The Oral History and Biography Channel (including memoir and autobiography)is an Australian-based publishing project devoted to both the craft and realisation of oral history and biography, the capturing of life stories. Its masthead features photographic portraits of the psychologically-minded novelist, Virginia Woolf, and the Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, to immediately signify the channel’s interest in psychology and in what drives people to think, act and live in the way that they do. The duality of Woolf and Freud is also to establish from the outset the channel’s devotion to the stories of women and men in equal measure and, overtime, seeks to redress the balance accorded disproportionately to men’s lives over and above and often to the exclusion of women’s lives.
That said, the project draws initially on an archive held by the channel’s publisher that is disproportionately weighted to men and the recounting of their lives in politics and law, particularly. Rather than block this archive, the goals is to progressively match it with the lives and voices of fascinating and arresting women. But this will take time and the channel asks for your patience and, indeed, help in tackling the disparity.
The oralhistoryandbiographychannel has other initial biases. It is overly weighted to Australian political figures and to law. The channel aims to make these biases less pronounced over time.
There is a high degree of filmed interview material on the channel and the aspiration is to continue to add to this as the project develops further. Much of this filmed material has been shot by cinematographer Steve Moxey who has been working with the channel’s publisher Garry Sturgess for more than a decade. He was the cinematographer behind the feature documentary Barry Jones In Search of Lost Time – A Film Story.