Wendy Lowenstein

Lowenstein is chiefly known for her written oral histories, which include The Immigrants 1977, Weevils in the Flour 1978, and Under The Hook 1992. She is less well known for her recordings of Australian folklore and her interviews with everyday people about Australian working life. Her work concentrates on early manual laboring industries such as coal mining, cane cutting, northern cattle station work, waterside workers, and the pearling industry. Lowenstein sought to record the worker’s perspective in a range of industrial dispute.

The Lowenstein Oral History Collection consists of at least 741 hours of interviews recorded between 1969 and 1999. The interviews in the collection cover a diverse range of topics from the social effects of the 1930s Depression and working life in Australia to Children’s Rhymes and Australian folklore from pearl luggers and the Gurindji strike and walk-off in Wave Hill to the Patrick’s Waterside dispute at Melbourne Docklands in 1998.

Lowenstein was a social activist most of her life. In 1955, she co-founded the Folk Lore Society of Victoria with Ian Turner and she contributed to and edited the Folk Lore Society of Victoria’s magazine Gumsucker’s Gazette, later Australian Tradition, for fifteen years. Shirley Andrews (Chairperson) and Lowenstein worked together on the committee which organised the first Festival was held in Melbourne in 1967.

Wendy Lowenstein (born Katherin Wendy Robertson Lowenstein; 1927—2006) was an Australian historian, author, and teacher notable for her recording of people’s everyday experiences and her advocacy of social activism. She pioneered oral history in Australia, with Weevils in the Flour in 1978 but she began collecting folklore and oral histories of early Australian working life in the 1960s.