Childhood is a place full of memories. Some of those memories are factual, shared in common with others and to a greater or lesser extent validated by photos, newsletters, newspaper articles and momentos. Others are a curious blend of fact and fantasy, collages of memory that create a realistic picture of our past but are more accurately labelled as works of historical fiction.

This is where oral history lies, a curious blend of facts about the past laced with generous helpings of feelings and emotions. It’s not simply what happened that counts as oral history but also how we, as individuals, felt about these events in our lives.

Oral history is an important complement to institutional records. The official institutional records record things quite blandly; the opening of a school, the graduation of a class, the entrance of a new member in the society, the profit and loss for the year, the Board’s decision to grow the institution or the legal decision to compensate someone for a judicial wrong.

It is the oral history that adds life to these bland institutional records and transforms the institutional to something personal. It is just as important for us to create and maintain oral history records as it is to maintain institutional history records.

At the heart of this article is a plea, an impassioned and a passionate plea, for people to assist a group of people who are beginning to develop oral history records of the institutions that shaped and affected the lives of many Greek-Australians over the past 50 years.
I’m talking about the Community buildings in Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, not the Koinotites themselves but the building themselves. In Adelaide, there is the Olympic Hall at the corner of Flinders Street and West Terrace and I am sure there are halls and venues in Melbourne and Sydney which served a similar role for the Greek community.

If I may use the Olympic Hall in Adelaide as an example, this was the social and communal focal point of the Greek Australian community in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s. It is where the community held the afternoon Greek community school classes, where the various adelfotites (regional Greek communities) held their dances, where the political organizations (such as PASOK) met to discuss their agendas and where many of us, for better or worse, grew up.

In Adelaide, a small band of people have been on a two-year journey of collecting memories and oral histories of individuals to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the opening of the Olympic Hall.

They now realise they have a paucity of photographs and related archival material to illustrate the oral histories. If you have such photographs, records of dances (especially of the Grecian Ball), momentos of the political events held there, programs from film evenings or from events of the Filoptoho, can we ask you to offer them for use in the forthcoming Oral History of the Olympic Hall in Adelaide.

If you are in Melbourne or Sydney or in any city where a Greek community organisation which is important to you has operated for decades, set up an oral history project and start collecting those memories, histories, recollections, momentos and documents which give substance and flavour to that organisation’s history.

Do it before they just become faded memories deep in the institutional records of the organisation.