Attending to the Subaltern Through Oral Histories of the NSW Tablelands: Uralla, “Struggletown”, and Guyra, the “White Cockatoo”

Keeping in mind how memory and history constitute power, this article advocates the use of existing oral histories of subalterns that make rich contributions to our understanding of regional towns such as Uralla and Guyra, in the New England Tablelands. By paying close attention to subaltern oral histories outside the written record, including Indigenous narratives, we can better understand our shared history in place. By drawing on past subjective oral histories while working collaboratively with community, this essay supports processes of heritagisation that first deconstruct and then describe meaningful histories, thus contributing to decolonisation. Oral history is not always easily accessed and its protagonists do not consistently explicate their intersubjectivity. Nonetheless, this article builds on Lynn Abrams’s view of oral history as advocacy while acknowledging the need for care in its use for heritagisation.