Hazel Estelle de Berg

Hazel Estelle de Berg (; 21 March 1913 – 3 February 1984) was an Australian pioneering oral historian and broadcaster who conducted recordings locally and abroad including the United Kingdom and United States. De Berg recorded her collections exclusively for the National Library of Australia between 1957 and 1984, producing 1291 hour-long sound tape reels of interviews with subjects that were prominent or becoming prominent in their respective industries. Her interviewees mostly included writers and artists, in addition to a smaller group of historians, musicians, directors, actors, scientists and architects, as well as a selected group of politicians, public servants, journalists and churchmen. De Berg also photographed each of her subjects.

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, 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. while continuing to live at home with her parents. An amateur, using an Australian-made Nova reel-to-reel tape machine, 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 In a 1973 unpublished paper de Berg wrote that:"I have come a little way along the road a blind man showed me — a road I hope someone else treads in the centuries ahead — but I have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." 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. 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, 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." was paid an annual grant and the library funded the transcriptions, a more easily searched format useful to historians. She travelled to every state, and de Berg also interviewed expatriate Australians in London and New York.

The interviews The recordings vary both in length and form depending on the subject, and became longer as de Berg's recording technique developed; while the early tapes each contain five or six interviews, that extended to three or four tapes for one. De Berg's standard interview, especially with artists and writers, begins with the subject sketching a short autobiography for which she is particularly interested in their childhood influences and their earliest impulse to begin painting or writing. The interviewee then describes their creative methodology including, the influence on the work of their own experiences, and the need for revision. A particular book or painting is discussed in detail; its inspiration and ideas, and problems encountered in its completion. In conclusion, the interviewee may outline their general philosophy or discuss the state of the arts in Australia. All questions, pauses, broken sentences or repetitions have been edited out to give the impression of an uninterrupted reflective monologue. Given that some contain material that is frank, or potentially libellous, those have restricted access.

Reception The National Library in its 1961–62 annual report noted her contribution;An unusual addition to the growing National Library collections illustrating the life and work of our creative writers is a record which also illustrates the co-operative attitude of Australian writers and the initiative of an Australian woman. Mrs. Hazel de Berg has recorded our leading authors reading their own work and recalling their experiences. The National Library, the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the authors have together made copies available for broadcasting and for use in educational institutions. When publisher Angus & Robertson launched six books of poetry together at a spring event in 1961, they included De Berg as an invitee among critics Leonie Kramer and Nancy Keesing, academics Cecil Hadgraft and Eunice Hanger, journalist Ross Campbell and poets Ronald McCuaig, Elizabeth Riddell, A. D. Hope, R. D. Fitzgerald, Douglas Stewart, Kenneth Slessor, John Thompson, Vivian Smith and Charles Higham.

In 1967 the Library reported on further progress; "The steady progress of Mrs. Hazel de Berg's series of tape recordings and its extension from creative writers and artists to other notable Australians has brought the total number of reels to 254 and those recorded to nearly 500. A tribute to her sensitivity and the cooperation of those who have been recorded, this project has created an exceptionally rich biographical source for the future." In 1974 Graeme Powell declared that;The de Berg collection is by far the largest and the most important oral history collection in Australia and can be ranked with the great collections in America. It is particularly impressive in that for many years Mrs. de Berg built up the collection with almost no assistance and even today it remains a very personal collection. notes that in 1970 bibliographer and librarian Pauline Fanning, in her commentary on the collection, remarked that de Berg was not herself a scholar of literature so "is not sufficiently well informed to know what questions to ask, and furthermore, she has so edited the tapes as to eliminate the questions she asks. This results in the recording being in monologue form, with no indication as to why or how the person interviewed was prompted to speak on a particular topic." In response Foster argues that de Berg's "idiosyncratic approach in fact creates rather fewer difficulties with writers than with politicians [...] since writers may be judged by what they have said and written, and perhaps ought to be, it does little harm, I believe, to let them ramble on to their hearts' content, as a great many of them did."

De Berg's interviews continue to be cited in books, book chapters, papers, theses and journals.

Personal De Berg converted to Judaism and in 1941 married Woolf (William) de Berg, a Lithuanian-born businessman and later presented her work to the Women's International Zionist Organisation (WIZO) state council. For more than ten years she dedicated herself to raising their children.

Legacy

De Berg's collection of sound tape reels of interviews with writers, historians, artists, musicians and scientists such as Peter Sculthorpe, A. P. Elkin, Manning Clark, H. C. Coombs, Howard Florey, Jack Lang and Cardinal Norman Gilroy, whose pioneering role as Australia's main collector and preserver of oral history (with more than 44,000 recordings by 1990) was initiated by de Berg's early efforts and Harold White's interest in the medium, and was a project that State Libraries have since followed.

Though men outnumber women in de Berg's recordings, ANU academic Barry York notes that it is a distinction of de Berg's collection that her subjects include so many Australian women, Joan Phipson, Judy Cassab, Kath Walker, Kathleen O'Connor, Kylie Tennant, Lorna Hayter, Maie Casey, Margaret Curtis-Otter, Marjorie Pizer, Miriam Hyde, Nancy Cato, Nancy Keesing, Nancy Robinson, Nerida Goodman, Ninette Dutton, Patsy Adam-Smith, Ruby Rich, Stroma Buttrose, Thelma Bate, Thelma Clune, Vicki Viidikas, and Vida Lahey.

In 1989 a directory of her work, The Hazel de Berg Recordings: From the Oral History Collection of the National Library of Australia, was published. In reviewing it, Barry York called it a "unique and invaluable oral history source" for "Australian researchers, librarians, broadcasters, teachers, students and writers."

The de Berg tapes have been the source material for biographers;

In 1991 David Foster selected and introduced Self-portraits a book of fifteen of the recordings de Berg made of writers; Wilfred Burchett, David Campbell, Ross Campbell, Maie Casey, Charmian Clift, Laurence Collinson, Ion Idriess, Jim McNeil, Stephen Murray-Smith, Grace Perry, Evadne Price, Rohan Rivett, Colin Simpson, John Thompson, and Alan Villiers. In 2020 the National Portrait Gallery in collaboration with the National Library of Australia developed a gallery audio tour, In their own words from de Berg's oral history recordings, which as of 2023 remains available online.