Soundtrails congratulates the Australian Living Peace Museum for publishing their second Soundtrail: this one in Perth, WA.
We further wish to recognise teacher/producer, Alex Pierce and Associate Professor Bobbie Oliver Director, from the Centre for Western Australian History for their hard work, and in recognising the role that Soundtrails can play in engaging students on the ground with these important yet little-known histories and stories.
ALPM is a volunteer-led, community based organisation that “aims to foster a culture of peace…in accord with a range of local, national and international contexts relating to disarmament, human rights, ecology, reconciliation (including Indigenous responses to colonisation), education and the growth of international humanitarian law.”
The first ALPM project, based in inner-city Melbourne, tells of an “unlikely coalition of politicians, Christians and socialists, women and trade unionists [who] united to successfully oppose the introduction of conscription for overseas military service during World War I.”
This more recent offering in Perth (undertaken this time as an ‘Indie Production’) unpacks storied sites and the people “who made known their opposition to conscription in the lead up to the 1916 and 1917 conscription plebiscites (called referendums, at the time).”
Focusing on civil action, union and labour histories, and important landmarks/buildings en-route that encapsulate these stories, the ALPM Soundtrails, as media scholar Jason Farman reminds us, make salient the “lesser known voices” to challenge the dominant narratives of “those in power” and importantly recognise how “visible object [s] in the environment can serve as a reminder of the link between a story and the landscape.”
Soundtrails is delighted to see such important stories and voices come to light and we look forward to working with ALPM in the future.
Work Cited
Farman, Jason. “Stories, spaces, and bodies: The production of embodied space through mobile media storytelling.” Communication Research and Practice, vol. 1, no. 2, 2015, p. 109.