Memory Tapes

The National Library of Australia's Oral History and Folklore collection is the largest in the country. Containing memories from the mid-nineteenth century to today, the collection covers moments of social change, cultural creativity, political struggle, and everyday experience.

Memory Tapes brings together a selection of these compelling voices and reveals how Australians have spoken about their lives, their work, their struggles, and their hopes across centuries. The chapters, broken up into distinct themes, such as First Nations, Political Players, and Sand and Stadium, capture lived experiences in all their complexities, emotions, and contradictions. Readers can get a sense of the textures of memory—tone, hesitation, reflection—hearing the past directly through the people who lived it. A QR code in the back of the book will take readers to the original voice recordings in the Library's collection.

From the voices of Prime Ministers, protestors, First Nations Australians, and migrants to scientists, athletes, artists, older people, and younger people—each contributes to a national memory that is alive and growing.