| Summary |
Graham Seal born 1950 in Canterbury, UK, talks about migrating to Australia, his family background and early years in Australia; becoming involved in folk music, folk revival and folk boom of the sixties; meeting his future wife and returning to study; Arts degree at University of NSW (1972-1976), specialising in history; attending University of Leeds UK (1977) to study at the Institute of Dialectology and Folklife Study; coming back to Sydney, getting a job in the NSW public service, under the Graduate Administrative Training Scheme; his interest in outlaws and finishing his first book on Ned Kelly; moving to Perth; getting a job at Western Australian Institute of Technology (now Curtin University of Technology, 1987) to teach in the Australian Studies area and folklore studies, establishing the WA Folklore Archive (1985); folk festivals in the 1970s and how they now have much broader appeal; the reasons why people are still interested in bush songs and bush recitations.
Seal discusses the games played as a child; their house in Mt Hawthorn; the Mt Hawthorn Progress Association; his PhD thesis finishing in 1994, through Deakin University; his already published works; the continuation of work of collectors like John Meredith; the new generation of collectors; the WA Legends project; his visits to Sheffield in 1991, 1994-95 and 2000, and the University of Kent in about 1996; his connections with China and America; establishing Antipodes Press (1990); being the publisher for Black Swan Press at Curtin since 1992; working on a dictionary of Australian folklore; his visions for folklore and the future of folklife studies; a national folklore centre and how it could be achieved; his 'Folklore Australia' website; the National Folk Festival in Canberra; the folklore journal 'Australian Folklore'; the Woodford Folk Festival; the National Library Australia's Oral History section; the need to have some kind of entity to oversee and ensure proper study and collection of Australian folklife.
|