Internship Reflection

Creative Folk | January 29, 2025

By Claire M Brereton

My Internship at Celebrate Living History has been a rewarding privilege and I have learned a great deal from this experience.

My background in the Australian public service provided training and experience in both public speaking and interview techniques. I have interviewed many different people over the years. Approaching and giving people space to confide in me during the interview process seems second nature to me, and people seem to feel safe telling me private things they have not spoken of previously.

During my internship, I reflected on my training about being sensitive the dangers inherent in having the ability to elicit trust. There is always a risk that when a person is alone after having revealed past traumatic experiences, the process may bring up feelings of vulnerability or a sense of violation. For this reason, I made it clear from the beginning, that my interviewees could withhold signing the ‘publishing approval form’ until I had finalised the article.

I also allowed each individual to read the work before it was published. I ‘voice recorded’ their words and transcribed them verbatim. However, once they saw it in print, all interviewees believed some of their original words did not clearly express their actual meaning and we agreed to minor changes to the quotes. It is interesting how we sometimes think we have said what we mean but when we read it, the meaning seems different.

Allowing interviewees this much post interview input, worked for me and against me in some ways. On the one hand, I feel behaved ethically, in protecting the emotional welfare, privacy and social standing of the individuals, and this was satisfying to my peace of mind. But on the other hand, there were a couple of occasions where having spent a lot of time crafting what I considered would be a very impactful story, we agreed to withdraw from the process and withdraw the record. It felt a shame that I needed to sanitise the effect our commercial world and its inherent inequity has had on these individuals.

Nevertheless, I did manage to find a couple of brave individuals. One was willing to take the risk their anonymity would be safe, and the other was comfortable for me to release their identity. I published their stories with the help of the editor Bev Wilkinson.

Bev’s professional guidance in my grammatical errors, enabled improvements for the second article. However, I noticed that Bev recognised a mistake I made twice. I feel a bit humbled that despite the fact I recognised importance of it the first time, I once again assumed the audience would know certain facts. I hope that in future I will remember that some audience may not understand the political background of my topics, and I am able to clearly explain this. I feel I have grown professionally from this.