By Tyler Wright
Hills residents are being encouraged to share their stories of the history Selby Community House and surrounding areas in a new podcast being produced by Emerald-based musician Riley Jordan.
Jordan will interview residents whose lives were impacted by the community house in a three-episode podcast series called the ‘Selby Community House History Project,’ prompted by her experience producing her own gardening podcast in the late ’00s and her own connection to Selby Community House.
Preparing to start recording in her home studio over the next month, Jordan is looking to find out how Selby Community House has helped people, how it has connected them to the community and what the community centre has taught locals since its opening in 1975.
“It’s not a big imposing studio, so people need not be afraid,” Jordan said.
“But it’s really important to me to get at least some stories in people’s own voices from the Hills who were here, and I think that would give it that flavour, that authenticity that it craves.”
While she is still in the research phase of the podcast project which is set to be available for download next year, Jordan said the first episode will discuss how Selby Community House came to be.
“The community house had a history of being involved with the LET system in the ’90s, which was a local employment training system… so there’s room for all kinds of things there, and at the moment I’m just collecting information, I’m doing my research,” Jordan said.
The podcast will be launched alongside a documentary made up of extended interviews with Selby Community House founding member Jocelyn Aytan among others, to be launched in a public a multimedia exhibition around February next year.
Documentary researcher Judy Wolff, who sourced three local filmmakers for the project, said the era prior to the opening of Selby Community House was a time of “enormous national and global change,” with Vietnam War moratoriums, women’s liberation and the environmental movement.
Wolff said a group of men and women came together to build what was an “almost derelict shack” into a service used by young mothers and the elderly, with TAFE colleges using the building as a source of study.
“As as the younger adults got more established, they made strong connections with the elderly people there and they wrote up memoirs, and they had cross-age tutoring [where] the elderly people would teach their hobbies to the children…that became a great source of pride that the young and the old were mixing very well,” Wolff said.
Family daycare was introduced into Selby Community House, helping it grow into a “vibrant centre for culture, childcare, learning, environmental and social action,” Wolff said.
“Local people from a very isolated community banded together and did an amazing thing as both activists and community builders,” she said.
“It took on a huge loss of its own and vibrancy of so much energy in the ’70s and ’80s.”
If you would like to share your experiences with Selby Community House and have your voice on the ‘Selby Community House History Project’ podcast , you can fill out a contact form on the selbyhouse.org.au website.
