Celebrating 21 years of life history and community history
In a recent post I highlighted the enormous power of life-story feature articles.
But Central Queensland’s Gladstone Region has been taking this power to the next level with its popular Our Priceless Past lift-out and gallery exhibition, on show until next month.
The annual community event is celebrating 21 years of students interviewing, writing and publishing the life stories of special seniors.
The stories are printed in a collectors’ section of the daily newspaper The Gladstone Observer – this year with the support of sponsor LiveBetter Community Services – and displayed with storytelling memorabilia at the Gladstone Regional Art Gallery and Museum.
Gladstone Regional Council cultural projects specialist Di Paddick describes the whole experiences as “a big warm hug” that brings together two very different generations.
She has helped organise the project since 2006 and said community enthusiasm and feedback kept growing year on year.
Forever Young Autobiographies caught up with Di to find out more about Our Priceless Past and hear her tips about starting a similar project with your community or family …
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Di Paddick on the beginnings of Our Priceless Past
In 1999 it was the International Year of Older Persons.
Our Priceless Past began to celebrate that year. And we’ve still got the original publication that we display each year.
It was done a little differently in the beginning where all of the schools were involved.
And then we morphed into having a partner school each year.
We start our timeline early in the year with an extension of invitations to a participating school.
The teachers will either choose a whole class to work with or they might choose selected students.
And then we invite the community to nominate seniors, which they do all year round.
They’re quite used to it. We’ve already got nominations for next year.
Then about four weeks before the interviews we send out about 50 invitations to the seniors.
We usually end up with about 15 acceptances each year from that 50.
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Uniting to record life history
The students usually look to their teachers for guidance and we provide a student handout to the school.
But before students hold interviews, our colleagues at The Observer speak to them about how to interview: getting comfortable, asking leading questions, making contact and easing into it by not being too hard hitting up front.
The senior photographer also talks to the students about portrait photography and photojournalism.
And the school makes sure the students have suitable spaces for interviewing and portrait photography.
We’ve got to make sure spaces are accessible, safe and quiet for the seniors’ interviews.
Our local history researcher and writer Paulette Flint also does a masterclass with the students the day after the interviews to help them condense all their interview words into stories of about 500 words each.
Once we have the stories from the students we send those out to the seniors for them to check.
Sometimes they’ll go: “Oh, I forgot to tell them about this really important time.”
And they might want to add something in that is really pivotal and meaningful to them.
But it’s 99 per cent the students’ work that gets published.
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Going to the next dimension
During the interviews and editing we start talking to the seniors about memorabilia that matches some of the storytelling.
And when they bring in those objects we’re then collecting more information about the people and the place.
One of the special seniors this year is a retired watchmaker.
And he set up his entire workstation for us: all of his tools, all of his magnifying glasses and there is this beautiful specialised vice.
It was wonderful to watch him set it up and to talk about his work life.
And again that’s more and more information for our social-history collection.
We also ask the seniors for heritage images from their lives.
We’ll see school photos, wedding photos or important moments in their lives.
We enlarge one of those for the display, which act as a feature to pivot into that person’s story and life.
The exhibition has gone from starting in our smaller Museum Room to now the Town Hall Gallery, which has got this lovely, warm heritage to it.
The Town Hall Gallery really lends itself to telling these stories.
And a lot of the people remember coming here for shows, coming here to pay their rates or coming here to be vaccinated.
It’s one of those community centres. Its had many, many personalities.
They all have memories of this place. It’s wonderful.
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Loving Our Priceless Past
Our Priceless Past is much loved. After 21 years the publications are highly sought-after souvenirs.
People come in early to make sure they collect the latest edition.
Because it’s community based and community nominated you get a lot of engagements.
On the day of the official launch we invite all of the seniors who’ve been featured before.
So they come in and it’s like a big reunion.
They celebrate with the new people and reminisce over the time they were nominated.
It has a very strong family feel to it.
And then throughout the time the exhibition is on display we get other people coming in and saying: “Oh, I remember this.”
Those people are telling us more and we’re building that social-history collection continuously.
Plus people are thinking about nominating for next year and telling their story.
So Our Priceless Past doesn’t really have a start and a finish – it continues.
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Overcoming challenges to build bonds and friendships
After 13 years of working on Our Priceless Past, I see how it’s very tentative that relationship between student and senior at the beginning.
They are a bit nervous.
Often the seniors need a little bit of encouragement from family and friends to participate because telling of your private life can sometimes resurface things that are a bit sensitive or be a reminder of hardships.
But they are very honest with the young people. It’s quite lovely.
And the students themselves feel that sense of responsibility to do the right thing by the seniors.
History researcher Paulette says what she notices is the students feel writing is a big mountain they’ve got to climb.
But at the end of the day they just realise they have achieved something great.
There is a sense of accomplishment they wouldn’t have had the day before.
And we also see an exchange of information.
The young people beginning this firsthand history knowledge discussion and the seniors very interested to hear what sports the students are involved in and what they like at school.
It is the start of a new friendship for sure.
It is a deeper understanding and strengthening of bonds between two very different generations.
For me, even if we’re familiar with a participant and they have been in the gallery many times, it is always surprising when you find out news of something they have been really challenged with in the past or maybe you find that different perspective.
Getting to understand your community and the diversity of people we are is really, really valuable.
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Final say: Our Priceless Past
To conclude Di said Our Priceless Past was a valuable record that embraced new relationships and celebrated community heritage.
She said she hoped it would inspire others to start something similar.
“I think you ask the community to come along with you,” she said.
“It’s not something you could do on your own.
“You must have those people who know the place and know the people that have shaped your community.
“You’ve got to bring them along.”
Happy writing!
Our Priceless Past is a joint initiative of the Gladstone Regional Art Gallery and Museum and The Gladstone Observer, supported by LiveBetter Community Services. The Gladstone Regional Art Gallery and Museum is a community cultural initiative of the Gladstone Regional Council, located on the corner of Goondoon and Bramston Sts, Gladstone, Queensland, Australia.
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Your say
Would you like to start an Our Priceless Past style initiative in your region? Or what about writing the life story of an older person? I’d love to hear about it. Send me an email or leave a reply in the comments section at the end of this article.
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This article first appeared on the website Forever Young Autobiographies.com.