LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL

ESTIMATES COMMITTEE B (Hon David Bartlett – Minister for Education)

Wednesday 28 June 2006

Mr FINCH - Minister, in answer to a question I posed last year about oral history, Mr Pearce gave me an answer that the Archives Office is more of a recipient than a preserver and I am just wondering whether you might acquaint yourself with the report I did on that for the previous minister and see whether there is an opportunity - no, I have to ask a question, don't I?

Laughter.

Mr FINCH - Do you think there might be an opportunity that we could embrace an oral history component in our library services?

Mr BARTLETT - I would be really interested to read your report. There is a particular program that I am really interested that runs in the US called storycorps.net. I will send you details of the web site because I know you would be really interested. It is about the recording of oral histories and a whole range of things around that and is a project that before becoming minister I had been involved with in doing some preliminary thinking about how we might get a Tasmanian Community Fund grant to go and do it. I think what it requires is a group of people, and we will have a chat about this because if there is a group of people who at a community level can drive a project like this, it might be that through the State Library and State Archives we could provide some form of support in kind or something along that line. Something like the Tasmanian Community Fund might be able to get access to some funding for it.

The web address for this site is storycorps.net and it is really worth a look. It is a fantastically innovative project from the US that uses mobile recording booths and a whole range of other things to record local histories at a local level and it is just terrific, so I am really interested in that topic. Inasmuch that we do not write the books or record the history, what Mr Pearce says is right, but I think there are ways that the community could get together and with some support from us make that sort of thing happen.