St George's Nurses’ Voices were heard in Sydney Australia in July 2006 when Kath Start and Carol McCubbin presented a paper at the International Oral History Association’s 14th international conference.
The conference theme was ‘Dancing with memory: oral history and its audiences’. Sub-themes included archiving memory, fire and water, memory and community, places and buildings, healing memories, memory and trauma, pleasures of memory, remembering the land, sharing/passing on beliefs, talking to ourselves, teaching and learning.
The conference was extremely interesting and informative; it was opened by Her Excellency, Professor Marie Bashir AC, Governor of NSW. The welcome address was given by Bob Debus, the NSW Minister for the Arts and patron of the conference. The conference also contained master classes by such well known and respected oral historians as Alessandro Portelli who teaches American Literature at the University of Rome La Sapienza and is the author of a number of essays and books on oral cultures and oral history. He received the Viareggio Book Prize in 2004 and one of two Oral History Association book prizes in 2005.
Our paper was presented under the sub-theme of healing memories and was titled ‘The impact of medical advances on the individual spoken through the voices of nurses from 1930 to 1970’. It contained extracts from interviews that described the administering of early antibiotics, cardiac pacemakers, stereotactic treatment for Parkinson disease and nurse lead innovative treatment for burns during the Second World War. You can listen to these extracts in the themes section of this website.
The presentation was very well received and generated a lot of interest in both the data that has been collected and the method of collection, in particular the fact that the interviewers were volunteers who were themselves part of the subject set.