Oral history : a practical guide based on Maltese migration and settlement in Australia (including a catalogue of collections)

Abstract

Mark Caruana and Barry York have captured on tape the stories of more than 160 early settlers from Malta. While they have co-operated over the years, they have done their practical work separately, travelling to several centres of Maltese settlement in Australia armed with question lists, cassettes tapes and recorders. Mark and Barry have an identical goal - the preservation of the Maltese migration and settlement experience as told in the words of those who lived it - but they come from two different backgrounds. Mark Caruana was born in Malta and speaks fluent Maltese. Barry York was born in London, to an English mother and Maltese father, and does not speak Maltese. Mark Caruana's oral history research began through his work as a migrant welfare worker in the late 1970s. Barry York's involvement developed in the early 1980s through his enrolment as a PhD candidate at the University of New South Wales. Mark Caruana was a migrant welfare worker with the Department of Immigration from 197 6-84. His work brought him in touch with a number of pre-World War 2 immigrants from Malta and Gozo whose settlement experiences he found to be vastly different from his own as a post-war immigrant. In time, his interest grew from initial fascination to a deepening concern that such a wealth of human experiences was likely to be lost to future generations unless an immediate rescue operation of recording such human migration history took place before it was too late. Mark was fortunate to meet Tony Apap, a 1916 immignint of "Maltese of New Caledonia" vintage, who put him in touch with several of his contemporaries. Mark's growing interest was funher boosted in 1983 in the lead-up to a number of festivities marking the Centenary of Organised Migration from the Maltese Islands to Australia. He started interviewing as many Maltese pioneers as was humanly possible. He made a conscious decision to give the recording of interviews priority over the transcribing, as many of the pioneers he needed to interview were already in their late eighties. For several years, he developed a close team-work approach with George Griffiths, a 1948 immigrant who had similar concerns and an innate affinity with migration history. He valued his advice. Mark and George researched, discussed, questioned and continually sensitized others by writing in 'The Maltese Herald' and regularly shared "their discoveries", additional evidence, etc. The team-work approach was further strengthened when contact was made with Barry York, whose formal training in history and greater opponunities of recording early Maltese settlers as pan of his academic studies opened up new horizons in expanding the then limited knowledge of the Maltese presence in Australia. Mark was by then continually picking up the required skills of oral history interviewing through attentive listening, follow-up reading of relevant historical events, discussing and sharing of ideas, and continual fine-tuning of his interviewing and listening skills. He learnt as he went along! Mark believes that oral history is best done as a collaborative and co-operative venture. The positive benefits of team-work cannot be underestimated. This is now being made possible as Mark and Barry and others are very happy to assist with their knowledge gained and experiences shared, which has accumulated over years of oral history recording with anyone who shares their concerns. Mark believes that oral history is fun. It is the fascinating face of the history of the people by the people where one soon discovers that the collective human experiences of Maltese canecutters or wharf labourers are on an equal footing with those who held high office. When such experiences are recorded, transcribed and matched with written documentary material, a more accurate and complete picture emerges. You will enjoy every minute of it! Barry York's formal training and education as an undergraduate history student did not encourage oral history. In the early 1970s, it was regarded as a very peripheral, even eccentric, approach to research; the domain of lazy amateurs. It wasn't until the 1980s, when he undertook postgraduate studies in history, that oral history started to become more respectable and credible in Australia. The supervisor of his PhD thesis on early Maltese settlement encouraged him to complete interviews with early migrants who had settled as far apart as Mackay in north Queensland and Broken Hill in the far west of New South Wales. He extensively researched through mountains of official documents, reports, newspapers, passenger lists, books and private papers at archives and libraries all over Australia and overseas. Oral history interviews with early settlers complemented such research and, better still, occasionally pointed him in the direction of new information and sources. Above all else, the process of going out from the 'ivory tower' of university life and into the various places where Maltese had settled prior to the second world war gave him something that books could not possibly teach: namely, a sense of the human beings, with all their strengths and frailties, feelings and motivations, who were the subject of his research. Barry cannot see how Australian social history can be written, especially in regards to ethnic groups, without some degree of oral history. A government report may accurately describe how many Maltese resided in the same boarding-house at Innisfail in the 1920s but it cannot tell you how those men felt about the experience, nor why they lived in that particular place. Similarly, official statistics may reliably inform you of the number of Maltese men and women who came to Australia in a given year and where they disembarked, but they cannot explain why they chose to leave Malta, nor why they chose Australia as a destination. Only oral history - the process of learning from the people who have helped make history - can unlock such 'secrets'. In a sense, as a person who believes in listening first and talking second, Barry believes he has always been an oral historian. He used to be enthralled by his uncle Joe's stories of his early years in Melbourne in the 1920s. Barry was probably not even a teenager when, one boiling Christmas Day sitting under the shade of his massive grapevine, the canaries twitting away noisily in the background, his uncle told him about a group of men from his native Gozo who had been turned away from Sydney during the first world war. Today, a great deal more is known of those men - known as "the children of Billy Hughes" or "the Maltese of New Caledonia"; indeed, Barry interviewed one of them for the National Library of Australia. His uncle Joe passed away a few years ago. His story, in his own words, has been preserved on tape thanks to an interview completed with him in 1985. It is not just his story but his voice that is preserved and, not just his voice, but its wealth of accents and inflections. Through that taped interview, something essential of, and unique to, him lives on. If this Guide results in a dozen new Maltese-Australian oral historians, actively recording and transcribing the stories of their parents and grandparents, uncles and aunties, friends and new acquaintances, then its publication will have been well worthwhile. Your contribution to the sum total of our knowledge of Maltese migration history assumes a very important role. So please: be in it! [Preface]