Hazel Estelle de Berg (21 March 1913 – 3 February 1984) was a pioneer of oral history in Australia. Between 1957 and 1984 she produced 1291 hour-long sound tape reels of interviews with writers, historians, artists, musicians and scientists and photographed each. Biography Hazel Estelle de Berg was born on 21 March 1913 in Deniliquin, New South Wales to George Robert Holland and Ann Holland (née McIntosh). Her father was a Methodist minister, whose pastoral work led to the family moving around country New South Wales during de Berg's childhood, living in Cessnock Cobar Orange and Kempsey In 1928 the family moved to Sydney, where de Berg enrolled at Methodist Ladies’ College, Burwood and completed her Leaving certificate in 1932. She then trained as a photographer at Paramount Studios and until 1938 worked in the studio of Noel Rubie, while continuing to live at home with her parents. Career According to David Foster, de Berg's introduction to tape recording was a 1957 commission by Ken Bruce, founder of Talking Books for the Blind in New South Wales, and himself blind, to read, on tape, the 1951 A Man Called Peter. Later that year, de Berg was asked by historian Frank Clune to record a book for a blind friend. An amateur, using an Australian-made Nova reel-to-reel tape machine, she recorded Dame Mary Gilmour's Old Day, Old Ways. She subsequently recorded an interview with Dame Mary for background information and the recording became the first of the de Berg oral history collection, held at the National Library of Australia in Canberra. She proved undaunted by the fame or high standing of her subjects. At a meeting in October 1958 of the Book Collectors' Society of Australia at the Public Library of New South Wales, de Berg played some of her recordings, of Dame Mary Gilmore, Frank Dalby Davison and others addressing their personal messages to the blind. In a 1973 unpublished paper de Berg wrote that:"I have come a little way along the road a blind man showed me — a road I hope someone else treads in the centuries ahead — but I have come a long way in love, and perhaps knowledge, for the people who express our country." De Berg had no special connections in Australian literature apart from being a distant cousin of poet David Campbell, though in a 1956 ABC radio feature My Friend Keats for