Last week I went to two workshops.
On paper they had little in common. One was about making cabbage tree hats. The other was about recording oral history.
By the end of the week, I was thinking about both of them through the same lens. They were both about the past, and about what happens when people decide it still deserves a place in daily life.
The first was Sue Brian’s cabbage tree hat workshop at Jamberoo Youth Hall. I went to watch, not to make a hat, which was probably wise. The people at the tables were learning how to boil, shred and plait the palm fronds. I was listening for the story behind the craft.
There was a lot to hear.
In the mid nineteenth century, cabbage tree palms were cut in huge numbers. The trunks were used and the unopened leaf spears were taken for hat making. Sue and the people who still make the hats use the palm differently now. They take the unopened leaf from young palms in a way that allows the tree to keep growing.
The 19th century method took the palm out of the landscape. The current one leaves the tree standing.
The same palm that was once stripped from this landscape is now being planted back into it. Landcare Illawarra’s Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm project is planting cabbage tree palms around Jamberoo, below Saddleback Mountain, where some of the last old palms still stand.
Cabbage tree hat making workshop proved to be very popular and the workshops will return in 2027. See bottom of blog post for contact details
The second workshop was at the Pilot’s Cottage in Kiama, run by Alison Wishart and hosted by the Kiama Historical Society.
Alison Wishart and attendees at Oral History workshop. The Historical Society always offer a superlative morning tea.
This was familiar ground. I have spent years helping people tell their life stories through written memories. Alison was talking about oral history, and the power of recording it.
As Alison reminded participants, the recording keeps the emotion for others to interpret. You hear the hesitation, the humour, the catch in the voice. On the page, I have to find another way to express it.
I keep noticing how much people here care about memory. Our local “remember when” Facebook pages come alive when someone posts an old photo. Within an hour, people are naming faces, houses, streets, teams and families. Someone always knows something. Someone else adds the bit they missed.
I understand that feeling more now than I did when I was young.
Earlier this year, when the council floated moving the Pilot’s Cottage Museum from Blowhole Point into a small space under the library, the reaction was immediate. Dr Tony Gilmour and the Kiama Historical Society volunteers led the campaign, and people who rarely write submissions wrote in. In five days, the idea was reversed.
Around the museum, they still joke that the council wanted to turn them into a KFC.
The museum is here to stay (but it is still looking forward to council giving it a 5 year lease – if only council worked as fast as our community)
I grew up in a family that took history seriously. Years were spent writing down who came to this country, where they settled, what the men did, how wonderful the wives and mothers were at raising children and keeping house. Which women never married because they stayed home to look after their parents or their ten plus siblings. Not an era I would have thrived in.
I always thought I should find it fascinating. I didn’t.
I did well in history at school, but I learned the dates to pass the exam. I realise now I wanted to know what it felt like to be alive then.
I am grateful for the people I meet today who are prepared to share their story.
When I sit with someone to record their life, I am listening for what it was like to live through their sixty, seventy or eighty years. How much changed. Who stood beside them. What they learned through grief, love, disappointment and endurance.
When I ask people what they would say to young people now, the answers are the same.
Find a way to live in peace.
Be kind.
At the oral history workshop, someone asked the obvious question. If you are recording one person’s memory, how do you know it is accurate?
It is a fair question.
Memory shifts. Families remember things differently. History is full of confident versions that do not line up. Put ten people at the same accident and the police will take ten different statements. Each person saw it from where they were standing.
So you listen for how that person remembers it. Their version may differ from someone else’s. It may differ from your own. But it is their story.
That does not mean anything goes. A life story is not a place to settle a score with family. The highs belong there, and so do the lows, but the purpose is to understand a life, not punish people from the page.
The other thing I came home thinking about is how different every person is to record.
Some people give you gold in the first ten minutes. Some hold their story so tightly you wonder why they agreed to begin. Some families want every sentence to serve a different purpose. Some people need audio. Some need a written story. Some need a patient interviewer who can sit with silence. Some need structure before they can begin.
There is no single right way.
The cabbage tree hat workshop showed me that a craft survives because people keep practising it, slowly and carefully, with their hands.
The oral history workshop showed me that a life story survives because someone listens, then chooses the way to record it that suits that person.
Anyone can keep the dates and the places.
I am focused on the voice behind them, and whether I can express enough of that voice on the page for the person and their loved ones to recognise them.
Three exciting things to share
- Dr Tony Gilmour the Vice President of the Kiama Historical Society told me the majority of the Oral History workshop participants would like to turn their workshop learnings into recording people’s lived experiences; Contact the society at E: kiamahistory@outlook.com P: 02 4232 1001
- The Cabbage Tree Hat making workshops will return in 2027. Contact Kate Malfroy E: kate@lampshadeworkroom.com.au
- Landcare contact is Meredith Hall E: coordinator@landcareillawarra.org.au
M: +61 (0) 499 027 770
Further reading:
Cabbage-tree hats through history
Jamberoo welcomes the Future Proofing the Cabbage Tree Palm Project
Behind every hatmaker is a husband happy to be the mannequin.
