Connect with our Oral Histories

Mayor, Eve Dutton and Ross Brown. Australia Day, 1996. Courtesy Strathfield Local Studies

The National Trust’s Heritage Festival runs from 18 April until 19 May 2024!

This year’s theme is Connections. You can find the NSW program of events at: https://www.nationaltrust.org.au/explore/?content=ahf_event&ahfdate-search=

Many of these events are free.

This year we invite you to connect with some of Strathfield’s oral histories.

Between 1993 and 2003 interviews were conducted with former councillors, mayors and senior staff of Strathfield Municipal Council. These interviews have now been digitised. While we have transcripts for many, we do not have them for all participants. Interviews requiring transcription include former mayors Eve Dutton, Clarrie Edwards and Laurel O’Toole and councillors Eileen Stirk and Robert Jordan. Eve Dutton had the honour of becoming Strathfield’s first female mayor in 1991. Interviews with senior staff include Deputy Town Clerk, Viv Hudson and Chief Health and Building Surveyor, Paul Wilson.

With the assistance of the State Library of NSW and Amplify, transcripts have been generated for these valuable oral histories but we need your help to correct them.

Amplify is a platform designed to deliver audio collections from the archives of cultural institutions across NSW. These oral histories, many of which have been preserved digitally from their original format, are being delivered online paired with machine-generated transcripts. These transcripts can be edited by any user to improve their accuracy and ultimately enrich important historical and cultural documents.

This Heritage Festival we invite you to connect with the Strathfield Local Studies Collection by joining our team of transcribers. From the comfort of your own home you can help by listening to computer-generated speech-to-text audio files and correcting the spelling errors. Once three different transcribers have agreed on the corrected text, this is accepted as an accurate record of the audio recording. Our aim is to make these available to the community through the library catalogue in the future.

As you help correct text you will hear from prominent voices of Strathfield’s past and learn more about our district and its history. You can choose to participate anonymously or register as a transcriber and track your progress. It’s up to you! Enthusiastic transcribers have already assisted many libraries in correcting the transcripts of oral histories in their collections.

If you would like to be involved, you can find the interviews at: https://amplify.gov.au/strathfield/MAYORS_OH_Strathfield_Council

To help you get started, a tutorial is available at: https://amplify.gov.au/page/tutorial FAQs are also available on the site.

For further details contact Council’s Local Studies Advisor at Strathfield Library on 8762 0222 or through this website.

Thanks for your help!

By J.J. MacRitchie

Local Studies Advisor