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Tales of the days of nursing hostel curfews, starched caps and when “doctors were God” can be heard online with the launch of New Zealand’s first nursing oral history archive.

Snippets of the stories of nearly 60 nurses who trained in the 1950s and 60s are available on a new website that is the culmination of a three-year oral history project by the Nursing Education and Research Foundation (NERF).
Dr Jill Clendon, a New Zealand

Nurses Organisation researcher, was an advisor to the oral history project and project facilitator for the new website www.nursinghistory. org.nz, which she hopes will become a “repository for all things nursing history in New Zealand”.

“Our intention is that this is the ‘go to’ site for information about nursing history in New Zealand.” Clendon says that in the past oral history recordings were only archived in the Alexander Turnbull Library and not easily accessible to nursing students, researchers or nurses in general.

The new website, designed using open-source software, aims to be an ‘online museum’ for NERF, containing not only interesting ‘click and hear’ snippets of oral histories but also historic photos, documents, mementos, reminiscences and research into New Zealand’s nursing history.

In 2012 NERF contracted a University of Auckland project team – made up of health historian Professor Linda Bryder, nursing academics Associate Professor Margaret Horsburgh and Dr Kate Prebble, and historian Dr Debbie Dunsford – to carry out oral history interviews with a wide range of nurses who trained in the 1950s and 1960s.

The resulting almost-60 oral histories feature a wide variety of nurses, from well-known nursing leaders to ‘everyday’ nurses, and includes male, Māori and mental health nurses. While many are retired, a number are still practising today.

“I’m pleased that people will be able to listen to fascinating snippets of history, and dip in and out of different nurses’ stories,” says Bryder.

“The audio files are the perfect length to listen to on the train or in the car.”

Clendon says the full recordings are held by the Alexander Turnbull Library’s oral history archive, which is also the home of 300-plus other nursing oral histories (185 of them collected by NERF), which include those of nurses who registered before 1920, wartime nurses, nursing nuns and Plunket nurses.

The Turnbull is in the process of digitalising its oral history archives, Clendon says, and snippets of these
other nursing stories might also be loaded onto the site in the future. Nurses and researchers who think they have material that could be a good addition to the site can contact Jill Clendon ([email protected]) to discuss further.