is a Miri woman of the Meriam Nation from the Torres Strait Islands and an extraordinary woman. Born in Cairns in 1938, she has been a nurse, an activist, was deeply involved in the 1967 referendum campaign, and was one of the founders and a key figure of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service. When she reflects on the 1967 Referendum, she says: 

Dulcie Flower: 

We didn't think about changing the world. We just had to have the...we just had to have people, the Aboriginal people, the First People, recognised as people in this country. Because it came out, as you know, that visitors—just overnight visitors—were counted in a census. You know, they knew the number of cattle and sheep and goodness knows what, and councils...But nobody knew how many Aboriginal people there really were. There were estimates. Because they were never…they were never included in a census. But more important than that: because they weren't citizens, they weren't entitled to any of the Commonwealth services that were available like child endowment, like pensions, access to houses, access to jobs, access to proper legal representation. There were all these state acts defining Aboriginal people. Queensland had the most rotten, I think, because you know how they all worked, a lot of people worked on farms, and money was paid back into the missions. Then government took control of the areas. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The 1967 referendum was a major moment. More than 90 per cent of Australians voted yes, and for many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people it represented a long-overdue recognition of rights. But constitutional and legal change did not immediately erase the inequalities that many First Nations families continued to face. 

Therese Adler: 

Yes. When you think about the overall history of Australia and how it unfolded from colonisation right up to now, Indigenous Australians have always suffered the most. Yeah, you know with the Stolen Wages for example, you know. And the lost wages that wasn’t even paid to them. My mother was one of those. I remember my mum telling me stories that when she was at La Perouse, living there on the mission, and she’d go and collect boys. And there was another Aboriginal lady, but I forget her name, but there was always two of them that went together. They’d actually go right down to Victoria, Swan Hill, to pick up children that was very ill, Aboriginal children only, and bring them to Sydney to the hospitals because what my mum said was, they wouldn't take Aboriginal children in Victoria into their hospitals. So they had to bring them up to Central Station and take them to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Glebe there. That was the only hospital they would take them to. And it wasn’t far from Central Station anyway. And they’d be there for a week or so. But the thing was, you know, my mum and the other lady, they would go and get from you know, the op shops and stuff like that, children's clothes and that, and even shoes and things, and they’d wash the clothes for the kids because the first few kids they picked up, they didn’t have, they wasn’t clean, they didn’t have no clothes, nothing. And they were starving. No food, because their families couldn’t provide that because they wasn't working at that particular time and, in the ‘40s and that, and ’50s they were struggling, and the ‘60s. So, my mum and her friend, they’d always get children’s clothes. They’d get like coupons because they never really got paid. They only got like rations for the pay. They’d make sure that they…my mum would have, they’d have a basket each of...they’d make sandwiches or have a lot of fruit and cakes and things like that. My nan used to…she was a good cake-maker. And she’d always make little scones, and all that, for the kids. And they’d last, you know. And so they had something to eat and not starving. Because, you know to catch the train from Swan Hill, all the way up to Sydney, that took about two days or so or nearly three days on a train and that’s what they had to do to get by. They worked so hard but to lose their pay, you know, and they...they thought they was getting everything. I remember my mum saying you know. She actually died before she could get the rest of her funds. Which I…it came to me. So I received my mother’s stolen wages.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The 1967 referendum counted Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people but it did not give them a say. That question, a voice, would take another half century to reach a national vote. In 2023, Australians were asked to enshrine a First Nations Voice to Parliament in the Constitution, a proposal that emerged from years of First Nations-led dialogue and was given its most powerful expression in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Professor Megan Davis, a Cobble Cobble woman and constitutional law scholar, was at the centre of that process from the beginning. Here, she speaks to the deep history that made the Uluru Statement from the Heart not just a political document, but a declaration of continuous presence and sovereignty. 

Professor Megan Davis: 

This is our story. Our First Nations are extraordinarily diverse cultures living in an astounding array of environments, multilingual across many hundreds of languages and dialects. The continent was occupied by our people and the footprints of our ancestors traverse the entire landscape. Our songlines covered vast distances, uniting people in shared stories and religion. The entire land and seascape is named and the cultural memory of our old people is written here. This rich diversity of our origins was eventually ruptured by colonisation, violent dispossession and the struggle to survive a relentless inhumanity. This has marked our common history. The First Nations regional dialogues on constitutional reform bore witness to our shared stories. All stories start with our lore. The lore. 

Theresa Adler: 

When I first heard that, it was like a breath of fresh air that hit us like a cyclone. You know, when the referendum wasn’t approved, you know, it actually broke a lot of First Nations hearts...working up to it, you know, and yeah, when you look at the Australian Capital Territory, they had the most votes out of all territories and states. I honestly say was because of my community, where I grew up, the Wreck Bay Aboriginal Fishing Community, which is in the Jervis Bay Territory, which, we come under the ACT. And, you know, we had the largest votes in that. And we are a very political community, always. And you know, I think a lot of First Nations communities are political, people say. But when I say political, it means we are fighters. Fighters for our rights, of the past wrongs and making the future right. And I think that’s very important. It’s paramount in regards to recognising First Nations knowledge and cultural obligations, forevermore. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

What comes through in everything that we've heard today, is an extraordinary combination of struggle, survival and the determination to achieve full self-determination. And what we've heard today is just a very small part of the First Nations voices who are such an important part of the National Library of Australia’s oral history collection but our continent’s history. And I want to close with one last voice from the collection. Ruby Langford Ginibi was a Bundjalung woman, a wonderful writer and storyteller. 

Ruby Langford Ginibi: 

What makes me the most proud? That my people are survivors since time immemorial and we're still here. 

Therese Adler: 

Oh, so powerful, indeed. Yes. It puts a big smile on my heart and my face, most definitely. We are forever, you know, First Nations people in this country. We are strong survivors and we keep at it until we get a good result. You know, it might not happen right away. Maybe be over years. But we still continue and we thrive on making it happen for the generations to come. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Theresa, it has been an absolute privilege to have you join us today. Thank you so much for your time, your generosity and for sharing such profound reflections on these stories and on your own family's extraordinary history. 

Therese Adler: 

And thank you very much. It has been a great honour to actually be a part of this history.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

You’ve been listening to the National Library of Australia’s The Memory Tapes. We are deeply grateful to Theresa Ardler for joining us for today’s episode and to the First Nations individuals and communities who shared their stories and to those have given us permission to hear them. 

This has been a National Library of Australia production. I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson. Thank you for listening. 

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander listeners who would like to talk or text with someone can access free, confidential, culturally-safe support through 13YARN, 24 hours of the day, seven days a week. That number again is 13 92 76. 

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

Included in this episode are excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection:

• Gladys Ardler interviewed by Catherine Johnson 

  Born in Sydney, Ardler speaks of her family background, the environment and local community when she was young, her memories of life during the Depression, her Aboriginal mother, self-sufficiency and selling crafts, leaving school at 12, her employment in a factory, her domestic employment, work and conditions, living in a house on the mission, married lifestyle, sex education, abortions, having and raising her children, Aboriginal traditions, local fishing and the stories passed down through her family about Captain Cook's landing. 

• Japarta Maurie Ryan interviewed by Glenys Dimond 

  Ryan speaks about his father and his grandfather Vincent Lingiari, Gurindji leader. Ryan was removed at the age of 4 years by Patrol Officer Ted Evans. He was placed at Seaview cottage on Croker Island, N.T. and was cared for by Una Clarke, whom he praises for her care. In 1956, he was transferred to Lantara Children's Home, Magill, S.A. A couple eventually fostered him and he still maintains a loving relationship with them. In 1963, he became the first Aboriginal student at Westminster College, Adelaide before being conscripted into the Army for 3 years from 1966. In 1981, he won the seat of Victoria River Downs for the Democrats and he is now the Chairperson of the Northern Territory Stolen Generation Corporation. Ryan gives his views on the issues of an official apology and reparations. 

• Herb Simms interviewed by John Maynard 

  Simms speaks about being removed from his family at the age of 3 and being placed at Bomaderry Children's Home, where he feels the children were well cared for. In 1935, he was transferred to Kinchela Boys' Home, and he describes harsher conditions at this institution. In 1942, Simms went to work on a poultry farm and the family there assisted him to get an apprenticeship as a mechanic. He worked as a motor mechanic from 1945 until 1965, when he went to work at the Aborigines Welfare Board. He returned to Kinchela Boys' Home as the manager for three years until its closure in 1970. Simms expresses his opinions on Reconciliation and the issue of compensation to separated children. 

• Joe McGinness interviewed by Lloyd Hollingsworth 

  McGinness was removed from his mother at the age of 5 after the death of his father. He was placed at Kahlin Compound, Darwin and remained there until 1924 when he was released into the care of his sister and her husband. He speaks about his political activism for Indigenous rights in the Northern Territory and Queensland and about his involvement with the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. McGinness also talks about his friendship with Xavier Herbert and about the 1967 referendum. 

• Dulcie Flower interviewed by Odette Best 

  Dulcie Flower, a Miri woman from the Mer Islands, is a Member of the Order of Australia and the 2024 recipient of the NAIDOC Lifetime Achievement Award. She was significantly involved in the 1967 Referendum and the establishment of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service. In this oral history she reflects on her family’s history, attending school in Woree and Cairns, growing up with limited access to western medicine, her lifelong passion for helping people, training as a nurse in Cairns, her experiences of racism within hospitals and the medical field, training as a midwife in Sydney and completing her dual qualification in 1961. She discusses her involvement with the Aborigines Progressive Association (APA) in 1962, learning about and getting involved in Aboriginal Rights activism, campaigning for the 1967 Referendum, her fellow campaigners including Faith Bandler, Joseph McGinness and Isabel Ferguson, representing APA at the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), what the Referendum would mean for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders and the extensive work done after the Referendum to enact change, the significant impact of the work done by Aboriginal nurses and midwives, the removal of the Welfare Act, the cessation of the APA and FCAATSI, William Wentworth, the establishment of the Aboriginal Legal Service, the establishment of the Redfern Aboriginal Medical Service, working with Fred Hollows and her experiences of government surveillance. 

• The Uluru Statement from the Heart and the referendum to enshrine an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice in the Australian Constitution : the 2022 Kenneth Myer lecture presented by Professor Megan Davis at the National Library of Australia on 28 October 2022. 

  Professor Megan Davis, a proud Cobblecobble woman, is the director of the UNSW Indigenous Law Centre, Pro-Vice-Chancellor Indigenous at UNSW, holds the Balnaves Chair in Constitutional Law and was a member of the expert panel on the recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Constitution, the work of which informed the Referendum Council for the 2023 Voice to Parliament Referendum. In this lecture she discusses her childhood in Queensland and the impact that art has had on her life, the difficulties of campaigning for the Uluru Statement from the Heart during national lockdown and tells the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander story of Australia that was produced from the Dialogues that culminated in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. 

• Ruby Langford Ginibi interviewed by Frank Heimans 

  Ruby Langford Ginibi is a Bundjalung author best known for her Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Human Rights Award for Literature winning Don’t Take Your Love to Town. In this oral history she speaks of the tribal history of the Bundjalung people, her grandparents, her early life at Box Ridge Aboriginal Mission, how she was protected from being removed by the Aborigines Protection Board, how her father took her and her sister into the bush to transmit cultural knowledge of her people, supporting her eight children as a single parent, the racial discrimination she experienced, how she came to write her first book in 1984, the circumstances which lead to the death of her child from a drug overdose and her own drinking problems, why she wrote her book Haunted by the Past, her views on human rights in Australia and her fear for her son during his incarceration owing to the high incidence of Aboriginal death in custody. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson. This episode includes descriptions of natural disasters, injury and loss of life, which some listeners may find distressing. Listener discretion is advised. 

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

This is The National Library of Australia’s The Memory Tapes and I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson. In this series, we explore the people and moments that shaped Australia, through the voices of those who were there. In this episode, we will hear from people who lived through some of Australia's most devastating natural disasters. There will be stories of loss and upheaval, but also of resilience, care and determination. These are the voices of people who survived the unthinkable and continue to shape how Australia understands disaster, recovery and resilience today. 

Dr Ella Stack: 

It is now January the 4th, and some days have passed since that fateful Christmas morning when Cyclone Tracy reduced the beautiful city of Darwin to ruins. You have asked me to compile recordings of the people of Darwin who suffered. I suppose one could record the stories of everybody that was in the town that night, but I have just chosen a few. Apart from my personal loss—losing my home, my surgery, and many things that I treasured—we suffered no loss of life, no injuries whatsoever. We are staying on here to rebuild the city. I would now like to introduce some of the people of Darwin who will tell us what befell them between the hours of about midnight and 6am on Christmas morning, 1974. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

That was Dr Ella Stack. In December 1974, she was a GP and an alderman in Darwin. She moved to the city in the early 1960s and opened one of its first private medical practices. In the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy, she treated the injured and—almost unbelievably in the midst of everything—recorded invaluable survivor memories as history unfolded around her. 

Cyclone Tracy, a category four cyclone, struck Darwin in the early hours of Christmas morning, 1974, destroying more than 70 per cent of buildings. 90 per cent of homes were uninhabitable. Tens of thousands of people were suddenly homeless. Communications failed, the Darwin Hospital was damaged, and almost every form of relief collapsed. 

Dr Ella Stack later became Darwin’s Lord Mayor, but in December 1974 and January 1975, she provided medical aid, and recorded people’s experiences immediately after the cyclone. Her recordings were conducted with great compassion, therapeutic training and understanding. She spoke only with people she knew and who expressed a willingness to record their experiences. Over fifty years later, her recordings may be the best way we can understand how Cyclone Tracy was experienced.  

Cyclone Tracy was incredibly destructive. It was also a turning point in how Australia prepared for and responded to natural disasters. Since 1974, Australia has contended with many other natural disasters. Whether these have been cyclones, floods, bushfires or earthquakes, they have reshaped and challenged many Australian communities. Today we will also hear some recordings from recent events such as the 2011 Queensland Floods and the 2020–2021 Black Summer Bushfires.  

Most Darwin residents could not have conceived what lay ahead on Christmas Eve 1974. But there were some exceptions.  

Ken Stagg, an Aboriginal teenager was aged fifteen in 1974 and was a member of the Stolen Generations who had spent his childhood in the Retta Dixon Home. On one 1974 night, he booked a room in a Darwin men’s boarding house.  

Ken Stagg: 

Didn't even get to sleep there one night. The first night I slept in there, this alarm bell rang in my head really loud. And I woke up terrified and screaming and everything like that. And took off out the door, down the bottom of the stairs, dog bit me on the ankle and I raced up to the main road and walked back to Nightcliff where my auntie and that was. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Returning to the hostel the next day to get the belongings he'd left there. Ken was adamant that he would not return. 

Ken Stagg: 

I said, no, I don't want to. What it was, it was a warning to not sleep there because there was a cyclone coming, Cyclone Tracy. That house was untouched except for where my bed was. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

There was a big hole in the wall and Ken believes if he had slept on that bed the night of Cyclone Tracy, he would have been killed.  

Peter Bate, an aviation forecaster, aged 26 at the time, also had concerns about the looming cyclone. He had started working at the Darwin office of the Bureau of Meteorology in 1974 after five months of travel across Europe with his wife Helen. He attended a Bureau of Meteorology party on Christmas Eve 1974. Here, he saw indications that things were not right but felt largely alone in these concerns. He believes people were relaxed for two reasons. 

Peter Bate: 

One was the fact that it was Christmas Eve, and everyone was in party mode. But the other reason was that Tracy followed Cyclone Selma, which had approached from a fairly similar direction, only about three weeks earlier, which is a fairly unusual occurrence, but not unknown. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Cyclone Selma had developed offshore in early December and initial predictions that it would have a serious impact were unrealised. Many thought Cyclone Tracy would pass by in a similar way. Yet, a quiet unease still grew for some, including Dr Ella Stack. 

Dr Ella Stack: 

That afternoon I started to get apprehensive. They were warning us and warning us, and the cyclone would be over Darwin at five in the morning. And so, it was a very funny Christmas Eve and nobody was relaxed. I'd gone to the hospital earlier to do a delivery in the middle of a sort of Christmas tea we were having with friends. I came back to the family and said, “Well, let's all, let's all have our Christmas presents now.” So, we sat upstairs in the lounge room and exchanged Christmas presents. And then they all went down to bed. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Dr Stack was then called back to the hospital. She performed a delivery on a young woman and left the labour ward around 10 minutes to midnight. She almost stayed later when a patient in the early stages of labour arrived, but they assured her they were comfortable being treated by another doctor.  

Dr Ella Stack: 

And I then was a bit scared. I thought, 'I don't know how I'm going to get home.' The wind was rising and howling. It was really a frightening night. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

By now, Peter Bate had returned home from the Bureau of Meteorology party to Helen, his pregnant wife. Cyclone Tracy was still on his mind. He headed to the airport, where the radar unit was, to try and find out more. 

Peter Bate: 

So I thought, I'll have a good look at the radar screens. And that was when I first began to get worried. I saw that image on the radar. It was a really well-organised picture on the radar. When you looked at it, you knew this was a fairly intense cyclone. 

News Reporter: 

Batten down your house. Remain calm and stay inside. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

After making it to home, Dr Ella Stack found two of her children in the top guest bedroom. She insisted they move downstairs. Tom, her husband, had fallen asleep but she felt unable to rest.  

Dr Ella Stack:

I found my husband was asleep. I couldn't sleep. You have dreadful noises and I'm listening to the ABC, all the electric lights off at this stage. I've got a little torch, a strong medical torch, and I had this going. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

As the noise continued, Ella decided to wake Tom up.  

Dr Ella Stack: 

He got out of bed and, just within a few minutes of getting out of his bed, the next-door house disintegrated. And a great big bearer, a wooden bearer, oh, about 3x8 or one of those big thick bits of wood came through the double wall at the end of our bedroom and right into the pillow of Tom's bed. So, if I hadn't gone home that night, I perhaps wouldn't have had two children or a husband. I'd just woken him up and got him out of bed just minutes before this happened. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Realising by now their extraordinarily dangerous situation, Ella gathered the children. They were all awake and soaking wet, just like she and her husband Tom. Everyone took refuge in a child’s bedrooms, where they all lay on the floor. They stayed there for… 

Dr Ella Stack: 

The next unspeakable six hours. Oh, you can't describe it? How can you describe it? Six hours of terror, you can't. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The volume of noise of the cyclone was horrifying. Yet it was even worse when the noise stopped.  

Dr Ella Stack: 

So, in the morning, as the thing died down, we were right in the eye of the cyclone. There was a dead space for about ten minutes. We were all wishing it was over, but Tom said, 'No, it's not.' And when the second half of the cyclone came, it made the first half look like a tea party. It was ten times worse. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Peter and Helen Bate were trying to sleep at their house in the cyclone’s early stages. But any pretence at resting came to a rapid end when a huge tree came crashing down and hit the end wall of their house.  

Peter Bate: 

I've thought about this before and the best place to shelter inside a house was where the dimensions are the smallest. So, it's either the toilet, the bathroom, or, if you've got a narrow hallway. In the hallway, we decided we'd stand in the hallway and that went down the middle of the house. We took the mattresses off the beds for padding. And we'd filled up our bath with water, which is what you did, what you still do. Just for an emergency water supply should you need it. And hope for the best. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

When Tracy struck, Peter Bate found unlikely support. He’d never considered himself a cat person, but in the days before Cyclone Tracy, he and Helen had adopted one, and it became an unexpected source of comfort.  

Peter Bate: 

In this hallway, we were basically swapping the cat all night, because when you're cradling the cat, you feel a little bit more secure. You know, “It must be getting heavy. You don't want to hold it all night.” “Aw okay, you've can have it for a while. I'll take a..I'll hand it back.” The cat's name was Misery. Anyway, we just stayed in the hallway. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Peter and Helen Bate spent the night hearing the roaring wind and flying debris and seeing frequent lightning flashes. Once dawn broke, Peter went outside. What he—and all residents of Darwin—saw that morning was unfathomable. 

Peter Bate: 

In most cases, your neighbour's house wasn't there either when you went out in the morning. That included us. It was badly smashed up as well. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

That morning, Dr Stack realised how fortunate it was she had moved her children from the top bedroom the previous evening as that room was no longer there.  

Dr Ella Stack: 

So we opened up below this and looked out, and our beautiful house just was no more, and all our neighbours' lovely houses were all gone. Just things flapping in the breezes, and trees down, no leaves, and the odd blanket being torn from what was left of a tree, and all this sort of thing. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

She and Tom found food was an issue. There was no water either until she improvised a solution with old tin coffee percolator.   

Dr Ella Stack: 

So that's my story. That we were fortunate. Nothing happened to us. It was all the people who lost a member of the family or were maimed, they were the ones that I feel were the true victims of the cyclone, really, and always will be. 

News Reporter: 

Check your transistor radio and spare batteries. Keep tuned to radio or television news broadcasts. 

Dr Ella Stack: 

And Cyclone Tracy was as violently destructive as that. It was not an ordinary cyclone. Apparently, it reached the lowest barometric pressure ever recorded of any cyclone ever. In fact, it was so small, so intense, and moved so slowly that it did the destruction that it did. Usually they're going at a much greater speed when they crossed the coast and they'd go in a straight line. Apparently this one didn't. And going at 4 kilometres an hour, I think was its speed, which gives it plenty of time to do all it wanted to do. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The Bureau confirmed Tracy had reached wind speeds of least 217 kilometres an hour before the measuring instrument was destroyed by debris. Sixty-six people were killed and 145 people were seriously injured. What faced survivors in Darwin—and what Australia would see—was total devastation. 41,000 people were left homeless. There was chaos. Communication to the outside world was severely restricted because of cyclone damage. Conveying the full extent of what had happened in Darwin to the rest of Australia took time because of this.  

News Reporter: 

For a few days they had no safe water, no certain food, few possessions except for the clothes they were wearing. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In these circumstances, Ella was grateful she was a doctor, there and could help.  

Dr Ella Stack: 

And I drove the car up to the hospital to look at my patients and to offer my services…for, you know, what I could do. So, they gave me the job of running the Darwin High School Medical Centre. So, I spent the next two weeks up there, looking after all the minor injuries, stitching them up and cleaning wounds. And after three or four days, of course, we had the diarrhoea, treating diarrhoea. Giving injections and so on. And this was very good, that I had all this to do. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

For Dr Stack, saving lives in those first chaotic hours was just the beginning of an unprecedented disaster response. 

Dr Ella Stack: 

We didn't know which day was what. There were no Mondays, Tuesdays, Saturdays, Sundays. It was day one, day two, day three, day four. It went on like this till it was day 35. It wasn't until then we returned to the normal weekly days of, you know, weekends off. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

While Ella treated the injured inside Darwin High School, outside power was gone. Water was uncertain. Entire suburbs were uninhabitable. Because of the lack of safe drinking water, no electricity and no sanitation, including working toilets, there was a very a high risk of disease outbreaks. This was compounded by the destruction of a sewerage treatment plant. There was very little shelter due to the destruction of almost all houses and buildings. 

The Australian Defence Force embarked upon the largest peace-time rescue and relief operation in Australian history on Christmas Day 1974. The Air Force plane carrying retired Major General Alan Stretton, who led relief efforts as head of the National Disasters Organisation, arrived at 10:20pm to a dark Darwin where no runway lights or navigational aids worked. Len Wilmington, an RAAF Air Traffic Controller, arrived right after the cyclone.  

Len Wilmington: 

And we arrived in Darwin late in the afternoon and my first impression was, where has Darwin gone? It was literally flattened. The second impression was the reflection from millions of sheets of roofing iron in the late afternoon sun.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Len Wilmington’s married quarters had been cyclone-proofed.  

Len Wilmington:  

The roof was missing of the lounge room and the dining room and the kitchen and the bathroom. But the roof was still over, over the bedroom. So, I went to our bedroom. I took the nails out of the cupboard that I'd nailed it shut. I took out some fresh uniforms. I reported to the control tower and didn't leave it for six days, until the evacuation was over. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The ADF managed an unthinkable process—the evacuation of Darwin.  By 31 December, a total of 35,362 people, three-quarters of the entire population, had been evacuated to other cities. Just under 16,000 people had been evacuated in civilian aircrafts, 9,678 people in military aircrafts, and 9,734 people by road. Over the next six months, a permit system regulated all movement in and out of Darwin.  

Roland Chin, fourteen years of age at in 1974, remembers cleaning up the family store and hearing that children and women needed to evacuate within two days. 

Roland Chin: 

The men had to stay behind to help clean up Darwin. So, we were evacuated, I think, on the third day and we were on a jumbo where you could only, you couldn't take suitcases, you could only just take your personal effects. Ah, that, on that flight we actually broke the record of most persons on a jumbo. Because you couldn't carry a lot of luggage. And that record, that record was broken again. The reason why they wanted to evacuate the children and women was they were worried about cholera and typhoid and all of that because the water supply was limited. We actually had showers by going to the main water line and undoing some of the main taps, so if you didn't have a shower, you just had some gushing out and you stood underneath it. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Experiences of evacuation and time away from Darwin could vary but Darwina Fong, who had been evacuated with a pelvis fractured in two places, remembers recovering in a Sydney Hospital where… 

Darwina Fong:

And soon as they heard you were Darwin, you know, cyclone, everyone was so kind.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

As the military managed the process of evacuation, some medicos arrived in Darwin to help the few remaining doctors. Dr O’Shea, from Queensland, had a conversation with Dr Ella Stack about the importance of recording the cyclone experiences of those who had suffered the “the utmost in experience”. She wondered how she would ever find a recorder and tapes, given that Darwin was without shops, banks, power or money. A bush nurse let her know that the Health Department officers in central Darwin had some small recorders and tapes that they used on trips to Aboriginal communities. Together, they searched the building, whenever workloads and daylight permitted. Finally, they found a small battery-powered recorder and used tapes. 

Over the fortnight following Cyclone Tracy, Dr Stack recorded the stories of fourteen people, as well as a women’s meeting held in her backyard and a Darwin Memorial Service. As part of her conversations, she became aware that Father Collins had been recording his Christmas Eve service when the Cyclone intensified. He allowed her to copy that recording. [Playback of the recording of the choir singing and the crashing cyclone sounds in the background.] 

Father Collins: 

It's almost unbelievable. Didn’t think it's possible that a cyclone could be so loud? That noise you can hear, the wind. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The cyclone itself almost drowned out Father Collins words. But the recording captures Cyclone Tracy’s destructive power. Among the people recorded in the two weeks after Cyclone Tracy was James Muir, then 31 years of age, working at the Attorney General’s Department. He told Dr Stack what happened to his wife Christine and his father-in-law Ray. Between three and four in the morning, the louvers in their living room were smashed. James attempted to barricade the door.  

James Muir: 

Moments pass and then I can feel our house swelling and the living room was the first to go. The roof lifted. It flew away. And where we were, I thought we would be safe for a while. You couldn't get to the bathroom. And about five o'clock, things started getting really bad. Our roof lifted. And I grabbed for Christine and Ray and tried to take them to the floor. Ray had been thrown out of my arm and into the yard. And at that time, the wall had came down on Christine and pinned her to the floor and we were hanging over the floor and then battling the floor in mid-air. But just then there was a bit of a lull for about a minute or so, which gave me time to stand and lift the wall off her. Ray, who'd been thrown in the yard, gave us notice that he was alright and he went under the house. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

James’ account was one of many that revealed how violently families could be physically torn apart as homes collapsed around them. The next morning, he checked on his neighbours. Thankfully, they had survived. For James Muir and his family though, the losses were devastating. He told Dr Stack… 

James Muir: 

The morning came and I feared for the worst for my family because of the house they were living in was one of the original houses at Fannie Bay, a suburb of Darwin and my mother, I know she received a fractured jaw, my sister Isabelle and her baby, a broken arm each and Isabelle’s broke her hip. Dad, through inquiries, we found that he was struck by the debris across the forehead and that made a big wound and he died instantly, so I believe. Mother was flown to Brisbane that morning. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

This is a very raw and incredibly moving account of the true cost of Cyclone Tracy. Dr Stack understood that these important accounts of a national tragedy needed to be preserved. On 26 January 1977, The Canberra Times reported that she had sent her “recordings made during Cyclone Tracy and in the fortnight after it devastated Darwin” to the National Library of Australia. By doing this, she ensured future generations would continue to know of Darwin’s pain and strength through the voices of those most impacted.  

In 1979, Dr Stack was elected Lord Mayor of Darwin. She helped lead the rebuilding of Darwin, which was achieved within five years, and was instrumental in pressing the federal government to fund the Darwin Reconstruction Commission at a time when some politicians and bureaucrats argued that Darwin should not be reconstructed as a city.  

Yet Cyclone Tracy did prompt reforms, changes and new knowledge. Emergency Management Australia—set up after the devastating 1974 Brisbane floods—made sure it deployed learnings from Cyclone Tracy to inform future disaster management. Inadequate building codes in the Northern Territory were improved and these, in turn, influenced national construction codes. The country started to appreciate that the trauma natural disasters cause are not only physical, but psychological, something that is acknowledged to a much greater extent today. We also have a great ability to predict cyclone patterns—though nature can still surprise us.  

The endurance and vibrancy of Darwin today is a testimony to the strength, courage and determination of its people, including Dr Ella Stack, who sadly passed away in 2023. So many residents lived through one of the worst experiences imaginable and still continued to call Darwin home. After Cyclone Tracy, Darwin had to find a way to live with what happened and to honour loss, but look to the future also. A nation needed to understand that natural disasters stay with you for a lifetime. This wasn’t properly appreciated in 1974 but it’s better understood now, in part due to Cyclone Tracy.  

Australia is still experiencing a wide variety of natural disasters. In 2011, Queensland faced catastrophic flooding. In 2019 and 2020, bushfires burned through Australia’s southeast. The questions provoked by Cyclone Tracy—how to prepare, how to remember, how to draw strength and how to honour voices of experience after disasters remain as relevant today as ever. 

News Reporter: 

The boat flips and is sucked underwater, it and the man, carried by the raging water from *fades out* 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In January 2011, thirty-seven years after Cyclone Tracy, Queensland was inundated by catastrophic flooding. By the 9th of January, two-thirds of the state was underwater. Thirty-three people lost their lives. Tens of thousands of homes were inundated. Again, Australian asked familiar questions: How do we survive this? How do we rebuild? How do we remember? Anna Bligh was Queensland Premier at the time of the floods.  

