Voices For The World: Taking Oral History To A Wider Audience

This title (paper) has been presented at the 2nd International k@Borneo Conference 2021 organised by Pustaka Negeri Sarawak that has been held virtually on 14 and 15 September 2021. This paper been presented by Dr David J. Jones, Independent researcher from Sydney,Australia.

Abstract

Oral history recordings and transcripts are an important resource for researchers in many fields, using what they discover to augment, confirm, or contradict what they glean from print, manuscript, electronic and other sources, including artefacts and works of art. Drawing on a range of examples, this paper illustrates how oral history has been taken to a much wider, popular as well as specialist audience by skilful selection and editing, and by adopting a creative approach to retelling stories, especially those of ordinary women, men and children. The author hopes that researchers and writers will expand their use of existing oral history resources – and indeed that oral historians will redouble their interviewing activities - in order to bring the stories, cultures and traditions of the Bornean peoples to a worldwide audience.

Keywords: oral history, editing oral history, publishing oral history

Voices for the World: Taking Oral History to a Wider Audience

In the nineteenth century Carlyle (1898, p.160) wrote: ‘In Books lies the soul of the whole Past Time; the articulate audible voice of the Past, when the body and material substance of it has altogether vanished like a dream.’

This was a confident declaration of the immortality of information, knowledge, perhaps wisdom, carried through the ages by documentary means. It was written when books were printed on rag paper, and were expected to last more than five hundred years. In those days the great libraries could still collect all significant works of science, the arts and humanities from the publishers and learned societies of the world.

Of course, there is a vast amount of valuable information and knowledge which has never found its way into print. Perhaps it has an electronic life today, and can be archived, or simply vanishes into thin air. But that is another story. Knowledge is also conveyed by word of mouth, and spreads within a circle of friends, family or colleagues. Perhaps it goes in one ear and out the other. Perhaps it remains within the individual memory, there to stay until life ebbs away, when it is lost for ever.

This kind of information or knowledge is in what I call the ‘human archive’. Oral history interviews can extract some of this knowledge and preserve it, long after we have all vanished like a dream.

Oral history recordings are a vital part of the documentation of our world. They can capture facts, memories, opinions and knowledge which might otherwise never be recorded. Oral history helps researchers in many fields augment, confirm or contradict what they have gleaned from other sources. For example, a snippet from an interview can provide a key which unlocks an entirely new line of enquiry for a historian. Sometimes an interview may be the only surviving source. One has only to scan the sources of historical works, particularly those dealing with events during the past century, to see the debt which researchers owe to the interviewees, interviewers and institutions involved.

A recent publication which captured my attention - partly because it mentioned in passing the father of someone whom I had interviewed, and partly because of its use of documentary sources of all kinds - was Semut by Christine Helliwell (2021). The author, an anthropologist, deals with the activities of an elite and very small group of Allied troops during the latter part of World War II in the heart of Borneo. In an operation mounted by ‘Z Special Unit’, Semut operatives were parachuted into the Bario area, from where, with the help of local villagers, they carried out successful reconnaissance and harassment across much of Sarawak.

Helliwell’s extensive sources included surviving operatives and residents of Sarawak, and they certainly add enormously to the history of this operation. Significantly, the author draws attention to the part played by indigenous peoples in the success of the operation. This was something which had barely figured in earlier accounts. For parts of this ‘untold’ story had, in fact, been told before.

Many individual voices found their way into print in Bob Long’s Z Special Unit’s secret war (1989). Long gathered accounts from twenty surviving Semut operatives. One of them later published his own wartime memoirs (Griffiths-Marsh, 1990).

A major player in Operation Semut was a controversial and divisive figure, well known to many of you at least by reputation. Tom Harrisson was one of the first operatives who parachuted into Borneo. He recounted his part of the story of Semut in World within (Harrisson, 1959). Just how divisive Harrisson really was in this operation one can gauge by another account of ‘the most successful Allied guerrilla war in Borneo’ with the uncompromising title Kill the Major (Malone, 2020).

