Oral History Awards reflect extraordinary diversity

Media Release

Ministry for Culture and Heritage

8 June 2011

New Zealand Oral History Awards reflect extraordinary diversity

Over $120,000 have been awarded to 14 oral history projects including subjects such as the Auckland beach suburb of Milford, women judges in New Zealand, the ”Dunedin Sound” in music, and the Christchurch earthquake.

“The projects in this year’s New Zealand Oral History Awards will capture the stories and memories of a remarkable variety of people, and do it in a way that other forms of history could not,” said Alison Parr, Senior Oral Historian at the Ministry for Culture and Heritage which administers the awards. “The beauty of oral history is in the detail it preserves of individual lives.”

A number of places, ethnic and worker communities as well as individuals will have their oral histories recorded in the coming year.

This year’s successful applicants were selected by a committee of five historians.

All the recordings will go into the Oral History Archive at the Alexander Turnbull Library, where they will be available to researchers. The awards began 22 years ago following a gift from the Australian government to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Treaty of Waitangi.

Successful applicants for the 2011 awards are:

Deborah Dunsford $10,000
Auckland beach suburb of Milford

NZ Association of Women Judges $ 8,500
Women judges in New Zealand

Susan Fowke $10,000
Gisborne and Tairawhiti citizens

Carol Dawber $10,900
Golden Bay fishing history

National Dance Archive of New Zealand $ 8,820
Maori and Pasifika men influential in NZ contemporary dance

Barbara Inch $ 8,000
Christchurch School of Nursing graduates class 1971-1974

Emma Kelly $ 820
Older gay men in Auckland

Hineani Melbourne $12,056
Nga Tama Toa

Helen Frizzell and Lesley Paris $ 9,850
Formation and early period of the so-called Dunedin Sound

Ann Packer $ 2,856
Richard Nunns

Caren Wilton $13,400
The NZ sex industry workers

Erolia Ifopo and Sarah Hunter $10,000
Samoan community in the Christchurch earthquakes

Julia Brooke-White ` $11,000
New Zealand Wildlife Service

Beth Shalom $ 3,900
Beth Shalom Progressive Jewish Congregation

ENDS

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