Anna Bligh: 

We had never seen anything like this—the size, the scale and also just how long the event took to unfold fully. People will all remember, I think, the shocking inland tsunami that swept through Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley. When a capital city floods and is deserted, it’s quite a sobering experience and that week in particular, I think, is what will always stand out in people’s minds. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In Dr Stack’s recordings, the cyclone aftermath included moments of confusion and fear, but also extraordinary cooperation, endurance and bravery. The Queensland floods revealed that same quality. Disasters separate families, destroy homes and reshape cities. But people refuse to let those memories disappear. Almost forty years after Dr Stack recorded the aftermath of Cyclone Tracy, Queenslanders also documented their experiences and thousands of ordinary people tried to hold on. Maria Kravchenko was 80 years of age at the time of the Queensland floods. She recalls the impact of the natural disaster, but also the kindness.  

Maria Kravchenko: 

The water was coming up this street. Down that way. It was coming up from the river and because the rest of Yeronga down there was flooded, they cut the electricity. So, we were without electricity for a week so I had to go stay with my niece because I had no light, no refrigeration, nothing. But one of the men here stayed and sort of kept contact saying you know, you can come home now because we have electricity. So, they are all very nice here in that respect. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Just as Dr Stack recorded early memories of Cyclone Tracy, communities continue to document what they’ve lived through. Between December 2019 and January 2020, Australia’s devasting Black Summer bushfires reached their horrifying apex during the country’s hottest and driest recorded year. More than 24 million hectares were burnt and 33 people were killed. The deadliest bushfire was the Badja Forest Road fire. Ronnie Ayliffe, an artist born, raised and still living in the small New South Wales town of Cobargo, identified oral histories and a Resilience Centre as ways of giving voice to bushfire-affected communities.  

Ronnie Ayliffe: 

People’s stories matter and capturing them and letting people tell their stories, that matters. And sometimes you only get knowledge by giving voice to people who aren't often heard. And if I wanted to capture the story of the Badja Forest Road fire for the Resilience Centre, this was the best way I could figure out how we could do it, and give healing at the same time for the community. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Ronnie Ayliffe also recognised that the people who had lived through the Badja Forest Road fire were able to share valuable bushfire knowledge at a time when climate change increases their likely duration and intensity.  

Ronnie Ayliffe: 

The fact that this fire was not like other fires, but inside that is a story that it will be like other fires. This is what fires will look like into the future, in a future that has climate change. This is what you will face. It won't be based on the things that we've known in the past. We have the stories here of what you're going to see into the future. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Across decades, Australians experience natural disasters not only as they strike, but in their long aftermath. Oral histories, whether collected on a tape recorder found in an abandoned office in the aftermath of a terrifying cyclone, or on recording equipment with oral historians working with the National Library of Australia, become part of how communities heal, how governments learn, and how future Australians understand what it is to live through these events. Dr Stack and all those who shared stories of survival, solidarity and loss with her, and those who today share experiences of living through natural disasters give us a gift—a greater understanding of what it means to live through the inconceivable. 

Every recording of experiences of natural disasters reminds us that voices of experience matter. There is a unique courage in describing and sharing your experience of unthinkable events and personal stories of grief and loss to help others. Courage requires thinking about what resilience and recovery mean and acknowledging that these might be lifelong processes. Hearing these recordings might just give us the knowledge and the courage needed if we ever find ourselves in an unthinkable situation. They might also give us a greater appreciation of what it truly means to survive and to live after a natural disaster.  

You’ve been listening to the National Library of Australia’s The Memory Tapes. I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson. Thank you to the National Library of Australia and thank you also to all the courageous people who have shared their experiences of living through a natural disaster to help others.   

If their voices spoke to you, share them. Tell someone about the stories of Cyclone Tracy, the Queensland floods, and the Black Summer bushfires—the loss, courage, and knowledge that shapes how Australians understands disaster and recovery. 

Follow us, and if you can, leave a review. It helps these stories reach more listeners, and it helps carry forward the voices of the people who lived through these events. 

This has been a National Library of Australia production.

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

Included in this episode are excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection:

• Ella Stack interviewed Phyllipa Wyatt 

  Ella Stack, physician and Mayor of Darwin, speaks of her childhood and family background, her early days in medicine, her husband Tom Lawler and his work as an agricultural scientist in the Namoi Valley. She explains their reasons for moving to Darwin and her subsequent return to medicine. She details her general practice and her developing interest in obstetrics and gynaecology. Ella then describes the impact on her life of Cyclone Tracy, the establishment of the Cyclone Tracy Trust Fund and her election as Major of Darwin. 

• Ken Stagg interviewed by Colleen Hattersley 

  Kenneth Stagg was born 1959 in Darwin. He speaks about his grandmother and grandfather who were both removed as Indigenous children to the Beagle Bay Catholic Mission in Western Australia in the early 1900s. He describes his own removal to Retta Dixon Aborigines Inland Mission Home in Darwin at the age of 2. Following the death of his mother, Stagg was released into the care of his uncle until he was evacuated to Adelaide after Cyclone Tracy in 1974. He also discusses his working life and his efforts to trace his family and to arrange a family reunion. 

• Peter Bate interviewed by Rob Willis 

  Peter Bate speaks his profession as a meteorologist and his lifelong interest in music. He describes the days leading up to Cyclone Tracy based through his experience as a meteorologist. He then explains how he survived the cyclone with wife Helen, and the dawn of Christmas Day 1974. 

• Len Wilmington interviewed by Rob Linn 

  Len Wilmington, air traffic controller and pilot, talks about his apprenticeship with the Queensland railways and joining the RAAF as an electrician. He went to Darwin as an electrician from 1962 to 1963, where he attended an Air Traffic Control Course. He then served in most states as an Air Traffic Controller and instructed other air traffic controllers. He explains the Cyclone Tracey aftermath and the need to rebuild the air traffic control system. He described his role in assisting the evacuation of Darwin after the cyclone, moving some 80,000 people out in 6 days. 

• Roland Chin interviewed by Rob Willis and Olya Willis 

  Roland Chin is President of the Chung Wah Society – a social and sporting club for Darwin’s Chinese community based in Darwin. Roland tells of his youth in Darwin, which he and his family evacuated after Cyclone Tracy. Spending six months in Sydney, the family took a vote to return to the destroyed city, where he has remained to this day. 

• Darwina Fong interviewed by Diana Giese 

  Darwina is a member of the large and distinguished Top End family, the Chins. She married into the prominent Fong family and helped to run Darwin's soft drink factory - Darwin Aerated Waters - for 30 years. Darwina migrated from China to Australia at the age of eight or nine following Japanese attacks on China prior to World War Two. Darwina recounts her life in Darwin and then how she and her family survived Cyclone Tracy. Injured with a fractured pelvis, Darwina and her daughter were evacuated via a Hercules transport plane to Sydney’s Royal North Shore hospital. 

• Interviews with residents of Darwin after Cyclone Tracy by Dr Ella Stack 

  Dr Ella Stack recorded various interviews with residents of Darwin in the fortnight following the destruction wrought by Cyclone Tracy on Christmas Eve, 1974. Includes a recording made by Father Collins during the cyclone of the noise around him. Also includes an interview with James Muir where James describes the impacts of the Cyclone on his family. 

• Anna Bligh interviewed by Malcolm McMillan 

  Anna Bligh, is an Australian politician and the 37th Premier of Queensland from 2007 to 2012. Bligh was an Australian Labor Party member of the Legislative Assembly of Queensland seat of South Brisbane from 1995 to 2012. This oral history includes her recollections of the impact of widespread flooding in Queensland in 2011. 

• Maria Kravchenko interviewed by Elena Volkova 

  Maria is a child of Russian migrants who travelled to Australia via the far East, transiting Shanghai. Maria grew up in Nowra and then moved to Brisbane in 1939. She did not attend school until the age of seven. Religion and faith were an essential part of Maria's ordinary everyday life. The family lived far from the church, and it was difficult to attend the Sunday service. Church was the hub of the Russian community and its cultural centre. Maria explains how the community came together to support each other during the Queensland floods. 

• Ronnie Ayliffe interviewed by Scott McKinnon 

  Ronnie was born in the Bega Valley where her mother and father worked at a general store. She explains her childhood, her close relationship with her grandparents and the community of Cobargo. Ronnie explains the impact of the Badja Forest Road Fire on herself and the community.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I am Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar— Cyclone Tracy. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1964, Oodgeroo Noonuccal, a Quandamooka woman from Stradbroke Island, who was then known by the name Kath Walker, published her first book of poetry, We Are Going. This was the first book of poetry to be published by a First Nations person in Australia. 

Oodgeroo Noonuccal: 

My publishers put on a cocktail party to launch the book and discovered that there weren't any books for display. So there was a frantic picking up of phones and ringing all the other states in Australia saying, 'Hey, have you got any of We Are Going? Hold them, don't put any more out for sale. We do have to put a display on for the cocktail party.’ We managed to rescue about four dozen, I think it was, from Melbourne, who quickly packaged them up and flew them back to Brisbane so that we could go on with the cocktail party of launching the book. The whole edition of 1,500 copies of the book went in that very first week. They subsequently reprinted We Are Going seven times in as many months. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The success of We Are Going should not be considered surprising. The collection was, and still is, an extraordinary one, authored by a very talented poet. Even before We Are Going had been released, Oodgeroo Noonuccal had lived a remarkable life. As significant as her poetry was, and indeed, it was very significant, Oodgeroo Noonuccal was much more than a poet. She was an environmentalist and a former servicewoman in the Second World War. She was the mother of two sons. And she was also one of the most well-known civil rights activists of the twentieth century. 

With the release of We Are Going, she used experience and vision to create something very different to the types of Australian poetry that had been published before. She rejected the erasure of First Nations culture and history. Her work drew attention to dispossession, assimilation and the brutal cost of colonisation. With a distinctive voice, she claimed the rightful place of First Nations people and culture in this nation and explicitly wrote work that she hoped would speak to her own people. Yet, as the public reception showed, her message and her talent resonated widely.  

This is the National Library of Australia's The Memory Tapes, and I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson. In this series, we explore the people and moments that shaped Australia through the voices of those who were there. In this episode, we are looking at culture and the long and sometimes challenging, and at other times exhilarating, process by which Australia began to imagine itself on its own terms. 

Well into the second half of the twentieth century, Australian creatives looked outside of this nation for inspiration and for value. Generations of children were raised to feel the ‘cultural cringe’. They were taught that ‘real art’ was something that developed elsewhere, in distant places such as Britain and Europe. That was where art, theatre, literature and painting happened. And if you did want to pursue something creative or different, to be taken seriously, you left. And if you could, you made sure you didn't take your Australian accent with you. 

But in the aftermath of the Second World War, something very slowly started to change. It would not be quick. But eventually, a new generation of writers, artists, playwrights and photographers began insisting that this place, with its rich First Nations history, its particular light and beauty, its silences and its contradictions was not a limitation. It was the whole point. 

This shift happened because individuals, some of whom have been celebrated and others long overlooked, refused to accept that Australian culture was a pale reflection of somewhere else. It happened because Australia welcomed migrants from across the world who brought new ideas and different approaches with them. And at the centre of this transformation are questions that matter. What is a national culture? What lights the creative spark that helps someone capture a society through art? Whose stories speak for us? And why did it take a significant majority of this country far too long to see the beauty of the culture that had long existed? We will hear from a painter who transformed how this country saw its own landscape and legends, a playwright who took working-class Australian life to the world stage, a First Nations poet whose work became the moral and creative turning point of the era, and a photographer who widened the frame of who counts as Australian. Today, we trace that story. 

In the years after the Second World War, Australian creative life was stirring. Painters, in particular, were beginning to look at this continent with its unique light, its silences and its vast interior and to ask whether what they were seeing could become the basis for a genuinely unique Australian art form. Yes, there had been efforts before with painters such as those from the Heidelberg school. But it was time for something different, something that could only have come from this land, something that spoke to this generation.  

One artist who spent a considerable time thinking about this was Sidney Nolan, born in Carlton, Melbourne in 1917. He was conscripted into the Australian Army during the Second World War. Time at Wimmera in Victoria give him space to think and to paint but in 1941, after it appeared he was going to be sent overseas to fight, he went absent from the Army without leave, adopting a pseudonym and not resuming public life as Sidney Nolan until 1948. Those years immediately after the War did result in some outstanding creative outputs.  

Sidney Nolan: 

After I came out of the Army, I mean, ‘45, ‘46, I did settle down to produce a series of paintings on Ned Kelly. I'd thought about it a lot when I was in the Army, and as soon as I got out and had the time to really concentrate on painting, I remembered all these stories I'd heard from my grandfather and everything about Ned Kelly, and I wanted really to try and get some image, some Australian image that I could pour all my emotions and thoughts into, and this was Kelly, and so for two years, from ‘46 to ‘47, I really, you know, gave it everything I had. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Nolan’s Kelly paintings drew on the tradition of Australian bush legends and underdogs. They asked who we valorised as heroes, as well as who we should valorise as heroes. By 1962, when he spoke with Hazel de Berg for the National Library of Australia, Sidney Nolan expressed optimism about a growing appreciation of Australian art within this country. 

Sidney Nolan: 

And I think in Australia, that this now is probably we’re at a rather wonderful position where all this is coming together. You don't produce things out of your own compulsions to find that they fall on stony ground, it's now beginning that you're being, you're getting a response, and this of course, makes—enables you to produce more and more, make it richer and richer, and seems to me that young painters now here in Australia are just at the moment when they can kind of have full confidence that whatever they produce, honestly, will meet with…with a recognition. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Despite this optimism, Nolan made London his permanent base from around 1953 onwards and much of his subsequent career unfolded abroad. Generations of creative Australians absorbed the message, to be taken seriously, you must leave. The cultural cringe was a fact of artistic life. 

But although Sidney Nolan left Australia, he did look back. He retained his conviction that this place, with its specific, unrepeatable light and scale and its history was not a disadvantage for an artist if they were willing to look at it honestly.  

Nolan remains one of Australia’s greatest artists but he primarily built his reputation abroad. The question of whether an artist could make a life and a reputation here, in Australia, that question still needed to be resolved. 

While painters such as Nolan were re-examining the landscape and legends for inspiration, a similar pattern was unfolding on stage and it would follow the same arc. Very often, an Australian writer would create something unmistakably and proudly of this country. And then they too would leave. 

Ray Lawler was born in Melbourne in 1921. As a child, he was injured by fire and spent considerable periods of his childhood in hospital isolated from his family as a result. He left school at the age of thirteen and went on to work in factories, attending evening acting classes and writing his first play at the age of nineteen. When he wrote Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, which is regarded as one of the most significant Australian plays of the twentieth century, he was not consciously trying to redefine Australian culture. Rather, the characters, men who worked on the canefields seasonally, came to him—literally. 

Ray Lawler: 

I came back to Melbourne in 1949, and went to work for the National Theatre Movement. I was there for about three years. And then I felt I wanted to actually settle down and try my hand at a play I had in mind without any other distraction. And I did, and this was Summer of the Seventeenth Doll. I had not actually been to the cane fields. I still have not actually been to the cane fields. But I did meet a couple of cane cutters during my time at the Cremorne Theatre. And although I didn't get the idea immediately for the play, they did stay in my mind as a couple of characters and in later years when other elements came in and I visualised the plot. These two men did occur to me as possible types for it. And so I suppose that Brisbane did yield the cane cutters and Melbourne yielded the background, more or less, for the play. And the two came together, as I say, I wrote it. And I put it in for a Playwrights Advisory Board competition, and it came co-equal first. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The Summer of the Seventeenth Doll opened at the Union Theatre in 1955. It is set in a Carlton boarding house over a summer. The play focuses on two Queensland cane cutters who spend their lay-off seasons in Melbourne, and the women who wait for them. For sixteen summers their arrangement has worked. In the seventeenth summer, it falls apart. 

What made the play remarkable was the accuracy of the Australian language, the scrutiny of masculinity and vulnerability and the challenge it posed to the Australian myth of the free, roaming man by asking what that freedom cost others. Writing in the Argus in 1955, critic Biddy Allen described how Summer of the Seventeenth Doll spoke to Australians in their own language. "Barney, Roo, Pearl and Emma are real people. We know their faces, their voices, we share their dreams, we understand their failures." 

Ray Lawler found himself in demand overseas, despite having written a quintessentially Australian play. From 1957 onwards, he spent seventeen years overseas. And on his return in 1975 to take up a position as Associate Director of the Melbourne Theatre Company, he shared a concern that his long time working overseas may have impacted his connection to Australia. 

Ray Lawler: 

Coming back to Australia is a wonderful experience, very exciting, but I wonder if I haven't been so long away that I have become an exile in the same way that, now I look back on it, that I became an exile from my family when I was a child in a hospital. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The international stage did welcome Ray Lawler. Summer of the Seventeenth Doll transferred to London's West End in 1957 and then to Broadway. It took Australian vernacular speech and the lives of working-class Australians to audiences who had encountered neither. Meanjin, in September 1957, wrote that the English audiences went for the play with as much enthusiasm as the Australians, and that unlike most contemporary plays, The Doll did not divide the critics, it united them. 

The success of Summer of the Seventeenth Doll had demonstrated something, that the Australian experience was sufficient material for the highest ambitions of the form. Yet by this time, Lawler and other artists were working overseas. The work they produced might have been Australian to its core, and yet the culture that produced them had not yet found a way to hold them. Something had to change, and it did. Not with a departure, but with a resolution to remain on Country and to create work that spoke of this land and its First Peoples.  

While painters and playwrights were leaving a country that provided very little support for its artists, a Quandamooka woman from the Noonuccal clan of North Stradbroke Island was doing something very different. She was staying. And she knew with absolute clarity that the culture this country needed was not overseas. It was already here. It had always been here.  

Oodgeroo Noonuccal was born in 1920 and grew up on the lands of her people, at Minjerribah or North Stradbroke Island in south-east Queensland. She grew up under the restrictions of various Queensland Aboriginal Protection Acts, oppressive legislation that controlled where Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people could live, who they could work for, whether they could move freely. A talented student, it was apparent very early that she had a gift for writing. 

Oodgeroo Noonuccal: 

Words are, like to me, as bricks are to a bricklayer. And I love to find, dig into the dictionaries and find all these new words and put one alongside of the other. Or underneath and so, you know, build something. And I suppose at a very early age, as early as 11 or 12, I started making rhymes and trying to match up with all the words I could get my hands on. And this was perhaps the early part of my training with words that turned me finally into what I'm known now as a poet. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Despite her talent, Oodgeroo Noonuccal had to leave school at thirteen. This was the expectation for Aboriginal girls in Queensland at that time. She went on to work as a domestic servant, one of the very few occupations open to Aboriginal girls and women at this time. And like other Aboriginal workers, she was paid less than non-Indigenous workers for the same tasks.  

Her life changed significantly during the Second World War. Both of her brothers were taken prisoners of war by the Japanese Army after the fall of Singapore. She joined the Australian Women's Army Service, where she was trained first as a signaller and then undertook administrative duties. She was promoted to lance corporal in April 1943. In June 1943, she was transferred to the district accounts office where she remained until being discharged on 19 January 1944.  By 1953, she was mother to two sons. She was also becoming increasingly involved in political activism. She was a gifted speaker and that meant that she was sent across the country to advocate for reform for First Nations people.  

In 1962, she was elected Queensland State secretary of the Federal Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement, while also being a member of the Queensland Aboriginal Advancement League executive. She travelled around Australia with Federal Council for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advancement delegates such as Faith Bandler and Joe McGinness, delivering speeches and collecting signatures for the 1967 referendum where Australians were being asked to vote on the inclusion of Aboriginal people in the census and to empower the Federal government to legislate on Aboriginal affairs. In those early years, there was very little money to support such travel. She remembers… 

Oodgeroo Noonuccal: 

The first time I went into the field we had no money. I started off in Sydney. The civil rights movement people there just collected as much money as they could. FCAATSI got me to Sydney. And then the Sydneyites were responsible for getting me to Victoria. And so I stood on platforms. I averaged from seven to ten platforms a day, in Sydney for a week, appealing for money. And appealing to the people to sign petitions. The people cooperated very well. And we got the petitions and we got the money. And off I went into Victoria. The same thing occurred there. Then over to Adelaide. And then to Perth. And then home to Brisbane. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1964, when she published We Are Going, she drew together the creative and the political. The response to We Are Going was extraordinary with seven reprints in as many months and a readership that extended well beyond literary circles. Its success made her one of Australia’s best-selling poets.   

She used every opportunity her platform afforded her to advocate for a YES vote in the 1967 referendum. Ultimately, thanks to her and to her fellow campaigners, the yes vote was over ninety percent. This remains the highest yes vote ever recorded in an Australian referendum. In the aftermath of the 1967 referendum, she remained politically committed to her people and to art and to creativity in many forms. But she did take a step back from the extreme commitments that her roles in the 1967 campaign had demanded.  She continued to write a number of books, essays, speeches and collections of poetry throughout her life. The Dawn is at Hand came out two years after We Are Going. She also created artworks, wrote children’s books and established an education centre on Minjerribah to teach Aboriginal culture on country.  

In her 1976 oral history recorded with Hazel de Berg for the National Library of Australia, Oodgeroo Noonuccal explained why she wrote the poem, The Past, which was published in The Dawn is at Hand. 

Oodgeroo Noonuccal: 

In all my travels, I’ve got this all the way through, and one day I sat down and thought, ‘I’m sick of answering questions. I’ll write a poem about who I am, what I am, and why I am what I am.’ The poem is called 'The Past.' 

Let no one say the past is dead.  
The past is all about us and within.  
Haunted by tribal memories, I know  
This little now, this accidental present  
Is not the all of me, whose long making  
Is so much of the past.  
 
Tonight here in suburbia as I sit  
In easy chair before electric heater,  
Warmed by the red glow, I fall into dream:  
I am away  
At the campfire in the bush, among  
My own people, sitting on the ground,  
No walls about me,  
The stars over me,  
The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind 
Making their own music,  
Soft cries of the night coming to us, there  
Where we are one with all old Nature's lives  
Known and unknown,  
In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken.  
Deep chair and electric radiator  
Are but since yesterday,  
But a thousand campfires in the forest  
Are in my blood.  
Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.  
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part  
Of all the race years that have moulded me. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Oodgeroo never believed she had to travel internationally to prove herself as a writer or to find inspiration. But she received many invitations to speak internationally and often took them up, especially if they provided opportunities to advocate for her people. In 1974, she was travelling on a British Airways flight that was hijacked by terrorists campaigning for Palestinian liberation. The hijackers shot a crew member and a passenger and forced the plane to fly to several different African destinations. During her three days in captivity, she used a blunt pencil and an airline sickbag from the seat pocket to write two poems, Commonplace and Yusuf (Hijacker).  

While her recognition remained high in the decades that followed, she did become disillusioned at the failures of various governments to recognise the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In 1988, the year of Australia's bicentenary, she returned her MBE in protest. And she reclaimed her Noonuccal name. The gesture was impossible to misread. 

Oodgeroo Noonuccal died in 1993. But the culture she had helped to shift was already in motion. Her legacy is as powerful as ever. She never needed to go anywhere to change everything. She had stayed and had done it here. And the questions she placed at the centre of Australian cultural life would not go away: Whose stories does this country carry forward? 

Not every argument about culture is made in paint or on a stage or in a published collection. Some are made through a camera lens. It is the lens and the photographer behind it that record the faces deemed worthy of being remembered, they decide which communities deserve a record and which version of Australian life is considered worth preserving. 

William Yang was born in 1943 in Mareeba near Cairns in North Queensland. He grew up in a family who had an uneasy relationship to their Chinese heritage due to the racism of the era. He has described realising he was Chinese at the age of six, after experiencing taunting at school. As a high school student, he came to realise he was homosexual, although he felt at the time as though he must have been one of a handful of such people in the world. 

He moved to Sydney in the late 1960s and by 1974, he had become a freelance photographer, taking photographs of an increasingly visible gay scene, as well as his friends and social networks. By the following decades, he was witness to both positive change, with the decriminalisation of male acts of homosexuality in New South Wales in 1984, as well as the great loss that was caused by the arrival of HIV and AIDS on Australian shores.  

In an oral history interview recorded with Daniel Connell, he spoke about what it had meant to arrive in Sydney and find his community, and what taking photographs and visibility meant at that time to many in his community. 

William Yang: 

There was very strongly a feeling, in my opinion, that the subtext was: our community has been invisible for thousands of years. In fact nobody even know it existed. We want our stories told. Maybe that's a contemporary validation of person or group, I felt that in the seventies and the early eighties there was very much that feeling, go ahead, anything goes. I'll be in it, I'll put up my hand.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

During the AIDS crisis, Yang lost friend after friend. He kept photographing. His work from this period is intimate, grief-stricken and confronting. It is also some of the most important documentary photography in Australian history.  

With his refusal to let these lives be forgotten, Yang’s photography was a profound act of cultural insistence that the gay community was part of Australia's story whether Australia chose to acknowledge it or not. Yang went further still. In a series of monologue performances, works that wove projected photographs together with spoken personal narratives, placed his Chinese-Australian experience at the very centre of his story, he named the racism of his childhood in Queensland and the lived reality of people from families like his, who had long been here and had always been left out of the frame. 

The Whitlam government, elected in 1972, formally dismantled the last remnants of the White Australia Policy in 1973. But dismantling a policy and dismantling the assumptions that sustained it are two different things. Yang understood this. His photographs and his performances said: we were always here. We were always part of this. And any Australia that does not include us is not showing the whole picture. 

He spoke about what it meant to make that argument through art, but it was not until 1983 that he began to feel able to truly claim his Chinese heritage.  

William Yang: 

First of all, I embraced my own family and my family's story and, and in so doing, I embraced the whole story of the Chinese in Australia which resulted in my travelling around Australia visiting places where the Chinese had been. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The multicultural Australia that emerged through the 1970s and 1980s was not simply a demographic fact. It was a cultural transformation, a slow, uneven, and sometimes contested expansion of who counted as Australian and whose stories were considered part of the national story. William Yang was one of the people who held up a camera and insisted that the frame be wider. 

His work sits alongside Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poetry, Ray Lawler's theatre and the paintings of Sidney Nolan as part of the same larger argument: that Australia's imagination had been artificially narrowed, and that the country became more fully itself every time someone refused to accept that narrowing. The faces in Yang's photographs, people laughing, grieving, dancing, dying, these are faces that belong to this nation. They always did. It just took the culture time to catch up. 

The Whitlam government, in power between 1972 and 1975, understood something that Australian governments before had not: that culture is not a luxury. It is how a nation understands itself. In those three years of the Whitlam government, federal funding for the arts more than tripled. The Australian Council for the Arts was established, providing ongoing support for writers, composers, visual artists and theatre companies. The Australian Film Commission was created, giving rise to a new wave of Australian cinema. Across the country, artists who had previously faced a stark choice between poverty and departure found, for the first time, it was possible to make serious creative work here and be supported in doing so. 

The cultural cringe had never been purely psychological. It had been structural, a consequence of a country that had not yet decided its own creative life was worth investing in. The Whitlam years began to change that. And in 1973, something happened that no government policy could have manufactured. The Swedish Academy awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to an Australian for the first time. The recipient was Patrick White, whose novels, amongst them Voss, The Tree of Man and The Eye of the Storm,  had spent decades mapping the inner life of this continent with an intensity and ambition that European literature had long claimed as its own. White suggested Australia had spent too long being embarrassed about its own imagination. The Nobel Prize did not create that imagination. It simply made it harder to ignore. 

What is striking, looking back, is that so many of the people we have heard from in this episode were making their contributions during these same formative decades, the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s, before the infrastructure of support existed, before the cultural confidence had fully taken hold. Oodgeroo Noonuccal published We Are Going in 1964 without government subsidy and against the weight of a society that had spent generations refusing to hear her. Ray Lawler wrote Summer of the Seventeenth Doll in borrowed time. Sidney Nolan painted his Kelly series in a country that had not yet decided if it wanted them. William Yang photographed a community that official Australia preferred not to see. But they did not wait for permission or for policy. They made the culture, and the culture eventually caught up with them. 

The shift in Australian cultural identity that gathered force in the late 1960s was not completed in a generation. It is, in many respects, still underway. 

The question of how to reckon honestly with First Nations history, not only in law and policy but in the stories the culture tells about itself, remains unresolved. Oodgeroo Noonuccal understood this when she returned her MBE and reclaimed her name. And yet First Nations writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians and theatre-makers continue to produce work of extraordinary originality and power, work that insists, as Oodgeroo did, that this culture is not waiting for permission. It is already here and it always has been. 

The question of what it means to be Australian in a country where more than a quarter of the population was born overseas, where the textures of daily life are radically more varied than they were in 1964, is one that artists are still actively and joyfully exploring. William Yang's photographs documented one version of that complexity at a time when it was largely invisible to the mainstream. The artists who have followed from every background and tradition have widened that frame still further. 

And the questions that new generations of Australian creatives will ask is one that only they can answer for themselves. The cultural cringe has not entirely disappeared. There are still Australian artists who feel the pull toward London or New York for validation. There are still stories that struggle to find funding, stages, publishers or audiences. There is still work to be done in ensuring that the full diversity of Australian creative life, including First Nations cultures, multicultural, regional and working-class people, is not only celebrated in principle but supported in practice. 

But something has irrevocably changed. The Australia that once looked to Britain for permission to take itself seriously is gone. In its place is a culture that knows, however imperfectly, that the material it has to work with is extraordinary. That this land, these histories, these contradictions and these people are not a disadvantage for any artist willing to look at them clearly. They are the whole point. 

Oodgeroo Noonuccal knew this. She told the country in 1964, and the country could not stop reading her work. 

You've been listening to The Memory Tapes. I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

Thank you to the National Library of Australia, and to the poets, painters, playwrights photographers and creatives whose imagination has helped shape what it means to live a creative life in this country. The culture they made was never inevitable. It was argued for, fought over, sometimes lost and sometimes found, and passed on. 

If these stories spoke to you, share them. Tell someone about the extraordinary poet from Minjerribah, North Stradbroke Island who sold out her first print run in a week, who spent her life insisting that this country face itself, and who never needed to go anywhere to change everything. Tell them about the playwright from Melbourne who put a Carlton boarding house on the West End stage. About the painters who looked at this landscape and refused to make it smaller than it was. About the photographer who turned the camera on the faces Australia had been looking past. And how each creative person here found new ways of showing others that this country was worth imagining. 

But these are not only stories about creative people. They are stories about what a country becomes when it finds the courage to imagine itself honestly. Australia is still in the middle of that process. And it is one of the most interesting places in the world to watch it happen. 

Follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you can, leave a review. It helps these stories find new listeners and it helps carry forward the voices of those who had the imagination to see this country more fully than it saw itself. This has been a National Library of Australia production.

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

Included in this episode are excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection:

• Oodgeroo Noonuccal interviewed by Hazel de Berg 

  Oodgeroo Noonuccal, a Quandamooka woman from Stradbroke Island, was an author and activist who’s book of poetry: We Are Going, was the first book of poetry to be published by a First Nations person in Australia. In the interview she speaks of her beginnings as a poet, her involvement with the civil rights, the destruction of the Aboriginal race, her two books: "The dawn is at hand" and "We are going", and reads the poems: "Son of mine", "The dawn is at hand", "Biami", and "The past". 

• Sidney Nolan interviewed by Hazel de Berg 

  Melbourne born, Sidney Nolan, is an artist best known for his post-war series of Ned Kelly Paintings. Here he speaks about how he began to paint, working on Australian images, his various exhibitions, going abroad, his method of painting and materials used. 

• Ray Lawler interviewed by Hazel de Berg 

  Ray Lawler was an Australian playwright, dramatist, producer, director, and actor. In this interview he speaks about his childhood, how he found his way into the theatre, his time working for the National Theatre movement (1949), writing "Summer of the seventeenth doll" and about his method of work. 

• William Yang interviewed by Daniel Connell 

  William Yang, is a Chinese-Australian photographer, who was born in North Queensland in 1943. In this interview he discusses the political nature of his work, his experiences of racism, his experiences as a young gay man in Sydney during the sixties and seventies, his work photographing the Mardi Gras parade, how his art created visibility for his communities, and how his work refused to let the human stories of the HIV/AIDS crisis be forgotten.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I am Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate:

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In this episode, we turn to the idea of distance and how it has defined life across this vast continent and how Australians have worked to stay connected in spite of it. You'll hear stories from those who have struggled with isolation. You'll hear stories of ingenuity and the bonds that hold people together. There are voices of people who've bridged great distances, geographical, social and emotional, and whose experiences continue to shape how Australia understands connection, belonging and resilience, even in the face of new and emerging technologies.  

Long before any telegraph lines or flight paths existed, this continent was connected and mapped. First Nations Australians developed extraordinary songlines over tens of thousands of years. These intricate maps of memory and movement spanned across the entire continent, linking country to country. But from the 19th century onwards, non-Indigenous Australians increasingly felt the distance. The silences stretched and the miles weighed heavily. News travelled slowly. Into the first decades of the 20th century, Australia was still a country shaped by its vastness. Its large cities were scattered, roads were rough and the great expanse felt fixed and unyielding for many.  

Distance was keenly felt in Anne Travers' childhood. She was born in 1925, grew up on a Queensland property 100 miles northwest of the closest town, Springshore, lived at a distance from neighbours and was educated mainly by correspondence with a brief stint at boarding school. Life on the family property involved hard work. 

Anne Travers: 

We didn't mind the hard work. Well, young people love hard work, I think. But I think the loneliness, you know, not being able to communicate and, and, and play sport and, and be with people your own age, you know. We had neighbours and we'd see them if we, you had to ride backwards and forwards to the neighbourhood, but we had no communication, no telephone or nothing like that in the early days. It impacts on people's lives all, for the rest of their life I think because I myself find it very difficult now to, to communicate with other people. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

While Anne felt that an isolated childhood impacted her, she felt the isolation must have been even worse for her mother, who moved to the property from the city after marrying Anne’s father.  

Anne Travers: 

My mother was a city girl and she married my father before he went to the First World War and she waited for him to come back and, and they came back and went and settled at Ingelara, which was very isolated and remote, because of no communication with the outside world. I often think about my mother, how lonely she must have been in her young days when she first went to live there because it was, it really was, it took all day if she wanted, if they wanted to go to town to Springshore. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

As she didn’t drive, Anne’s mother spent the majority of her adult life confined to the same property.   

Anne Travers:  

She never learnt to ride or drive a horse and buggy. And if you couldn't do that you either walked or stayed at home, and she stayed at home. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Throughout the 19th century new forms of technology closed the distance for many Australians, although, others still felt it keenly. Railways certainly played a role in connecting people but for many people in remote towns in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it was telegraphs that carried connection. They were often the first dependable thread tying them to the rest of the country.  

In 1872, the Overland Telegraph, more than 3000 kilometres in length, spanning the distance from Adelaide to Darwin, connected the continent. Just months later, that cable was linked to an underwater cable that reached Java, and from Java, reached London. While the Overland Telegraph was heralded as a technological triumph, its construction saw colonial intrusion onto Aboriginal lands. Colonists brought with them weapons and a determination to claim the land for themselves. This came at a very dark cost.  

There's no doubt though that telegraphs changed everything. Well into the 20th century, employment could be found at with the Postmaster-General’s Department as phonogram operators. Phonogram operators typed up telegrams which were phoned in to post offices, instead of being physically handed in to post offices. 

Evelyn Goodwin passed an examination to be a phonogram operator after she left school during the First World War. She was not yet eighteen years old and one of only three girls who passed the General Post Office examination required for the job.   

Evelyn Goodwin: 

I had to type all the telegrams, and some of them used to come out in what they called Wheatstone, it was like a big brown sheet of paper done in Morse That's why we had to learn the Morse, and we had to transcribe them into English, you see, when we gave the telegram through, and we'd mark it off, and then we'd copy it, put the English into it, and send it out to the typist and let it go out to the people that it was intended for. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The telegraph made business communication much faster and it reached zenith in 1945, when 35 million messages were sent each year. Although telephones were introduced in the 1880s, they did not replace the telegraph. At least, not at first. For decades, the two systems worked side by side. Telephones connected towns and cities, but they required expensive, dedicated lines. Outside urban centres, they were slow to arrive and many remote Australians still relied almost entirely on telegrams for urgent communications. In the outback, a phone line might stop hundreds of kilometres short of the nearest homestead. That's why, well into the 20th century, the telegraph remained the backbone of communication across Australia.  

When telephones did spread into the suburbs and regional towns, the challenge of distance still wasn't solved. Telephones still relied on physical lines, and physical lines had limits. Storms brought them down, heat warped them, and the cost of running them across the interior was enormous. For vast parts of Australia, the map still went quiet. What people needed was a technology that could travel through deserts, ranges, and across miles in a single moment.  

And then change arrived with an early wireless set, temperamental crystals with cat's whiskers that were fragile and easily interrupted. But to families gathered in lounge rooms or on verandas, these very early forms of radio were astonishing. Thomas McKinnon recalls… 

Thomas McKernan: 

When wireless was beginning to find its way into normal civilian life and my earliest recollection of this phenomenon, where you could hear people speaking from space, was the business of playing with a crystal and a cat's whisker. The cat's whisker being a fine piece of wire which, if it landed on an appropriate spot on the crystal, would produce sound through the necessary earphones. If any member of the family were to happen to move past without tiptoeing, immediately the broadcast was interrupted as the fine wire moved off the centre of the spot on the crystal. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

However temperamental they may have been, these early forms of radio did make far-flung places feel closer. Stations like 2FC and 3LO became lifelines during storms, droughts and elections. 

But in the first decades of the 20th century, the air also offered new ways of connecting Australians to each other and later, to the world. In 1920, two Gallipoli veterans and pilots, Hudson Fysh and Paul McGinness, returned home after serving in the First World War. They were intrigued to see the Australian government was offering a prize for the first Australians to fly from England to Australia. To their great disappointment, the funding that would have enabled them to enter the competition was lost when their backer, Sir Samuel McCackie, unexpectedly died. 

Yet all was not lost.  

Hudson Fysh: 

The federal government said, ‘Well, now, you two young fellows, you've been disappointed in this. Will you go and survey the route through to Darwin and choose landing grounds, lay the petrol down, and get it ready so if any of the world's flyers that do get through, they'll have proper places to land in Australia?’ There were no landing grounds, of course, or air routes at all in Australia in those days in 1919. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Fysh and McGinness accepted the government’s request that they go to the Gulf of Carpentaria—a place where no roads existed. They headed up with another man, George Gorham, and their car was the first car to ever traverse around the shores of the Gulf of Carpentaria. They followed an old survey track and struggled across the Calvert and Robinson Rivers, only managing to cross by waiting until the tide went out. Some Aboriginal men helped them to cut away some banks but the journey was completed. 

Fysh described what happened next…  

Hudson Fysh: 

And you might remember that the federal government had sent a warship out to be stationed halfway between Timor and Darwin. They reported to us that the plane had passed over there and we were all out very expectantly waiting. And it's one of my greatest memories in my lifetime, is of seeing the little speck appear in the sky and there was the aeroplane coming along and circling the aerodrome and putting its wheels down on Australian soil. The very first aeroplane to ever land in Australia from abroad. And it was a very moving time to see that happen. And I'm very glad I was there and others to see it. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

On 16 November 1920, in the back room of a Winton building, a company named Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services was registered. This company was a risky venture when the possibilities of air travel had not fully been revealed but a group of shareholders invested in the company and in what flight might mean. 

By early 1921, the fledgling Qantas operation had moved to Longreach, where the outback horizon became its runway. At first, the work was simple but transformative: charters, joyrides and the kind of short hops that made people on the ground look up in wonder. Then, in 1922, the first scheduled services began. These were the routes that became lifelines for communities scattered across western Queensland. 

Those early aircraft didn’t just carry passengers. They brought mail, newspapers, spare parts, medicine, and even fresh fish from Normanton to inland towns where “fresh” was a rare word. Aviation was becoming infrastructure. P. H. ‘Skip’ Moody remembers piloting some of those very first Qantas runs.  

P. H. ‘Skip’ Moody: 

I did the first Qantas run from Charleville to Brisbane and Brisbane to Charleville. I inaugurated that service. We had a very good run. Then back to Charleville. And up to Cloncurry and to Camooweal. Often times I’d go out to Camooweal or Normanton—we had extended to both those places as time went on—and we considered we had a pretty long run in those days. Of course, later on, they went to Singapore and then to London. And now, around the world. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In those early days, the main problems P.H. ‘Skip’ Moody experienced as a pilot were… 

P. H. ‘Skip’ Moody: 

We didn't have any radio aids and we flew by the seat of our pants. We didn't know what was ahead of us, if there was any bad weather ahead, the airport where we were leading, where we were going to, was under heavy storm or something like that. We didn't know anything about it. We just had to plunge on regardless. 

Heat was the worst thing, I think. In the summer heat, I remember once taking off in Winton to go to Cloncurry. And I couldn't get above 500 feet. At least I dared not go above 500 feet. The engine was so overheating. I feared it was going to catch fire. I was scared stiff, as a matter of fact. But however, we got through all right. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Flying early Qantas planes certainly carried challenges.  

P. H. ‘Skip’ Moody: 

Turbulence was quite a big factor in the summertime. During the flight, over, between Blackall and Tambo, we got into this turbulence. And the front seat passenger, he was looking, looking around wildly for somewhere to be sick. He saw my hat. He was thinking of my hat. Oh. I was very sorry to lose that old hat. I used to love it. However, I must say, when we got to Charleville, he bought me a new one. 

Qantas Ad: 

“I’ve been to cities that never closed down. From New York to Rio and old London town.” 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Yet Qantas persisted. And in 1928, when the fledgling Flying Doctor Service needed its first aircraft, Qantas supplied it from Cloncurry, another moment where flight wasn't just convenience but was connection. 

Through the 1930s, Qantas grew quickly across Australia. But the real ambition lay beyond the coast. In 1935, the airline launched the first international service between Brisbane and Singapore. Three and a half days in the air was an unimaginable luxury compared to the weeks a sea voyage demanded. Just three years later, Sydney was linked to Singapore as well, with the majestic Qantas Empire flying boats. And in 1938, Qantas hired its first flight stewards, the beginnings of the cabin crews who would come to define the Qantas experience. Qantas is now the second oldest airline in the world and it continues to occupy a unique place in the Australian imagination. 

In 1977, Nancy-Bird Walton, one of Australia’s first female commercial pilots, stated that so many pioneering aviators, people who were the record breakers of the 1930s, were Australian.  

Nancy-Bird Walton: 

Because Australia was forever trying to link itself by air with England and Australia. It’s almost inconceivable now to realise that in 1928 Kingsford Smith who first flew the Pacific—7000 miles of ocean—was doing this for the very first time it had ever been done. Over uncharted waters, uncharted skies—at least not uncharted waters but certainly uncharted skies—and today, every hour of the day, there is something flying that ocean, and there’s a lot of heavy traffic on it. 

Australians have pioneered almost every major ocean of the world one way or the other. And, you know, we have every reason to be exceedingly proud of our aviation history. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Aviation technology also connected people in remote areas with medical care in the form of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, a non-profit aeromedical retrieval service. The Service owes its origins to John Flynn, an Australian Presbyterian Minister and the founder of the Australian Inland Mission. In 1928, Flynn, conducted a one-year experiment in Cloncurry, Queensland, to test the merits of what would become the Royal Flying Doctor Service. 

The Very Reverend James Frederick McKay, former superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission, knew John Flynn and was his successor as superintendent of the Australian Inland Mission from 1951 to 1973. 

Very Reverend James Frederick McKay:

To give the future people some ideas that I would have of John Flynn and the total dream that he had for the services which he originated in the outback…it was obvious that he had a passion, a quiet determined passion about developing the service and really doing something for Australia. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The Royal Flying Doctor Service owed much to the quiet genius of Alfred ‘Alf’ Traeger. As a boy of 12, he'd rigged a telephone line between his house and the family tool shed. Radio fascinated him. After a tour of the outback, Traeger set to work in Adelaide on a transceiver for the Flying Doctor Network: one that had to be cheap, tough. small and simple enough for anyone to operate. He divided his time between the workshop and the field, teaching Morse code to station families, and what he came up with transformed the inland. 

Very Reverend James Frederick McKay:

If there hadn't been an Alfred Traeger, there probably wouldn't have…there wouldn't have been a flying doctor service. And out of that comes the pedal generator. That is, he’d heard about, you know, the Germans using pedals in wartime, but he knew nothing about them. But he got bicycle pedals and an orthodox generator and linked them together and start to get a real solution to the power problem. 1928 comes, Flying Doctor's already started, no radio. But the end of that year, Traeger has got this little machine going. You know, the Flying Doctor and the radio system together then started to bring this mantle of safety over the whole country and people could talk to one another, they get medical help. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The pedal wireless broke the vast silence of the inland. Emergency calls could reach hospitals. Later came the School of the Air. Traeger kept refining his machine, a Morse keyboard in 1933, a pedal-free set by 1939. But it was that first contraption, powered by human legs, that bridged much of the distance. Yet, Reverend John Flynn's dream of a mantle of safety descending over the whole country was never fully realised. The Flying Doctors served the pastoral inland, the stations and settlements of the mainland outback. At the northern tip of the continent, in the islands of the Torres Strait, there was no such surface, and distance still meant what it had always meant. Dulcie Flower, a Meriam woman, grew up in Cairns in the 1940s, where the pearling luggers crewed by Torres Strait Islander men were a familiar sight coming into port. 

Dulcie Flower: 

My mother's Torres Strait Islander. And the luggers, the pearling and track shell luggers manned by the Torres Strait people, the Torres Strait men coming into port in Cairns. Eventually you learned that the men's health wasn't all that good. They never used to go to the doctors. So mum would sort of do a patch of first aid.  

That's right, yes. They had a little old hospital there. They had a very good matron and they did have nurses and doctors. I used to sometimes go up from Cairns, but I think there was one resident doctor. There was no dentist, there were no ancillary services or, you know, sort of the associated professional people there at all. So people just got used to living. And if they got too sick, they tried very hard to get them to the hospital by boat, because that was before the airlines sort of decided to provide a service from Cairns up to Thursday Island and then eventually the other islands. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The Flying Doctor Service never reached the islands of the Torres Strait in those years. Its mantle of safety was stretched largely over the pastoral inland. Communities, like Dulcie Flower’s, were left to bridge the distance themselves by boat, spending days at sea. She never forgot the need. She became a nurse, and amongst many other achievements, decades later helped to found the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, bringing healthcare to people the system had overlooked or left behind.  

Back in the inland at this time though, the Flying Doctor Service was becoming an institution and the men who flew its aircraft were becoming legends. The Very Reverend Fred McKay shared recollections of some of the earliest Flying Doctor Service pilots operating in rural Australia in the early years. 

Very Reverend James Frederick McKay:

In 1932 was when Alan Vickers, who was probably our greatest flying doctor of that era, he had brought a patient from Croydon up in the Gulf country. The hotel proprietor, the kerosene refrigerator had exploded and blinded him and he had head injuries. They called the flying doctor. Alan Vickers went out in the DH-50, that is the, you know, the old first aircraft that was used with Qantas. And he immediately saw that this was a serious case. He brought him into Cloncurry and he said, No, I'll have to take you to Brisbane. So he set off on a journey from Cloncurry to Brisbane with this patient, was sitting beside the patient all the time. At Longreach, they changed over to another aircraft, which Hudson Fysh provided. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Bernie Higgins, a drover born in 1941, reflected on the Flying Doctor Service in his own life as he worked on remote Lorraine station in Queensland. 

Bernie Higgins: 

It was a good service. I nearly died of pneumonia out there, you know, and they came and got me, you know. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Working as a pilot for the Royal Flying Doctor Service remains gruelling work but it is still incredibly rewarding. One pilot, Neil McDougall, recalls a shift where… 

Neil McDougall: 

They rang me at 2 o'clock in the morning and asked me could I go up to Tennant Creek to pick up an accident. Tennant Creek had runway lights and radio aids so you could fly up there in the night. I flew up there in the dark, picked up this patient and came back to Alice Springs. We were doing routine medical visits, which is like a GP that runs a clinic here and there. We'd be doing these clinics at stations and one thing or another. Yeah, people come from miles to see the doctor. We didn't like cancelling the clinics, routine medical clinics. We'd try and keep them at all cost because people went out of their way a lot to see the doctor. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The importance of bridging the distance in the air has probably been responsible for Australia producing several major innovations in aviation, including one of the most important: the black box recorder, created by David Warren. When examining the 1953 crash of the world’s first commercial jet airliner, the Comet, he developed the concept of a cockpit voice recorder. By capturing audio-ambient noise, spoken communication, and mechanical irregularities, it offered investigators a direct window into the causes of an aviation disaster. 

In 1986, Harry L. Perriman, a mechanical engineer who was then aged more than 100 years, shared his experiences as a missionary and reflected on David Warren’s very personal reasons for his invention and its immense value.  

Harry L. Perriman: 

Yes, that little baby born on Groote Eylandt was the one, his father was lost on him coming over from Tasmania on the Miss Hobart, and I think that made him feel that it should be recorded because they didn't know what went wrong with that plane. So, he invented this black box. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Distance didn't stop at the coastline. No nation is more closely bound to Antarctica than Australia. We claim the largest slice of the continent. And it was an Australian, Douglas Mawson, who carried the first wireless ever taken there, relaying messages home in 1913 through a lonely mast on Macquarie Island.  

But for the generations of Australians who followed him south, isolation remained the defining fact of Antarctic life. A year or more on the ice, no way home once the last ship sailed. When meteorological observer Denise Allen first went south for the Bureau of Meteorology in 1985, beginning a career that would make her the first woman to enter all four of Australia's Antarctic stations, that isolation was still as much as Mawson had known it over 70 years later. 

Denise Allen: 

When I first went to Macquarie Island, communications at home was a ham radio, like a radio sked. There was no telephones. So I would contact people at home every maybe 3 weeks. And even then, you would be sitting in the radio room and there'd be crackle, crackle, crackle. You know, ‘Can you hear me? Hello, hello?’ Finally, they'd say, ‘It's 3 minutes. Are you extending?’ You know? And you'd go, ‘I haven't said hello yet because we can't get good radio comms.’ So that was communication back then. By the time I was at Davis, we had the telephone was introduced that year, satellite telephone. It was expensive. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

A satellite telephone at the bottom of the world, a technology that finally broke Antarctica's silence. It was one that had been decades in the making. Its story begins back on the Australian mainland in the early 1960s. 

Historian Anne Moyal has noted that from 1960, Australia had realised the possibilities that domestic satellite technology might offer a country like Australia. In a country of Australia's size, the concept of a radio communication station in the sky, capable of receiving, amplifying and rebroadcasting audio or visual signals to Earth, held alluring prospects. This was a time when copper cable and terrestrial-based microwave technology was faced at times by insurmountable problems of terrain. Satellites offered opportunities to be seized. 

Radio recording: 

I got them in to use them before we are on. Right, pitch 212, yaw plus 37. Eagle, you're looking great. Coming up 9 minutes. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1961, the Parkes Radio Telescope was completed.  

Radio Recording: 

We're go, train type, we're go. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

It offered an opportunity for Australia to capture parts of the moon landing. John Bolton, inaugural director of the Parkes Radio Telescope in Australia, reflected on the implications… 

John Bolton: 

I was asked to take on the use of the Parkes telescope as a communication link to the Apollo series. I felt I really had to commit myself to that because I knew the instrument better than anybody else. 

We were the relay link for anything that was coming over the transmission. Our much larger size than the standard tracking station size gave us a gain in signal which was vital for high-speed telemetry and vital for the quality of TV pictures sent back from the moon. I mean they were very secondary, the TV, the safety of the entire mission was far more paramount. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

John Bolton also explained how the Parkes telescope played a vital role with the Apollo 13 mission. 

John Bolton: 

Well, we also provided the link with the command module on its way to and from. In fact, this became very vital in Apollo 13, the one that we weren't actually supposed to take part in that mission because the moon would have been below our horizon at the time of the landing and walks and everything was scheduled to go into Goldstone. And then, of course, when it broke down halfway, there was no communication with it until Parkes was brought into the network. That night, we followed it right through the spacecraft instead of orbiting the moon for two days and then landing and so on. Of course, we were able to follow it right through the slingshot as the moon was still south. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

It is often said that we are now living through a digital revolution, a revolution comparable to the Industrial Revolution. In 1972, physicist Harry Messel reflected that… 

Harry Messel: 

In 1951 and ‘52 when I came here to Sydney, radio astronomy was just in its infancy, computing was just something a few people were talking about. There were a couple of electronic computers in the United States, most other people to whom you mentioned it had never heard of it and were thinking you were crazy when you talked about it.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

By the 1980s and 1990s though, many Australians were hearing the first sounds of a changed future with the ping of a modem, that screeching handshake with another machine somewhere else. It was slow, fragile and very often temperamental—but also astonishing. The reach of the internet has transformed connections not just within this continent but across the world.  

Megg Dunn recalls those early years of the internet revolution.  

Meg Dunn: 

Well, when I was a child, we didn't have TV at all, but TV just came in. So, I mean, that was a huge change. When television came, I think most people got television that came into their homes. They were exposed to different things that they hadn't been exposed to before. And a different medium, you know, we were able to see the man land on the moon. I mean, that was pretty incredible.  

Then we come into computers, I guess, when Bill Gates' vision of the PC in every home and on every desk, it did open up the world to a lot of people. As, you know, the next step really was the internet. When the internet became available to everybody, and I was working at Microsoft when that happened and we were, you know, going down the path, I thought it was amazing. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The rapid rise of the internet and gaming has been viewed through a critical lens, even by some who also recognise its benefits. Scott Ryan, a father to young children, reflects on his own experiences… 

Scott Ryan: 

I remember I was getting dial-up internet around the turn of the century. That sound burnt into my brain, when it connected to dial-up. I think they call it the digital revolution or whatever. And I was bang smack in the middle of that being in my early 30s now. We watched it go from Nokia 3310s to iPhones in a couple of years. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

There is a longing Scott feels for a less complex time, while still appreciating the possibilities of technology of this era. 

Scott Ryan: 

I would have rather been born in the ‘70s to be honest. It was a simpler time or even earlier. Younger people have watched things change quite a lot and I think that's why a lot of us are quite into video games and binge-watching Netflix shows and things like that. And it's, yeah, we've always had it sort of on demand and we can have it any time we want. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The internet has opened up a world of information to many and a world of connection. Yet there are still inequalities and faultlines. For urban Australians, broadband arrived early and fast. 

But for remote communities, particularly First Nations communities, access lagged. 
Some homes share a single connection. Others rely on expensive satellite links, slow and unreliable. Others have no access. This digital divide echoes previous divides surrounding access to telecommunications and transport. Connection still depends on who’s being seen and who is overlooked.  

But despite inequalities, the technological shift has been profound. For the first time in Australian history, a child living on a remote outstation could attend school through a computer screen. This became immensely important to people all across the country during the COVID pandemic. Telehealth can now reach patients hundreds of kilometres from the nearest clinic. Letters that once relied on mail planes, long steamship journeys, or might have even been carried by drovers, became instant messages. This pace of change has been astonishing. Edgar Percival, a pioneer of aviation in its early years, once reflected. 

Edgar Percival: 

I cover the field from horse and buggy days in the 1900s, and right up to men being placed on the moon. Australia has grown a tremendous amount, largely from the fact that the distances are there to be covered. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Today, Australia still feels the weight of distance. A cyclone can cut a community off from all forms of communication. A blackout can sever the only link to services hundreds of kilometres away. Bushfires may mean that mobile signals no longer work. A child may still lose internet access for days, and with it, their schooling. Perhaps finances mean they don't have access to a computer at home at all. Distance has not yet vanished.  

But our technology, our insistence on connection, have changed what distance means. From telegram operators tapping late into the night, to families crouched around early, unstable and frustrating crystal radios, to pilots landing on makeshift strips, to satellites casting invisible paths across the continent, every era has added another thread. And together, those threads form something strong enough to cross the reach and to bridge the distance. 

You've been listening to The Memory Tapes. I'm Dr. Shirleene Robinson. Thank you to the National Library of Australia.  

If these voices spoke to you, share them. Tell somebody about the stories of connection, innovation, aviation pioneers, the digital revolution, and the meaning of distance. Follow us, and if you can, leave a review. It helps these stories reach more listeners, and it helps carry forward the voices of the people who lived through these events.  

This has been a National Library of Australia production.

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

Included in this episode are excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection: 

• Anne Travers interviewed by Bruce Simpson and Bill Gammage 

  Distance was keenly felt in Anne Travers’ childhood. She was born in 1925, grew up on a Queensland property 100 miles north west of the closest town, Springsure, lived at a distance from neighbours and was educated mainly by correspondence, with a brief stint at boarding school. Life on the family property involved hard work. 

• Evelyn Goodwin interviewed by Judy Wing 

  Evelyn Goodwin passed an examination to be a phonogram operator after she left school during the First World War. She was not yet eighteen years old and one of only three girls who passed the General Post Office examination required for the job. 

• Thomas McKernan interviewed by Mel Pratt 

  Thomas McKernan recalls this was when wireless was beginning to find its way into normal civilian life. My earliest recollection of this phenomenon, where you could hear people speaking from space, was the business of playing with a crystal and a cat's whisker, the cat's whisker being a fine piece of wire which, if it landed on an appropriate spot on the crystal, would produce sound through the necessary earphones. 

• Hudson Fysh, Bunny Hammond, Nigel Love and Charles Kingsford-Smith and the crew of the Southern Cross interviewed on the 50th anniversary of Ross Smith's flight from London to Australia  

  Hudson Fysh was a decorated World War I hero who founded Australia's national airline Qantas with two rickety biplanes to the age of the jumbo jets. A celebrated light horseman at Gallipoli, Fysh flew dangerous missions with the Australian Flying Corps, battling Germans in deadly dogfights in the skies over Palestine. On his return from the Great War, Fysh launched his bush airline, the Queensland and Northern Territory Aerial Services Ltd (Qantas), with the help of a wartime pilot friend and some western Queensland graziers. 

• Skip Moody interviewed by Fred Morton  

  Mr PH ‘Skip’ Moody was a contemporary of Sir Kingsford Smith and flew with Qantas as a pilot. He fought in the Great War after signing up with the AIF as a private soldier and went to England. The Royal Flying Corp was being badly shot up by German Fokkers, so Moody was selected for flight training, which consisted of only two hours practical instruction. After a lengthy career as an Australian domestic pilot in early Qantas, he was commissioned to participate in World War II as a test pilot for fighter planes. 

• Nancy Bird Walton interviewed by Hazel de Berg 

  Pioneering Australian aviator Nancy Bird Walton speaks of beginning of her flying career at the age of 17 and of meeting Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. She describes the training available for pilots in the 1930's and earning a living flying her Gypsy Moth. Walton recalls her childhood and family life during the Depression and speaks of the Air Ambulance Service which she helped to establish. 

• Flying high: Talk on aviation given by Nancy Bird Walton, Stewart Wilson and Geoff Shepherd 

  Recorded at the National Library of Australia, this talk – featuring former pilots Nancy Bird Walton and Geoff Shepherd, was hosted in support of aviation items in the Library’s National Treasures exhibition in 2005. 

• Fred McKay interviewed by Alec Bolton 

  Reverend Fred McKay talks about his family background and his childhood on farming property, "Crab Hollow", west of Mackay, Queensland. He then describes his education at Thornburgh College, Charters Towers and Emmanuel College, Presbyterian University College, Brisbane and meeting John Flynn in 1934 in Southport. He decided to follow him and work with Australian Inland Mission (AIM). He then describes his early experiences on patrol in Cloncurry, Alfred Traeger and his radio work and his reminiscences of some of the earlier Flying Doctor Service pilots. 

• Bernie Higgins Interviewed by Bruce Simpson and Bill Gammage 

  Bernie Higgins, a drover born in 1941, reflected on importance of the Flying Doctor Service in his own life when he was working on remote Lorraine station in Queensland. 

•  Neil Mcdougall interviewed by Hamish Sewell 

  Neil McDougall talks about his family background including memories of his uncle Don, the family farm, kangaroo hunting, horses, animals, dingoes and corn harvesting. He recalls WWII, and leaving school at 15 to work with his father on the farm. He explains how he began flight training and gaining a commercial pilots license aged 22. Working for Australian National Airlines, he became a flying instructor in Townsville before taking a job with the Royal Flying Doctor Service. 

