Memory's hidden lanes to be revealed

He’s a fourth-generation, Ballarat-born-and-bred man. On his mother’s side, he’s descended from Chinese and Irish immigrants; on his father’s, English. He has the physical bearing of someone quite happily capable of swinging an axe in the forest or a guitar onstage. Both of which he does with fervour in his daily life.

Above all else, he’s passionate about the city where he lives, about its history and inhabitants. So much so that he’s conceived a project to capture and tell their personal histories.

It’s called The Memory Atlas.

“The Memory Atlas project  – we’ve boiled it down to three words  – History Is You”, says Michael.

“What we’re trying to do is match every brick in the city to the person who put it there. Every building and place in Ballarat – we want to know the history of people’s involvement with them. We’re trying to track down those stories and not only put them in a place, but in a geographic time of the city.”

His knowledge of the history of the town extends further than the official stories and written tomes describing upright town fathers and fortunes made on gold, sporting heroes and commercial success.

Rather it’s the process of building an atlas - not of geography, but of human memory.

“There’s a temptation to always tell the hero’s story,” he says.

“So if you look at football in Ballarat, you know the hero story: someone like Plugger Lockett (from North Ballarat). What we’re looking for is ALL the people who were there – the ground staff, the vendors, the football crowd, the guys in the change rooms –  we’re trying to find the stories of everybody involved in the building, at the time.

“Because Ballarat has 90 years of living memory in it, there’s probably three, if not four, massive generational changes that can be told in those stories.

Michael looked to local icons to open The Memory Atlas – both human and geographic.

“If you were looking at a building like the Capri Cafe in Sturt Street, which is one of the longest-lasting buildings in my generation – it’s been unchanged for 40, 45 years, longer. Everybody has a story about it: when they first took their girlfriends there in the 70s, when the Bridge Mall was Bridge Street. My memories of the place are getting Dairy Queens in the 70s.

The genesis of the project is having respect for every person’s experience; understanding that experience is something that needs to be acknowledged and celebrated for the contribution it makes to the ongoing fabric of the city and its community.

“I had a chat with Rose Young who is working with Ballarat City Council on the positive ageing strategy to come up with a project for Seniors Week. 

“I had seen some projects done for Seniors Week in Melbourne and to me they seemed to infantilise old people a bit, treat them like primary school children; pack them on a bus with a sandwich and take them out somewhere nice for the day.

“There are older people in this town whose stories and achievements match anybody, anywhere in the world. Those are the stories I want to tell, the people I want to celebrate – that ageing population of Ballarat.

“We’ve found some extraordinary people from the BLOC theatre, the indoor tennis centre, The Ballarat University Pipe Band –  people who have taught thousands of other people to play music, to act, to play sport… people who have changed the landscape of Ballarat, very quietly, very humbly.

“We’ve done a few preliminary interviews that are up on the Historic Urban Landscape site. The next stage of things is to really empower older people to use their phone and computers, to take things like a smart phone and to run their own interviews, to cut out the intermediary, so that families can begin to document their history.

“So the next phase of this project is about tuition, to teach people how to use really simple technology, pretty much a smart phone and a computer, looking at interviewing techniques; how to get people to speak freely and not be too formal, to be warm and open; and to get people to use that technology to begin to document their families and their stories in Ballarat.

Among the Ballarat stories collected by Michael so far are some well-known names: Lynne Muller of the Ballarat Light Opera Company; historian Dorothy Wickham; Les Hardy of the Brown Hill Pipe Band.

The stories they reveal are deeply personal, compelling, often funny and always enlightening – how the BLOC provides costumes to other companies for shows, the battle to learn the intricate mysteries of the bagpipe, the hidden histories of a women’s refuge; how a young boy imagines the planets of the solar system as characters with personalities.

“There’s a very traditional way of writing a history book – one person writes 500 pages,” says Michael.

“Conversely, 500 people can write one page, and you get a multi-perspective story of what happened. Because it’s the ‘Memory’ Atlas, these are not necessarily the ‘facts’. These are impressions, these are meetings, these are dreams. These are your first kisses, the places that had significance for you. It might be something small at Lake Wendouree; an inspiring teacher at school; the moment you gained a certain skill, learning to play an instrument. They are not the big, ‘capital H’ history stories.

“One of the reasons I’m interested in this is that Ballarat is being sold as an outer western suburb of Melbourne at the moment, you know – ‘we’ve got everything that Melbourne’s got!’ But in fact Ballarat has a unique and individual identity, and they way to tell that is through thousands of stories, not just one.

The Memory Atlas project has been supported financially through the Victorian Seniors Festival. Go to http://www.hulballarat.org.au/cb_pages/memory_atlas.php