Honouring Stories of Struggle: Reassessing Australia’s Records of Disadvantage – Hearing the Voices of Those Who Struggle

Abstract

When deciding what and how documentation should be made and kept about the experiences of welfare recipients, it is vital to ensure that recordkeeping strategies meet the needs, preferences and expectations of the recipients of those services. This article presents a transcription of a video created by a non-government community welfare organisation in South Australia that features interviews with a range of that organisation’s clients. Interviewees express concern about the partial and overly negative view of their life experiences captured in the documentation of welfare provision. They suggest that a more holistic approach to documenting their lives would preserve a more accurate and humanistic record of their stories of struggle.