• Harry Perriman interviewed by Barbara Blackman   

  In this interview, 103 year old Harry L. Perriman, mechanical engineer, talks about his experiences as a missionary on Groote Eylandt – the largest island in the Gulf of Carpentaria. He recalls growing up in Melbourne, his mechanical hobbies, and how he came to join the first official St. John's Ambulance Brigade. He joined a missionary service league and was later persuaded to volunteer for a mission on Groot Eylandt in 1919, where he had a close shave with pneumonic influenza. He describes his initial stay at Roper River Mission in 1921, and after 6 months moved to the newly established Groot Eylandt Mission. He explains how the wife of the Superintendent there bore a child that grew up and went on to invent the black box cockpit voice recorder. 

•   John Bolton interviewed by Lennard Bickel   

  John Bolton was born in Sheffield, England. He was a pioneer in using radar as a means to detect radio emissions coming from distant galaxies. He discovered the Crab Nebula, Southern pulsars, and he identified quasars using the Parkes Radio Telescope. From 1969 to 1973 was worked with NASA to prepare the Apollo missions. 

• Harry Messel interviewed by Hazel de Berg 

  Harry explains how he came to Australia in 1951 to take up a position at the University of Adelaide. From there he moved to head the school of physics at Sydney University, starting the Science Foundation for Physics in 1952. In this interview, Harry explains his joy at working during what he called the ‘golden age’ of computers and technology where he was able to observe many scientific disciplines grow from infancy into fully developed areas of practice including information technology, cosmic rays, nuclear physics and more.   

• Meg Dunn interviewed by Frank Heimans  

  Meg Dunn was born in Mudgee. In this interview she talks about her childhood, the farm at Bylong Valley and her family relationships. Meg explains how she studied a Diploma of Library Information and embraced the digital world. She explained the impact of the development of the internet, following which most research activities shifted to online.  

• Scott Ryan interviewed by Carolyn Collins  

  Scott Ryan worked at the Holden plant from 2010 to 2015 – the latest of three generations of his family to work for the company. He reminisces about how both his parents worked for Holden, and about his childhood. He remembered his first gaming console – a Sega Megadrive – when he was a child in the nineties. Scott then discusses the rapid pace of development of computer games throughout his life, and how even now his children are growing up using them for recreation. 

• Edgar Percival interviewed by Neil Bennetts  

  Edgar Percival, a former aviator and aircraft engineer, reflects on the extraordinary pace of technological development during his lifetime, during which he grew up with the horse and buggy, through to the first human landing on the moon. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I am Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:  

Australia is a land that has been shaped by migrants. Before this, and throughout, First Nations people have cared for this Country for millennia. By the late 18th century, though, two vastly different worlds would meet on these shores, one deeply rooted in Country, the other driven by exploration, empire, and ambition. That meeting changed both forever, setting in motion stories of dispossession, resilience, and transformation that continue to shape the nation today.  

In the years that followed, migration would continue to redefine what Australia was and what it could be. From the earliest arrivals of convicts and free settlers through to the rigid hierarchies of race formalised through the White Australia Policy and the dictation test, migration reflected both exclusion and opportunity. 

After the Second World War, the slogan ‘populate or perish’ brought a new wave of arrivals—displaced persons from war-torn Europe, at first the so-called ‘beautiful Balts’, with the ‘ten-pound Poms’, followed by Southern European families who helped to build the nation’s industries and suburbs. 

By 1973, Australia began to reimagine itself once again as a multicultural nation shaped by the experiences of Vietnamese ‘boat people’, asylum seekers fleeing conflict, and subsequent refugees seeking safety and belonging. But the promise of inclusion has never been consistent. There has been contestation, detention and resistance against inclusion that continues into the present.  

Across each generation, migration has represented an opportunity not always seized. An offer to meet worlds in ways that remake and enrich Australia’s identity in profound and unexpected ways. Through it all, this story has unfolded on lands long cared for by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, whose sovereignty, languages, and cultures endure as the first and continuing story of this continent. And within the stories of migration, of departure and arrival, loss and renewal, lie the voices that remind us of who we are. These voices are preserved in sound, carried across generations. 

Brought to you by the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes. I’m Dr. Shirleene Robinson. 

In this series, we explore the people and the moments that shaped Australia, through the voices of those who were there. In this episode, we begin with what is believed to be the oldest surviving recording of a migrant describing their voyage to this continent and then move forward to contemporary voices that speak to both the heartbreak and the hope of building a new life. We will hear of migration journeys blighted by discrimination and prejudice, and affirming journeys where Australia offered security and friendship. 

Migration has always been more than movement. It is about what people carry with them and what they leave behind. Here, we turn to the voices that remember those journeys, the voices that connect memory and migration across generations.  

We begin with an extraordinary voice that recalls migration before Australia even became a nation. It is most likely one of the oldest memories of migration ever recorded on tape. From there, we move through the decades, hearing how experiences of arrival, belonging, and identity have changed. We will also hear how, in many ways, they have not. These are stories of imagination, endurance and reinvention—the threads that run through the long story of who we are. 

Let’s begin then, with that remarkable recording of Matthew Ryan, who travelled from Ireland to Australia in 1897 at the age of 23, before this country was even a nation. He tells of a chance meeting with a relative in an Irish town in a state of flux that changed his destiny. 

Matthew Ryan:  

I had in my mind; I was about to go to America and a relative of mine met me in the city of Limerick and he told me that he had his passage paid to Australia. I thought the matter over, and I went and paid my passage, and I came away with him and we both came out and we landed here in this country of the 1st of April. I found it very hard to get work in Australia when I landed. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Matthew Ryan had arrived just as Australia was experiencing a devastating 1890s economic Depression. He describes first-hand seeing men with their swags, bedrolls carrying their worldly goods. These were the desperate men described in Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson’s unofficial national anthem, Waltzing Matilda, setting off on foot in desperate search of work. 

Background music: 

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong under the shade of a coolabah tree.  

Matthew Ryan: 

In those days when I first came, there was a lot of people leaving the city of Sydney that were going to Western Australia. Some were going to America; others were hiking their swag and were going onto the railway lines looking for work. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Ultimately, Matthew Ryan’s life in Australia was a happy one. He married; he worked as a blacksmith and in horseshoeing. He had many supportive relatives in the country. His career meant that he did eventually sustain some hearing loss and also dealt with typhoid fever. Yet he helped to build the Glebe Bridge, worked on the cane fields, and retired, financially secure, in a climate that he liked. Matthew Ryan’s story takes us to a time before the twentieth century, when migration was largely, although not exclusively, from Britain and Ireland.  

After the discovery of gold in 1851 through to the 1880s—when racist sentiment saw parts of Australia place restrictions on Chinese immigration—significant numbers of Chinese immigrants sought opportunity here. But by the latter half of the nineteenth century, racist attitudes had hardened, and whiteness was considered the marker of belonging.  

When Australia became a nation in 1901, one of its first acts was to close the doors—the Immigration Restriction Act. This would become part of what is known as the ‘White Australia Policy.’  This legislation restricted non-white migration and allowed for the deportation of so-called ‘undesirable’ residents already in the country. In 1901, the Pacific Island Labourers Act was passed. This legislation was introduced in an attempt to deport the many indentured Pacific Islanders and their descendants, who had built the sugar industry in Queensland and northern New South Wales under appalling and exploitative conditions. British migration was favoured and a dictation test was used to exclude other groups. As a result, non-white people, including Australia’s Indigenous population, made up only about two per cent of the overall population by the early 1940s. Yet, if we look back, we can see that non-British migrants have long made a valuable contribution to this country, showing enormous courage and ingenuity.  

In 1993, Eddie Quong told the extraordinary story of his courageous grandmother, who had travelled to Australia from China at the age of sixteen in the late 1800s for an arranged marriage with Eddie’s grandfather. Her search for a new life began as racist exclusion was escalating, yet she met challenges with bravery, initiative, and determination. Fong Nun Choi Toit became Chin Fong Toy after marriage. Eddie Quong remembers the migration story his grandmother shared with him when he was a child. 

Eddie Quong: 

Now she came over on a ship to Port Darwin, or Palmerston, but apparently this is what she’s told me and my family and my sisters, who verified it, is that when she got here, she found out that her papers weren’t in order for some reason or other. So, she jumped ship and she used to tell us a story that the family that brought her over, accompanied her over, hid her in a little dinghy and rowed her down to a place called Fannie Bay Beach, or where Fannie Bay Beach is. There they went by ox dray, it took several days, to get to a place called Pine Creek where the goldfields were. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Her journey took her from the coast to the goldfields, a long, harsh route through heat and dust. With her new husband, she set up a farm at Pine Creek. Eddie Quong describes the important contribution this made to the community. 

Eddie Quong: Now Pine Creek, they had a farm there and they grew rice, they grew vegetables, they grew Chinese vegetables, mainly fruit and vegetables. And they became self-supporting and they supported a great population of Chinese down there, plus the white population and all of the other populations as well. So, they had to grow their own vegetables. The Chinese from the Guangdong Province, they were experts and my grandmother used to always say that as a little girl she was always growing vegetables and knew exactly how vegetables were grown. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

While she may have helped an emerging community survive through the provision of food, she still faced discrimination. 

Eddie Quong: 

There was no hospital and my grandmother used to say how the white people used to segregate them completely. The Chinese were only used for farmers, labourers, laundry or wherever they could eke a living, but they were never allowed to go into the white department stores or stores or the white hospitals.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

While prejudice was rife from European settlers, Eddie’s family found acceptance and friendship from Aboriginal people.  

Eddie Quong:

 My mother actually had been to the Aboriginal ceremonies, and I think she was born near an Aboriginal camp. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

In many parts of Australia, relationships between Chinese people and Aboriginal people were shaped by mutual respect and the shared experience of living outside of the margins of a society that excluded them both. Through these quiet acts of connection, new forms of belonging began to take root in Australia’s frontiers. Relationships that remind us that Australia’s history of connection did not begin with colonisation, but with a millennia of First Nations exchange and care for Country. 

In 1945, a new chapter of migration began. After the devastation of the Second World War, and fears that Australia’s relatively low population would prevent it from defending itself in conflict, Australia opened its doors under the ‘populate or perish’ policy. 

That year, the Australian Government announced that it would be seeking both British and other European migrants. Between 1945 and 1965, more than two million immigrants arrived in Australia. The majority were British, who had registered for subsidised migration. 

But between 1947 and 1953, more than 170,000 displaced persons from refugee camps in eastern Europe were selected by Commonwealth officials and brought to Australia. They were leaving counties that no longer existed as they had done previously—places that been shattered by war or seized by the Soviet Union. They were required to work for the Australian Government for two years and in return, they received food, accommodation, education, and health services and a standard wage. They were free to stay in the country after that, or to return to Europe.  

In the years after their arrival, migration policies slowly changed, later allowing migrants from southern Europe and then a range of other countries. Between 1947 and 1971, Australia’s population increased from 7.5 million to 12.7 million, as a result of increased migration from people seeking to rebuild their lives in a distant land that promised safety and economic security.  

In 1950, Anna Piotrowski, originally from Poland, arrived in Australia with her mother on board the Fairsea. She was just three and a half years old when they reached Port Melbourne and were sent to the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre near Albury-Wodonga. 

Anna Piotrowski:

 I remember Bonegilla quite well and Australia, so I was three and a half. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 Bonegilla was the first home for more than 300,000 new arrivals between 1947 and 1971—a former army camp turned temporary village. For children like Anna, it was the beginning of an unfamiliar life under a hot southern sun. 

Anna Piotrowski:

 When we got to Bonegilla, I think they’re called Nissen huts? They’re sort of corrugated-iron huts that the army had used. And they had two families per hut and they were just very, very hot. Very hot, especially for people that had come out sort of from a European winter. Yeah, just the heat and the dust and the flies. That sort of worried them a bit, but I mean they were happy to have freedom. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 Freedom came with heat, dust and uncertainty but also with the fragile joy of beginning again. From those metal huts at Bonegilla, families like the Piotrowskis would move across the country, helping to build the suburbs, industries, and communities of post-war Australia. 

Leaving home could provoke powerful, conflicting emotions. For the post-war British migrants who had registered for the Assisted Passage Migration Scheme, dubbed ‘ten-pound Poms’, the journey was meant to be one of opportunity. But the leaving itself could be heartbreaking. In 1953, Kathleen Golder left post-war England with her husband and young children, determined to begin a new life in Australia. 

Kathleen Golder:

 The date for our departure did not come as early as it could have done and I was getting onto six months pregnant and I said, 'I'll get on that boat if it's the last damn thing I'll do. I'll get on. I don't care if I'm in labour, I'll get on that boat.' But I happened to have had the baby two weeks before we got on the boat. So, I got on the boat with this new baby. And I was, stood, it was raining, as it would be in London in November—with this baby and I, and I was crying. Crying, oh dear me. I didn't want to leave really. You know, it was my home. It was my family. My brothers and every, all my family were there. I didn't want to leave but I, it was the best thing I ever did. But I didn't know it then. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 Kathleen’s memory captures both the grief of departure and the hope of arrival, the emotional crossroads faced by so many who left behind the familiar for the unknown. For some, that journey meant freedom. For others, it meant loneliness and loss. And for their children, growing up in the years that followed, it meant learning to belong in a country that was still uncertain of its own identity. 

By the late 1950s, the children of post-war migrants were growing up in a country still learning how to define itself. For many, the playground became the first test of identity, a place where accents, names and even your lunches could mark you as different. Richard Galea was born in Sydney in 1958 to parents who had migrated from Malta just three years earlier. He remembers that being considered ‘different’ could come at a cost. 

Richard Galea:

 We had often had some huge fights together in the school grounds. But nearly always it was because of the ‘wog’ word. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 It was a word that, for a generation of migrant children, could wound deeply. 

Richard Galea:

 Oh, used to, you know, be like just very, very painful, very hurt. Very, very hurtful. It was probably the worst word in the vocabulary actually, for me.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 Like many second-generation Australians, Richard Galea’s story is one of negotiation, between heritage and acceptance, between pride and the desire to blend in. 

Richard Galea:

 People, they're a beautiful race of people. They're very generous, very loving. And you very rarely find someone who can say a bad word against Maltese people to be honest. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 Sometimes, Australian ideas went too far. May-Britt Mosshammer, who migrated to Australia from Denmark, drew one important line—Australian food. 

May-Britt Mosshammer:

 And then my brother was saying to me, ‘Hey you have to try these crumpets with this, you know, chocolate-looking kind of stuff on’, which was Vegemite and I thought it was very, it looked chocolatey and so I expected it to be very sweet. So, he made me these crumpets with Vegemite. And I thought that was the most disgusting thing I ever had. I just spat it out. It was like bread with stock cubes smeared on it. It was just the weirdest thing. Oh boy. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 But for her, it was the people who made Australia her home.  

May-Britt Mosshammer:

 And I felt that has been really very often been the case in Australia that people have helped me. You know. They were never sort of like, ‘That’s none of my business.’ They really were very empathetic. And went out of their way often. And you know what, more than anything I think that’s where I started falling in love with the country. It was the humanity side. It was certainly not the country, the food, it was none of that. It was the people.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 Over time, the pride that once sat quietly at home, in kitchens filled with different food and voices from other lands, became part of the broader Australian story itself. In 1973, the White Australia Policy officially ended when Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, introduced the policy of multiculturalism to parliament. 

For those who were escaping conflict and war, Australia offered not only opportunity but refuge. The fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War saw a wave of refugees seeking asylum. On 26 April 1976, the first boatload of refugees fleeing Vietnam sailed into Darwin Harbour, heralding a series of arrivals over the next few years. 

Most refugees from Vietnam arrived by plane, after they had been selected by Australian officials from refugee camps that were established throughout South-East Asia. These refugees endured perilous journeys with great courage. 

One woman who made an extraordinary voyage was Van Thi-The Huynh, who fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975. With her two sons, both gravely ill, she boarded a crowded fishing boat bound for Malaysia. Their voyage would test every limit of human endurance. They were attacked by Thai pirates and forced overboard. Van swam through the dark waters to a nearby island, carrying her children to safety. For three days, they survived there, until the United Nations rescued them, arranging for her sons to receive urgent medical care. Eventually, they were accepted as refugees to Australia. 

Van Thi-The Huynh:

 When I were in the interview, the interpreter knew we were accepted and he said to us, “Why you go to Australia? It’s a very, very big country but not many people and, you see, if you live in the country, it’s very boring.” But we didn’t mind at all. We just very happy and knew we were accepted. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 For Van Huynh, and for thousands like her, Australia was more than a destination, it represented safety, renewal, and a fragile kind of peace. Such stories would help shape a new understanding of who could call this country home. 

By the 1970s, migration to Australia reflected a broader world, one in which identity could no longer be contained by one single story or a single place. For many, home existed in two countries at once. Everest Pitt, who migrated from Fiji to Queensland in 1974, has come to see herself as both Fijian and Australian. 

Everest Pitt: I loved everything about Australia. Still do. Like to me, if it was like: which country would you die for? Well, I'll put one foot in Fiji and one foot in Australia. I would die like that. Because I've given over 48 years of my life to the country.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 Her words speak to the layered belonging that defines modern Australia, where identity stretches across oceans, memories, and generations. In voices like hers, we hear the long arc of migration come full circle: from arrival and exclusion to belonging and pride. 

By the 1980s, classrooms were becoming small mirrors of a changing Australia. For many new arrivals, belonging didn’t come from blending in, but from finding others who also stood a little apart. Sevuloni Waqatairewa, who was born in 1970 and migrated from Fiji to Sydney while in primary school, remembers finding comfort in that shared distance. 

Sevuloni Waqatairewa:

 So, there were Indigenous children that went to the school with me. So that gave me a sense of comfort. There were other brown-skin kids around and we were taught Indigenous culture classes, we had language classes, and this is back in 1980, 1980–81 when I was at the school, so that was really great to get that. It was a very different experience, but at least I felt identified and connected. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

 For Sevuloni, those early connections were built on recognition, a quiet solidarity between communities who shared the experience of being seen as outsiders. It was through that mutual understanding that a new sense of belonging began to grow not about sameness, but about shared respect and resilience. 

By the end of the twentieth century, new forms of migration were reshaping Australia. Conflict, persecution, and instability in places like Afghanistan and Iraq drove thousands to seek safety far from home. Amongst them were Hazara families, a Shia Muslim minority in Afghanistan who had long faced discrimination and violence under Taliban rule. For many, escape meant leaving everything behind.  

One of those who fled was Mustafa Jawadi, born in Kabul in 1991. His story is one of courage, fear, and the long wait for safety. When the Taliban came to power, his family faced persecution and fled Afghanistan, first to Iran. But life there was also unsafe, and when his father couldn’t secure a visa to Australia, he obtained false passports so they could travel through Malaysia to Indonesia. 

After a month in Surabaya, they were woken one night and told their boat was ready. The journey was terrifying: on overcrowded, rough seas with little sleep. After eight days at sea, they reached Australian waters only to be told by the Australian navy they could not enter and must turn back. When smoke rose from the deck, panic spread. 

Mustafa Jawadi: 

Suddenly the big smoke came out from the deck, I didn’t know what’s happening and I went around the boat a bit with my dad to find a lifejacket. Our family we just jumped together 'cause my dad was only one who could swim properly. Like, he knew a bit how to swim. I didn't know and my mum didn't know. So, we jumped together and when we jumped, we were on the water for 30 minutes and Australian water, Australian, we saw the Australian navy came back with the boat started pick, picking us out and it took them to pick us up, pick us up at least an hour. They took us to the, to the bigger, to their navy ship and we stayed there and then they, everyone, when they got everyone out and they said two women died and everyone was worried who is it, who is it? And, and they went and looked and there was an old woman. She was around her 80s and there was a young woman pregnant. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The family was taken first to Christmas Island, then to Nauru, where Mustafa spent three years in detention before finally being resettled in Canberra. Since then, he has undertaken studies and has reflected on the complex ways his family’s journey played out. He says his parents… 

Mustafa Jawadi: 

Feel very happy. They're, they're more excited. The only thing is just that they miss their, like our family back in Iran and Afghanistan. They just want to meet them again. It's been seven years now, so I haven't seen them. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Even in safety, the distance remains, between what was gained and what was lost. Migration brings many challenges, and distance has long been one. Even as travel became easier and Australia grew more connected to the world, distance could still be an ache that never quite went away. For many migrants, maintaining ties with family and friends overseas remained a costly and an emotional challenge, a reminder of how far ‘home’ really was. Mohan Parasu, who migrated to Australia from India with his wife in 1992, remembers those early years vividly. 

Mohan Parasu: 

In the initial years it was really tough because the only way we could talk to somebody is by telephone, international calls, and they were very expensive. Like I remember, I think it was $2.60 per minute. We used to, especially the first four months of our stay in Australia, because we were living off the government allowance, we used to budget for so many minutes to get in touch with the family to let them know that we are fine here and things like that. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Those short, precious calls carried whole worlds:  reassurance, yearning, and love, across the crackling phone lines. 

Mohan Parasu: 

In recent times there is now video calls. It’s like so cheap and so available now. So, communication is not a problem anymore. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

For Mohan Parasu, the distance that once felt insurmountable has been replaced by instant connection, yet the emotion of those first years remains part of his story. Migration is no longer just a physical journey. It is one way of staying connected across time and technology. 

Across more than two centuries, Australia’s migration story has never been steady. It has moved forward and it has slipped back. There have been moments of generosity, and moments of great fear and prejudice. Times when we opened our arms, and others when we closed our borders and our hearts. Those exclusionary moments are not in the distant past, but they play out in different ways today.  

Over time, we have welcomed those in need, we have also detained them. And through it all, people have continued to come. They have crossed oceans and deserts, carrying languages, songs and memories. They have rebuilt lives from loss and created belonging from uncertainty. Their endurance and imagination have helped to reshape this country, not perfectly but profoundly. Migration is more than the movement of people. It’s the movement of memory, of ideas, of courage, of endurance.  

These are now part of the Australian story; they are our memory tapes. This is a story that remains uneven, conflicted and unfinished. But in the meeting of many worlds, is something enduring. Even in the face of fear and setback, people keep reaching for connection and opportunity. In that reaching, they keep remaking who we are. Voices of migration tell us not only where we have come from, but who we are still becoming. 

You’ve been listening to The Memory Tapes. I’m Dr. Shirleene Robinson. Thank you to the National Library of Australia, and to those many voices whose journeys continue to shape our shared history. 

If these voices spoke to you, share them. Tell someone about the stories of migration that helped shape modern Australia—the journeys, the challenges, and the hopes that continue to define who we are. Subscribe and if you can, leave a review. It helps these stories find their way to more ears, carrying forward the voices of all those who made this country home.  

This has been a National Library of Australia production. 

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

This episode includes excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection:

• Matthew Ryan interviewed by Hazel de Berg 

  Matthew Ryan’s life in Australia was a happy one. He married; he worked as a blacksmith and in horseshoeing. He had many supportive relatives in the country. His career did mean he eventually sustained some hearing loss and also dealt with typhoid fever. Yet he helped to build the Glebe Bridge, worked on the cane fields, and retired, financially secure, in a climate he liked. 

• Eddie Quong interviewed by Diana Giese  

  In 1993, Eddie Quong told the extraordinary story of his grandmother, who had travelled to Australia from China at the age of sixteen in the late 1800s for an arranged marriage with Eddie’s grandfather. Her search for a new life began as racist exclusion was escalating, yet she met challenges with bravery, initiative, and determination. 

• Anna Piotrowski interviewed by Barry York 

  Bonegilla was the first home for more than 300,000 new arrivals between 1947 and 1971 — a former army camp turned temporary village. For children like Anna, it was the beginning of an unfamiliar life under the southern sun. 

•  Kathleen Golder interviewed by Ben Ross  

  Kathleen’s memory captures both the grief of departure and the hope of arrival, the emotional crossroads faced by so many who left behind the familiar for the unknown. For some, that journey meant freedom. For others, it meant loneliness and loss. For their children, growing up in the years that followed, it meant learning to belong in a country still uncertain of its own identity. 

• Richard Galea interviewed by Elena Volkova 

  Richard Galea was born in Sydney in 1958 to parents who had migrated from Malta just three years earlier. He remembers that being considered ‘different’ could come at a cost. 

• May-Britt Mosshammer interviewed by Shirleene Robinson  

  Sometimes, some Australian ideals went just too far from those who came from afar. May-Britt Mosshammer, who migrated to Australia from Denmark [in the 1950s] with her family – taking to Australia ‘like a duck to water’. 

• Van Thi-The Huynh interviewed by Ann-Mari Jordens 

  Born in a small town northwest of Vietnam, Van Huynh faced many personal difficulties. Her older brother and then her two younger brothers, all died from illness in their childhood. Van cared for her older sister who contracted polio. Moving to Saigon at age six, she pursued an education as the country succumbed to the Vietnam War. Van’s father was wounded and died during the Tet offensive. Surviving the fall of Saigon, the political and domestic situation continued to decline, so Van and her family began a perilous ocean journey, eventually arriving to start a new life in Australia. 

• Everest Pitt interviewed by Hamish Sewell  

  Everest Pitt tells of her childhood in Fiji, where she needed to grow up quickly while looking after her brothers and sisters in the household. Always knowing she was going to leave – Everest looked abroad, eventually migrating to Queensland in 1974. Everest has come to see herself as both Fijian and Australian. 

• Sevuloni Waqatairewa interviewed by Thelma Thomas   

  Sevuloni was born in Nausori, part of Tailevu, Fiji.  He attended primary school in Suva, and when in year five he and his family migrated to Australia. Sevuloni remembers building strong friendships with Indigenous children in Newtown, Sydney. From there, Sevuloni completed a retail management cadetship with Coles Myer Group, developing professional expertise in management, sales and marketing which he then applied in a new role at Microsoft, where he worked for the next 20 years. 

• Mustafa Jawadi interviewed by Ann-Mari Jordens 

  Mustafa tells about his childhood in Afghanistan and at the age of six, travelling with his family to Iran, where he lived as a refugee. He recounts travelling through Indonesia, then making his way via a perilous boat journey to Australia. The family was taken first to Christmas Island, then to Nauru, where Mustafa spent three years in detention before finally being resettled in Canberra. Since then, Mustafa has undertaken studies in Canberra and has reflected on the complex ways his family’s journey played out. 

• Mohan Parasu interviewed by Barry York  

  Mohan Parasu describes his childhood in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, India. Mohan’s father was involved in community and social work, his grandfather was a patron of the arts and theatre, while his mother managed the large ancestral home. He describes his early academic interests and the achievements of his brothers. Mohan migrated to Australia in 1992, as a highly skilled electronics engineer.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

We knew the virus was coming before it reached our shores. Still, there was hope that maybe Australia could avoid it. But in a world this connected, it was only a matter of time. And with the virus came fear. People panic-bought. They were urged to stay home. One state shut its borders before the others. Arguments broke out over whether masks actually worked. But this wasn’t 2020. This was 1919, when the influenza epidemic transformed Australia. Viruses have a way of making people forget what came before. 

In the early 1980s, doctors started hearing about another mysterious virus overseas. 
Again, it reached Australia. And again, fear followed closely behind. So too did stigma, prejudice and moral panic. Yet from this, emerged something incredible: great courage and dedicated activists, carers and communities who refused to be silenced and changed a system. This is the history of HIV and AIDS. 

Then, four decades later, just when a new pandemic seemed unimaginable, the news broke: a city called Wuhan, people falling ill, no cure and a globalised world where no country could remain untouched. In 2020, COVID-19 arrived. 

Panic buying returned. Streets were empty. Working from home became routine. 
And Australia sealed itself off from the world once more. Three pandemics. The first and last are more than a century apart. But each one reveals who we are and how we respond when everything changes and nothing is certain. 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes.  I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson. In this series, we explore the people and moments that shaped Australia, through the voices of those who were there. Today, we consider the stories of some of Australia’s greatest public health crises through the voices of many of those impacted and whose courage met the moments. 

Australia has faced many outbreaks over its history. Polio, smallpox and the plague all left deep marks. But this episode focuses on three: influenza in 1919, HIV and AIDS during the 1980s and 1990s, and COVID-19, because each emerged in a radically different era but forced Australians to confront the same questions in new ways.  

How do we respond to fear? Who do we trust? Who gets left behind? And what will we do to keep ourselves and our loved ones safe?   

This episode is about people: those who faced uncertainty, who cared for the sick, who refused to be silent at a time when so many wished to erase their voices, those who experienced great loss and still fought for better and those who found new ways to live through some of the most disruptive health challenges this country has ever known. 

Across three different eras, we’ll explore how epidemics disrupted the familiar, 
how borders closed, how individuals and communities responded and how public health became something every Australian had to think about.  

By travelling through 1919, through to the early HIV/AIDS epidemic and into COVID-19, we’ll trace what changed and what didn’t in the way Australians understand risk, responsibility and each other over more than 100 years. 

The Influenza A pandemic which emerged towards the end of the First World War was particularly devastating. It has been unfairly dubbed ‘Spanish Influenza’ because Spain was open about the virus. In Australia, it became commonly known as ‘pneumonic influenza’. This pandemic killed more than fifty million people globally between 1918–1920, a greater number of people than those who died during the First World War. It remains one of the deadliest events in recorded human history.  

By 1919, Australia was already a nation exhausted by war. A generation of men had been killed or wounded in action. Nearly 60,000 of those who served would never return. Thousands more carried physical and psychological scars as they returned home. Yet the horrors of Gallipoli were already being shaped into a national story. The ‘war to end all wars’ had also seen divisive debates around conscription and increased sectarian conflict between Protestants and Catholic Australians.  

But even as the country tried to stitch itself back together, another invisible threat was approaching. When the troops arrived on Australian shores, so too did the influenza virus that would further test this nation. From October 1918, after seeing outbreaks in New Zealand and South Africa, maritime quarantine was adopted for ships.  A reporter in the West Australian newspaper on 2 January 1919 outlined how infected soldiers were being taken off ships and into makeshift quarantine wards. They noted that: 

‘A dreadful silence reigns, broken only by strangled coughs and choked breathing as the boys are carried in. They know they are home, but they do not speak. Tent after tent is filled up and white-clad masked figures run from one to another to minister to their great needs.’ 

Later that month, the virus reached mainstream Australia with cases in Melbourne from the 9th or 10th of January 1919. In 1918, each state government had previously agreed to alert the Commonwealth as soon as they detected a case of influenza. Yet it took Victorian officials around a week to let the federal government know about their cases. By the end of January 1919, the virus had spread from Victoria through to New South Wales and South Australia. Victoria attracted much blame for this. 

The Sun newspaper in Sydney published a particularly scathing editorial at this time about Victoria, declaring: 

‘Melbourne has no cause to congratulate itself upon the part it has played. Nero fiddled while Rome burnt, and the health authorities of Melbourne have fiddled with new names for a well-known pandemic disease while Melbourne becomes infected and in turn infected other capital cities.’ 