Whatever view of Harrisson one may have, Semut was successful. Take, for example, the rescue of a number of American airmen, whose aeroplanes had crashed into the jungles of Borneo: Heimann (2007) recounted their story in The airmen and the headhunters.

Harrison’s connection with Sarawak is three-fold: he spent part of 1932 in Sarawak, leading an Oxford University expedition. During the War he was part of Semut. After the War he was curator of the Sarawak Museum. This brings me, in a roundabout way, to Mass-Observation, for in 1937 Harrisson was a co-founder of Mass-Observation. A British organisation, it described itself as ‘an independent, scientific, fact-finding body, run by Tom Harrisson’ with a ‘team of trained, whole-time objective investigators and a nation-wide panel of voluntary informants’ (Harrisson, 1943, p.2).

These ‘informants’ were asked to write down what they thought and felt about various issues. Mass-Observation wanted to get to the heart of people’s thoughts and feelings, as well as to observe their behaviour. There was a practical application for what Mass-Observation was doing, and this came into prominence during World War II. It was realised that morale was important, but how to measure it? And not just the fighting spirit of troops, but the resilience or otherwise of civilians. Listening to people, asking them questions and observing their activities were the key.

Take for example a survey examining problems in factories in Britain during the early years of the War. War factory (Harrisson, 1943) is a skilful analysis of a wartime workplace, based on observation and drawing on what employees at all levels of the firm told the investigators. Their actual words – often blunt and vivid – are used to illustrate the observations made and to back up suggested improvements.

Mass-Observation’s documents were all paper-based.. Today the informants might have used a smart phone or social media to record their innermost thoughts and their activities. But back to Semut and Z Special Unit. After the War, operatives were generally reluctant to talk about their experiences – some were warned that this was forbidden under the Official Secrets Act. But over time, stories came out, as can be seen from the Griffiths-Marsh (1990) and Harrisson (1959) memoirs and Long’s (1989) compilation. Official papers which had survived culling (or censorship) became available in archives and libraries, serious writers took up their pens, some surviving operatives and locals in Sarawak were interviewed, and gradually a fuller picture is emerging – one which has begun to throw overdue light upon the role of indigenous Borneans in the events described.

Part of the picture has been filled in by recorded interviews – notably by Helliwell (2021) over the many years she has worked on this subject, and also by Pustaka Negeri Sarawak. A sample of what Pustaka has gathered is presented in The unsung heroes (2013).

This rather protracted example illustrates a stage in the evolution of a valuable documentary form – the beginnings of oral history as a distinct literary genre. Here the sheer volume of transcribed interviews – selected and edited to follow a particular theme – dominates the work. It may be a dramatic event or series of events - such as those surrounding Semut – or a social movement, way of life, or era.

This is not a new phenomenon, but it is one which I believe should be more widely practiced. Several authors have used oral history as the principal source for entire published or broadcast works. Take for example the work of ‘Studs’ Terkel, the American author and radio personality best known for his oral histories of ordinary American..

Particularly compelling for me was a series of publications originating in programmes commissioned by Radio 4 of the British Broadcasting Corporation: Plain tales from the Raj (Allen and Mason, 1975), followed by Tales from the dark continent (Allen and Fry, 1979) and Tales from the South China Seas (Allen and Mason, 1983).

Closer to my own home, a landmark in the use of oral history in publications was Lowenstein’s Weevils in the flour (1978), in which ordinary Australians spoke of their experiences during the Great Depression. This was followed by Struggletown by McCalman (1988). Another work drawing upon the voices of those not usually heard was Goldsmith and Sandford’s The girls they left behind (1990), based on interviews with women who describe their experiences in Australia during World War II.

