My experience has shown me that telling local history through lived experience draws a response rooted in recognition rather than nostalgia.
People are asking how using history to share lived experience changes the way decisions, relationships, and reputation are understood in the places they know well. From there, the questions deepen.
I am being invited to speak to community groups about history, and the invitations keep coming. Each one begins in a similar way. People say they know the dates. They know the names. They know the family trees. What they want to hear is what life felt like. Over time, a pattern has emerged.
The curiosity has grown alongside a book I am writing. It is historical fiction set in my village of Jamberoo around Federation. An elderly widower marries a much younger woman when circumstance leaves them both with few options. The marriage unsettles the family. Relationships strain. Friendships shift. The town steps in and fills the silences.
At its heart, the book is about the courage it takes for a woman to live outside the version of her that a community has already decided on, before they’ve even met her.
That story catches attention because it sounds familiar. Every community recognises how quickly private lives become everyone’s business . Reputation circulates. Memory lasts.
When I talk about the book, I also talk about the research behind it. Family histories tend to preserve facts with care. They record births, deaths, marriages, places, and dates. The outline survives. What slips away is the experience of living inside those moments.
You know what happened. You rarely know what it demanded of the people involved.
That is where people lean forward. They recognise the pressures of the time, the work that filled the days, the skills people relied on, the compromises they made, the losses they experienced, the way change landed differently across households. Place returns to the centre of the story.
At that point, I see it each time I ask a simple question. Who here keeps stories? Hands rise. Photo albums. Letters tied with ribbon. Boxes in cupboards. A drawer nobody else opens. People understand the responsibility straight away.
One story I often share involves a suitcase. A man kept his family’s letters and photographs inside it. When he died, the suitcase passed to his son. The son treated it as something to look after. Inside were photographs of my own family I had never seen. My history survived through someone else’s care.
Experiences like this are common. They rarely get spoken about.
Today, that care can extend beyond cupboards and drawers. Digital spaces allow stories to travel. Ordinary lives become searchable and discoverable. A single record can reach families, researchers, and future generations who have yet to realise what they are looking for.
Each invitation I receive leads to a different conversation.
People want to hear about their own backyards. Their streets. Their arguments. Their decisions. Their innovations. They want to recognise themselves in the record.
What I bring to these conversations is a way of looking at history through lived experience. History shaped by choice, effort, and consequence. The facts still matter. Meaning travels alongside them when someone takes the time to carry it forward.