In the six months that followed, at least 15,000 Australians died of influenza and as many as two million people (40% of the population at the time) were infected. Almost one-third of deaths were in young adults between 24 and 34 years of age. First Nations Australians were severely affected by the epidemic with some communities suffering mortality rates approaching 50 percent. In the City of Sydney in 1919, 42 percent of all deaths were from the influenza epidemic, and there was ongoing and increasing pressure on health care facilities, with public hospitals unable to cope with the magnitude of the epidemic.  

On 27 January 1919, New South Wales was the first state to officially proclaim an outbreak of pneumonic influenza. Victoria followed the next day. Soon each state made its own arrangements for handling and containing influenza outbreaks and state borders closed across the country. Tasmania imposed strict quarantine, while Queensland imposed border controls at Tenterfield. A reporter from the Tamworth Daily Observer, writing on 31 January 1919, believed, ‘the dislocation of interstate traffic is quite unavoidable, as naturally the clean States could not be expected to continue communication with the infected.’ 

Alice Doyle, who was 29 and living in Sydney, remembers hospitals preparing for the impact of the epidemic in 1919.  

Alice Doyle: 

I had friends working out at the Coast Hospital, and the whole hospital was allowed time off before they began to nurse this. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Daily life quickly narrowed. As the virus spread, major public events were cancelled and the wearing of masks in public was made mandatory.  

Alice Doyle: 

Everything was quarantined. Churches were shut, and the shops and other places were shut. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Masks were the most visible sign of the influenza epidemic. Barbara Cullen recalls her husband returning from war.  

Barbara Cullen: 

I don’t know whether they did any good or not. Because if the masks were not washed properly, they could have been harbouring as many germs as the air outside. I mean, it didn’t occur to me those days, I wasn’t very aware of germs. But my husband said when he came back from the war, just wanting to get ashore, and there were all these people walking about with these masks on, they didn't know what was happening, they had no idea. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

But behind every mask was a private story of fear, labour, compliance or survival. Louisa Martin, around eighteen years of age at the time and living in Brunswick Heads in northern New South Wales, cared for her whole family when they all contracted influenza. This stopped when she contracted it too and could no longer continue.  

Louisa Martin: 

And then I got really bad myself, I got very, very bad with it. I nearly died. And anyway, mother didn’t know what was going to happen to me. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

She remembers the kindness of her soldier boyfriend while she was fighting for her life.  

Louisa Martin: 

I can remember him bringing me a great big bag of oranges. Given to mother, you know, on the verandah, and asked would she give them to me. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Others remembered the epidemic through the eyes of childhood. Thomas McKernan was six years in Melbourne in 1919.  

Thomas McKernan: 

I can recall very distinctly, for example, in that post-war period, there was the outbreak of the Spanish flu, which took many lives in Australia, and which was a most virulent disease. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Preventative techniques were being tried across the country. Beatrice Gerdes, who was living in Sydney and was seventeen years old in 1919, remembers working in an AMP office where she and other workers were sprayed each morning with a disinfecting agent. 

Beatrice Gerdes: 

We had to go to work with masks, and we had to go up every morning to this room on the fifth floor where we were sprayed, you know, with some kind of gas or something like that. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

For Beatrice, the epidemic became very personal.  

Beatrice Gerdes: 

My sister Alma got the pneumonic flu, and mother was—we were very worried about Alma, very, very worried. And, of course, she lost her hair, and she was really very, very ill. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

While Alma eventually recovered, many others did not. And in many families, fear turned to grief. Ethel Brunton Gibb, who enjoyed a career as one of Australia’s most successful radio actors in the 1930s, was seventeen and living in Sydney when the pandemic arrived.  

Ethel Brunton Gibb: 

There was a great deal of illness and very many deaths. There wouldn't be a family anywhere that hadn't been touched. I was sent to stay with my Uncle Albert when the flu hit the family at home. And my grandmother was a natural nurse. She was a marvelous nurse. She nursed the whole, everybody in the family that got sick. There were four of them who got sick. And then, of course, she succumbed herself. She'd be about 72 at the time. And she died just in a matter of days. It was horrifying because she was the electric spark in the family. She was a wonderful person, very lively. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Eva Nowlan, who was aged seven and living in Casino in northern New South Wales, remembers her sister Mary, a talented musician, who she describes as ‘marvellous and good’. 

Eva Nowlan: 

I can remember, the hospital was so full they couldn't put another person in, so they went over to the showground and they opened up the pavilion and the grandstand and everything, and they put all the patients all over there and they asked for anyone that could volunteer to come and nurse them and look after them, and Mary got that pneumonic plague. I can remember she, about three o'clock in the morning, she'd wake up and she'd scream and say, ‘oh my hands are going stiff and I'm in pain’ and everything. And my father, he'd jump on a horse, we had no telephone, no car, so, he jumped on a horse, and he'd go up to town to get a doctor. All the doctors were nearly that busy, you could nearly not get a doctor. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

After treatment from a doctor, the family believed Mary was recovering, but she became ill in Sydney. 

Eva Nowlan: 

So, they rang up and my mother and father caught the train to Sydney, but she died at 20 to…20 to 8 on the 15th of September. So, she was our first break in the family. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Eva Nowlan’s grief here is still palpable, so many decades after the loss of her sister. The simple words, ‘the first break in the family’ underscore how grief and loss stayed with families and communities long after the epidemic faded and for some, that break never healed. 

For Phyllis Matthews, the influenza epidemic reshaped her entire childhood. She was six years old in 1919.  

Phyllis Matthews: 

Well, very long after that. Terrible pneumonic influenza hit Australia, presumably brought back by some of the men returning from overseas. This was in April of 1919, incidentally. My mother contracted it, and there were so many ill that every school was turned into a hospital. There were litters on the floor for beds. There weren't the doctors or the nurses to look after them. My aunt had to lift me up so that I could see Mother, who was lying in bed with her beautiful curly hair spread all over the pillow. She turned her head and smiled at me. I never saw her again. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Finally, in August 1919, after two devastating waves and more than 12,000 Australian deaths, the influenza epidemic was declared over. But the memory of what happened, of the masks, makeshift hospitals and the sudden, unimaginable grief remained unspoken for decades.  

But epidemics never arrive on empty ground. By the early 1980s, another virus emerged, one that spread unevenly, striking first at communities already pushed to society's margins. But they pushed back and demanded to be heard. In December of 1981, the US Centre for Disease Control published an article which was the first reporting of what we now know as Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome. The article provided cases of a number of gay men.  

Jennifer Power has noted that like in the United States, the gay male community in Australia was more affected by HIV and AIDS than any other group. However, injecting drug users, sex workers and haemophiliacs were also heavily affected by this epidemic. Between 1982 and 2009 in Australia, 10,446 people were diagnosed with AIDS and 6,776 people died from AIDS-related illnesses.  

A virus does not reach everyone equally, and in the early 1980s, its unevenness was immediate and brutal. Sarah Shulman has movingly written that every gay person who lived in New York or San Francisco in the 1980s and the early 1990s is a survivor of devastation and carries with them the faces, fading names and corpses of the otherwise forgotten dead. A similar observation must be noted about gay men and affected communities in Australia.  

Medicine struggled to keep pace, but Australia's experts showed compassion and skill. In 1982, Ron Penny, Professor of Clinical Immunology at St Vincent's Hospital, located in the epicentre of Sydney's gay world, diagnosed the very first case of AIDS in Australia. When treating this patient, he faced the challenges of trying to diagnose a virus he had never seen before, where no antibody test that could diagnose it existed. 

Professor Ron Penny: 

And it just seemed to gel that perhaps we were really dealing with a patient with AIDS. So never having seen a case of AIDS and not knowing what it would mean, not being able to make a diagnosis because there were no antibody tests, We, I, then contacted the CDC and rang them. And I can remember there were long discussions with them about how we diagnose it, what should we do and so on. So, we had the communications and backwards and forwards. There were no faxes. So, it was by telephone and by courier or mail. And the guy had a lung biopsy and was immunologically tested. That was, you know, a point at which we thought, well, that's interesting, we've got a case of what this condition is, but I'd have to say that not the faintest concept of what the longer-term ramifications would be, because nobody knew in 1982 by then, there'd only been, you know, the cases in the US in two digits. And we still was a bit unsure as to what to do with that. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

But outside this hospital, fear spread even faster than the virus. Historian Paul Senchuk describes how many gay men were evicted from their homes or denied accommodation in Australia in the 1980s. Sydney Telecom engineers refused to carry out repairs at the Pitt Street Mail Exchange because, they claimed, it was staffed by large numbers of homosexual telephone operators who probably had AIDS.  

Yet even amid stigma, extraordinary leadership emerged. It wasn't from the top, but from within the communities most affected. The Australian Government partnered with affected communities to develop a response to the epidemic. They did this by funding AIDS councils. By empowering those most affected, the federal government enabled them to conduct critical outreach amongst their own peers. Members of affected communities, including LGBTIQ people, sex workers, injecting drug users, and positive people's groups in Australia, responded proactively and creatively to the epidemic, and were a key component behind Australia's successful response in terms of minimising the spread of the epidemic. But the emotional cost was intense.  

John Bal remembers he had only just come to terms with his sexuality as a gay man and found his community when it struck. He quickly volunteered to work as a carer in Melbourne and then went on to train as a palliative care nurse. He remembers the frantic pace at that time. 

John Bal: 

Maybe all that adrenaline protected us and distracted us from the holes in the background and maybe, however strong the feelings of helplessness were, the more we had to work harder and longer to overcome them. I don't know. I had very strong feelings of helplessness and powerlessness. The numbers were just mounting up. People that I never met were dying, but now I never get to meet them. I wasn’t going to anyway, but that wasn't the point. This was my community. It was dying. Was there going to be anything left for me, having finally arrived? 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

For many, activism meant both survival and testimony. For Leslie Taylor, a HIV-positive man who made a remarkable contribution as a founder of People Living with HIV-AIDS Victoria and served as Vice-President of what later became the Victorian AIDS Council, this epidemic was particularly cruel. It impacted the most marginalised in Australia.  

While previous epidemics had been experienced more or less at all strata of society, it was far too easy now for many in positions of power or who were removed from the epidemic to feign ignorance of what was happening. This was part of the reason why he was so keen to share his experience. In 1992, he told oral history interviewer James Waits… 

Leslie Taylor: 

I've got people coming in and taking videos of me and interviews like this and other things, because I think it's very important, because when this war is over—it's a war—and one day that war is going to be over, and the generation that's coming through are going to say, ‘We dared none, what did you do in the war?’ You know, it's like the Vietnam War, but this is lasting longer. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And even in the bleakest years, some held tightly to hope. In 1991, when treatment options for HIV and AIDS were still very limited, Robert McLean, who had been diagnosed as HIV-positive, reflected on the way that it was hope that propelled him forward. In his interview with James Waits, he stated: 

Robert McLean: 

The main thing is to not live as if you've got a death sentence. To live as though each year, the prognosis of increases, like when I was first told, they were talking about two or three years. The last thing I heard was up to 20 years. So even if a cure is not found, there's always hope. And if you give up having hope, then you might as well put a gun to your head. If you're diagnosed, you should always think that like in Gone with the Wind, tomorrow is another day. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Black humour too became a shield: sharp, irreverent and necessary. Many oral histories emphasise attempts to live fully before illness overtook. Black humour became a way for many to feel human. Ian Rankin said… 

Ian Rankin: 

One of the phrases that I recall from that era was ‘comply or die’, which was one of those black humour types of how do we explain that these things have to happen every day and multiple times during the day, sometimes different pills at different times of the day, all the rest of that, just to keep the virus down. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Geoffrey Cole remembers that nurses in hospital wards, many of whom were gay themselves, also used black humour to cope with the grim reality they were experiencing. 

Geoffrey Cole: 

They survived on that. The people who worked there survived on that black humour, and it was fantastic. I never saw them once, you know, do it in any way to embarrass a patient. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Then, in 1996, everything changed. Combination antiretroviral therapy transformed the experience of living with HIV and AIDS from a fatal illness into a chronic, treatable condition for many. But the devastation remained. In December 2025, the World Health Organization stated that 44.1 million lives had been globally lost to HIV/AIDS. At the end of 2024, there were an estimated 40.8 million people living with HIV and 65% of whom live in the WHO African region. These numbers remind us that epidemics are not only medical events: they reveal inequalities, they demand compassion and call on us to remember.  

In Australia, the HIV and AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 1990s left us with grief, as well as a powerful lesson in community care and what it means to insist on dignity and agency in the face of fear. For decades after AIDS first emerged, Australia learned, slowly and painfully, how epidemics are shaped not only by biology, but by politics, inequality and the stories a society chooses to tell.  

Community activists built new health infrastructures from the ground up. They contended with obstructionist politicians in states such as Queensland. It was a time that revealed both deep fractures and extraordinary solidarity. But just as the country grew used to thinking about epidemics as something from the past or as something affecting only particular groups, another virus appeared. 

News reporters: 

First case of novel coronavirus. Prepare for the worst, hope for the best. Hospitals were filling up. People were dying. No proven effective treatment. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

This time, the scale would be different. This time, no one would be outside its reach. The year was 2020 and the world was about to experience a new kind of global shutdown. 

News presenter: 

We have a new name for the coronavirus. The World Health Organisation has officially called it COVID-19. Co for corona, Vi for virus, D for disease and 19 because it started last year. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Australia's first case of COVID-19 was identified on the 25th of January 2020 in Victoria in a passenger returning from Wuhan. By the 20th of March, Australia closed its borders to all non-residents. Within days, states and territories began introducing restrictions too. Just as in 1919, the instinct was containment. Lines were drawn at the borders, hoping the virus could be held at bay. Just like 1919, masks reappeared, borders closed, streets emptied and families once again faced illness at home. A century apart, the visual language was the same. Masks on the street, buildings shut and an uneasy quiet settling over the cities. Professor Edward Holmes, a leading virologist, had been following the earliest reports from Wuhan closely. After speaking with Chinese researchers he knew, who shared data rapidly and bravely, he felt a rising worry as the virus spread beyond China. 

Professor Edward Holmes: 

Watching the outbreak, looking at some of the early patterns of spread, looking at the first evolutionary trees, watching it spread, watching it coming to Australia, this impending sense of doom, right, coming over. I, you know, began to realise this is going to be bad.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

As the virus spread, Australia organised emergency repatriation flights from Wuhan. These flights carried enormous risk. There was no test for the virus, no treatment and no certainty about transmission. Alison McMillan, who worked with the National Critical Care Trauma Response Team and AUSMAT, remembers. 

Alison McMillan: 

Qantas took the flights, went to Wuhan to get the Australians, Australian citizens and Australian residents, I think, out of Wuhan with those flights. And then we brought them to Australia, to the air base at Exmouth. Qantas staff, absolutely superb. You know, these guys volunteered. I think we forget that, they volunteered, go and do this. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Just as nurses, orderlies and volunteers stepped forward in 1919, modern frontline workers found themselves taking extraordinary risks in the name of care and duty. But epidemics never fall evenly. In 1919, influenza took the young and the healthy without pattern. During the AIDS crisis, whole communities, especially gay men, shouldered grief that others often refused to see. 

And in COVID, lockdowns and quarantines in New South Wales and Victoria disproportionately focused on socio-economic areas that were more disadvantaged. Furthermore, during COVID, remote Aboriginal communities faced shortages and risks that were far harsher than what many non-Indigenous Australians experienced. 

Through the pandemic, so many people sought ways to protect and sustain their communities. For some, that meant healthcare or logistics. For others, it meant something far older, drawing on traditions of care that had been passed down for generations. In places like Wilcannia, already facing overcrowded housing, limited food supply and long distances to essential services, the arrival of COVID threatened to become catastrophic. When supermarkets became unreachable, Leroy Johnson stepped up in the most direct way he could, to provide food. 

Leroy Johnson: And then you'd start hearing stories about COVID getting to Wilcannia and sort of the old town got locked down and the shops got shut and then all of a sudden there was this drama around no one having tucker in town and that's all the mob, you know. So, we just sort of got in contact with the coppers and said, ‘Look, we're out here, we can hunt some wild meat and take it into town’. And they said, ‘Yeah, no worries.’  

So, we sort of went hunting and got as many as we could and I dressed them, you know, boned them out and got some eskies and boxes and stuff and loaded them up. I drove them into Wilcannia. At the edge, at the edge of town, got someone to meet me. You know, just left the boxes there and drove back out to, out to Mutawintji. And we started doing, then there was word back that they never had no food in Wilcannia and no could get, because they weren't allowed to come across to Broken Hill because it was locked down, so we just kept doing it, every couple days. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

His actions echo the quiet acts of care remembered from 1919. Neighbours tending the sick, families feeding one another, communities stepping in when systems failed. In Wilcannia, care didn't come from a hospital ward or a border policy. It came from community, from kinship, obligation and the will to look after each other when systems failed. Across a century of epidemics, one truth has held. When health systems strain, communities improvise. The forms change. Oranges delivered to a flu patient in 1919, hunted meat during a COVID lockdown. But the instinct is the same.  

In 1919, the influenza epidemic fractured a nation still reeling from war. In the 1980s and 1990s, AIDS demanded courage and clarity from communities who had been pushed to the margins. And in 2020, when another virus brought the world to a halt, Australians again found ways, large and small, to protect each other.  

A century apart, the questions remain the same. A virus doesn't only test our hospitals or our governments. It tests our relationships, empathy, and willingness to care for those we may never meet. And it reminds us again and again that epidemics end, but the memory of how people respond becomes part of who we are. From soldiers coughing in quarantine tents, to activists building new health systems from the ground up, to a man driving hours so that an entire town could eat. The throughline across these epidemics isn't just illness, it's courage and care. Ordinary people choosing to act, even when afraid, even when uncertain, even when no one was watching.  

These tapes remind us that epidemics end, but the way that people respond to them become part of our national memory, and acts of care shape who we are long after the virus fades. Each epidemic changed Australia. Each asked us to reconsider how we live with one another, and each left behind lessons we are still learning.  

If influenza revealed how fragile a newly federated nation could be, and HIV and AIDS revealed how stigma can deepen suffering, COVID revealed how closely our well-being is tied to one another, and how unevenly risk is distributed. Seen together, these stories are not only about disease, but about the kind of country we choose to be. As new global health threats emerge, these stories matter more than ever.  

The purpose is not to scare but to remind us that we've been here before and that our greatest resilience comes not from certainty, but from solidarity. What we choose to remember shapes how we face what comes next. 

If these voices moved you, share them. Follow The Memory Tapes wherever you access good podcasts and help these stories find their way to more ears. I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson. Thank you for listening to the National Library of Australia's The Memory Tapes.

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

This episode includes excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library Oral History Collection:

• Alice Doyle interviewed by Lucy Taksa 

  In this oral history Doyle speaks of her family's background in country and city Victoria, moving to Sydney at age 11, the comparison of school in country and city, her immediate and extended family, her employment in an umbrella factory, work conditions, lifestyle, family reading material, and her memories of the plague in Sydney, 1903 and the flu epidemic of 1918. 

• Barbara Cullen interviewed by Catherine Johnson 

  Born in Double Bay, Sydney, Cullen speaks of her parents' background, childhood memories, family life, their living conditions, family servants and their chores, family health, schooling beginning with a governess and then private schools in Sydney and Bowral, the custom of "coming out", her memories and experiences as a child during WWI, her mother's lifestyle and modern attitudes about women and society, contraception, sex and sex education, and the influenza epidemic of 1919. 

• Louisa Martin interviewed by Catherine Johnson 

  Martin speaks of her parents' background immigrating from Scotland and England, childhood memories with her brothers and sisters, life and work on the farm, moving to Brunswick Heads, employment doing housework for local families, and her experiences during flu epidemic of 1919. 

• Thomas McKernan interviewed by Mel Pratt 

  McKernan, a journalist, overseas correspondent, and publicity officer for the National Capital Development Commission, speaks about early childhood in Northcote, his family background, living conditions during World War I, illness brought on by Spanish flu epidemic, education at St. Patrick's College, the police strike of the 1920s as he was told by his father, post-war Melbourne, the death of his father, and how he entered journalism in 1948 with Radio Australia. 

• Beatrice Gerdes interviewed by Bronwyn Hughes 

  Born in Balmain, Sydney, Gerdes speaks of her family, being the eldest of 9 children, her parents' backgrounds and work, her mother and her work in the home, sex education, pregnancy, social life, family roles, family health, employment with AMP doing clerical work, WWI, and the flu epidemic. 

• Ethel Brunton Gibb interviewed by Catherine Johnson 

  Born in Surrey Hills, Gibb speaks of her parents' background, her father's employment overseas, life with extended family in Ashfield, the family home and family values, meeting her father for the first time, lifestyle and education in U.S., returning to Australia, discrimination and racism during World War I, her husband's involvement in World War I, her and her husband's work in radio, the flu epidemic 1919, and the Depression. 

• Eva Nowlan interviewed by Inge Riebe 

  Nowlan speaks of the family dairy farm, family life, the pneumonic influenza that killed her sister and its effect on the community, her memories of WWI, employment as a home help after leaving school, brief experience nursing, marrying reluctantly, her opinion of their marriage, and managing a farm on her own during the 1914 drought. 

• Phyllis Matthews interviewed by Stan Arthur 

  Matthews talks about her earliest recollection of her Uncle Ted singing a song for her at the front gate of the family home before he headed off to the War, the family home and neighbourhood, her mother's contraction of the pneumonic influenza in 1919, her father's return from the war and his being unaware of mother's death, relocation to the countryside and life on the farm, her father getting out of the 'family business', her relationship with step-mother, meeting her husband, moving to Papua New Guinea and working as a radio (tele) operator. 

• Ron Penny interviewed by Diana Ritch 

  Professor Ron Penny, Director, Centre for Immunology, St Vincent's Hospital, Sydney, NSW, speaks of his background in medical research, setting up immunology laboratory St Vincent's Hospital, medical research funding, first contact with AIDS as a disease, epidemiological study of HIV and gay men, his representation on AIDS Taskforce, National Advisory Committee on AIDS and ANCA (anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibodies), lessons learned from AIDS epidemic, the Grim Reaper campaign, AIDS education, and scientific advances made from AIDS study. 

• John Bal interviewed by Shirleene Robinson 

  In this oral history John discusses growing up in country Victoria, his experiences of bullying at school, attending La Trobe to study, reconciling with himself that he ‘was not heterosexual’, moving to Adelaide and working at Flinders Medical Centre, the gay scene in early eighties Adelaide, how he learned about GRID (gay related immunodeficiency) in medical literature, prior to joining the gay community, and how it may have helped prepare him for the emergence of the AIDS crisis, moving to Melbourne in 1984, his work with the Victorian AIDS Council, volunteering as an ‘AIDS mate’ at Fairfield Hospital, the dedication of medical staff at the time, going into nursing, the Grim Reaper Campaign, the media’s handling of the 1984 incident where multiple children had received HIV infected blood transfusions, his long lasting friendship with the man who had unknowingly donated the infected blood, the contrast between the media portrayal of him and the reality of the man himself, learning he was HIV positive, living with HIV, and his career supplying HIV counselling to patients in GP clinics. 

• Leslie Taylor interviewed by James Waites 

  Taylor speaks about his early life in New Zealand, coming to Australia in 1981, living with HIV, becoming involved with the Victorian AIDS Council in 1983, the AZT Task Force, the People Living With AIDS program, and how HIV has affected his life. 

• Robert McLean interviewed by James Waites 

  McLean speaks about his childhood in Adelaide, his sexuality, contracting HIV; promoting understanding of HIV/AIDS among Torres Strait Islanders, living with HIV, and what he has learned from being HIV positive. 

• Ian Rankin interviewed by James Waites 

  Ian Rankin, President of the Australian Federation of AIDS Organisations speaks about his upbringing, the early days of AIDS, gay-related immune deficiency (GRID), his involvement in social advocacy and activism, AZT trials, relocating to Canberra, local HIV services, his position as Convenor of People Living With HIV/AIDS-ACT and President of AIDS Action Council-ACT, the arrival of highly active anti-retroviral therapies, his early involvement in HIV community sector activity, his time as Australian Federation of AIDS Organisation delegate; the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power model, the AIDS Match Funding Programme and Medicare AIDS Programme, the HIV community sector over past 10 years and the reduced resources while the HIV+ population increases, the Disability Support Pension, Canberra's first mobile needle exchange, his involvement in AIDS Action, and the changes in approach to education over past decade. 

• Geoffrey Cole interviewed by James Waites 

  Geoffrey Cole, Services Coordinator at the AIDS, Dementia and HIV Psychiatry Service, speaks about studying to become a psychiatric nurse, his experiences working as a medic in Nui Dat during the Vietnam War, moving to Sydney, working as a mental health nurse, building rapport with patients, the gay community in Sydney during the early eighties, the impact the emergence of HIV had on the community and interpersonal relationships, ‘fake’ HIV tests and false positives, the discrimination faced by himself and others in the community during the AIDS crisis, unexpectedly strong support from volunteers out of the Lesbian and heterosexual communities, community building in the HIV and Tropical Diseases Ward at Prince Henry Hospital, the Neuro AIDS Symposium and International Neuro AIDS Society World Conference, the scientific and medical advancements Australia made in HIV treatment and prevention, the effects of HIV in remote and rural areas of Australia, the relationship between HIV and mental health, AIDS Dementia Complex, and starting the AIDS, Dementia and HIV Psychiatry Service and it’s work in the years following 

• Edward Holmes interviewed by Michael Green 

  Virologist and evolutionary biologist, Edward Holmes is a Professor at the University of Sydney and fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). With Zhang Yongzhen, he co-authored the first published descriptions of SARS-CoV-2 (Covid 19) and its genomic sequence. 

  In this oral history Professor Holmes discusses his early life, growing up in the UK, his studies, moving to Australia, developing an interest in virology during the AIDS crisis, his work prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and his long-standing working relationships with chief virologists in China and the Chinese Centre for Disease Control, the ecosystem in and around Wuhan, and how it likely contributed to the virus jumping from animals to humans, initial sequencing of the genome and making the information public, the ramifications of its unsanctioned publication, the virus’ spread and development into a pandemic, theories on the origin of the virus, early speculation on the nature of the virus, increasing understanding of how the virus works, the medias representation of the scientists involved in studying the virus, facing criticism and conspiracy theories, the intersections of politics and science, the process of peer-reviewing papers, and balancing due process with public safety and awareness during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

• Alison McMillan interviewed by Madonna Grehan 

  Alison McMillan is the Commonwealth Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer, and a member of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee, the committee that guides emergency and disaster response for disease control in public health. 

  In this oral history she discusses her childhood and family life in England, migrating to Australia with her husband, living and working as a nurse in Australia, her work with the Victorian Department of Health, developing analytic practise of ‘sentinel events’ and publishing the first Sentinel Event Report in Australia, the Start Clean: Victorian Infection Control Strategy and the impacts of hand hygiene among hospital staff on the spread of infectious diseases, implementing a system of third party credentialing in the health system, the National Critical Care and Response Centre and the Australian Medical Assistance Teams, her roles in health and disaster emergency management, sexism in emergency response organisations, and improving the working environment for emergency response workers at every level, her work as State Health and Medical Commander, epidemic thunderstorm asthma in 2016 and changes to the Bureau of Meteorology’s reporting on storms and developing national monitoring systems to pick up notable abnormal increases in respiratory symptoms presenting to emergency departments, becoming the Commonwealth Chief Nursing and Midwifery Officer just before Christmas in 2019, coordinating emergency responses to the emerging Covid-19 virus, the repatriation of Australian citizens from China and quarantining on Christmas Island, and the wide range of challenges facing public health in managing Covid-19. 

• Leroy Johnson interviewed by Peter Read 

  Born in Wilcannia 1973, Barkindji/Malyangaapa man, Leroy Johnson, is the Native Title Officer and Park Manager at Mutawintji National Park. In this interview he discusses his family history, attending university in Newcastle, working in Juvenile Justice after university, his roles at Mutawintji National Park, conservation of Aboriginal Rock Art and the threats posed by feral animals, Covid-19 effectively cutting Wilcannia off from Broken Hill and therefore access to food and resources, and how his team hunted and butchered kangaroos out in the park to provide food to the town, in the interim between the start of lockdown and the roll out of Government assistance packages.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I am Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

On the 19th of February 1965, Charles Perkins, an Arrernte and Kalkadoon student studying at the University of Sydney, arrived in the New South Wales town of Moree. The stop was part of a fifteen-day Freedom Ride that he made with 28 others, students from the University of Sydney. While the majority of Freedom Riders were non-Indigenous students, Gumbayngirr-Bundjalung man Gary Williams, the only other Aboriginal university student at the University of Sydney other than Charles Perkins, was also on the Freedom Ride. Gerry Mason, an Aboriginal man from Adelaide and a friend of Charles Perkins, also travelled with the Freedom Riders for parts of the journey.  

Under the umbrella of the group Student Action for Aborigines, the Freedom Riders hoped to document the discrimination and poor living conditions that impacted almost every element of life for First Nations Australians. Their journey had been met with considerable pushback and outright hostility. The bus that the Freedom Riders travelled on had been followed by a convoy of cars as it left the town of Walgett. One vehicle deliberately forced the bus driver to swerve off the road, causing the bus to tilt dangerously. 

But the Freedom Riders had also been supported by many of the First Nations people who lived in the towns they visited. And the courage of Charles Perkins and the Freedom Riders never faltered. In Moree, in the face of violent opposition, they challenged discrimination in the form of a by-law that restricted Indigenous people from entering the Moree Baths and Pool on the same conditions as non-Indigenous people. In doing so, in front of a watching media, they drew the attention of the nation to the endemic prejudice and colour bars operating at this time. In an oral history interview with Peter Read, Charles Perkins reflected: 

Charles Perkins: 

And so, Moree was a, a really bitter experience. And you know, frightened the death out of the lot of us.  But it did get a massive amount of coverage. Massive amount of coverage on TV and radio and that was the whole idea, I suppose, was to get that coverage out so people became aware. And we'll never be the same again and it certainly isn't. A lot of progress to this date, a long way to go. Can't solve everything by one, by one Freedom Ride. You know, one swallow doesn't make a summer. Nor does one Freedom Ride change the minds of everybody. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

This is the National Library of Australia's The Memory Tapes and I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson. In this series, we explore the people and moments that shaped Australia through the voices of those who were there. In this episode, we're looking at power and protest.  

