A Lasting Tale: Regional podcast documenting the lives of Australia's oldest generation

The Canberra Times

Dimity Brassil is the founder of the ' A Lasting Tale' podcast she records the stories of elderly people in regional areas.

Transcript

00:00 This came about 12 years ago.

00:03 I lost my father and my sister.

00:05 They both died in pretty quick succession.

00:09 That was kind of before podcasting was a thing.

00:12 People were just starting to listen to it.

00:15 I realized that I would never hear their voice again, particularly in the case of my sister

00:20 who died relatively young and left behind a young daughter.

00:24 I realized that we didn't really have a lot of her voice recordings.

00:27 Then I moved forward about five or six years.

00:31 I used my skills as a journalist and a writer.

00:34 I decided to record my own mom's life story.

00:37 Her name is Anne.

00:40 She's still living in Wagga Wagga and is 89.

00:43 I got her story about five years ago.

00:46 We decided to record it as a podcast because it was becoming a more widely used technology

00:53 and a way to really simply record audio.

00:57 We worked together on recording her story and then doing really simple guides and questions

01:04 so other people could produce their own life story podcast of their mom or dad or their

01:09 grandparents.

01:10 She'd be out coming for a cup of tea.

01:14 "Oh, the Cattless Boy and Patty are ready to come in?"

01:17 "Yes, we're all going for a cup of tea."

01:19 And then one night we were driving around the back of the hospital.

01:22 This happened for so long.

01:24 I was sitting there and he was in the driver's seat and he leaned across, won the window

01:29 across and there was a lever on the seat and the seat went back.

01:32 And he said to Karen, "No more bloody cups of tea!"

01:36 So I ran this little competition to see who's had the latest electricity connected to the

01:42 house in Australia.

01:44 And my interviews, it's always in rural towns, of course.

01:48 And the latest I've ever had was a lady called Gladys from Burren Budok.

01:54 And she got electricity connected to the house in 1961, which was after she was married.

01:59 When the power came, it would have been in about the mid-50s, I reckon.

02:03 And we had our own generator before then, which was 32 volts, which was only good for

02:07 lights.

02:08 You couldn't use heating or dishwashers or hot water or anything like that.

02:13 So things like that is a really good example of how simple life was and is.

02:22 I know people go on a lot about services in the country and rural Australia and how they

02:28 don't have enough services, but it's actually true.

02:30 And when you can take a historical long view of how resilient people are when they just

02:35 don't have the same access to services, I think that's a great thing to see.

02:39 And the last thing is, this is in rural Australia, regional Australia, but also in the cities,

02:48 is that everybody had less.

02:51 We over 70 in this country had less stuff than we do.

02:57 Even the people, of course, there were people that were still more wealthy than others and

03:00 there's still social differences.

03:02 They still exist.

03:04 But across all social stratas, everybody just had less.

03:09 They did less things.

03:10 They owned less stuff.

03:13 And everybody seemed just as happy.

03:15 That's my observation.

03:16 Thank you.

03:17 [END]

03:17 [BLANK_AUDIO]

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