Precious recordings with older family members uncover purpose of life

I doubt that the convenience and the accessibility of the iPhone will hold precious recordings with family members as safely as a shoebox stuffed with cassettes, writes Bernard Salt.

More than 40 years ago, when asked by my parents what I would like for my 21st birthday, I said a portable cassette radio player. It was a forerunner to the Walkman (1980s), which morphed into the iPod (early 2000s), which in turn was superseded by the smartphone (late 2000s).

The cassette recorder allowed me to record conversations. I had a plan of chatting with elderly relatives about their lives. Over the next 10 years I made 25 hour-long recordings of chats with uncles and aunties in their fifties, and with the surviving siblings of my deceased grandparents who were then in their eighties and nineties. I also recorded a conversation with my mother when she was 58. Sadly, I didn’t record my father’s voice. Every voice has a cadence that when replayed immediately connects with a powerful memory.

I stored the cassettes in a shoebox thinking that one day I would have them digitised. I did just that a few weeks ago.

As I listen to the recordings, I recall the room, the warmth, the conversations. My language seems slow; I don’t recall but maybe this was deliberate, to reflect the language and the hearing of my elderly relatives. Every so often this oddly familiar twentysomething version of me that had laid dormant in a shoebox for decades delivers a jarring pronunciation: today’s seamless “July” was then configured as “Ju-ly” and back then my “castle” rhymed with hassle. My accent, speaking rhythm and even pronunciation of some words has changed.

And what struck me about the conversations is the life, love and energy evident in my grandmother’s sisters chatting about their youth: the singing, the dancing, the mischief all retold in loving, mirthful detail. And the love and respect they held for their mother and father. Their voices and their values still carry through the decades.

There’s a conversation with my mother’s oldest sister talking about how they had to flee for their lives when threatened by a bushfire near Winchelsea in the 1920s. It’s a story that resonates still. I love the story of a great grandfather, a Bavarian sailor who supposedly jumped ship in Van Diemen’s Land. Every family has a story of dash and of derring-do.

I may have changed: grown older, a little wiser, more worldly, perhaps. I may have even shifted in my language. What has not changed is how people in their eighties and nineties think and interact. This cohort enjoy a chat, to reflect, and to learn something of their community, their family, the people they love. This is what I have learnt from my cassette tape experience. It’s almost as if the purpose of life isn’t truly revealed, understood, or appreciated until much closer to the end of life. At a human level, elderly people both today and 40 years ago pretty much want the same things: to be included, to have contact with family, to savour every moment of life’s later years and days.

I am sure many people capture the voices and the images of their extended family on their iPhones. But over the decades, I doubt that the convenience and the accessibility of the iPhone will hold these precious recordings as safely as a shoebox stuffed with cassettes.