Tag: Pilot’s Cottage

Two workshops in one week, and what they showed me about memory

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

  1. 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
  2. The Cabbage Tree Hat making workshops will return in 2027. Contact Kate Malfroy E: kate@lampshadeworkroom.com.au
  3. 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

 

Kiama Council’s Easter ambush sparks anger over cuts closed doors and police

Kiama Council dropped an extraordinary meeting agenda on the Thursday before a four day Easter break, then set the meeting on for the following Tuesday, the first day back. The agenda carried sweeping proposed savings across community life, including youth, cultural and community services, visitor services, tourism, library hours, Leisure Centre hours, the pensioner rebate, community donations and sponsorships, staff positions, and the proposed relocation of the Pilot’s Cottage Museum and Visitor Information Centre.

People in Kiama understand there is a budget problem. They understand Council is operating under a Performance Improvement Order and that difficult decisions are in front of it.

The anger has come from the way this was handled. Material of this scale was put into the public arena on the eve of a long weekend, when people were heading into Easter, then debated the moment the holiday ended. Councillors had already been through workshops and briefings. The community got a scramble.

The public forum timing sharpened the sense that this was being pushed through rather than opened up. Instead of the breathing space most people would expect before a decision of this size, public access was held immediately before the meeting itself.

People were expected to absorb complex proposals, organise their thoughts, speak, and watch councillors move into debate, all in the same late afternoon.

Then came the access arrangements. On the afternoon of the meeting, Council announced that the administration building would close at 4 pm, the public gallery would be limited to 20 attendees, protest material would not be permitted inside chambers or council workplaces, security would manage access, and NSW Police had been advised of the intended protest. That combination told its own story.

Community anger was being managed as a risk event at the very moment residents were trying to be heard.

This is the part Council seems not to have understood. When you put youth services, community services, library hours, tourism functions, the pensioner rebate, staff positions and local heritage on the table, people will react. When you do it before a four day break and bring it on for the first day back, they will react harder. When you then tighten access and prepare for protest, they draw their own conclusions.

Watch community concerns on WIN4 News here 

The question now is larger than one difficult meeting. Kiama has already seen police called to a tense council gathering in recent years. That gives this latest episode a wider significance. Residents are entitled to ask whether this is becoming a pattern, late release of major decisions, compressed opportunities for public response, and a readiness to treat dissent as a security problem rather than a democratic reality.

No one expects budget repair to be painless. People do expect honesty, time and respect. They expect to see the problem clearly, weigh the trade offs, and speak before the process tightens around them. That did not happen here.

You would hope this is not how Kiama Council plans to handle major public decisions from here. It looks too much like another way of shutting down community voices. And once a council starts hearing community anger as a threat instead of a message, it has lost sight of the room.