It is no surprise that life-changing events, like economic depressions, wars and other catastrophes, figure prominently in works such as these. They have dramatic impact, and for the participants the interview process itself can often be distressing, but cathartic. From the viewpoint of the reader, such works are profoundly important. These works document the stories, experiences and feelings of real and ordinary – and sometimes extraordinary – people. They do not dissect economic and social conditions, nor dispassionately chronicle military campaigns; they do not scale the political heights, nor plumb the political depths. They enable us to gain an insight into real people – or at least a select sample of real people, with all their virtues and vices – and how they feel in retrospect about what they experienced. In a sense this is a kind of Mass-Observation exercise, with the participants providing the raw material, subject to the selectivity applied by and context provided by the editor.

Take, for example, the much-documented events of D-Day, the 6 June 1944 landings on the Normandy beaches. We may be familiar with the grainy footage of the assault, the Hollywood blockbusters, the memoirs of combatants, the official war histories, the reminiscences of politicians and the post mortems by academics.

But there are also some notable collections of extracts from interviews of military personnel and civilians caught up in the preparations for the invasion and later in front-line action. In what was subtitled ‘a landmark oral history of D-Day on the Home Front’, Arthur (2015) collected in The silent day hundreds of brief recollections of the time when 160,000 troops gathered in southern England. What did the locals think of these temporary residents from many nations? How did the troops themselves feel, knowing that something was afoot, but not knowing exactly what? Many of the recollections are by people who were children at the time: ‘We children loved the black GIs because they used to give us sweets – candy, they called them – and they were very kind. I can remember French sailors too, ‘cos they were very good at dancing the tango’ (Arthur, 2015, p. 55).

Overnight the huge army disappeared, as one eye-witness recalled: ‘I came back in the morning and not a soldier was to be seen, they were gone. It was quite eerie. Fires in the camp’s ranges were still burning. There were urns of cocoa, coffee, tea, all hot. Cheese, butter, bacon, it was all there in the dining room, half-eaten meals on the table’ (Arthur, 2015, p. xi).

Another collection of extracts documents some of the experiences on the other side of the English Channel. Voices from D-Day (Lewis, 2014) is frequently disquieting. In this extract an Allied soldier talks about a French family’s hospitality: ‘They had so little to give us, but we were given soup with a little meat. We were enjoying this meal when we observed a small boy crying in the corner, and in our best French, enquired why the boy was crying. We were told that we were eating his rabbit’ (Lewis, 2014, p. 272). Where would you find such a vignette in one of the clinical military accounts, primarily from the victors, or in any of the scholarly histories?

A concerted effort to record the recollections of veterans of conflicts in which Australia has taken part resulted in the Australians at War Film Archive. Over two thousand people were interviewed between the years 2002 and 2005. Preserved for posterity are twelve thousand hours of interviews, ‘not dry history, but flesh and blood; not the movements of armies or the piece-by-piece reconstruction of a particular battle, but the stories of our countrymen and women as they faced the greatest challenges of their lives’ (Crawford, 2006, p. ix). Extracts from twenty-one interviews were published in book form, the diverse interviewees including a refugee from Hungary who served with the Special Air Service during the Malayan Emergency, a nurse in Vietnam, a prisoner of war, a dog handler, a survivor of Nagasaki, and a servicewoman who later became a war bride (Crawford, 2006). Indeed, these are stories of real flesh and blood.

One author who has made oral history interviews a cornerstone of her literary career is Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian essayist, oral historian and winner of the 2015 Nobel Prize for Literature. She has made her mark with a series of works dealing, very frankly, with darker times in history, drawing on countless interviews conducted over many years.

In The unwomanly face of war (Alexievich, 2017b), she casts light on a neglected corner of history – the role of women in the armed forces of the Soviet Union during World War II. She listened to women who had served in the army, navy, air force and partisan forces, as nurses, doctors, bakers, laundresses, snipers, pilots, engineers and train drivers. In her interviews she is intent on documenting ‘the history of small human beings, thrown out of ordinary life into the epic depths of an enormous event. Into great History’ (Alexievich, 2017b, p. 19).

