Discover the power of memory and storytelling as the panel reflects on oral history interviews that have surprised, moved and helped define culture. Together, they'll revisit the moments that stayed with them, the people who shared these stories and why these voices matter now more than ever.

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Entry to this event is free but bookings are essential.

Watch online

The presentation will also be available online. Please make a booking and we will send you a direct link to the livestream event via email. Or you can join anytime through the Library's YouTube channel.

About The Memory Tapes: Voices from the Oral History Collection of the National Library of Australia

The Memory Tapes brings together a selection of compelling voices and reveals how Australians have spoken about their lives, work, struggles and hopes across centuries. The National Library of Australia's Oral History and Folklore collection is the largest in the country, containing more than 58,000 recorded hours of interviews. Interviewees describe major moments of social change, cultural creativity, political struggle and everyday experience that will both enhance and challenge your understanding of Australian history.

This book, edited by Dr Shirleene Robinson AM, contains hundreds of interview excerpts, organised into chapters on broad themes, from domestic life to politics. The excerpts capture lived experiences in all their complexities, emotion and contradictions. Through the voices of Elders, prime ministers, migrants, scientists, athletes, centenarians, artists and more, this is our national memory. 

This new NLA Publishing title is now available for pre-order.

Pre-order the book

About the speakers

About Dr Shirleene Robinson AM

Dr Shirleene Robinson AM is an experienced oral historian who has interviewed in every Australian state and territory. She is also a curator and an Honorary Associate Professor and Visiting Fellow in the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. 

Shirleene Robinson AM, image courtesy of Joy M Lai.

Dr Robinson has published extensively across the areas of oral history, colonisation, Indigenous and non-Indigenous contact histories, LGBTIQ history and the history of childhood. She has written the research book Something like Slavery? Queensland's Aboriginal child workers,1842-1945 (2008) and has been a co-author for In the Eye of the Storm: Volunteers and Australia’s Response to the HIV/AIDS Crisis (2021) and Pride in Defence: The Australian Military and LGBTI Service Since 1945 (2020). 

Dr Robinson has won both the Oral History Australia Media Award (2019, with Anisa Puri) and the Oral History Australia Book Award (2021). She is currently the Oceania representative on the International Oral History Association Council and is a past President of Oral History New South Wales. Between 2018 and early 2023, Dr Robinson was Senior Curator of Oral History and then Director of Curatorial and Collection Research at the National Library of Australia. In 2022, she was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia for significant service to the LGBTIQ community, marriage equality and history. 

About MC Trey

Thelma Thomas, also known as MC Trey is a Fijian-Samoan Australian storyteller, writer, artist, creative producer, social worker, community and cultural development arts worker. She was born in Fiji and raised on the Darug lands of Western Sydney. With over 30 years’ experience across various sectors, she is passionate about Indigenous storytelling practices and stories, cultural knowledge, cultural heritage and climate advocacy.  

MC Trey

She is an advocate for young people, women, First Nations, Pacific, culturally diverse and creative communities. She has hosted National TV Hip Hop, soul music shows, performed Hip Hop theatre, produced creative festivals, events and well-being youth programs in Australia and Fiji. Her qualifications include a Bachelor of Social Work, Mental Health, Youth Work, Music and Business accreditations. Music nominations include an ARIA with her group Foreign Heights, and Urban Music, 3D and Jack Music Awards for her solo work. She has released several albums and, has performed locally and internationally.  

Her business, Tapastry activates at the intersections of Pacific cultures, music, arts, Hip Hop culture, wellbeing, technology and the humanities. Pacific methodologies and knowledge underpin her practice. Trey has proudly contributed to the National Library Archives since 2021, via Fijian and Pacific Australian oral history projects.

About Dr Barry York

Barry York

Dr Barry York was born in London. In 1954, his parents migrated to Melbourne, where he grew up in Brunswick, an ethnically diverse, working-class suburb. He never knew his grandparents as they existed only as framed photographs on the family mantelpiece. From an early age, he questioned his parents about them, who they were and what their lives had been like. Dr York developed the probing, personal lines of inquiry that later shaped his work as an oral history interviewer.

A graduate of La Trobe University, he helped create Great Disorder Under Heaven during the Vietnam protest era and served six weeks in Pentridge Prison for contempt of court in 1972. Dr York later completed an MA and PhD and in 2005 was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to the recording of immigration history. He worked for ten years as a historian at the Museum of Australian Democracy at Old Parliament House.

Dr York began oral history interviewing in 1984 and has recorded more than 500 interviews. Many are held in the National Library’s collection, particularly about migrants from Malta and Poland. He has been an interviewer for the Library since 1988. 

About Dr Barbara Lemon

Dr Barbara Lemon

Dr Barbara Lemon is the co-Director of Curatorial and Collection Research at the National Library of Australia and is responsible for managing the oral history collection. She has held senior roles in the National and State Libraries Australasia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. 

Dr Lemon completed a doctoral thesis in Australian history in 2008 and her work as a professional historian has been published in a wide range of journals, online exhibitions and radio documentaries.