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Keeper of the Scrolls


2010 Posts
Posted -  17/05/2004  :  16:42
AN AUSTRALIAN LIFE

1893 - 1973



INTRODUCTION.

The best form of history is story-telling. This is nothing new, humans passed stories down from one generation to the next before learning how to use tools. Any spare time they had was either taken up by sleeping or talking to one another. In our more complicated world, we seem to have lost the art of handing on information in this way, there are too many distractions for it to be a commonplace activity. The old are not seen so much as a resource, but as a burden.

I came to this conclusion about thirty years ago and, having a tape-recorder and a Father with an interesting story to tell, I got him to sit down and tell us about his life. What follows is a near verbatim transcript of those tapes.

One question that is always asked about oral evidence is how trustworthy is it? The answer I always give is that they used to hang people on oral evidence. In my experience, almost everything that a person tells you on tape is absolutely accurate as long as it is evidence about what they saw or did. Doubt creeps in when they are reporting what someone else told them. A classic example in this story is my Father’s version of the capture of Dunne, the bushranger. He relates a story he was told by an oldster, this was corroborated by his Father and it differs from the official history of the event.

Of course, memory can play tricks with details and there is also the occasional topic which is painful to the correspondent and is glossed over or left out. Apart from this, you can rely on what is said. The best evidence for this is the way the story overall holds together and the checks you can make by cross-referencing other people’s accounts of the same incidents. A good example is Father’s story of how they escaped from behind the enemy lines in Gallipoli via a tunnel under the mountains. I always thought this sounded a bit far-fetched but my Brother Leslie looked it up in the official Australian history of the Great War and the tunnels were there and were used by escapees.

What it comes down to is that we should trust our story-tellers until we find out that they are wrong. One thing I am sure of, what follows gives an accurate description of what life was like in Australia at the turn of the century and beyond. It is a life full of incident and adventure, one which makes me envy my Father for the opportunities that he saw and grasped. Reading it, we can learn much about what made Australia the unique and marvellous country that it is today. We also get a glimpse of the roots of some of the problems which still have to be dealt with.

I have not altered the transcripts beyond eliminating repetition and have tried to keep the language exactly as it comes over on the tape. Anything that is bracketed [] is an insertion by me in order to keep track of the chronology or the story line. Apart from that, here is the story as Father told it to me.


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