Stories

One of the great challenges facing the managers of museums and historic collections is to make them relevant to the next generation of potential visitors which has no personal experience of the conditions under which people lived and worked or of the equipment and facilities available to them. We must work on writing our stories while there are still many dedicated people with first-hand knowledge to assist.

Oral Histories

Members of the Australian Country Hospital Heritage Association have been working over the past 40 years to record, through interviews, the stories of distinguished health service professionals who have served our region. To date 75 such histories have been recorded. We would love to have transcripts of these which would be easy to publish on websites such as this. Unfortunately, converting the complex text of an oral history to a simple transcript requires special skills and a lot of time. So far we have only 21 such transcripts.

Software which is able to convert voice to text is becoming more powerful. It certainly works extremely well when there is a single speaker. This year we tested such software and found that, while it works to some extent, the transcipt produced still requires a lot of manual processing. The software has no sense of the context. For example, in one interview tested this year, the speaker said that he was born in the county of Ayr in Scotland. The sotware transcribed that as "air". Nevertheless, we did produce one successful transcript this year with a lot of time and effort.

All of the interviews previously recorded on audio cassettes have been converted to digital media in order to preserve them for the future.

To provide a 'taste' of what is possible, a story built around the transcript of an interview between a retired Obstetrician and Gynaecologist, Dr Tom Dewar, and a retired Specialist Dermatologist, Dr Mervyn Gold, was included in the Association's November 2007 Newsletter. You will find a copy of this newsletter on our website here. Dr Gold's career commenced when he graduated at the start of World War II and spanned over 60 years.

Other stories

While the stories of people are most important, there is a story to be told around each hospital, each practitioner and each new medical development. The Association will weave some of these stories into the pages of this website as well as into its physical museum. You will find links to a number of short stories associated with photographs which have been reproduced on the website. These are meant to be general interest stories to place a building, person or item of equipment in context rather than 'historical dissertations'. They are based on information in the ACHHA archives plus published documents which have generally been identified in the Sources section of each Story.

© Australian Country Hospitals Heritage Association Inc 2008-2025