Australians barrack for the underdog. We are the country that invented the eight-hour working day. Yet the story of Australian democracy requires that we think about who has been left out and who has had to fight to be included. This is a story of movements that began on the margins and changed the centre. Today’s episode is a history of some of those movements and inspiring Australians who decided that the gap between what this country promised and what it delivered was too much to accept and joined together to take action for change. We will trace struggles that took place during a time of great social transformation in the 1960s and ‘70s. From bus rides to the barricades, from marches and moratoriums to beatings, these are the moments when Australians raised their voices and put themselves on the line in growing numbers. And with their courage, they helped to transform this country for the better for each and every one of us today. 

The Freedom Ride of 1965 was inspired by similar civil rights actions that had taken place in 1961 in the southern states of the United States, which had aimed to desegregate interstate travel. These US Freedom Rides had occurred at a time when the Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr. was emerging as a once in a generation, inspirational figure of change. In 1963, he spoke to 250,000 people in Washington, delivering a 17-minute speech,  

Martin Luther King Jr: 

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history. as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

‘I have a dream’, one of the most important and moving speeches of the twentieth century. His message of adopting nonviolent resistance to achieve equal rights earned him the Nobel Prize in 1964. It resonated globally.  

In Sydney, students watched on. They adopted the tactics of the US civil rights movement, but they also modified them to address the particular Australian manifestations of racial prejudice. This was a time when colour bars were in place across the state of New South Wales and Australia more broadly. In Moree and towns like it, colour bars were largely unofficial. First Nations servicemen who had served in the First or Second World Wars would return home to find that entering an RSL club and asking for a drink like non-Indigenous ex-servicemen, was an act that could be met with refusal or violence. Cinemas enforced segregated seating, as did many other businesses. Such colour bars sent a message that First Nations Australians were not equal citizens. They constrained the rights and freedoms of First Nations people. 

Australia today still has a long journey to undertake in bringing about true equality of opportunity. When First Nations Australians are given their due right to fully and freely exercise self-determination, that will be the true force for change. But we also must appreciate how overtly discriminatory parts of Australian society were in the 1960s and what has been changed as a result of the dedicated and courageous activism of people such as Charles Perkins and the Freedom Riders and the generations of First Nations activists who have come forward over subsequent decades. 

Looking at the travel schedule that the Freedom Riders undertook over 15 days in 1965, it is difficult not to feel a sense of awe at their energy and their determination. They covered a lot of ground. And we’ve heard, by the time they reached Moree, they’d been shouted at, physically attacked and they had been followed out of Walgett by an aggressive convoy of locals who tried to violently force their bus off the road.  

This considered, it really does say something that Charles Perkins spoke of the actions at Moree as the ones that particularly stayed with him due to the levels of aggression and particularly virulent prejudice. Yet, what Charles Perkins, his fellow Freedom Riders and Aboriginal children from the local mission sought in Moree was not radical. It was very simple. It was the right to swim without discrimination in the Moree pool. Ten years earlier, in 1955, the Moree Council had passed a unanimous resolution barring Aboriginal people from using the town’s Memorial Hall, artisanal thermal baths and adjacent swimming pool under the same conditions that non-Aboriginal people could. 

In Moree, Charles Perkins and the Freedom Riders collected a number of children from the mission and attempted to challenge this and gain entry into the pool. Unbelievably, this led to three hours of increasingly heated negotiations. During this time, a sizeable and increasingly hostile crowd gathered. Physical violence was directed at the Freedom Riders, local Aboriginal people and Charles Perkins. Some people were knocked over. Produce, such as eggs, were thrown at the protesters to diminish and hurt them. Several arrests were made. 

Charles Perkins spoke with Peter Read about those efforts to bring Aboriginal people into the swimming pool on that hot day. 

Charles Perkins: 

Anyhow we got a group of kids together and one of them was young Lyall Munro and a few others in the town. Got them all together and so I got them in front of me and lined them up and said, 'We're all going in.' And of course, we didn't get in. So, they kept tossing us out as we came through the turnstile, they grabbed us and tossed us out, so we just, it was just a bit of a ridiculous situation walking up and getting, confronting and then going away. And I tried to sort of hold on then. I sort of got wrestled quite vigorously by a couple of big coppers. And was, it wasn't nice at all, you know. Probably one of the worst things I've ever been involved in in terms of insults. You know, being called all sorts of names and abused for no reason, apart from just trying to get people into a swimming pool. And when you, you know, reflect on it and you think back on it now, it, it just seems ludicrous that people will go to that lengths to sort of demonstrate their hatred and their venom, you know in such a way just stop Aboriginal kids having a swim, when they were swimming anyhow during the school hours. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Contemporary media reports compared the events at Moree Baths as being little different from the American South. The protests and the picket lines of the Moree Baths were the best known and most photographed event of the Freedom Ride. The protest ended when the Moree Council rescinded the 1955 by-law. 

There are a number of photographs that were taken of that day in Moree at the swimming pool once the children were granted entry. They show smiling faces and clear joy. A couple of children are glancing at Charles Perkins with what looks like admiration, and perhaps awe. He looks tired, understandably, but also calm and resolute in that swimming pool.  

The events at the Moree Baths were a seminal moment in the Australian Indigenous civil rights movement. They were not the first time that Indigenous people had advocated for rights. But in the 1960s, at a time when televisions were growing in popularity, the journey of the Freedom Riders captured the attention of the media in Australia. The New York Times even wrote about their travels. The issue of injustice to First Nations people was brought to greater numbers of non-Indigenous Australians than ever before.  

But that swim in the Moree pool, on the lands of the Gamilaraay people, had taken immense courage. It had involved pushing back against deeply entrenched prejudice. But through courage and direct action, change did come to Moree. And this was just part of a larger story of how a bus ride, that lasted just over two weeks, ushered in real reform that swept across the country in the years ahead.  

Charles Perkins did not believe that the Freedom Ride would change everything. But he did believe it would be a starting point that would lead to other change as well. And he was right. Two years later, a major victory was achieved. In 1967, a referendum was held in which over ninety percent of Australians voted to finally count First Nations people in the national census and to allow the federal government to make laws on their behalf. This 1967 referendum remains the most successful in Australian history. There is a direct connection between the visibility that the Freedom Ride brought to racism and segregation in country towns and the success of this national vote. 

Those news cameras that followed the bus into towns such as Moree and Walgett and Bowraville broadcast the reality of life for First Nations Australians into living rooms across the entire country. Australians who’d never really thought about colour bars were suddenly watching them operate in real time. And awareness fostered change.  

Charles Perkins went on to complete his degree from the University of Sydney in 1966. In doing so, he became the first Aboriginal graduate from an Australian university. He then went on to a trailblazing career in the Australian public service which included being appointed the first Indigenous Australian person to head the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1984. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters by the University of Western Sydney in 1998, and later, an honorary Doctorate of Law from the University of Sydney. When he passed away in 2000, he was granted a state funeral. 

The impact of the Freedom Ride and Charles Perkins has continued to remain in the memories of many Australians more than sixty years later. Larry Brandy, a Wiradjuri man, was born in Condobolin in 1958. He was only a young boy when the Freedom Riders toured through New South Wales. He didn’t personally see them on their journey. But growing up, he did experience the segregation and discrimination that they were fighting against. In 2014, he reflected on what the Freedom Riders experienced and the broader significance of their journey and the visibility of Charles Perkins.  

Larry Brandy: 

What he did and what was a great thing, was national, the television followed him and then you know we got exposure about Aboriginal issues in small country towns. And you know because I came from a small country town. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

The Freedom Riders had demonstrated that direct action, combined with media attention, could shift what a country was willing to accept. And it was a lesson that other movements were already learning and one they would not soon forget.  

News reporter: 

The end of August 1963, in some places in the United States, a negro could not go to school where he chose, eat where he wished, build his home where it pleased him. But he was coming to Washington, he said, to swallow up hatred and love, to overcome violence by peaceful protest. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

By the second half of the 1960s, something was shifting. The international currents of change were reaching Australia. It was palpable on university campuses, in folk clubs, bookshops, pubs and in the pages of student newspapers. A new generation was arising. These were the children born after the Second World War, the baby boomers. Raised in prosperity, they were the largest generation in the country's history and by the mid-1960s they were flooding into universities and into public life. 

They were the first generation to grow up with television, influenced by American popular culture with the US civil rights movement playing out in their living rooms. They could see, clearly and in real time, what injustice looked like. And they were developing a language to name it and ways of challenging it. 

And then came the Vietnam War, the conflict that galvanised so many Australians in the second half of the 1960s and early 1970s. Australia sent more than 60,000 defence personnel to Vietnam between 1962 and 1972. The Australian government’s rationale in so doing was to stop the spread of communism. It was argued that, with South Vietnam becoming communist after the French were forced out in 1954, if North Vietnam was to follow, communism would continue to spread throughout Asia and then across the world. Engagement in the Vietnam War was also seen as a way of strengthening Australia’s relationship with a critical strategic ally, the United States.  

The most controversial element of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War was not fighting in the war itself but the issue of conscription. During the First World War, there had been two divisive and closely fought referendums held on the issue of conscription. One was held in October 1916 and the other in December 1917. On both occasions, Australians voted against forcibly conscripting Australians into overseas military service.  

But in 1964–65, the Menzies government introduced conscription by ballot with the passage of the National Service Act 1964. This Act required 20-year-old males, if selected, to serve in the army for a period of 24 months of continuous service, reduced to 18 months in 1971, followed by three years in the Reserve. The Defence Act was amended in May 1965 to provide that conscripts could serve overseas. Over 60,000 men were conscripted and over 19,000 served in Vietnam. 

For much of the duration of the war, opinion polls showed that most Australians were against conscripts serving in Vietnam even if they broadly supported the war itself. The method by which young men were selected appeared both random and cruel. Young men's birthdays were drawn from a barrel. If their number came up, they went to Vietnam to participate in a war many Australians did not understand and increasingly did not support.  

As the war progressed Australians were becoming less and less convinced by the original rationale that communism posed a direct threat to this country. Opposition to the war also grew as national servicemen were killed and wounded in the course of their service. 

For a generation already asking questions about authority, about equality, about what Australia owed its citizens, conscription was the spark that lit the tinder. The protest movement that followed would become the largest in Australian history at that time. Historians Robin Gerster and Jan Bassett have argued in their book, Seizures of Youth, that ‘the protests had an indisputable moral force, elderly men, politicians, asked for the burdens of the war to be shouldered, in a bizarre birthday ballot, by young men considered not even old enough to vote’.  

The Vietnam moratorium protests against the War became the largest public protests in Australian history at that time. The first moratorium took place on 8 May 1970 and was inspired by the US moratorium held in October 1969, where more than 500,000 Americans protested across 1,200 cities and towns. 

The two objectives of the moratoriums and the protest movement were to withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam and to end conscription. The largest event was in Melbourne where 70,000 people marched peacefully down Bourke Street, led by Labor politician, Dr Jim Cairns. Similar events took place in Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, Perth, Hobart and in dozens of rural towns. 

The second and third moratoriums took place on the 18th of September 1970 and the 30th of June 1971 respectively. The moratorium movement drew in a disparate range of groups opposed to the war, including mothers, clergy, teachers, academics, unionists, politicians and school students. While university students had led initial protests against the Vietnam War and conscription, the moratoriums involved thousands of everyday, middle-class Australians. Geraldine Box, born in 1949, remembers this time well. 

Geraldine Box: 

I didn’t attend any of the moratorium marches in Melbourne but I, I was certainly active and, spoke out about what was happening in Vietnam and took a great interest in that. And, also seeing, I think having a brother who, who was at the age when he could’ve been called up and fortunately, he wasn’t. His birth date didn’t come forward but my, my cousin, the cousin’s birth date came forward, and he was conscripted into the army. So, I just felt it, it wasn’t a right thing for, for Australia to be doing. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Given her strong feelings on the issue, and personal feelings towards conscription, Geraldine took action. 

Geraldine Box: 

I came home from the nursing job that I was in and decided to do a late night midnight run to the local war memorial and plaster it with anti-Vietnam war…ah I think it was actually just after the Cambodian, after the bombing of Cambodia and that really, I thought that was it and I’d, I went up and wrote things on newspaper and spread it all, pasted it all over the War memorial and my, my parents who by that stage had moved into town and lived just up the road from the War Memorial were absolutely aghast when I told them what I had done. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Peter Galvin, born in 1951, found himself at the epicentre of the political protest movements of the early 1970s and the issue of conscription. He had left school at the age of 15 and he took action as a 19 year old in 1971, when he protested against the six-week Australian tour of the all-white South African rugby team, the Springboks. South Africa at this time was a country of apartheid, where legislated policies of racially discriminatory segregation were strictly enforced. The McMahon government, in Australia at the time, let the Springboks tour go ahead, despite considerable public dissent and many other nations preventing the Springboks from touring as a sanction against apartheid. Peter Galvin was arrested at a Sydney match, becoming one of the hundreds of Australians who were arrested protesting against this tour. 

Before this though, his political consciousness had already been disturbed by what he saw as the injustice of conscription.  

Peter Galvin: 

As I was growing up, you know, from between the ages of about 16 and 20, as the age for being called up, you know, conscripted into the army, grew nearer, I had to think more and more about it. I was always against the concept of, you know, of, you know, this compulsion of conscription of human life. I mean, I thought it was akin to slavery. And I was against it. I was just morally against it. No political reason particularly, I just thought it was just a conceptually wrong. Irrespective of what the war was about or anything else, I just thought that the idea of being able to conscript a person against their will to do something was wrong. And I still do. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Due to his moral objection, Peter Galvin had long decided that he was not going to register for the draft. There was a possibility that he could have avoided arrest for this by staying under the radar. But this course of action was not in line with his moral beliefs. He knew that you were required to register at the age of 20 years and after that…  

Peter Galvin: 

They drew the birthdays out of the barrel and then all the people that had registered were then called up if their birthdays came out. In my case, where you don't register, nine times out of 10, that'd be the end of it. They never knew you didn't register because they didn't know who you were. Until, Unless you came to their attention somehow of the authorities. Yet there was a school of thought that if conscription was wrong, you should actively do something about it to stop it. And that's the school of thought that I came from. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

And so, Peter Galvin wrote to the minister responsible for National Service at the time, informing him of his decision.  

Peter Galvin: 

His response was to send the police round to arrest me but yeah. So, I didn't register. And so that act took place about a year before the call up would have happened. And so, then when the call up did happened, my number wasn't called out. So, I was prosecuted for failing to register. And I was eventually fined for that, another hundred dollars or something. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

He remembers that a failure to register resulted in being automatically called up for service. You were then required to attend a medical to see if you were fit for the army. Peter did not turn up for his medical and that was the trigger for arrest. Once you were in prison for seven days, you were usually given a medical in gaol and a notice to attend the Army on a particular date. Peter believes that it was in the interests of the Army and government to try and prevent cases reaching such a stage where dissent was so visible. 

Peter Galvin: 

It was only if you really annoyed them that they'd really go after you. And unfortunately, I fell into the really annoying category. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Peter Galvin was gaoled for seven days, and the communist party organised lawyers for him and others protesting against conscription. He was released in August 1972, just months before the Whitlam government came to power and officially ended conscription.  

The direct action and visibility of protest against conscription and the Vietnam War also inspired the growth of another movement for change, the women’s liberation movement in Australia.  

Shirleene Robinson: 

On the 31st of March 1965, the same year that Charles Perkins and his fellow Freedom Riders challenged discrimination and prejudice against First Nations people in New South Wales, three women walked into the Regatta Hotel in Brisbane and ordered drinks. 

That was not, in itself, unusual. But what they did next, when they were refused service, was. Two of the women, Merle Thornton and Rosalie Bognor produced a chain, fastened themselves to the footrail of the public bar and refused to leave until they were served. The third woman, Elaine Dignan, left the Regatta Hotel, ran and tossed the key into the nearby Brisbane River.  

They were protesting a law that confined women to a separate lounge, a ladies lounge that was quieter and smaller. It was away from the main bar where business was done, and opinions were formed and where men moved freely amongst strangers and friends. Confinement to the ladies lounge sent a message, that some Australians belonged and some did not. These women had decided that message was no longer acceptable. As a large crowd gathered around them, their husbands handed out a leaflet explaining the purpose of the action.  

Merle Thornton remembers that this was a time… 

Merle Thornton: 

When there were often women standing around outside public bars waiting for their men around Brisbane. And I just couldn't handle that. What I think is that it made the connection between the, the ongoing women's movement and the right to full social acceptance as members of the public. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

There were costs as a result of her visibility though. From 1965, when she formed the Equal Opportunities for Women association, Merle Thornton was monitored by ASIO. They saw her activism for women’s rights as a potential threat to society which could cause political unrest. She remained under ASIO surveillance until 1977. 

The women's movement was not without its own exclusions. It was predominantly white and middle class in its early years. First Nations women, migrant women, lesbian and bisexual women often found that their concerns were not addressed. 

Yet the movement did speak to very real issues. Key demands included reproductive freedoms, equal pay and employment opportunities and childcare, and an end to domestic violence. It was the arrival of the contraceptive pill, which gave women control over their sexuality, that played a really important role in the rise of the movement in Australia. Patricia Barrkman remembers… 

Patricia Barrkman: 

I guess it was probably the start of the forerunner of the women's movement and the change in society for women 'cause women could suddenly, they had more control. I mean there were various forms of contraceptive but I don't think a lot of it was terribly successful and I think for many women, it was something that was on their mind all the time that, you know, ‘Oh, we're going to get pregnant’. And I was one of those women. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

A young expatriate Australian academic became one of the most prominent spokespeople of the second wave feminist movement. Germaine Greer, who completed a PhD on Shakespeare at Cambridge University in 1968, went on to write The Female Eunuch, published in 1970. This book, which sold out its first print run on its first day of publication, and became an international bestseller, argued that the traditional nuclear family with its roles of traditional wives and mothers, oppressed women. Greer spoke passionately of the change that women’s liberation offered. 

Germaine Greer: 

I mean, women's liberation is sexy, it's exciting, it's all kinds of things. And it's here to stay, I'm sorry to say. Because there's no turning it back. I mean, a radicalised woman is not able to go back to the old one-two hanky-dropping routine. It's just too nauseating. It isn't going to happen, you guys. You'd better get used to it. You'd better get used to it. You'd better get used to it. You'd better get used to it… 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Pat Turner, born in 1952, an Aboriginal Australian woman of Gudanji-Arrernte heritage, expresses this. 

Pat Turner: 

I mean in the late ‘60s I was ripe for all of that. I mean I was a woman's liberationist; I was gonna be a black activist. I was gonna stand up for social justice for Aborigines and no one was going to stop me just because I was a woman. I mean that was my mental take on everything. And, and that was what I was absolutely determined to do to fight for social justice for Aboriginal people and see things change. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

The movements for First Nations rights, for an end to the war, and for women's liberation had each asked Australia to look honestly at who was included and who was not. A new generation had developed a language for discrimination and a set of tactics for challenging it. The contraceptive pill had begun to separate sexuality from reproduction and to loosen the grip of conservative moral frameworks. And the Stonewall riots of 1969 in New York, which were widely reported in Australian newspapers, had shown that gay and lesbian people could organise, resist and demand recognition. It was in this charged atmosphere that Australia's LGBT rights movement found its moment. 

In late 1969, two Melbourne women, Marion Norman Paull and Claudia Contessini founded the Daughters of Bilitis, Australia’s first openly homosexual political organisation. In June 1970, Daughters of Bilitis member, Francesca Curtis, became the first homosexual person in Australia to appear on television with her face shown, openly discussing her homosexuality. Phyllis Papps remembers watching this appearance… 

Phyllis Papps: 

And I'd never realised that there were other people like me before. So, Francesca, for the first time, opened face on television, declared that she was homosexual and that she was representing the organisation—Melbourne chapter of—Daughters of Bilitis. In actual fact, I was just stunned. And I suppose that was the epiphany for me. There was somebody else who was like me, apart from what I'd read in books. So, I wrote a letter to the Daughters of Bilitis post office box and got a reply and was invited to attend one of their afternoon social functions. I think at that stage there were five or six original members of the Melbourne chapter of Daughters of Bilitis, of which Francesca was one of them. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Phyllis and Francesca soon became a couple and would remain so for 51 years, until Francesca’s death in 2021. In October 1970, two other members of the Daughters of Bilitis shared the first homosexual kiss ever shown on Australian television on This Day Tonight. And Phyllis Curtis and Francesa Papps made history in 1970 when they were the first lesbian couple to come out on national television, on This Day Tonight. In their oral history, they reflected… 

Phyllis Papps: 

Well, we’re trying to get through to a wider audience, which in those days was extremely hard. 

Francesca Curtis: 

We were idealistic and I think we both had the same philosophy. We were passionate about spreading the word. We wanted acceptance for gay people, who were all mostly in the closets. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1972, the Daughters of Bilitis, which had by then changed its name to the Australasian Lesbian Movement, officially announced its closure. In some ways, it had been very early for its time. The pressures of organising and activism had also been intense. But the group had made an impact and provided support and visibility to women across the country.  

But another group, even more visible than the Daughters of Bilitis had emerged soon after. In 1970, the Campaign Against Moral Persecution, or CAMP, was established by John Ware and Christabel Poll.  

John Ware: 

We formed the society CAMP Inc. We came out as homosexuals in 1970. But to understand the significance of all that, I think you have to look at what it was like in the ‘60s to be a homosexual and it was very much illegal. I think 14 years in gaol. And also, it was a medical model with psychology and psychiatry claiming that it was a behavioural disorder and that there are all sorts of things wrong with us like inability to form long-term relationships, immature development, all sorts of crazy things. 

I think the ‘60s was also a time of challenging authority. There was women's lib, there was Vietnam, there was tutors insisting their students call them by first name and having tutorials in hallways in universities and out in the paddocks under trees. And students being told they had to write an essay on anything they liked for as, as many words as they liked. And the students were totally bewildered by all this. And people weren't getting married. So, and also the pill. So, there was a lot going on. And in it all, came the Stonewall riots in New York. There was a lot of activity. It made all the newspapers out here. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

For gay and lesbian Australians in this era, visibility itself was the act of resistance. To appear on television with your face shown, to form an organisation and put your name to it, to come out to a neighbour or a colleague, these were acts of profound courage that laid the groundwork for everything that followed: the decriminalisation of homosexuality, state by state, across subsequent decades, the slow dismantling of stigma and ultimately, the long road to marriage equality and ongoing campaigns for the rights of transgender and gender diverse people and intersex people. Like the Freedom Riders who had boarded a bus, like the women who chained themselves to the bar in a Brisbane pub, like young men who had refused to register for a war they believed was wrong, these Australians had decided that the cost of silence was greater than the risk of being seen. And together, these Australian movements for power and protest, showed that when courageous people find each other across differences of race, gender and sexuality and refuse to accept the world as it is, they can bend it, however slowly, towards something better. 

John Ware attributed the growth of a movement for gay rights to the broader protest culture of the time, as well as to international events. In today's episode, we've heard from activists, organisers, marchers and quiet dissenters whose courage helped to shape what it means to live in a more just and equal Australia. The country that they helped to make was never inevitable. It was argued for, fought over, sometimes lost, sometimes found and passed on. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

You've been listening to The Memory Tapes. I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

If these stories spoke to you, share them. Tell someone about the students from the University of Sydney who rode a bus into towns that didn't want them there and changed the nation's conscience. Tell them about the women who chained themselves to a pub footrail and refused to be confined. About the young man who wrote a letter to a government minister knowing it would get him arrested because he believed that conscription was wrong and that silence was worse. About the thousands who marched down Bourke Street and through cities and towns across the country demanding that Australia account for the Vietnam War it was fighting in their name. And how each of them found ways of showing other that this country was worth fighting for. But these are not only stories about protest. They are stories about what a country becomes when enough of its people decide that the gap between what is promised and what is delivered is too wide to ignore. And Australia is still in the middle of that process.  

Follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and if you can, leave a review. It helps these stories find new listeners and it helps carry forward the voices of those who had the courage to demand something better for all of us.  

This has been a National Library of Australia production.

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

Included in this episode are excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection:

• Charles Perkins interviewed by Peter Read 

  Charles Perkins was born in Alice Springs in 1936 and is often recognised for his role in the 1965 Freedom Ride and his campaigning in the 1967 referendum on Aboriginal rights.  In this interview, he reflects on his early life at St Francis House, the influence of Ted Noffs and his Foundation and studying at Sydney University. He speaks about his experiences with the Freedom Ride, working in the Office of Aboriginal Affairs, joining the Tent Embassy and establishment of National Aboriginal Consultative Committee (NACC). Charles Perkins also speaks about his experiences of racism in his life, from confrontation with Bjelke-Petersen, land councils and boycotting of the Brisbane Commonwealth Games. He finishes the interview discussing the contribution Aborigines (First Australians) could make to Australian society in the future.  

• Larry Brandy interviewed by Mary Hutchison 

  Larry Brandy is a Wiradjuri man born in Condobolin NSW in 1958 and moved to Canberra in 1975. Over three interview sessions, Larry speaks about his family history in the Condobolin area, his childhood memories of “growing up Aboriginal” and playing football. He reflects on his move to Canberra to work in the Public Service, meeting his wife and working in the same building as Charles Perkins. He talks of his work with the Department of Health, the Ngunnawal Centre, Aboriginal Heritage Officer with ACT Parks and Conservation and involvement in the Apology to Stolen generations. He talks of his plans to become a full-time storyteller and performer with preschool and school aged children.  

• Geraldine Box interviewed by John Bannister 

  Geraldine Box was born in Blackheath, 1949 and grew up in the Riverina area outside of Corowa. Over four sessions, she reflects on her life journey and how her experiences have formed her decisions in life. She talks about her background and family history and her memories as a child in an isolated community. She reflects on her education; her nursing career; and overseas travel including work as a nanny. She talks about the Vietnam War and her protest activity; her return to Darwin, her memories of Cyclone Tracy and work in Alice Springs. She speaks about living through the Whitlam era, the Rights and Equal opportunity Act (1984); rights movements for women, the environment and First Australians peoples and her experiences in the LGBT community.  

• Peter Galvin interviewed by Matthew Higgins 

  Peter Galvin, born in Gulargambone, NSW, 1951 speaks of his protest experiences beginning with a moral objection to conscription including refusal to register for the draft and participating in the Melbourne moratorium marches. He recalls his experiences in protesting apartheid and the Springbok rugby tour of the 1970s, protesting the US base at West Cape and uranium and union protests against the Whitlam dismissal. He speaks on his careers both on the union side and industrial relations side, the media's role in public opinion; the change of technology; voting patterns; social observations. 

• Merle Thornton interviewed by Maryanne Dever and Margaret Henderson 

  In 1965 Merle Thornton, founding member and President of the Equal Opportunities for Women Association, and Rosalie Bogner chained themselves to the bar of the Regatta Hotel to protest the ban on serving women drinks in Queensland’s public bars. The protest was an inciting incident in Australian Second Wave Feminism and a defining moment in what would become the Women’s Liberation Movement. In this oral history Merle talks about her early childhood and family history, early experiences of gender discrimination, becoming involved in feminist politics, joining the Aboriginal Advancement League in the early 1960s, being a working mother, the Regatta Hotel demonstration, the rights of women in Australian society at the time, the Equal Opportunities for Women Association, the 1969 International Congress for Women in Helsinki, introducing Women's Studies to the University of Queensland, the pace of feminist change, working on the National Film and Sound Archive foundation committee, the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1987, the problems of Aboriginal advancement as linked to those of Women's advancement, and future prospects for feminist activism, culture and gender around the world. 

• Patricia Barrkman interviewed by Hamish Sewell 

  Patricia Barrkman, born in South Gippsland during the Depression, grew up on a farm with her parents and siblings. In this interview she talks about her family’s experiences on their rural farm during World War II, working for G J Coles as a junior office girl, how routines for young women were determined by others, the morals of the time, the sense of safety, the impact of technology on relationships, her courtship and marriage, the post war Americanisation of Australian homes and habits, sex education and the introduction of the pill, how rural social structure ran on religious lines, free education and opportunities for children, and her work with the Queensland Renal Association. 

• Germaine Greer address at the National Press Club 

  Germaine Greer is an Australian academic whose seminal work on female oppression in the nuclear family and the traditional roles of women in society, the Female Eunuch, was published in 1970. She was a prominent figure in second wave feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s. As a longstanding public figure in the areas of feminism and sexual politics, her work has continued to be controversial and influential. In this address to the National Press Club she speaks on the representation of women, and women’s issues in the media, in relation to a number of recent newspaper articles from the Murdoch press and US media. She discusses; working mother’s guilt, access to childcare, wage discrimination, and discriminatory workforce practices, how the media handles sexual assault, how reporting should be improved to reflect the real lives of women, cater to channels through which women consume news, and integrate women’s news into mainstream news, and urges women to join the trade union movement. 

• Pat Turner interviewed by Nikki Henningham 

  Born in Alice Springs, Pat Turner is an Aboriginal Australian woman of Gudanji-Arrernte heritage, who has worked extensively for the advancement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights, health and welfare, the civil rights and women’s liberation movements, and Aboriginal land rights, in both the Northern Territory and Federal Governments. In this oral history she discusses her family history, childhood and education, her commitment to self-determination for Aboriginal people, working as the first Aboriginal woman welfare officer in the Department of the Interior, the importance of community controlled organisations for Aboriginal people, the Civil Rights Movement and Women's Liberation, Northern Territory Land Rights and uranium mining at Ranger Mine, and her time working for various government agencies including; the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and Aboriginal Childcare, and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. 

• Francesca Curtis and Phyllis Papps interviewed by Helen Ross-Browne 

  In 1970, Francesca Curtis and Phyllis Papps were the first lesbian couple to ‘come out’ on national television, during an interview on ABC’s This Day Tonight. The interview is considered a turning point in the recognition of lesbian relationships in Australia. Though they exchanged wedding rings in 1970, the couple were legally married in 2017, after same-sex marriage was formally legalised in Australia. In this interview they discuss their childhoods, their early experiences of being different, discovering they were gay, their families’ attitudes towards homosexuality, and the societal understanding of lesbian relationships in the sixties and seventies. Francesca discusses founding the Daughters of Bilitis in Melbourne, later the Australasian Lesbian Movement, and her decision to appear on television. Phyllis reflects on seeking psychiatric treatment for her homosexuality, seeing Francesca’s appearance on the Bailey File, realising that there were other women like her, and subsequently joining the Daughters of Bilitis. Together they reflect on meeting, moving in together, their joint interview on This Day Tonight, and the repercussions, both positive and negative, of coming out on prime-time television. 

