`The Greatness and the Smallness of their Story': Developing an Oral History Interactive Documentary Creative Practice telling the Battle of Coral Balmoral, Vietnam 1968

Abstract

This research explores the interconnection between oral history, documentary film and the emerging field of interactive documentary as an interdisciplinary creative strategy for telling factual stories of war and trauma. In doing so, it recognises the problematic nature of broadcast television documentary where uneven power structures can negatively affect authorship and story. The objective of this research was to ease this tension with the development of a new creative practice model in the field of documentary story telling, as an alternative form of representation. The immediacy, polyvocality and accessibility offered by this new form of communication and technology, when coupled with oral history and documentary film, is particularly suited to projects where marginalised communities seek to make sense of their experience, and to challenge existing histories. I have developed an innovative synthesis between the three approaches to factual storytelling, which I call Oral History Interactive Documentary (OHID). As a means of factual, multi-narrative storytelling, this approach is designed to meet participants’ need to speak and be heard on their own terms and in their own words, rather than through ‘hierarchical media as a forum for privileged voices’ (Mitchell 2015, p.9). My development of OHID is based on a dataset of 150 audio-visual original oral history interviews conducted with returned Australian Vietnam War soldiers, who fought at the Battle of Coral Balmoral in May 1968, at the height of the Vietnam War. It was the biggest and bloodiest battle fought by Australians, with more Australian soldiers killed in this engagement than at any other time during the Vietnam War. However, the Coral Balmoral soldiers’ repatriation back to Australia in 1969 was troubled as it coincided with major historical, social and cultural shifts in Australian society. The re-casting of the previously secure Australian national identity, largely founded in the legend of Anzac, resulted in the soldiers’ exclusion from imperatives linked to nationalism and masculinity. Instead, the returned Coral Balmoral soldiers found themselves in an uneasy relationship with an Australian society unable to reconcile a gallant military history with the contentious war in Vietnam. It is within these warfare and post-war socio-cultural experiences that the oral history interviews I conducted sought to record the veterans’ memories. To better understand the relationship between telling stories of war and trauma, oral history, documentary film and its potential interconnection with interactivity, Sandra Gaudenzi’s (2013) taxonomy of four modes of interactivity was critically applied and tested against a range of conflict themed interactive documentaries. Critical analysis of these i-docs helped shape ideas of how interactive documentary enables authorship and agency. Rethinking ideas of authorship and inviting co-creation collaboration, opened new possibilities in digital space for multiple and layered storytelling. Importantly for the Coral Balmoral community, it allowed for the emergence of contradiction leading to new interpretative possibilities. Making obvious the synergies between interactive documentary, oral history and documentary film enabled me to design a creative strategy and practice model for authentic telling of stories of war and conflict. As a result, I have developed and tested the first contemporary single battle post-conflict oral history interactive documentary prototype, 26 Days: The Battle of Coral Balmoral. This practice-led inquiry shaped my own professional practice as a screen media artist. The synergy between oral history, documentary film and interactive documentary has enabled me to bridge a gap in current factual broadcast storytelling, that suffers from a lack of informed, documented strategies. This research also looks beyond linear, hierarchical television documentary as a favoured factual storytelling platform to a new model of communication by offering a strategy that transcends some of the limitations of time-based storytelling. By offering a collaborative and three-tiered storytelling system, operating in a spatial and temporal environment, the OHID strategy provides a multi-tiered, organic framework through which witness accounts are recorded, organised, cohesively presented and engaged with by a user audience. In this way, the OHID strategy provides a framework that builds storytelling arenas for ideas and plots to unfold freely, run parallel to each other, or be completely contradictory. In so doing, OHID breaks authorial codes, whether political, social, geographical or institutional. Finally, the OHID strategy encourages collaboration that empowers marginalised communities to present many and alternative versions of experiences, in a way that opens opportunities for new knowledge and understanding. The Interactive Oral History Documentary 26 Days: The Battle of Coral Balmoral can be found at www.fsbcoral.org Please note that all active oral history interviews are marked with a white star in a green circle.