‘In city apartments and village cottages, in the streets and on the train . . . I listen . . . I turn more and more into a big ear, listening all the time to another person. I read “voices”’ (Alexievich, 2017b, p. xix).

One interviewee, on the way to a battle front, recalled being seen off at the railway station by her mother, who ‘saw us going to the train, gave me a pie and a dozen eggs, and fainted’ (Alexievich, 2017b, p. 23).

Alexievich is constantly trying to bring history down to a human scale. She knows that there will be many differing views, and indeed her compilations are kaleidoscopic: ‘We all see life through our occupations, through our place in life or the events we participate in. It could be supposed that a nurse saw one war, a baker another, a paratrooper a third, a pilot a fourth, the commander of a submachine gun platoon a fifth’ (Alexievich, 2017b, p. 71).

One interviewee, a hairdresser in civilian life, said: ‘My specialty is men’s haircuts. A girl comes. I don’t know how to cut her hair. She has luxuriant wavy hair. The commander enters the dugout. “Give her a man’s haircut.” “But she’s a woman.” “No. She’s a soldier. She’ll be a woman again after the war”’ (Alexievich, 2017b, p. 164).

In other works, Alexievich has dealt with more recent events, such as the Soviet war in Afghanistan (Alexievich, 2017a) and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster (Alexievich, 2016a). Inevitably that brought her up against authorities whose narratives of events and outcomes are vastly different from those of surviving witnesses in her interviews.

A senior lieutenant, commander of a mortar platoon in Afghanistan, told her: ‘No-one likes to remember a war that was lost’ (Alexievich, 2017a, p. 124). Particularly unpalatable for authorities were accounts of casualties – the title Boys in zinc refers to the coffins in which the remains of fatalities were returned to their loved ones back in the Soviet Union. But the accounts of survivors – many with long-term physical and psychological injuries – covered a gamut of governmental failings, from inadequate equipment and training to poor living conditions and inadequate food. ‘They gave us one tin of mackerel between four,’ one interviewee told her. ‘The label had the year it was tinned: 1956, and its storage life, eighteen months’ (Alexievich, 2017a, p. 210).

‘My doctors have promised that my memory could come back,’ a helicopter pilot told her. ‘Then I’ll have two lives: the one they told me about, and the one that really happened. Come back then, and I’ll tell you about the war’ (Alexievich, 2017a, p. 93).

Not only were authorities disturbed by the testimony which Alexievich’s interviewees presented, but relatives of some of the slain accused her of defaming the dead. A series of legal actions ensued in the 1990s. In the face of political persecution her position in Belarus became untenable and she went into exile, but returned in 2011 and was for a time ‘guarded’ in her own home by Austrian, Lithuanian, Polish, Czech, Romanian, Slovak and Swedish diplomats (‘EU diplomats on guard’, 2020).

In Chernobyl prayer (Alexievich, 2016a) the author also touched a raw nerve, giving free rein to the voices of people affected by the 1986 accident at the number 4 reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union. The harrowing eye-witness accounts are what make this book different from others on the disaster. As Alexievich writes (2016a, p. 24): ‘This is not a book on Chernobyl, but on the world of Chernobyl. Thousands of pages have already been written on the event itself, hundreds of thousands of metres of film devoted to it. What I’m concerned with is what I would call the ‘missing history’, the invisible imprint of our stay on earth and in time. I am trying to capture the life of the soul. A day in the life of ordinary people. Here, though, everything was extraordinary.’

The same approach is followed in her more recent work, dealing with the end of the Soviet Union. Secondhand time (Alexievich, 2016b) draws upon interviews conducted from 1991 to 2012. Some interviewees looked back longingly, from what seemed chaotic contemporary events, to the stability of the Stalin era, bizarre though that may seem to many of us. Others viewed developments with optimism. Others with cynicism. Some with inertia: ‘I have no desire to go out into the street and try to accomplish anything,’ someone told her. ‘It’s better to do nothing. No good, no evil. What’s good today will turn out to have been evil tomorrow’ (Alexievich, 2016b, p. 295).

