About Al

 I conducted my first oral history interview with my grandmother in 1979. From the start, I have always loved asking people to ‘tell me your story’ and then making histories come to life through people’s memories.

My first major oral history project, with Australian World War I veterans in the early 1980s, generated my book Anzac Memories: Living with the Legend (1994, new edition 2013). Since then I have published widely on oral history theory and practice, including several influential books: The Oral History Reader (1998, 2006 and 2015 with Robert Perks), Ten Pound Poms: Australia’s Invisible Migrants (2005, with Jim Hammerton), Moving Stories: an intimate history of four women across two countries (2011), Oral History and Photography (2011, with Alexander Freund), and Australian Lives: An Intimate History (2017, with Anisa Puri).

I taught my first oral history course at the Centre for Continuing Education in Wangaratta in 1985, and since then I have taught oral history at the University of Sussex in England (1991-2007) and at Monash University in Melbourne (2007-2023), with community groups through Oral History Victoria and Oral History Australia, and in master classes throughout the world. In 2018 I received the Award for Teaching Excellence in the Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian Awards for University Teaching.

Across my oral history career, I have served as founding Vice-President and then President of the International Oral History Association, as President of Oral History Victoria and Oral History Australia, and as editor of the journal of the British Oral History Society. 

I am a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, and have previously been a Professor of Oral History at the University of Sussex (England), Professor of History at Monash University (Australia), and a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales in Marseilles (France) and at Aarhus University (Denmark).