Building communities through co-creative storytelling : sound walking in New England

The Story Project is a small, not-for-profit community media arts company based on the Sunshine Coast hinterland. It specialises in facilitating first-person storytelling. Since 2012 The Story Project has been collaborating with a small community arts organisation based in northern NSW, Uralla Arts, to record local heritage in first-person story form and to curate and present it ways that will appeal to new generations of listeners. The initial collaboration was funded by a Federal government Community Heritage program. The project successfully adapted a participatory method of life storytelling to this regional context and some 40 stories were contributed to a collection. A more ambitious suite of projects to develop soundwalks in a number of towns across the New England region has since grown from this initial collaboration. The soundwalks seek to combine local creative works in oral story, music and visual forms, and make them accessible through an application that can be downloaded to GPS-enabled mobile devices. While soundwalks are not new, the needs and challenges of creative community-building that New England soundwalks attempt to solve in this regional setting hold value for a broader range of interests than just those of the immediate project stakeholders. This paper reports on a research collaboration between The Story Project and QUT researchers that looked at The Story Project’s engagement with Uralla Arts and other New England community-based networks and organisations. It considers how this instance of story-centred, participatory media arts practice contributes to building population-wide capacity for creative expression.