Victoria’s top oral history award goes to Alexandra Pierce for her podcast series ‘Women, Conscription, War’.
Oral History Victoria warmly congratulates Alexandra, the recipient of the 2024 Oral History Award, presented as part of the Victorian Community History Awards. The award is a collaboration of Oral History Victoria, Public Records Office Victoria and the Royal Historical Society.
The 15-episode podcast ‘Women, Conscription, War’ tells the story of the Melbourne women who opposed the Vietnam War and the National Service Act from 1965-1972. Each thematic episode weaves together narratives from fifty-eight oral history interviews conducted by Alexandra Pierce for her project, while also including (through the website) contemporary archival documents, photographs and protest ephemera and invaluable bibliographies of primary and secondary source material.
Judges said the podcast was ‘an inspiring example of the power of oral history to allow historical actors to make sense of their experiences, to bring us along with them on that journey of understanding, and to recreate and explain a momentous period of Victorian and Australian history’.
The other projects shortlisted for the award were:
- Remembering Ash Wednesday. An oral and visual archive of the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires in Aireys Inlet and its district – Alexander Watkins.
- In The Footsteps – Melbourne Holocaust Museum, Lead Curator Jayne Josem
- The People’s Movement: The Birth of Selby Community House – Selby Community House, and commissioned creators: Filmmakers: Tadji Ulrich, Lia Hills; Podcast producer: Riley Jordan.
More information
Find out more about the winning and shortlisted projects, complete with judges comments on our website: