The Cobar Weekly’s history sparks National Library interest
Wednesday August 12, 2009
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The National Library of Australia’s John Harpley and Rob Willis interviewed The Cobar Weekly’s Tahnee Tomek and Sharon Harland last Friday as part of the library’s Oral History and Folklore project.
The story of The Cobar Weekly has been preserved for future generations as part of the National Library of Australia (NLA)’s Oral History and Folklore project.
Editor Sharon Harland and journalist Tahnee Tomek were both interviewed last Friday, with their stories now to be added to the NLA’s massive catalogue of oral history recordings.
NLA’s Rob Willis and sound recordist John Harpley visited Cobar as part of an ongoing tour of rural Australia, gathering “voices from the bush” to add to the NLA’s social history collection.
“We are looking for things that are unique to different areas.
“It is so important to preserve the tradition and culture of the bush,” Mr Willis said.
He said the story of a strong, independent newspaper in a small rural town was an important part of local history to preserve, with The Cobar Weekly’s current all-female staffing making the story even more unique.
“One of the priorities of the social history project is to address the imbalance of stories from men compared to women,” Mr Willis said.
The interviews will form part of a collection on independent newspapers, with Mr Willis travelling to Perth this week to gather more information on the subject.
“During this trip we have also looked at the difficulty of getting health professionals to the bush, and we conducted some interviews in Bourke.
“We will also come back to Cobar for more on that topic,” Mr Willis said.
He said he is also interested in finding out more about localised “sayings”, such as Cobar’s “iron-ringers”.
“We’re recording folklore, songs, unique sayings, yarns—anything that is unique to one particular area.
“The main thing is that we are preserving the voices of the outback,” Mr Willis said.
The interviews will now be collated by
the NLA before becoming part of its
collection, which will also be available across Australia through virtually any library.
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