ABSTRACT
The Social History Unit did have an established record of making radio programs utilising oral history sound recordings— the unit was born out of the emergence, in the mid-1980s, of popular and academic interest in oral history recordings. It's worth noting that the founder of the Social History Unit, Tim Bowden, came to oral history program making after decades working as a current affairs journalist. The shape and sound of each program was different, but they all followed a chronological spine, and they all included a large amount of oral history interview material. In contrast to oral history research, for a radio documentary interviews are developments, or refinements, of ideas for the eventual program. The Australian Generations oral history interview collection as an extraordinary archive, and an invaluable source of qualitative data for scholars and researchers, for a radio program producer, the 1,221 hours of interviews presented a huge challenge— and something of a dilemma.
