Oral History Project

Under the auspices of the Electrical Engineering Education Museum, an Oral History Project was set up in 1998, to capture the personal and professional histories of individuals associated with the Department. Most of the documentary evidence of the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne exists within the context of official administration: faculty and departmental minutes, research reports, governmental documents, department reviews. Teaching staff may leave records of their lectures or tutorials but most are subsumed into the morass of student education. Research staff record their ideas and theories for the academic community and posterity through official publications. Our Oral History Project supplements official documents with personal perceptions, familiar memories, important anecdotes. It provides evidence of the people of the department, not just the products of their work, to stand alongside and inform the official documents. It aims to give a social context in which to understand the growth of the technologies being developed in our Department.

The specific aims of the project are:

• To record aurally, through personal interviews, the memories of select individuals connected with the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at the University of Melbourne.
• To build an archive of audiotaped and transcribed material relating to the history of the Department for future use in museum exhibitions and university research.
• To develop a better understanding of the academic culture of a university department through the words of those who participated in that culture.
• To develop an understanding of the motivations behind the changes in departmental structure, including course changes and research groups, over time.
• To trace the different generational changes in the department and provide knowledge of the state of our discipline in the 1940s to the present day.
• To obtain a fuller record of the life of the department at all stages over its fifty year history.
• To trace the impact of our department's education on the working lives of engineers in the broader community.

The Oral History Project was instigated in October 1998, in order to record the memories and experiences of people who were integral to the development of the Department and its growth and contribution to the University of Melbourne's teaching and research. The main interviewer is Associate Professor John Packer. Our project has received Ethics Approval from the Office for Research and Graduate Studies, and is part of a wider project involving the setting up of an archive for our Department under the guidelines provided by the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Cinderella Collections. In 1999, the Department received a grant from the History of the University Unit (HUU) in order to proceed with interviews and transcriptions.

Eight individuals were identified as crucial to the project and were subsequently approached and interviewed. The first interviewee was Professor Charles Moorhouse who is well-known as the first Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Melbourne, as an innovative educator and an inaugurator of the University House Staff Club. Other individuals included Mr John Hill, who came through the Department in the pre-war period as a student and returned as a staff member after a period working with industry; Dr Ken Mackley, the first postgraduate of the Department; Mr Pat Boland, graduate and industry leader, 1999 winner of the Kernot Medal for excellence in engineering; Mr Harry Wragge, graduate and Chair of IE(Aust); and Mr Roger Banks, graduate and Chair of the Melbourne University Engineering Foundation. Dr Mei Mei, who received her undergraduate training in China and was our Department's first female PhD graduate, has also been interviewed.