Hidden in the depths of the ABC News’ YouTube channel is my new favourite thing, a simple playlist RetroFocus: Revisiting the Past. A simple archive of old snippets from ABC Broadcasts that really doesn’t look like anything exciting at first glance. But it has become my newest obsession.
As I like to constantly remind my friends, strangers and frankly anyone who will listen to me ramble, my favourite thing is Australian Social History. It’s something I could easily talk about for hours. I’m not one of those people who care much about wars or historic artifacts; I’d much rather dive into a diary entry from some random teenage girl from 1965 and delve into her world for a while. I want to hear it all, everything she felt, what was worrying her at the time, the boy she has a crush on, the band she’s saving up to see in concert. It humanises history in such a profound way that I find awe-inspiring – call me a sap or a romantic or whatever else, but it feels so beautifully human.
It’s such a stronger snapshot of moments in history to understand what life was like from the perspective of someone who genuinely lived it. Be the moment is historical or benign, seeing history through other people’s eyes is what makes us connect to it. it allows us to learn from an authentic source how they navigated the world, the good and the bad, that made up a true perspective of what life was like at the time for the average person.
So when I stumbled upon the ABC’s Youtube channel it was nothing short of a treasuretrove for people like me, who want to see this very human side of history. Their playlist, RetroFocus, has 197 vintage snippets from ABC broadcasts that have been archived and preserved on this channel in crisp, clear audio and video. There’s a number of specific focused snippets on their channel, but my favourite are their street interviews.
They take to the streets of Sydney to ask the public simple questions, what’s your wish for the new year? What’s life like as a kid in the city? Who should handle the money at home? And they asnwer so simply – they want their friends and family safe and loved, they want to play with their friends, they want their partners to feel heard – answers that honestly feel surprising when you think about your perception of what life was like in the 60s.
It’s easy to give old folk a bad wrap, it’s easy to cast them aside, they come from a different time after all, they’re your grandparents, that’s all they are. They are people too, people with worries and hopes and dreams, and simple, human desires that often get forgotten in the history books. It’s easy to look at everything going on in the tumultuous decades that were the 60s and 70s, but to most people, they just got by. They weren’t thinking that their life would one day be a chapter in a history book; they just had to get to work and make ends meet.
The history books often take the most monumental parts of history, the big events that shaped the course of our lives for decades to come, forgetting that for most people, their lives are not some historically ground-breaking event. They just got on with their days, just as we do. It’s only in retrospect that we can truly see just how groundbreaking events at the time were, weather the people involved were ordinary or spectacular, it’s only decades later, after the dominos have fallen and settled that we can look abck and decide that that one random tuesday was the day that changed it all.
When I watched these videos, I was honestly a bit worried it was going to be a bunch of the typical attitude we hear from a supposedly conservative older generation, that the man rules and his wife belongs in the kitchen. In reality, I was pleasantly surprised. Most people’s answers are pretty similar to what I would expect from the general public today. A mixed bag of conservative and progressive views that feel fairly proportional to what I think the general Australian feels now.
It’s so easy to view people in binaries. Even now, when the loudest voices rise to the top as they yell and fight on Twitter or get plastered all over the news, it’s so easy to forget that most people’s beliefs are very human. Most people don’t fall into the radical binaries that we think, as much as social media or the history books would like to make us believe. It wasn’t just young people making way for the future we know now, but their parents and grandparents and younger siblings who all shaped and were shaped by the people around them. It’s impossible to define someone simply by a perception you have of them in your head, just as it’s impossible not to shape the people around you, just by existing.
It’s so easy to lose sight of what makes us human, as we are increasingly more connected it feels that the divide only increases further and further. It’s nice, every once in a while, to dip back into the past, to remind yourself that at the end of the day, we’ve always been human. Flawed, contradictory, elequent, loving, humans.
- wilford peloquin, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons ↩︎
- Queensland Queensland University of Technology, CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Common ↩︎
- See page for author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7a/Australia_vs_Corea_del_Sur_1973.jpg ↩︎
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