• John Ware interviewed by Sara Dowes 

  In 1971 John Ware was a founding member of CAMP Inc (Campaign Against Moral Persecution), Sydney’s first gay and lesbian political organisation, which advocated for visibility, community building, law reform, and an end to the psychiatric ‘treatment’ of homosexuality. The organisation continues to operate today as the Gay and Lesbian Counselling Service of NSW. In this interview he discusses his role in CAMP Inc, the rebellion of the Sixties, the decision to 'come out', the public response, the CAMP INK magazine, the role of psychologists and psychiatrists in the treatment of homosexuality, the early Gay Liberation movement in Sydney, and the effects of HIV/AIDS on the gay community.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I am Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

At first, they were told they could not go. Not because they couldn’t swim but because it was considered ‘improper’ for women to compete in front of men. Yet in July 1912, 17-year-old Wilhelmina ‘Mina’ Wylie stood at the edge of a pool built in an inlet of Stockholm Harbour for the Summer Olympics. She was joined by her fellow Australian competitor and friend, Fanny Durack.  

Mina Wylie had grown up in the waters of Coogee, coached by her father, Henry Wylie. He had been a champion long-distance and underwater swimmer who opened Wylie’s Baths in 1909. But the greatest obstacle Mina Wylie faced competing had never been her ability. It was a rule. The New South Wales Ladies’ Amateur Swimming Association barred women from competing in front of men. Australian officials also claimed there was no money to send female athletes to the 1912 Olympic Games, even though it was the first time women’s swimming events were included.  

Yet Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack refused to accept that decision quietly. After a public outcry and a challenge to the authorities, both women were allowed to travel to Stockholm, providing that they took chaperones and paid for all their own expenses. In doing so, they became Australia’s first two female Olympic swimming representatives. And so, when that starting pistol fired in 1912, they dived into the water. And with that dive, something profound shifted. 

This is the National Library of Australia’s The Memory Tapes and I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson. In this series, we explore the people and moments that shaped Australia through the voices of those who were there. In this episode we will be focusing on sport. Few things capture Australia’s imagination in the way that sport does. We gather around televisions. We crowd into stadiums. We wake at impossible hours to watch events on the other side of the world.  

We define ourselves as a sporting nation, a small country that punches above its weight. We measure summers in Test matches and winters in grand finals. Many of us remember the day in 1983 when Australia II broke the longest winning streak in sporting history and brought victory in the America’s Cup sailing competition home.  

Sports Presenters: 

She's going to tack any moment and she'll swing around the committee vessel and they've lost it. There it is. Australia 2's victory has captivated the nation and sparked a delirious reaction from those who stayed up all night to watch the historic win. 

Prime Minister Bob Hawke: 

I tell you what, any boss who sacks anyone for not turning up today is a bum. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1989, when the Australian cricket team arrived in England to battle for the Ashes, many journalists described them as the worst team this country had ever sent. Yet Australia pulled off a decisive victory and won the Ashes that year, 4–nil. And, as Max Walker, a cricketer who had retired from the game by then, remembers, the reception on their return was enough to bring a tear to the eye of one of Australia’s toughest cricketers, 6’4” Merv Hughes.  

Max Walker: 

The ticker tape parade in Sydney in 1989 was one of the great sporting events that I've ever been to. To see them sitting on top of the car bonnets and six or seven hundred thousand people throwing streamers. It was a tear that trickled out of the corner of Merv Hughes’ eye. You might think that big fellas like that don't cry, but it was fabulous to think the amount of support we back here in Australia gave the boys. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And we are great supporters. We remember the legends who reshaped games, those teams who carried suburban loyalties onto national stages. Their victories have become part of how we understand ourselves. They give us proof of determination, resilience and a belief that our size is no barrier to success.  

There is something special about the Australian relationship with the water though. Our nation hugs a coastline of more than 25,000 kilometres. Water has long been our proving ground. We talk about the golden eras of our great Olympic swimmers from Dawn Fraser, Ian Thorpe and Emma McKeon, currently the most decorated Australian at the Olympics. Swimming holds a special spot in the national imagination.  

And yet, even in a country that celebrates sporting victories, the playing field has not always been level. Sport has reflected Australia’s deepest inequalities around race, gender and class and reinforced quiet assumptions about who belongs. At times it has reinforced prejudice. 

Yet sport has also been a powerful site of resistance. It has been a place where First Nations athletes, women, migrants and working-class Australians have challenged limits placed upon them. A place where the nation has been forced to reconsider exactly who it is and who it celebrates. In today’s episode, we trace the triumphs and the boundaries of Australia’s sporting story. 

When Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack fought to compete in the 1912 Olympic Games, they did so knowing that this was the first Olympic Games where women’s swimming was part of the program.  In Australia, the idea of women competing publicly, in swimsuits, in front of men, was still deeply controversial. Women’s bodies were scrutinised. Propriety mattered more than performance. Yet Mina Wylie had been swimming almost her entire life. She remembers that her father… 

Mina Wylie: 

Had, of course, all of us swimming. He was a champion swimmer, underwater swimmer of Australasia and also plunger of Australasia and he was so keen on swimming, of course, naturally he had all the family taught swimming. And we used to go to a lot of the men's carnivals as children and give exhibitions of fancy swimming. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

She had performed show-stopping feats in her father’s aquatic troop from the age of five years. She was accustomed to challenging social expectations.  

When the 5th Olympiad in 1912 drew close, Mina Wylie and Fanny Durack were champions. They had broken swimming records. Still, Australian administrators hesitated to send them to compete. Beneath the decision lay an assumption that international sport was a serious pursuit only worthy for men and one that was questionable for women. 

The public did not entirely agree. Newspapers took up the story of the two talented young women, who were being prevented from swimming for their country. Pressure mounted. On 4 March 1912, The Adelaide Advertiser headlined a report, “A Question of Propriety: Should Men See Ladies Swimming?” Ironically, this article announced that the decision had already been made. Fanny Durack and Mina Wylie would be allowed to attend the Stockholm Olympics but only if they raised their own funding and were accompanied by chaperones.  

Mina Wylie:

After a long fight with them we were allowed, given permission to go and both Fanny and myself went to Stockholm at our own expense. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Not only did they compete, but Fanny Durack won gold in the 100-metres freestyle and Mina Wylie won silver.  Mina Wylie remembers, with a touch of irony, that once they’d become Australia’s first women Olympic medallists in swimming… 

Mina Wylie: 

The Australian flag went up for one two in Stockholm, of course Australia sort of took the credit for which they really weren't due, I don't think. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The gold medal that Fanny Durack won was the only individual gold medal that Australia won at the 1912 Olympic Games. And Mina Wylie’s silver medal was one of only two individual silver medals. They had secured the very first Olympic medals for Australian women in swimming. Yet celebrations were muted. Both swimmers were praised for their grace as much as for their athletic ability. Their femininity mattered just as much as did their speed. Mina Wylie had crossed the pool but there were further distances to be navigated.  

Sometimes childhood memories capture the birth of new sports, a moment when something unfamiliar takes hold, sparks the imagination, and reshapes leisure. In 1914, Jack Tonkin, a teenager growing up on Sydney’s eastern beaches, witnessed such a moment. He saw a demonstration of a sport that would become one of Australia’s most popular. 

In 1914–15, the renowned Hawaiian swimmer, lifeguard and surfer Duke Kahanamoku visited Australia. Born in 1890, Kahanamoku was a world-record-holding swimmer and five-time Olympic medallist, including gold in the 100-metre freestyle at the 1912 Games, the same event won by Fanny Durack in the women’s competition. Though an accomplished athlete and lifeguard, he is best remembered for popularising the traditional Hawaiian practice of longboard surfing in Australia. 

Riding the waves was not new. There is evidence of a surfboard demonstration at Manly in 1912, and colonial accounts describe First Nations people bodysurfing along the New South Wales coast well before Kahanamoku’s visit. 

But when Kahanamoku gave his only public exhibition of surfboard riding after he’d competed in swimming carnivals, thousands travelled to the Freshwater Beach to watch. As The Sydney Morning Herald reported on 25 December 1914, ‘It was Kahanamoku's first attempt at surfboard riding in Australia. He gave a magnificent display, which won the cordial applause of the onlookers.’ 

Young Jack Tonkin was among them. This was no coincidence.  He remembered a childhood in which the beach was becoming central to leisure and sport, as volunteer lifesaving clubs spread and coastal recreation flourished.  

Jack Tonkin: 

Oh, yes, surf clubs were prominent. And don't worry. I remember when Duke Kahanamoku and George Cunha came to Australia as the two greatest swimmers in the world, Duke Kahanamoku—to this very day, there are surfboards known as Duke surfboards. He introduced surfboards, that was 1912. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Duke Kahanamoku certainly did introduce surfboards to Sydney's beaches, and for Tonkin, watching that demonstration, something had changed. 

In the 1960s, surfing went on to even greater heights, assuming extraordinary levels of popularity on Australian beaches, particularly with an emerging youth subculture. In 1964, twenty-year-old Australian, Bernard ‘Midget’ Farrelly won the very first official world championship for the sport at Manly. He’d been immersed in the sport since the 1950s but he remembers the 1960s were the real decade of change. 

Bernard ‘Midget’ Farrelly: 

So, it took a while for, you know, people to realise that an Australian had actually won something and then once they did realise, they sort of got a bit excited about it, sort of thing, and ironically about that time the popularity of surfing as something other than a sport, surfing as a sub-culture or a lifestyle took off. 

Surfing as an alternative in sport, lifestyle and everything that that encompasses, you know, clothing, language, music, dance, it just took off. A lot of young people jumped into it and the numbers in the water doubled, trebled, quadrupled and just kept going and going and going. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Since then, Australians have continued to pursue surfing with a passion. It is now the most popular water-based sport in the country after swimming and surfing legends have been numerous. Stephanie Gilmore, born in 1988, is an eight-time world champion on the women’s surfing league. Layne Beachley is a seven-time world champion and the only surfer in history to win six consecutive world titles. And Mick Fanning, born in 1981, was crowned champion of the Association of Surfing Professionals World Surf League's World Tour in 2007, 2009 and 2013. And in 2015, while competing at Jeffrey's Bay in South Africa, Fanning found himself sharing a wave with a ten-foot great white shark. He punched it.  

Mick Fanning: 

It was big enough, it came up. He got stuck in my leg rope.  

Pete Mel: 

We're just trying to process, I think, more than anything. You know, you kind of just want to hug him. But you wrestled the shark. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

His fellow competitor Julian Wilson, seeing what had happened, paddled towards him rather than away. Both were pulled from the water. That Fanning eventually returned to competitive surfing says something about the hold the ocean has. 

While sport had become central to Australian national identity by the early twentieth century, there were still restrictions that prevented some from fully participating. Until the late 1960s and 1970s, government restrictions controlled where First Nations Australians could live, if they could travel and whether they could compete in athletic events at all. 

The barriers were immense. And somehow, in spite of this, across the country, with great talent, First Nations Australians were still making a mark in some of Australia’s most popular sports. It was far from easy. In many cases, the opportunities simply were not there. As Wiradjuri man Harold Coe, who was born in 1955 and grew up on The Murie, remembers about sport in his youth… 

Harold Coe: 

Sport was a way. I think it was an escape. We looked upon it as an escape. But again, we didn't get the opportunities to excel, you know. We lived out in a small community and those of us or those of us that did show a little bit of potential would be looked after in terms of being taken away to Cowra and Forbes, Parkes and to the knockouts and that, but you know, from The Murie, we didn't get all that, that many opportunities, mate, and it wasn't until, I suppose, later on in years that we actually moved into the town that we got access to the sporting clubs and that, that we actually got involved, you know. I mean we had some terrific sportspeople within our groups but again, the policies didn't allow for our people to excel, you know. They just weren't thought of as team players in the mainstream sporting teams. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

But despite prejudice and restrictions, there were some who managed to break through. On country racetracks in rural towns and prestigious racetracks in major cities, First Nations jockeys rode to victory. Horse racing offered something rare: the chance to travel, to earn prize money and to gain recognition in a society that restricted almost every other avenue of opportunity. Worimi man Mervyn Maynard was an extraordinarily talented and sought-after jockey who rode over 1,500 winning horses between 1949 and 1994, competing across four countries. His son, Worimi man, historian and Emeritus Professor, John Maynard, describes how:  

John Maynard: 

That was primarily because he was riding in the big carnivals in Brisbane or Sydney and Melbourne, because he was very sought after as a rider to ride at those big cup carnivals. So, he was taken away from me, and I was able to go and, and visit those courses and those big, big events. He rode, actually, the year before I was born, he rode in the 1953 Caulfield Cup, and he rode for Sir Frank Packer, Kerry Packer's dad. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson:

In boxing tents and stadiums, First Nations fighters also stepped into the ring before roaring crowds. The ring could offer pay, prestige and global titles, as it did for Lionel Rose in 1968, when he became world bantamweight champion. Jenny Rose, Lionel Rose’s wife remembers that… 

Jenny Rose: 

There were lots of Aboriginal fighters around in Lionel's day, you know, lots. And, and they could fight at the stadiums in Sydney and Brisbane and Melbourne. And they could fight at the leagues clubs. So, they could make it, they could earn a living. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

On the tennis court in 1971, a young Wiradjuri woman named Evonne Goolagong, won the French Open. She would go on to become one of Australia’s most celebrated tennis players, winning Wimbledon twice. Her grace on court was admired. 

First Nations players were pivotal to AFL. There is a good deal of evidence that the game itself has First Nations origins. And First Nations players transformed it with their skill. Yet, well into the 1980s and 1990s, those players who proudly scored could be subjected to sickening and often unchecked racial abuse. Outstanding Noongar Australian Rules football player Nicky Winmar was repeatedly racially vilified during his career. After one 1993 match, he responded to this racist abuse by lifting his shirt and pointing proudly at his skin. On the 7th of May 1993, the Australian Jewish News reported that Winmar was “black and proud of the fact but, at an official level, little is being done to stamp out racist abuse or sledging by spectators.” 

Time and again, sport placed First Nations excellence in full public view. Time and again, Australia was forced to confront a contradiction: how could it celebrate Indigenous brilliance on the sporting field and deny equality in every other area? And then, in the year 2000, this contradiction played out before a global audience. 

A little past 8pm on the 25th of September 2000, Cathy Freeman stepped onto the track at the Sydney Olympic Games. As she prepared to run the 400 metres, she was carrying far more than her own ambitions. Her shoes, specially made, were the colours of the Aboriginal flag, showing her pride in her Kuku Yalanji and Birri Gubba heritage.   

More than 110,000 people were packed into Stadium Australia that night. Millions more Australians tuned into the race on television. Cathy Freeman, an extraordinarily gifted runner, was being held up as a beacon for reconciliation.  

Lisa Jackson, a proud Aboriginal woman who was also a volunteer at the Sydney 2000 Olympics, was determined not to miss Cathy Freeman’s race.  

Lisa Jackson: 

When her race was on, I said to the supervisor I said, ‘Look mate, I’m not going to be … I’m going to be sitting down there with everyone else in the exhibition park’ and he said, ‘Yeah, I think everyone else is going to do that too’. I said, ‘But I don’t think you get the cultural significance of it’, he goes, ‘I do’, I went, ‘Okay.’ So, I basically then took my hat off and sat there with everyone else. And I watched that—her race—while listening to the sounds of people at the Stadium Australia, which you could never get another experience like that again.  

Sports Commentator: 

Mary inside, Cathy lifting goes up to Graham, takes the lead, knocks the winner, draws away from Graham and Mary. This is a famous victory, a magnificent performance. What a legend, what a champion.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And as Cathy Freeman crossed the finish line in first place and won gold, the stadium erupted. Lisa Jackson remembers: 

Lisa Jackson: 

And so, I watched her win her race and I think I was more prouder as an Aboriginal person listening to that. And being, you know it’s a historic occasion. So that was—yeah that had an impact. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In that stadium, the noise was deafening. For many Australians, it was a moment of unity and pride. A turning point when sport seemed to fulfil its promise as the great equaliser. Cathy Freeman did her victory lap draped in both the Australian flag and the Aboriginal flag. She had not only won a gold medal, she had also won Australia’s 100th gold medal at an Olympic Games. But the triumph of that night did not erase the deeper structures of inequality. Cathy Freeman’s victory was powerful precisely because it existed alongside unfinished business. Sport had once again placed the nation in front of a mirror. 

The Sydney Olympic Games had shown Australia at its most watched, most scrutinised and most emotionally invested. But Stadium Australia was not the only arena that mattered in 2000. Eleven days after Cathy Freeman crossed that finish line, the same stadium and the same city hosted the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games. Australia won 149 medals. Yet recognition had been a long time coming. 

Australia’s Paralympians have performed exceptionally well at an elite level. Yet, until very recently, they have received very little financial support. One of the great Australian swimmers is Elizabeth Edmondson, born in 1950, who became a paraplegic after contracting polio in early childhood. When she was fourteen years old, she secured a spot on the Australian Paralympic team that would compete at the 1964 Games in Tokyo, despite only seven months of training. This made her the youngest competitor at the Games, which was only the second Paralympic Games to have been held.   

She went on to win three gold medals in Tokyo. She became the youngest Australian to claim an individual gold medal for swimming at either an Olympics or a Paralympics, a record that stood for over fifty years. In an oral history interview, she remembers what it was like to win three medals at the 1964 Games.  

Elizabeth Edmondson:  

Well, it all happened very quickly. And I was young and I just thought, well I can win it and I did. But it was, yes, it was that sort—and you just swam the three races in one night and that was it. There was no pressure. No one knew you or anything, so it was probably in that, I was fortunate in that way. There was no people rushing up saying how are you going to do and what are you going to do afterwards? You just got in and swam. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

She grasps now the full weight of her achievement.  

Elizabeth Edmondson: 

I suppose now looking back, it’s sort of realising that you were one of the first people to do it and when I came back, my father always said that's something no one can ever take away from you, the fact that you swum. For 48 years, I was the youngest swimmer to win gold for Australia, abled or disabled, which I thought was quite a good record. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1968, Edmondson went on to win an additional gold medal and two silver medals at the Paralympics in Tel Aviv. But she stopped competing after this due to the financial pressures. She did take up swimming competitively later in life again as a Masters champion. Yet it really wasn’t until the 2000s that her extraordinary feats as a youth were recognised on a wider level. In her 2012 oral history interview for the National Library, she told Ian Jobling of her hopes for the future of paralympic sport, which included more sponsorship opportunities and greater coverage.  

While recognition has not come as quickly as it should have, in recent decades, there has been a growth in programs to identify talented future Paralympians. Public recognition has also increased. The most recent Paralympic Games, broadcast to a commercial audience, have also shown that Australians across the nation are watching, recognising and celebrating the incredible achievements of Paralympic athletes. 

Women generally have not been at the centre of Australian sporting mythology. As we heard from Mina Wylie, a range of social and economic barriers made it difficult for women to compete, well into the twentieth century. It has taken time for Elizabeth Edmondson to receive the credit she deserves.  

But in 2023, one women’s sporting team captured the entire nation’s attention. This was, of course, the Matildas, Australia’s national women’s football team. For weeks, Australians rearranged dinner plans. They gathered in living rooms and pubs and crowded into Federation Square in Melbourne and suburban clubs and pubs. It felt, for a moment, like everyone was watching the same game. And that is because they most likely were. Over 11 million people watched the Matildas play England in the World Cup semi-final. That made the match the most watched broadcast in Australian history.  

Sports Commentator: 

Vines in the middle, back post arriving, grab deflected and Charlie Grant has her first ever Matildas goal.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

And that’s not to mention the effects afterwards either. Following the Matildas World Cup performance, junior soccer registrations for female players increased by 170 percent. The Australian government also pledged $200 million towards women's sporting facilities as a direct result.  

Susan Alberti, who was the Western Bulldogs Football Club’s Vice President from 2012 to 2016, and is known for leadership in Australian rules football and advocacy in women’s sports, reflects on what growing recognition of women in sport, such as a country barracking for the Matildas, means... 

Susan Alberti:  

I think the there's more respect there now for one another. Just you know, we're equals and should be treated as equals and who would have thought we would come so far, so quickly, with the introduction with women's football or women's sport. Just women's sport, the cricket, look at the cricketers, the rugby sevens, you know, Sam Kerr. What a champion she is.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

But the real story of Australians and sport is in the stands. It is about the supporters. It is about what sport has come to mean to so many Australians from all types of backgrounds and from all parts of the country. It is about the way that sport provides a means for communities to come together.  

For most Australians, sport doesn’t involve competing at an elite level. It begins on a weekend morning at local grounds where chairs are unfolded on the sidelines. It’s when someone runs the canteen and someone else washes the jerseys. It’s when children learn how to be graceful in victory and in defeat.  

Here, belonging is practical. It is embodied in the migrant family who finds community at the local soccer club or the grandparents who never miss a match. It might be shown through the teenager who referees younger kids to earn a little pocket money or through the young girl who pulls on boots and no longer has to ask whether she’s allowed to play. 

For newly arrived Australians too, sport has often been the fastest means of finding a community life. Edward Hekking was born in the Netherlands, fought against the Japanese Army in the Second World War and then migrated to Australia after the war. He found that joining a hockey team in Sydney was met with some resistance at home. 

Edward Hekking: 

She didn't like that at all. She said, 'You're, you're crazy. You, you migrate to start work and now you start playing sports again.' I said, 'Well,' I said, 'Okay, that's the only reason I'm in the New South Wales hockey team, the only reason that I make a lot of friends for my life again.' Which was true. She said, 'All right.' I said, ‘After that I won't play hockey anymore.’ Of course, I still played again after that. But we acted, we worked normally and on Saturday afternoon I played hockey. And that's where I got to know all those people. So, I made a lot of friends.  

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

The friends he made at the St George hockey club became part of the fabric of his new life. This is a story repeated across generations and across codes: the hockey pitch in Sydney, the football ground in Melbourne, the canteen in Broome. 

Sam Wong migrated to Australia from Hong Kong in the late 1960s, drawn in part by what he saw as Australian democracy at work. On arrival he quickly became an AFL fan, although he acknowledges his loyalties may have been driven somewhat by the catering options available at Carlton Football Club. 

Sam Wong: 

And I wanted to follow football. AFL. Now my team is Carlton. Oh, the reason I went to, for Carlton, because when I live in Parkville, there's, funny story is, I was a very poor student. Carlton football have this student membership only cost $2. But every Friday I can go have a feast and a meal for free. And in fact, I, even, they let me take some food back for the weekend. And therefore, I'm eternally grateful to the Carlton Football Club because they, they look after my food. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

Sam Wong was so impressed that he even converted some of his friends into becoming Carlton fans. 

Sam Wong: 

And I bring a lot of my Asian friends go there. They're all welcoming Asian people. Because there were very few Asians interested in AFL or VFL—at that time. And at that time Carlton did very well—especially they beat Collingwood in 1970. I was there. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

For Jodie Bell and her family, living in contemporary Western Australia, sports is a way of making connections amongst community. She talks of her role at Broome Saints Football Club…  

Jodie Bell: 

So, I'm currently, what am I? Fundraising coordinator, sponsorship coordinator, something like that at Saints Football Club and manage their canteen on the weekends at junior footy. My daughter now plays for Saints Juniors, so I do that. Also, I try and do a bit of sport when I can though I'm not the best at it. But I did play, when I got back here, I started playing netball again for a couple of years. Didn't play this year because my, my knees were telling me that maybe it wasn't a good idea anymore. 

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

For generations, sport has helped Australians make sense of who they are. It has been a meeting place across class, across culture and across languages. But even here, the rules matter. Who is made to feel welcome at the club? Who can afford the fees? Whose stories are told on honour boards and whose are forgotten? 

Sport offers something more than winning medals or breaking records. It is about turning up each week, standing on the sidelines and feeling part of something larger than yourselves. For some Australians, that sense of belonging has always come easily. For others, it has meant challenging prejudice and fighting for inclusion.  

And throughout Australia’s sporting story, one thing is clear. We always do better when we recognise and support talent from wherever it may come.  

You’ve been listening to The Memory Tapes. I’m Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

Thank you to the National Library of Australia, and to all the athletes, supporters, volunteers and community members whose voices help us understand the place of sport in Australian life.  

It has always been more than just a game. And whether it’s been in a swimming pool, the ocean, the racing track, the boxing ring, the footy field or the stadium, these have all been spaces that reveal who is welcomed, who has had to fight to belong, and how boundaries shift over time. If these voices spoke to you, share them. Tell someone about the stories of the swimmers who challenged the rules, the First Nations athletes who carried pride and expectation, and all those everyday Australians who gather each weekend on sidelines across the country to cheer others on. 

Follow us, and if you can, leave a review. It helps these stories reach more listeners, and it helps carry forward the voices of those who have shaped Australia’s sporting story. This has been a National Library of Australia production. 

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

Included in this episode are excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection:

• Max Walker and Max Walker Snr address at the National Press Club on 21 July 1993 

  Max Walker Junior, sports commentator and former test cricketer, speaks humorously about his cricket career and his childhood in Melbourne. 

• Mina Wylie interviewed by Neil Bennetts 

  Mina Wylie, an early women's swimming champion and Olympic silver medallist, speaks about the development of women's swimming in Australia, competing in 1912 Olympics in Stockholm and coming second to Fanny Durack, her family background, the introduction of mixed bathing, women's swimming since the 1920s, going to America in 1920 with Fanny Durack, and her election to the International Swimming Hall of Fame. 

• Jack Tonkin interviewed by Marjorie Biggins 

  Jack Tonkin, who was born at Woollahra, Sydney, speaks of his parents and family life, celebrations, exhibitions and shows in Sydney, swimming, dancing and other recreational activities, and the introduction of surfing to Australian sport. 

• Bernard "Midget" Farrelly interviewed by Neil Bennetts 

  Bernard "Midget" Farrelly, Australian international surfer and surfboard manufacturer, speaks about his surfing titles, his family background and early memories of surfing at Bondi at age 6, his first surfboard at age 12 when he first learnt to surf at Manly, the evolution of professional surfboard construction, the changing perception of surf culture in Australia, and the art of surfing. 

• Harold Coe interviewed by Rob Willis 

  Harold Coe, born 1955 in Condobolin, New South Wales, talks about his family background and education, early memories of the Murie, the spiritual significance of the Murie, living conditions on the Murie, and the leisure activities and sports they played there. 

• John Maynard interviewed by Hamish Sewell 

  Historian and Emeritus Professor, John Maynard is the son of Mervyn Maynard, a Worimi man and highly sought after jockey. In this interview he discusses his early experiences with education, being of Aboriginal-Irish descent, his father’s career as an international jockey, the family love for horse racing, his childhood on the Newcastle Racecourse, travelling for his father’s career, and his developing interest in history. 

• Jenny Rose interviewed by Rob Willis 

  Jenny Rose, born in Warragul, speaks about her love of sport, meeting Lionel Rose, his early boxing days and training, his work to become a world champion, the attitude towards women in the boxing industry, the elements needed to be a champion, and the mental courage required to compete. 

• Lisa Jackson interviewed by Frank Heimans 

  Lisa Jackson, born in Surry Hills, speaks about her Aboriginal Australian background, her family history, Stolen Generations, the 1967 Referendum, AFL and its Aboriginal history, the Sydney Olympics, Corroboree 2000 and Bridge Walks for Reconciliation, political activism, Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, and working with NSW Police Force 

• Elizabeth Edmondson interviewed by Ian Jobling 

  At the age of 14, at the 1964 Tokyo Paralympic Games, Elizabeth Edmondson became the youngest swimmer to win a gold medal for Australia, a record she held for 48 years. In this interview she speaks about the 1954 polio epidemic, recovering from polio and the resulting mobility difficulties, swimming at the 1964 Tokyo Paralympics, support for athletes with a disability in Australia, her involvement with the WA Wheelchair Sports Association, the changing attitudes towards awareness, acceptance and appreciation of people with a disability in Australia. 

• Susan Alberti interviewed by Nikki Henningham 

  Victorian born businesswoman and philanthropist, Dr Susan Alberti was Vice President of the Western Bulldogs football club between 2012 and 2016, and the inaugural ambassador for the AFL national women’s competition in 2017. In this interview she discusses playing sports at school, her start in business, the importance of youth sports, Aussie Rules football, the attitudes towards professional women’s sports, her extensive philanthropic works, her defamation lawsuit against Channel 9, the changing status of women in AFL leadership, the AFLW league, and creating joy, resilience, and community through women’s participation in sport. 

• Edward Hekking interviewed by Edith van Loo 

  Dutch World War II veteran, Eddy Hekking, speaks about growing up in the Netherlands, the German invasion of the Netherlands, travelling by boat to fight the Japanese in Indonesia when the war ended, immigrating to Australia, buying land and building a house, working for a Dutch dredging company dredging in Botany Bay, the influence of wartime experiences on his life, and becoming part of a new country. 

• Sam Wong interviewed by Michelle Potter 

  Former People of Australia Ambassador and Australian Red Cross board member, Sam Wong, speaks about his childhood in Hong Kong, studying in Australia, his interest in Carlton Football Club, Chinese community in Canberra, the role of the government in promoting multiculturalism, and the history and impact of the Chinese in Australia. 

• Jodie Bell interviewed by Elaine Rabbitt 

  Broome based Jodie Bell was the CEO of Marra Worra Worra Aboriginal Corporation, CEO of Goolari Media, and board member for the Kimberley Aboriginal Women’s Council. In this interview she discusses her family’s history and her Aboriginal ancestry, repeated relocations during childhood, her time at school and university, Aboriginal students at university, working for the Department of Training and Workforce Development in Aboriginal access, working for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission out of Broome, working with remote communities in the Fitzroy Valley area, racial violence at Fitzroy, her family’s involvement in the Broome Saints Football Club, and health and welfare in the Kimberley.

Dr Shirleene Robinson: 

From the National Library of Australia, this is The Memory Tapes, and I am Dr Shirleene Robinson.  

National Library of Australia Oral History Sound Technician: 

And we’re recording. 

May Gibbs: 

Well, what do I say first? 

Peter Black: 

How we won marriage equality in this country. 

Kim Bear: 

It was Gough Whitlam, it was feminism. They were incredible times. 

Neville Bonner: 

To Aborigines, we do not own the land, the land owns us, because we are part of the land. 

Jennifer Robinson: 

It is also an inspiring story of how a small group of people took on a superpower and won. 

