AustLit

'Native American Writer Leslie Marmon Silko notes that within traditional Pueblo society, story telling (oral history) is part of a communal process of remembering, in which everyone is expected to listen and to speak up and contribute a detail or a fact that has been omitted, or to recount a conflicting version. People welcome even conflicting versions of events, recognising that loyalties, grudges and kinship influence narrative choices, and truth lies somewhere within the web of differing versions, disputes over minor points and outright contradictions arising from old feuds and rivalries.

This paper explores this way of oral history, and memory making. It focuses on accounts by and about unemployed young people in a rural community in Southern Tasmania. It discusses the way these accounts were collected, transcribed and transmuted, in a collaborative venture, into literature (to date, a novel and a radio play) in order to stand witness to a community's memory and experience and also to ensure that particular individuals not be shamed - a dialogue which includes the conflicting accounts, attitudes, opinions and versions whose effective coexistence is essential to maintaining co-operative interdependence in small island communities.' Source: The author.