So Alexievich tells stories which would otherwise never be told, or would certainly not reach a wide audience. She presents ‘small history’ and many viewpoints, often suffused with raw emotion.

‘I collect details and feelings, not only from an individual human life, but out of the air of the time, its space and its voices. I don’t invent things or make conjectures, I gather the book together out of reality itself. This document is what people tell me, and a part of it is also me, as an artist, with my own view and awareness of the world’ (Alexievich, 2016a, p. 275).

I have spent some time talking about Alexievich as a recent exponent of what I regard as a very powerful combination of two media: the spoken and the written word. Undeniably she has brought the voices she records to a huge international audience. Her works have been translated into at least thirteen languages. Millions of copies of her books have been sold around the world. This literary genre clearly has appeal, and not just to the Nobel Prize judges.

Works such as this are widely read, they inform, they entertain. They may also spark further interest in the subject, drawing attention to the source material, perhaps stimulating research, encouraging people to record their own thoughts or the thoughts of others, and to present them to a wider audience.

Institutions, for their part, can be more than collectors and repositories, by actively publishing and promoting, or encouraging publications which make use of their oral history resources.

Using this approach, a number of topics suggest themselves to me in relation specifically to Sarawak. Some of these topics have already featured in Pustaka Negeri Sarawak’s oral history programme, and could be built upon with a view to wider dissemination.

The establishment of the Malaysia Federation, for example, was discussed in Pustaka’s interviews with a number of key figures from the time, including Dato Lim Kian Hock, Tun Datuk Patinggi Haji Abdul Rahman Yakub and Datuk Stephen Jusem.

Sarawak’s experience of the Volunteer Service Overseas programme could also be a suitable subject for a publication, providing insights by the volunteers into their experiences and also the reaction of locals in Sarawak. Pustaka staff have already interviewed ten or so former volunteers.

Difficult and sometimes controversial subjects should not be neglected, and Pustaka has indeed tackled issues such as the Anti-Cession Movement in Sarawak, and Konfrontasi, interviewing several former Border Scouts.

Many published oral histories have centred around crises of one sort or another, and the last year or so of COVID-19 has provided a classic example, akin to experience of war. Are the voices of frontline workers, decision-makers, hotel staff, children, market traders, airline workers, spiritual leaders, teachers, ordinary members of the public, being recorded as historical documents, so that we can learn from what we and others have lived through? I suspect there are many books in the pipeline dealing with the clinical, administrative, political, social and economic aspects of COVID. But what about Alexievich’s ‘little people’ and their part in ‘big history’?

Going back to local crises of the recent past, there was the East Asian Economic Crisis, which can be viewed from various levels, from decision makers who successfully championed Keynesian economic theory, to people in the street. On an environmental rather than economic level there have been states of emergency declared to cope with smoke haze, and a number of viewpoints merit documenting.

Urbanisation, resettlement, environmental protection, industrialisation and wildlife conservation are all Issues of vital importance, on which voices from the ground up should be recorded. This is to say nothing of the traditional arts and crafts, customs and knowledge, and the literatures of so many kinds transmitted orally, much good work on which is already under way.

Sport at various levels also deserves attention, whether at the village level or at national and international championships, and will be of interest to future generations. So too will accounts of entertainments and pastimes which predominated for generations before we became captives of the small screen.

As for the process of translating oral history recordings into something which is publishable in one format or another, considerable skill will be required in selection, editing and presentation.

Shopes (2016) provides a very helpful introduction to the finer points of editing oral history recordings for publication. She draws on a good range of examples to identify three genres of oral history publication: ‘biographical narratives of one individual; works that pivot around multiple narrators talking about a single topic or theme; and more traditional, interpretive studies that draw upon oral history as one of multiple sources’ (Shopes, 2016, p. 481).