Peter Bate: 

That’s when I began to get worried, when I saw that image on the radar—Cyclone Tracy. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1984, Professor Barry Marshall, a gastroenterologist, did something very unusual… 

Barry Marshall: 

So, we tested my stomach biopsies, and it was all a hundred percent normal. And uh, no bacteria or anything. That same morning after I’d had my scope, I went and scoped all the patients and rescued a few little Helicobacter there. Cultured them in the lab. And we chose one that was from a patient with gastritis. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Around one month later… 

Barry Marshall: 

And then I drank about 100mls of this out of a beaker in the lab and drank it about ten o'clock in the morning. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1984, Professor Barry Marshall and Professor Robin Warren confirmed that Helicobacter pylori causes peptic ulcers. They did this by following the scientific method, including clinical trials, publishing peer reviewed studies and providing extensive supporting evidence. And, as we have heard, Barry Marshall also tested the theory on himself. 

Their discovery changed millions of lives, because Helicobacter pylori is one of the most common human bacterial infections. It is a major driver of stomach inflammation and the leading cause of stomach cancer globally. In 2005, the significance of their work was acknowledged with the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

This is the National Library of Australia's The Memory Tapes and I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson. In this series, we explore the people and moments that shaped Australia through the voices of those who were there. 

In this episode, we're exploring the remarkable history of Australian innovation and scientific ingenuity. We will investigate 65,000 years of invention and imagination from First Nations Australians, we’ll consider 20th century scientists who defeated diseases that once seemed unbeatable and created new solutions to the treatment of burns, and we’ll ask an intriguing question: how does a country with less than half a per cent of the world's population keep producing discoveries that change the world? 

And I'll be asking something that sits at the heart of this episode: if Australia keeps producing remarkable people whose imagination changes the world, who are they right now, and what are they reaching for? To help me answer that, I’ll be joined by Bronwyn Ryan from the National Library of Australia, who will share an exciting oral history project that has been recording the contributions of Australian women working in the space industry. Women who are, right now, continuing a tradition of ingenuity and ambition that we’ll trace across tens of thousands of years and whose most significant discoveries and innovations may still lie ahead. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Australia's story of ingenuity stretches back for millennia.  

Roy Barker, a proud Murrawarri and Wiradjuri man born in 1928, told interviewer Rob Willis… 

Roy Barker: 

We know that, you know, megafauna animals existed. 10, or 15,000 years ago. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Roy Barker's memories connect to something larger. First Nations knowledge systems carried observations about the natural world across countless generations, including knowledge of animals that disappeared thousands of years ago. Megafauna roamed this continent until nearly 12,000 years ago. They included giant wombats, marsupial lions, enormous kangaroos and some of the largest reptiles ever to live on land. Living alongside these animals for thousands of years required a deep understanding of their behaviour, sophisticated hunting techniques, careful knowledge-sharing and extraordinary ecological awareness. That same capacity for sustained observation extended to the sky. 

Roy Barker: 

These people then, in my view, were astronomers in their own right. They knew the movement of the planets, the fixed stars. I, I don’t, I don’t know, I don’t think that, you know they, they knew that the planet was round or anything like that, but they certainly knew that it disappeared and come up again the next morning.  

And of course, we used to listen to the Old People talking about the Southern Cross, and uh, you know, there was at different times of the night and going in towards morning, dawn, and there was stories spoken about the heavens. And say, for instance, the Southern Cross turns over. And they had a timeline on it and they used to say, 'Well, you know, wake me when the Cross turns over.' And they knew exactly the stories that were told at a different time of the night. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

For at least 65,000 years, First Nations Australians read the night sky with precision, mapping stars, tracking seasons and navigating Country. That relationship with the heavens did not end with colonisation. It is still alive. And we’ll hear in this episode, it is now continuing to extend further than ever. 

The First Australians also shaped Australia through ingenious design. The boomerang is one of humanity's earliest aerodynamic instruments. Madi Madi man Kevin Pearce, in his oral history interview with Graham Dodsworth, made this connection clear. 

Kevin Pearce: 

And when they made the aeroplane, they made him to suit the boomerang. 

Graham Dodsworth: 

Right, it followed the design of the… 

Kevin Pearce: 

Followed the design of the boomerangs. They're airplanes made from boomerangs. Their aerodynamics is made from the boomerangs. 

Graham Dodsworth: 

The airplane wings. 

Kevin Pearce: 

Yeah, The airplane wings. So, they copied off us, see, these airplanes. 

Graham Dodsworth: 

That’s interesting. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

The link between boomerangs and flying machines was made by Ngarrindjeri man, David Unaipon in the early twentieth century. Born in 1872, Unaipon developed plans for a flying machine that used spinning blades allowing it to rise straight up, similarly to contemporary helicopters. He did this by drawing on his knowledge of how boomerangs spin through the air. 

David Unaipon is part of a much broader story of First Nations creativity and innovation. To survive on this continent for at least 65,000 years required observation, experimentation, adaptation and the careful transmission of knowledge across generations. These qualities did not disappear with colonisation. They remain an integral part of Australia's story of discovery and invention. 

In different times and in different ways, Australians have continued to ask difficult questions, to challenge accepted wisdom and to search for new solutions. 

Earlier, we heard the voice of Barry Marshall, the scientist who tested his theory and won a Nobel Prize with fellow researcher, Robin Warren. He is one of many Australian scientists, innovators and inventors who have looked at problems that the rest of the world had either accepted, overlooked or ignored. 

Australian innovation has taken many forms. Some inventions have changed the world. Others have simply made life a little easier. The CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, has been central to that story for over a century, from the chemistry behind Aerogard insect repellent, to wi-fi technology that now connects billions of devices worldwide, to polymer banknotes now used in countries across the world. But innovation has never been confined to the laboratory. The Hills Hoist clothesline transformed the suburban backyard. The Victa lawn mower helped to tame unwieldy grass. The ute emerged from a farmer's wife’s request for a vehicle that could carry the family to church on Sunday and the pigs to market on Monday. And somewhere along the way, Australians also gave the world wine in a cask. 

Barry Marshall and Robin Warren received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005. But they were not the first Australians to do so. Since 1915, fifteen Australians have won the Nobel Prize in various fields. William and Sir Lawrence Bragg, a father and son team, achieved that honour in 1915. By bouncing X-rays off crystals, the Braggs discovered how to map the precise arrangement of atoms inside any material, a technique that later unlocked the structure of DNA and transformed modern medicine. 

In 1945, as the world emerged from the greatest conflict it had ever known, another Australian, Sir Howard Florey, shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Ernst Chain and Sir Alexander Fleming for the development of penicillin. 

Fleming had first noticed in 1928 that a common mould appeared to kill bacteria. His observation attracted little attention. Nearly a decade later, Florey, Chain and their colleagues at Oxford transformed that neglected discovery into the world's first antibiotic, a breakthrough that would save hundreds of millions of lives. 

Howard Florey began life in Adelaide in 1898, the son of a bootmaker. After winning a Rhodes Scholarship, he left Australia for Oxford, where he would help to change the course of modern medicine. 

Howard Florey: 

But I think I left here thinking that there were no opportunities in the sort of things I was beginning to get interested in, physiology, for example. And in, it's no doubt, that was true, that there were very few opportunities in the universities and medical schools, in the science departments had were not well-equipped and hadn't the background for research. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

When Florey responded later about what had driven him in his research on penicillin, his answer was blunt. 

Howard Florey: 

People sometimes think that I and the others worked on penicillin because we were interested in suffering humanity. I don't think it had ever crossed our minds about suffering humanity. This was an interesting scientific exercise and because it was of some use in medicine, is very gratifying, but this was not the reason that we started working on it. It might have been in the background of our minds. It's always in the background of people working in medical subjects that it might be of use in medicine, but that's not the mainspring of why they do their research. They're very gratified if it's of use, but it's not essential. And the same thing would apply to penicillin. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

It is a very honest response. He does not portray himself as a hero, just as someone driven on by curiosity.  

Howard Florey: 

Now, one is asked, ‘What feelings do you have in getting a Nobel Prize?’ Well, it's very, very gratifying, very gratifying indeed. But one should always realise that there's a terrible lot of luck in this sort of thing. We happened to have hit an antibiotic which worked in man. We could have worked with hundreds of others, and they would have been chemical curiosities. So, this was a bit of luck, there's no question behind this. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

‘A terrible lot of luck’ is an interesting way to describe this achievement. Penicillin has saved hundreds of millions of lives. Florey made it into a useful antibiotic by continuing to investigate something that few people believed was worth pursuing. He and his team succeeded and then attributed the extraordinary result to luck. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

In 1980, Australian scientist, Professor Frank Fenner, chairman of the World Health Organisation’s Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication, addressed the World Health Assembly. He declared the world was free of the disease of smallpox. It is the only infectious human disease to have been declared wiped from the face of the earth. 

Smallpox had existed for thousands of years and had been one of the deadliest of diseases. In the middle of the 20th century, it was estimated that two million people died from it each year. 

Fenner, born in 1914, was a virologist who first made his name studying myxomatosis, the disease deliberately introduced to control Australia's rabbit plague in the 1950s. He had come to the attention of the World Health Organization because of his expertise on how viruses spread through animal populations. After being recruited to lead the global campaign to eradicate smallpox, he worked on a strategy to achieve that outcome. 

The eradication of smallpox took thirteen years. It drew from a smallpox eradication program that was initially proposed by the Soviet Union in 1958 on the basis of vaccinating 80 per cent of people in endemic countries. By 1966, it had become clear this strategy alone was not working in larger countries. An intensified program was set up at World Health Organisation headquarters with Dr. D. A. Anderson from the Center for Disease control in Atlanta as Director.  

Frank Fenner: 

He Insisted on three principles. Firstly, there had to be a research advisory body and continued research was necessary; whereas the Russians had thought it was not, you could just vaccinate. Secondly, there had to be quality control of the vaccine so that the vaccine would be effective, and that hadn't been followed before. And thirdly, what they called surveillance and containment. That is really looking for cases, when you found one, finding where he had come from, I’m thinking of villages in India for example. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

The logic was both simple and radical. Smallpox had no animal reservoir. It could only survive in human hosts. If you could break every chain of transmission simultaneously, the virus had nowhere left to go. It would cease to exist. 

Before the world was officially told that smallpox had been eradicated, there were internal discussions within the World Health Organisation.  

Frank Fenner: 

And by December 1979, they had before them a report which they endorsed at the end of the meeting, certifying that smallpox had been eradicated. I remember very well, it was a four-day meeting. We went over Saturday and Sunday and I persuaded the WHO authorities to get a couple of cases of champagne for us to celebrate with when we finished this meeting on Sunday afternoon at about half past three and were in agreement after a lot of, four days of pretty intensive argument about it. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

There are probably few occasions that would call for champagne more than this. A disease responsible for an estimated half a billion deaths in the final century of its existence alone, had been eliminated. Smallpox had shaped empires, it had altered the outcomes of wars, and it had left those that did manage to survive it scarred for life. It was now gone. That is how smallpox ended. 

Fenner spent the rest of his career at the Australian National University, continuing to think about viruses and about what science owed the future. In his oral history interview, recorded years after the eradication of smallpox, he reflected on something closer to home, his own father's chronic illness. And in doing so, he reached forward to another Australian discovery. 

Frank Fenner: 

I think now he would have been cured by the treatment for Helicobacter infection, the thing that Barry Marshall discovered ten years or 16 years ago, which has transformed gastroenterology. He was always complaining of gastritis, and we now know that that was caused by this bacterium Helicobacter pylori, which was discovered by two west Australian scientists, Barry Marshall and Robin Warren about 1983, 1984. And it's totally turned gastroenterology on its head. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Fenner’s reflection leads us back to Barry Marshall in 1980s Perth and that beaker of bacteria. Marshall has spoken about the particular disadvantage of working from Western Australia in the early 1980s and being geographically distant from the major research centres. That meant he, and fellow researchers, lacked the institutional heft that might have forced their findings to be taken seriously sooner. 

So, he found another way to force it, by experimenting on himself. Within days he was ill with gastritis. He treated himself with antibiotics and recovered. The hypothesis was correct, although his wife was not terribly happy with him when she found out what he’d done.  

After the groundbreaking Perth work, Marshall spent time in the United States, partnered with Procter and Gamble, joined the University of Virginia and then returned home to the University of Western Australia in 1996 to establish his own research centre.  

He became the National Health and Medical Research Council Senior Principal Research Fellow at UWA, and he and Robin Warren were jointly awarded the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease. 

From Howard Florey in Oxford, through to Frank Fenner in Geneva and then Barry Marshall in Perth, these were all different scientists requiring different ways of thinking. None of them described themselves as heroes. Florey attributed his achievement to luck. Fenner remembered a meeting with champagne. Marshall talked about an experiment. 

Australia keeps producing people like this. The questions worth asking are why and how can we continue to foster this history of innovation and achievement? 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Professor Fiona Wood grew up in a Yorkshire mining village, one of just twelve women admitted to her medical school. She migrated to Australia in 1987, became the first female plastic surgeon in Western Australia and eventually found herself director of the Royal Perth Hospital burns unit and director of the Burns Service of Western Australia, taking on one of the most demanding specialties in medicine. She’s spoken about what drew her to that work in the first place: 

Fiona Wood: 

When I got into the burns care then it certainly is a very complex area because it’s not just that small area of the body you may be working on, but it’s the whole systemic response. It’s the response of that burn to the person. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Wood and scientist Marie Stoner were always trying to work out how to deal with complex problems more effectively. This approach led them to a problem the medical profession had largely accepted as intractable. Severe burns destroyed skin faster than the body could replace it. The standard technique for culturing replacement skin took 21 days of open wounds, infection risk and potential scarring. 

Wood asked simple questions: why does it take so long? And then, how can we do this better? 

Wood and Stoner's solution was to take a small sample of the patient's own skin cells, multiply them in the laboratory and spray them back onto the wound. When asked about the science behind how these cells then behave… 

Fiona Wood: 

Well, we try to keep it simple, cause the cells know what to do and we don't understand that extracellular matrix, cellular interaction messages and what they're doing. But what we do understand is that if we put the cells in the right architectural environment, they will express themselves with the appropriate phenotype. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

This is not just about spray-on skin, but about how Australians have approached some of the hardest challenges in the world.  

In 2002, the Bali bombings brought 28 patients to the Royal Perth Hospital with burns on up to ninety-two percent of their bodies. The technology Wood and Stoner had been quietly developing for nearly a decade was suddenly at the absolute cutting edge of what medicine could do. 

Wood was named Australian of the Year in 2005. She's still innovating. A 3D skin printer is now in development. The problem is never quite solved. For Wood, that's a driving factor. 

All of the scientists that we’ve heard about, Howard Florey in Oxford, Frank Fenner in Geneva, Barry Marshall in Perth and Fiona Wood in the Royal Perth burns unit were working at different times, in diverse fields, they adopted different approaches, yet all four were connected by their refusal to accept a problem as it had been handed to them. 

Australia is a country of 28 million people. It should not keep producing extraordinary scientists and innovators like this. And yet it does.  

Shirleene Robinson: 

Although the scientists and inventors we've been hearing about were separated by decades and fields, they shared important qualities: innovative thinking, tenacity and a desire to see problems solved. That instinct didn't belong to a particular century. The story of Australian innovation isn't finished. It’s unfolding right now in laboratories, control rooms, launch facilities and research centres right across the country. For the first time, Australians are helping build a future beyond Earth, towards a frontier that First Nations people have been reading and naming for at least 65,000 years. And increasingly, women are at the forefront of technologies that could reshape how we communicate, how we understand our planet and perhaps one day how humans live beyond it. 

It’s incredibly important work, as the Australian Space Agency reminds us, space-based research has resulted in important scientific discoveries and gains. For the medical field, it offers a vital lifeline for Australia’s Emergency Services, through connectivity, communications and so much more. From agriculture to mining to Australia’s marine ecosystems, so many parts of our society can benefit. 

Bronwyn Ryan is Assistant Director of Curatorial and Collection Research at the National Library of Australia. She recently oversaw an oral history project capturing the voices of Australian women working in the space industry—women who are, in their own ways, doing exactly what Florey, Fenner, Marshall and Wood did before them, looking at the challenges of the present and the future and refusing to leave them alone. I asked Bronwyn about the range of what she found in this project. 

Bronwyn Ryan: 

Women are contributing in so many diverse ways to the space industry. And to be honest, before I started this project, I had no idea about the diverse roles that are going on in the space sector. Through this collection, I’ve actually learned that these women are working as space lawyers. There’s a space archaeologist. There’s a biologist. There’s a medical specialist. And there’s even a space historian. They’re doing the most amazing things, like running space institutes and training as astronauts. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

The collection includes 22 women, spanning generations, from those born in 1957 to those born in 2002. And Bronwyn told me it was the individual stories that stayed with her most. 

Bronwyn Ryan: 

Astronaut Katherine Bennell-Pegg talks about the fact she grew up always wanting to be an astronaut. She knew at school she wanted to be an astronaut. And she also talks about how her parents’ careers influenced her interest in space and science. Tracy Smart, who’s the Professor of Military and Aerospace Medicine at the ANU—I love her interview. She talks about how her dad had a telescope. They’d always ask their dad if they could look at the telescope to see if they could see Neil Armstrong on the moon. And Natasha Maimbo, one of the young scientists we’ve included in the um collection, is a mechanical engineer who used to work at CSIRO. And she describes when she was little, all her friends around her always wanted Barbies, but she just wanted Barbie’s replica BMW. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

The project was spurred on by the vision of oral historian and visual artist Louise Whelan, who approached the National Library with the proposal and conducted all 22 interviews herself. Bronwyn is quick to credit Louise for the rich idea and for conducting all the oral history interviews, as well as taking photographs of interviewees.  

Bronwyn Ryan: 

Louise was the sole oral historian actually for this project. Sometimes our projects here, we have multiple oral historians working on the project. But Louise was the sole oral historian. I think that was an important, something really important to note here, because Louise, in interviewing all the people, all the 22 women, it built up Louise’s knowledge of the sector. 

Shirleene Robinson: Among the 22 women in the collection is Katherine Bennell-Pegg, Australia's first female astronaut, the first person to train under the Australian flag, and in 2026, Australian of the Year. For generations, Australians looked up at the night sky and imagined what might be out there. For Katherine Bennell-Pegg, it became a career. She traces her fascination with space to something very simple. 

Katherine Bennell-Pegg: 

So often before bed, our parents would take me and my two younger sisters, when they were, after they were born, outside to look at the sky before bed. So, we’d often lie in the grass and look up, or if we were on the beach, we would do that. And, um yeah, once you realise that those, some of those dots are planets, it gives you a sense of scale of the universe and that just blew my mind as a kid, and I thought it was really cool. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Bennell-Pegg is now Director of Space Technology at the Australian Space Agency. That sense of scale she describes, lying on the grass, looking up, stayed with her. And when she was asked about what it meant to become the first Australian woman to qualify as an astronaut, she had a considered view on what that milestone actually meant. 

Katherine Bennell-Pegg: 

Yeah, I mean it’s a huge honour to have you know, been trained and qualified as an astronaut. The first, um, Australian woman to qualify as an astronaut and, you know, the first to get to represent Australia. Both I’m really humbled by and proud of. One thing that’s been really interesting to me is that, out of those two firsts, the public interest has been far more on the female aspect, which is fine, but for me personally the bigger ceiling to crack was that an Australian gets to do this representing Australia. That’s a far harder thing to do and it means so much more for the impact on the country, because when you have a flagged astronaut, it means that you can have an ecosystem effect. You can unlock access for your scientists, for your engineers, for your educators and for kids to aspire to be from your nation. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Tracy Smart is Professor of Military and Aerospace Medicine at the Australian National University. She came to the role after a long career in the Australian Defence Force, and she has been thinking carefully about what Australia will need, as its space ambitions grow. 

Tracy Smart: 

But what I thought is looking at where, um, we’re heading in Australia with the space industry. Even though at the moment it’s mostly launching satellites and, you know, that sort of thing, it won’t be long before we end up having humans going into space from Australia or Australians going into space. The Australian Space Agency also announced that, you know, that that was part of their long-term game. So, if you’re putting humans in space, you need a workforce. Or a whole cabal, or whatever, of experts who know something about that. To be able to research, train, and look after people who are going into space. Whether that be professional astronauts or even potentially space tourists over the next few years, you know. I think the cost of going into space will come down. More and more private companies, so there’ll be more people going to space, so you know, assessing them and understanding if it’s fine, writing the policies and all that. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

Discovery is only the beginning. Someone has to build what comes next and think about the consequences. This is a point that Natasha Maimbo, a Senior Mechanical Engineer whose work has focused on radio astronomy instruments, emphasises, and Natasha is the ideal person to ask. She’s deeply interested in working to create a more equitable future, and has previously volunteered with Engineers Without Borders, whose purpose is to harness the potential of engineering to do just this: 

Natasha Maimbo: 

So, I think it’s logical for us to do that. But I also think consideration needs to be made, not just by the scientists, not just by the engineers, not just by the astronauts, by everyone. We need to consider why? Is it because we are damaging this planet and so we need to make a new refuge? Then okay, go for it, because that’s a big thing to solve. Are we going there just to mine and bring it back? Are we going there just because we can? There needs to be thoughts. 

Shirleene Robinson:

Karlie Noon, a Gamilaraay astrophysicist and science communicator, believes that an approach that is informed by Indigenous values and traditions offers ways of thinking about innovation and discovery to the benefit of all of society. 

Karlie Noon: 

I’m Aboriginal. It’s something that I’m incredibly proud of. But that can look like a lot of different things in modern-day Australia. And I think for me, it’s about not compromising on Indigenous values and traditions. And that’s really the work that I bring into the space sector. It’s really about acknowledging that we can work in this, this new field in a way that is sustainable, ethical, prioritises everyone, doesn’t leave people behind, isn’t for colonial conquest, isn’t for the elite and the super-rich. But really coming to it from a perspective of an Indigenous person. For me, that’s the best thing I can do. That’s the, the truest thing I can do to who I am, my identity, my family, my community, my country. And I think that that is also a perspective that we, we kind of need. 

Shirleene Robinson: 

You've been listening to The Memory Tapes. I'm Dr Shirleene Robinson. 

Thank you to the National Library of Australia, and to the scientists, inventors, researchers and thinkers, known and unknown, whose curiosity and refusal to give up has made the world so much better. 

If these stories spoke to you, share them. Tell someone about the man from Adelaide who travelled to England in 1921 and pursued research few thought worth following and saved hundreds of millions of lives. Tell them about the virologist from Australia who stood before the World Health Assembly and announced that a disease responsible for half a billion deaths was gone from the earth. About the gastroenterologist in Perth who drank a beaker of bacteria to prove his theory. Or the surgeon from a Yorkshire mining village who asked why something that took 21 days couldn't be done in five and, in doing so, changed what it means to survive. 

And tell them about the 65,000 years of knowledge, ingenuity and observation that preceded all of this and the First Peoples who read the darkness between the stars, who understood complex aerodynamics and actualised its potential and survived in one of the most challenging environments for millennia.  

These are stories about achievement and about what a country produces when it makes a space for people to think differently. Australia keeps doing that. It’s against the odds and sometimes, it’s against the establishment. 

And the story of Australian innovation and discovery is nowhere near finished.  

This has been a National Library of Australia production.

To learn more, the book The Memory Tapes is available where all good books are sold.

Included in this episode are excerpts from the following oral history interviews from the National Library of Australia’s Oral History Collection: 

• Barry Marshall interviewed by Peter Pockley 

  Barry Marshall is Professor of Microbiology at the University of Western Australia. In December 2005, he travelled to Stockholm, with colleague Dr Robin Warren, to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for their discovery of the bacterium Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease". In this interview he discusses  

• Roy Barker interviewed by Rob Willis 

  Artist Roy Barker was born at the Brewarrina Mission in 1928, in this interview he reflects on life on the mission in 1930's, the Stolen Generation, Aboriginal musicians, claypan dances and gum leaf players, the disappearance of Corroborrees and the emergence of hillbilly music and old time dances taking their place, country music and its importance to the Aboriginal people, assimilation, removal from tribal lands, the Aboriginal Control Board, his knowledge of Aboriginal language, astronomy and lore, the stories passed down from his father, the official Government Apology, the Referendum of 1967, Census of Aborigines in 1938, Aboriginal deaths after colonisation in relation to Australian war deaths and the future for Aboriginal people. 

• Kevin Pearce interviewed by Graham Dodsworth 

  Kevin Pearce talks about his family, childhood and indigenous background, his family background in handicrafts, Aboriginal art and culture, traditional indigenous economy and the importance of didgeridoos as trade items, indigenous weapons and tribal wars, passing skills to the next generation, boomerangs, grass weaving and women's handicrafts, traditional authenticity of designs, and of being a teacher of culture to students. 

• Howard Walter Florey interviewed by Hazel de Berg 

  Florey speaks about his childhood, his studies at the medical school in Adelaide, his career in pathology, his work on penicillin, the setting up of the John Curtin School at the Australian National University and receiving the Nobel Prize. 

• Frank Fenner interviewed by Ann Moyal 

  Frank Fenner, microbiologist and virologist, was born in Ballarat, Vic. on Dec. 21, 1914, graduating in medicine and surgery at the University of Adelaide. After serving in the Australian Army Medical Corps from 1940-46, he undertook research in microbiology in Melbourne and New York before being appointed as Foundation Professor of Microbiology, Australian National University from 1949-1967. He was prominent in developing the myxamatosis virus as a biological control for rabbits. He campaigned for the need to establish an international centre for virology research resulting in his appointment as Director of the ANU's John Curtin School for Medical Research in 1967-73. 

• Fiona Wood interviewed by Peter Pockley 

  Dr Fiona Wood is a Consultant Plastic Surgeon, the Director of Burns Service at the Royal Perth Hospital and the Princess Margaret Hospital for Children in Western Australia and she was named Australian of the year in 2005. In this interview she discusses her early life in Yorkshire, her father’s job as a miner, her mother’s youth work, her and her siblings various part-time jobs, contributing to the household, the whole family moving so that she could attend a Quaker Ackworth Friends’ School, her growing interest and skill in maths and science, attending St Thomas’ medical school, working as a plastic surgeon at Great Ormond Street Hospital, developing an interest in burns care, the complex nature of burn injuries and the nuances of treating burns, tissue engineering, bioengineering and artificial skin, establishing a laboratory at Princess Margaret Hospital for Children in Perth to explore skin growing technology, their development of skin culture treatments and cell suspension grafting or ‘spray on skin’ and producing Clinical Cell Culture kits and starting a company (C3) to make the technology accessible around the world. 

• Katherine Bennell-Pegg interviewed by Louise Whelan 

  Katherine Bennell-Pegg is the first Australian woman to qualify as an astronaut and the first astronaut to train under the Australian flag and officially represent Australia, she was named Australian of the Year in 2026 and is the Australian Space Agency’s Director of Space Technology. In this oral history she talks about her childhood surrounded by nature and natural curiosity, a family vacation to the Space centre in DC and the Smithsonian, deciding she wanted to be an astronaut, learning to fly during high school and having the opportunity to apply her theoretical learning in the real world, her interest in the planets of our solar system, studying and working in a make predominantly male field, working in teams as both a leader and follower, different leadership styles, the process of becoming an astronaut through the European Space Agency and the rigorous tests and interviews involved, her astronaut training, seeing the Australian flag on her flight suit for the first time, the evolution and establishment of the Australian Space Agency, Australia’s many strengths in space related studies, the Australian Space Agency’s partnership with LEGO to inspire curiosity and creativity, the importance of space in everyday life and her hopes for inspiring the next generations to go into STEM fields. 

• Tracy Smart interviewed by Louise Whelan 

  Professor Tracy Smart is a Professor Military and Aerospace Medicine at the Australian National University. She was the first female Commanding Officer of the Institute of Aviation Medicine and the first lesbian to reach the rank of two-star officer in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). In this oral history she discusses growing up on a farm in the McLaren Vale, watching the Moon landing on television as a child, her lifelong love of Star Trek and science fiction, pursuing medicine, joining the Air Force as a medicine student, her role in Aviation Medicine and aeronautical evacuations, training and assessing air crew for the extreme environmental impacts of flight, her deployment to Rwanda in 1995 with the United Nations, working as Wing Command Officer at Langley Air Force Base in Virginia during the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” era, creating the first flight surgeon toolkit website in the wake of the September 11 attacks, her experience marching in the first official ADF entries into Mardi Gras, her deployment as Senior Medical Officer in Timor-Leste, her work as Surgeon General, being awarded Officer of the Order of Australia, her retirement from the Air Force, her work leading the COVID-19 response at the ANU and developing the processes and standards for the professional workforces that will make the future of space travel possible. 

• Natasha Maimbo interviewed by Louise Whelan 

  Zimbabwe born Natasha Maimbo is Senior Mechanical Engineer at Finisar Australia and was previously a Mechanical Engineer at CSIRO working on the next-generation CryoPAF receiver for Murriyang, CSIRO's Parkes radio telescope. In this oral history she discusses attending primary school in Zimbabwe, moving to Australia at age 13, attending high school in Australia, studying engineering and physics at University of Technology Sydney, the everyday realities of being the only woman in a workplace, her student outreach work with Engineering Without Borders, developing an interest in space, the ethics of space exploration, space litter, and utilising the resources of planets responsibly, working for the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) Space and Astronomy new space program, the versatility and importance of the Parkes Telescope and its role in international astronomy and her work designing antenna components for the Parkes radio telescope. 

• Karlie Noon interviewed by Louise Whelan 

  Karlie Noon is an astrophysicist and science communicator with extensive knowledge of Indigenous heritage and STEM education. She is currently undertaking a PhD in astrophysics at the Australian National University which focuses on the Milky Way and the chemical evolution of its nuclear wind. In this oral history she discusses her childhood in Tamworth, the isolation and bullying she experienced at school, the contrast between the expectations for students of different socioeconomic backgrounds, positive experiences of learning at home, discrimination by teachers, falling in love with maths, leaving school at 13 and attending TAFE, where she was able to study grade 11 maths, returning to a high school with greater understanding of students in difficult circumstances, experiencing a sense of cultural safety at school for the first time, falling in love with physics and going to university to study maths and science, graduating as the first female Indigenous person with a combined degree in maths and physics, her focus on Indigenous sky stories, studying astronomy at the ANU, minimising harm in the fields of science and combining indigenous values and traditions with the future of space exploration.