What are the challenges in building an oral history collection with tens of thousands of years behind it?

It's a really great question and it's one that we're grappling with at the moment because we're in the process of co-designing a training program for First Nations oral history interviewers.

So...

What we found, and in working with Dr Lorena Barker, who is an Indigenous oral historian and an expert in this area, is that There are two styles, if you like, not only two, but the two that we're looking at of recording oral history that are absolutely talk and cheese.

The national cultural institution style, which is quite formal, which involves being in a quiet room, involves high audio quality.

It's one-to-one.

There's a kind of formality even in that of people face-to-face.

Can we trace a common perspective in the lives of Australians through this collection, our collective sense of humour represented in the collection perhaps?