Helen Klaebe
Helen Klaebe is the Historian for the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project — a collaborative initiative of the Department of Housing and QUT. The Sharing Stories project collects and records stories from the Urban Village’s past, celebrating and learning from the local community.
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Transcript
Elephants in the Village
Growing up in rural South Australia I would read books of adventure, National Geographic and Life magazine. Places that seemed so far removed from my life on a farm. I have since travelled the world with my family and even lived in vastly different cultures from my own, always interested in their history and their way of life. The Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project is about capturing the social change within a particular community. While this area has never been densely populated, it does hold great memories for a diverse range of individuals.
For a public historian, academic research can record an accurate timeline of events but it’s the personal stories which give us the human picture. McCaskie Park, for instance, was used on occasion by the circus but the council no longer keep records of park hire. So I asked Mrs Staples, who was a local resident for over sixty years, if she remembers the circus. She told me a story about the day the elephants escaped and meandered their way through what is now the Urban Village, until they were rounded up by the ring master on Victoria Park Golf Course. Or Mr Pollock who told me he came to Kelvin Grove Barracks from the country as a seventeen year old recruit and saw death for the first time, not in a war zone but on the street during the Battle of Brisbane in 1942. How we go about our life, with our family, at work, or in our community, may seem at first glance unmemorable yet these activities will become the fascinating aspects of history. Which stories are told can define how the world remembers, so I try and give as many of them a voice through my writing. Digital storytelling is just another way of bringing these stories to life.
