Head along to Manatū Taonga the Ministry for Culture and Heritage’s next Public History Talk at the National Library on Wednesday 3 April 2019. If you can’t make it to the talk, keep an eye on the NZHistory PodBean page for a recording of the talk: http://newzealandhistory.podbean.com/.
Ordinary, extraordinary: recording the stories of sex workers
‘One thing I’d like to see is the recognition of sex workers as ordinary, sometimes rather extraordinary, people.’ – Dame Catherine Healy, national coordinator, New Zealand Prostitutes’ Collective.
Caren Wilton’s book My body, my business: New Zealand sex workers in an era of change (Otago University Press, 2018) is a collection of intimate portraits of New Zealand sex workers, based on her series of oral-history interviews carried out over a nine-year period.
Here she discusses using oral history — ‘history from below’ — to document what can seem to be a secret or hidden world and telling stories that are both extraordinary and ordinary.
The book is illustrated with photographs taken by Madeleine Slavick, commissioned especially for this publication.
About the speaker:
Caren Wilton is an oral historian, writer and editor, and was the recipient of three New Zealand Oral History Awards for her series of interviews with sex workers.
An editor at Te Ara – the Encyclopedia of New Zealand for almost 9 years, she is also a freelance book editor. She was the coordinator of an oral history project focusing on Upper Hutt in the 1960s for Upper Hutt City Library in 2015–16, and is the author of short-fiction collection The Heart Sutra (Otago University Press, 2003).
Date: Wednesday 3 April 2019
Time: 12.10 p.m. to 1 p.m.
Location: Te Ahumairangi (ground floor), National Library, corner Molesworth and Aitken Streets, Thorndon