Adding colour to history

“Social history adds colour and vibrancy to the dry facts of history,” says Helen McAnulty, a former schoolteacher who has spent the past four decades collecting colourful snippets of Australia’s past.

Helen was born in Sydney but grew up in towns throughout the Central West. Her father, a schoolteacher, was born in Orange. And his father served as principal of Orange East Public School from 1895 into the 1930s.

“Teaching runs in my family terribly,” laughed Helen, who long felt an affinity for Orange before settling down here twelve years ago.

“I grew up with stories of Orange. In those days uncles and aunts used to sit around the dinner table and tell stories of the past and they were great storytellers my family, some of them were probably exaggerated, but I think that probably engendered my interest in oral history.”

But it was only when Helen and her husband Bill —also a teacher— were posted to a school in Nyngan that she first ventured into collecting stories for herself.

“When we got to Nyngan there was no museum and the historical society, dear old people, were all saying they wanted a museum to put their old machinery in and I thought they all looked like museum pieces to me, I'm sure they have a story,” said Helen.

“I said what about a museum of memories, and these were the early days of taping things and I didn't know much about it but went for it and I got some wonderful people like Arthur Hall.”

As a 21-year-old Corporal at the Somme during the First World War, Arthur Hall rushed a machine gun post shooting four of the enemy, capturing nine along with two guns. The following day, during a heavy barrage, he carried a wounded comrade to safety. He was awarded a Victoria Cross for his actions.

“I had no idea he was a VC until halfway through the interview,” said Helen. “I asked, where were you fighting in France? and he quietly and modestly said that he had got a VC.

“So I was very moved by the West and the stories that people have to tell, because I talked to a lot of those people whose fathers were really the pioneers, they came up with cattle and that whetted my appetite a lot.”

Another favourite interview Helen recalls from that time was Elsie Walsh.

“She had gone with her father out on a mail run in a horse and sulky in 1910 delivering mail right out into the bush and she saw Hailey's Comet and she described it to me… these are such amazing memories,” said Helen.

There next teaching posting was Gulgong, which Helen found to be another rich source of stories.

“I was so thrilled when we went to Gulgong, it was wonderful because Gulgong is a place where people have lived for generations and they didn't move… people would remember their parents talking about the gold rush and things,” said Helen, who began to compile the stories she collected in articles for the Mudgee Guardian under the title ‘History Talking’.

It was also in Gulgong, where Helen began — initially by chance — her unique approach of using group interviews to tease out stories around a particular topic. It’s a practice she has continued since moving to Orange, with the 30 members of her Oral History Group meeting monthly at Duntryleague to discuss a chosen subject.

The Oral History group meeting at Duntryleague

“I had discovered that in a group people reminded each other of things, they are able to come at it from different points of view,” said Helen.

“My method of running a meeting is they sit all in a big circle and I pass the microphone around and they all have a say on a particular topic and the revelations that come out are amazing.

“It has to be social history; you can't do the history of this building… and I'm very aware that you cannot regard it as actually true because people can exaggerate, and they can see things differently.

“But that is what I like about social history; you might not always have the facts entirely right, and you've got to be aware of that, but you do have colour, you have a human element to it.”

When Helen gets her group together every month, she never knows just where the session will lead, but there is one thing she is very sure of after all her years of collecting oral history. “Behind every face is a story. No matter how much people say, ‘I have nothing to say’, there is always something.”

Helen McAnulty’s History Talking articles are now a monthly feature in Orange City Life.