Hazel Estelle de Berg (21 March 1913 – 3 February 1984) was a pioneer of oral history in Australia. Between 1957 and 1984 she produced 1291 hour-long sound tape reels of interviews with writers, historians, artists, musicians and scientists and photographed each.
Biography
Hazel Estelle de Berg was born on 21 March 1913 in Deniliquin, New South Wales to George Robert Holland and Ann Holland (née McIntosh). Her father was a Methodist minister, whose pastoral work led to the family moving around country New South Wales during de Berg's childhood, living in Cessnock Cobar Orange and Kempsey In 1928 the family moved to Sydney, where de Berg enrolled at Methodist Ladies’ College, Burwood and completed her Leaving certificate in 1932. She then trained as a photographer at Paramount Studios and until 1938 worked in the studio of Noel Rubie, while continuing to live at home with her parents.
Career
According to David Foster, de Berg's introduction to tape recording was a 1957 commission by Ken Bruce, founder of Talking Books for the Blind in New South Wales, and himself blind, to read, on tape, the 1951 A Man Called Peter. Later that year, de Berg was asked by historian Frank Clune to record a book for a blind friend. An amateur, using an Australian-made Nova reel-to-reel tape machine, she recorded Dame Mary Gilmore's Old Day, Old Ways. She subsequently recorded an interview with Dame Mary for background information and the recording became the first of the de Berg oral history collection, held at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. She proved undaunted by the fame or high standing of her subjects. At a meeting in October 1958 of the Book Collectors' Society of Australia at the Public Library of New South Wales, de Berg played some of her recordings, of Dame Mary Gilmore, Frank Dalby Davison and others addressing their personal messages to the blind. In a 1973 unpublished paper de Berg wrote that:"I have come a little way along the road a blind man showed me — a road I hope someone else treads in the centuries ahead — but I have come a long way in love, and perhaps knowledge, for the people who express our country."
De Berg had no special connections in Australian literature apart from being a distant cousin of poet David Campbell, though in a 1956 ABC radio feature My Friend Keats for the 'Poets Corner' program, she relates how, from childhood, she enjoyed the poet whose On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer, Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on a Grecian Urn, and his I Had a Dove and the Sweet Dove Died were dear to her. On 13 March 1960, an edition of the Australian Broadcasting Commission's radio program 'Quality Street' was produced by John Thompson from Hazel de Berg's recordings of South Australian poets. By 1961 she had tapes of all sixty-eight living recognised Australian poets reading their own verse.
De Berg did not intrude her own voice in any of her recordings nor her questions, but let her subject speak for themselves. She also photographed each of her interviewees, funding that, travel to capital cities, and the recording out of her own pocket, until in 1960 she was granted £100 from the Commonwealth Literary Fund after presenting her work at the Adelaide Festival, and for donating the tapes to the National Library of Australia was provided a further Commonwealth Literary Grant by Sir Harold White, the Federal Parliamentary Librarian and National Librarian. This encouraged her venture to bridge history by compiling a forty-five minute tape of people who had personally known Henry Lawson, who had died in 1922.
The 1963 annual National Library report to Parliament notes that "Further recordings have also been made by Mrs. Hazel de Berg, this time of Australian artists discussing their work." Though rarely passing her opinions on her subjects, The Bulletin in 1964 did obtain this comparison of artists and writers; "The artists are right out in front. They're more sophisticated and up to date than the writers. Our poets are wonderful, but a lot of the fiction writers tend to write backwards towards what is familiar and old-time. It's not us they're writing about."