It is the second of these genres upon which I have concentrated in this paper - multiple voices on a single topic or theme – and in which I see so many possibilities.

I do hope that the wealth of potential subject matter, Borneo-wide, and some of the examples I have mentioned, will inspire still more brave souls to take up the challenge of collecting further oral histories and, where appropriate, editing them for wider diffusion.

It is, to my mind, an effective way of ensuring that the voices of ‘little people’ are heard and preserved, thereby documenting Alexievich’s ‘missing history’ before it goes missing completely, and presenting it to the world.

References

• Alexievich, S. (2016a). Chernobyl prayer. London: Penguin.

• Alexievich, S. (2016b). Secondhand time: The last of the Soviets. New York, NY: Random House.

• Alexievich, S. (2017a). Boys in zinc. London: Penguin.

• Alexievich, S. (2017b). The unwomanly face of war. London: Penguin.

• Allen, C. and Mason, M. (Eds.). (1975). Plain tales from the Raj: Images of British India in the twentieth century. London: Deutsch and British Broadcasting Corporation.

• Allen, C. and Fry, H. (Eds.). (1979). Tales from the dark continent. London: Deutsch and British Broadcasting Corporation.

• Allen, C. and Mason, M. (Eds.). (1983). Tales from the South China Seas: Images of the British in South-East Asia in the twentieth century. London: Deutsch.

• Arthur, M. (2015). The silent day: A landmark oral history of D-Day on the Home Front. London: Hodder.

• Carlyle, T. (1898). On heroes, hero-worship and the heroic in history. New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons.

• Crawford, M. (Ed.). (2006). Voices of war: Stories from the Australians at War Film Archive. Sydney: Hodder Australia.

• EU diplomats on guard at Belarusian writer’s home. (2020). euobserver. 9 September 2020. Retrieved from https://euobserver.com/foreign/149386

• Goldsmith, B. and Sandford, B. (1990). The girls they left behind. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.

• Griffiths-Marsh, R. (1990). The sixpenny soldier. North Ryde, New South Wales: Collins/Angus and Robertson, 1990. [Republished 1995 as I was only sixteen, Potts Point, New South Wales: ETT Imprint].

• Harrisson, T. (Ed.). (1943). War factory: A report by Mass-Observation. London: Gollancz.

• Harrisson, T. (1959). World within: A Borneo story. London: Cresset Press.

• Heimann, J. M. (2007). The airmen and the headhunters: A true story of lost soldiers, heroic tribesmen and the unlikeliest rescue of World War II. Orlando, FL: Harcourt.

• Helliwell, C. (2021). Semut: The untold story of a secret Australian operation in WWII Borneo. [Docklands, Victoria]: Penguin Random House Australia.

• Lewis, J. E. (Ed.). (2014). Voices from D-Day. London: Constable and Robinson.

• Long, B. (1989). Z Special Unit’s secret war: Operation Semut I: Soldiering with the head-hunters of Borneo. Hornsby, New South Wales: Transpareon Press.

• Lowenstein, W. (1978). Weevils in the flour: An oral record of the 1930s depression in Australia. South Yarra, Victoria: Hyland House.

• McCalman, J. (1988). Struggletown: Portrait of an Australian working class community 1900-1965. Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.

• Malone, P. (2020). Kill the Major: The true story of the most successful Allied guerrilla war in Borneo. Petaling Jaya: Strategic Information and Research Development Centre.

• Shopes, L. (2016). Editing oral history for publication. In R. Perks and A. Thomson (Eds.), The oral history reader (3rd ed.), pp. 470-489. London: Routledge.

• The unsung heroes: Voices of the Sarawakian guerrillas of ‘Z’ Special Unit / Wira tidak didendang: Suara-suara gerila Unit Khas ‘Z’ Sarawak. (2013). Kuching, Sarawak: Pustaka Negeri Sarawak.