We appreciate people have different motives for exploring history, so we consider the best way to tell your story, engage with your audience, and ensure the final result is meaningful for you and for them.
For us, it’s about understanding and communicating your history with sensitivity, empathy, responsibility and the emotion, drama and humour found everywhere in life. We use a range of tools and techniques to produce touching, honest, revealing work that is also accessible, scholarly and engaging.
Researching
Private archives, public records, primary & secondary sources, objects, images – these are the tools of our working lives. We use them to understand values and philosophies, explain practices, activities and developments, and unravel complexities.
Oral history and consultation
Listening takes us to the heart of our research: hearing about significant events in a witness seminar; recognising vision, values and enterprise in a corporate memory, exploring the meaning of objects with their users and makers, or of places with their occupants; and delving into family heirlooms, community experiences and life stories. We find surveys most helpful when seeking the views of a large community.
Writing
This is how we distil our research and consultations. From note-taking to early drafts we like to ensure we’re off to a good start. Crossing the finish line involves sharing drafts with clients before submitting the final copy, which is always edited first by an in-house team member whether we’re writing expert witness reports, place histories, heritage assessments, commissioned histories, encyclopeadia entries, journal articles, or life stories.
Caring for objects, archives and collections
We talk with custodians and learn about your collection before we prepare significance and preservation needs assessments, develop collection policies, rehouse objects or conduct audits. Seemingly distinct, together these tasks enhance the significance and interpretation of objects and collections, and make them more meaningful to their communities, whether public or private.
Interpreting, curating and exhibiting
These involve communicating the significance of an event, person, theme, object or place in a way that succinctly imparts a story and a memory to the onlooker. Interpretations are at their best when objects, images, artworks, soundscapes, oral histories, timelines and text are combined with curiosity, empathy, inspiration, sound research and historical insights.
Editing, transcribing and digitising
Our editing skills include reviewing for the readability, flow, logic and sensibility of your work, and checking facts and integrity of sources. We transcribe oral history recordings, as well as handwritten diaries and other hard-to-decipher historical material and we digitise analogue audio cassettes.
Workshops and training
In the same vein as our Memoir Toolkit and Know Your ‘Hood walks, we offer workshops that will help you to enjoy caring for your collections or conducting oral history within your own community.
Behind the scenes
As well as editing our own writing and transcribing our interviews most projects involve a slow gestation to give time for searching, listening, talking, collecting and organising the stories of the past that matter so as to understand them within their larger context and themes. We have effectively managed highly complex projects that include training, supervising, logistical management, editing, research and writing.
To ensure every element of all our projects can be delivered in the best way possible we call on our trusted professional networks and collaborations with like-minded people skilled in photography, graphic and web design, exhibition fit-outs, way-finding, placemaking, sound and video recording.
Covid safe work
Although we would much rather be burrowing in archives and libraries, 2020 has happily confirmed the extent of Australia’s digitised local history stratosphere, making tremendous depth and breadth of research possible from home. Many public collections are now also providing researchers with access to non-digitised items. Our equipment and techniques enable us to interview remotely and still achieve broadcast quality audio.