Martie remembers Wendy
‘It was an adventure we all came to appreciate later in life,’ Martie said.
‘The beauty of oral history is it gets the feelings, the emotions, and hearing the voice is real. They really depict life as it was.’
Focusing on the lives and struggles of working-class people, Wendy wrote a number of celebrated oral histories in Australia including the best seller, Weevils in the Flour.
‘She was definitely a woman before her time’
Wendy’s story forms part of the Library’s Hear Their Voices Again appeal, which aims to preserve and make accessible more than 20,000 oral histories and recordings of conversations with Victorians – conversations about their lives, their families, their work and the moments that shaped our state.
Many precious voices in the collection will soon be gone. The analogue media used to capture recordings from past decades – such as cassettes, reel-to-reel and VHS tapes – is deteriorating. Without urgent preservation, they will soon become unplayable.
To find out more, or to donate to help preserve more memories in the collection and make them accessible, head to Hear Their Voices Again.
