Every year the Professional Historians Association of Australia Vic & Tas, in partnership with the RHSV, ask three ’emerging’ historians about their work. In 2024 we’ve asked these historians to reflect on how the spoken word has influenced their history. Andrew Lemon (RHSV) and Sophie Couchman (PHA) will be our MCs for the evening.

We look forward to hearing from our three historians at this event: Dr Hannay Viney, Dr Mia Martin Hobbs and Dr Aleksander Potocnik.

1. Telling a Story: Word Choice, Tone, and Intent in Oral Histories

This talk by Hannah Viney considers how voice and tone can completely change the meaning of the words in an oral history interview, in ways that often do not come across in written analysis. With reference to my own experience interviewing and presenting, this paper asks how we can convey such an ephemeral concept as vocal tone in written formats.

Hannah Viney is a history consultant and museum professional who is passionate about making history accessible to a wide audience. Her recent research explores women’s anti-nuclear activism between 1945 and 1965 to both investigate women’s political history between WWII and the Women’s Liberation Movement and to understand more about women’s experiences of the Cold War in Australia.

3. Little Stories Everywhere

Mia Hobbs writes, ‘Each of my research projects have begun with a single story that hints at a bigger history, waiting to be uncovered. In this talk I will explore how hearing these stories inspired my different research projects, taking me to Vietnam and the US, into the national security state, and to uncover hidden soldiers’ stories here in Australia. While what I find in historical research always complicates and deepens our understanding of a topic, the first story continues to resonate, gaining layers of meaning as I uncover more about the bigger history.’

Mia is an oral historian of war and conflict with research interests in memory, trauma, gender, race, and peace. Her PhD was an oral history with American and Australian Vietnam veterans who returned to Vietnam after the War, and her current project explores the experiences of women and minority veterans from the US, UK, and Australian militaries in the War on Terror. She is presently a Deakin University Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

  3. A remark made way back then …

Dr Alexander J. Potočnik writes, ‘As a teenager, I spent a night in a barn of a mountain farm at the Petrovo Brdo Pass [Slovenia]. A young man from the farm claimed that, during the First World War, German officer Erwin Rommel spent a week at this farm. The remark sparked my curiosity and three decades later I tried to find that young man in order to interview him for the book I was writing about Rommel and his role in the 12^th Soča/Isonzo Battle, better known as ‘The Battle of Caporetto’.

Alexander J. Potočnik completed a degree in architecture at the University of Ljubljana in 1984 and in 1993 a Graduate Diploma course in Animation and Interactive Multimedia at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne. Alexander has also worked as an illustrator. In 2006, he became an Associate Partner of the Ad Pirum Institute, a Slovenian organisation devoted to heritage protection and architectural conservation. His main field of research was Central European fortification heritage. In 2023, he completed a doctorate in history at Monash University.