The Interview-Document Nexus: Recovering Histories of LGBTI Military Service in Australia

Since 2014, I have been coordinating a team project documenting the history of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) military service in Australia. The project examines changing policies, practices, and most importantly, the lived experiences of LGBTI military service personnel from the end of the Second World War until the present. When we conceived this project, we expected that we would derive most policy information from records in the National Archives of Australia (NAA) and most information about lived experience from a mixture of media reports and oral history interviews. What has astounded us, though, has been the extent to which several service members kept their own personal archives of documents – most of which related to their personal service and some of which did not appear in the NAA catalogue. In other instances, interview participants’ testimonies or personal documents raised topics that sent us to uncover other uncatalogued archival records. In this article, I draw on examples from our research project where this interview- document nexus proved fruitful in uncovering hitherto hidden histories of LGBTI military service in Australia. Rather than thinking about oral and archival sources as needing to be reconciled, conceptualizing them as a nexus generates new methodological possibilities to uncover new sources that inform each other, enriching both microhistories and grand narratives of the past.