ANZAC memories: putting popular memory theory into practice in Australia

This chapter explores the situation in which Joanna Bornat returns to an interview she conducted in 1974 and offers interpretations that she did not, and could not, make at the time. Joanna Bornat is Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Health & Social Care at the Open University. She assesses the challenges of secondary analysis of archived oral history, and explores the meanings of emotion and how alternative theoretical approaches can cast new light on old interviews. In 1974, she interviewed Mrs Lockwood. Bornat considered the contribution of her own cultural habitus at two different points but concluded with the introduction of more recent theorising that the emotional qualities of the interview now become more, not less, significant in helping people to understand not only its internal dynamics but what it contributes to wider understanding of the social history of the period in which it took place and of the remembering of an older woman, Mrs Lockwood.