At a glance
Living Libraries is a State Library of Queensland program where community members become the storytellers. In the Douglas Shire, the theme was resilience: the stories of a community that lived through Cyclone Jasper and the December 2023 floods around Mossman, told by the people who were there.
Those stories matter most in the voices of the people who lived them. So rather than send in a crew, State Library brought us in to mentor the storytellers themselves, so they could capture and shape their own stories on their own gear.
How the mentoring worked
Beside them, not in front of them
We started where each storyteller was, not where a textbook says they should be. Some had never pointed a camera at anything. Plenty told us straight up that they were not comfortable on camera. That is the normal starting point, and it is exactly what mentoring is for.
Session by session, the focus moved from the mechanics to the story: how to set up a shot, how to draw a real answer out of someone, how to shape hours of footage into something people will actually watch. We stayed beside them the whole way, so the questions that only come up once the camera is rolling had someone to answer them.
In their words
“I joined specifically to learn skills to use in the Living Library project. I was a little trepidatious as I am not comfortable on camera. Suzie was very personable and put us all at ease immediately.”
A Living Libraries course participant
Why it matters for your team
The people closest to the story should get to tell it
This is the model for any library, council, community organisation or program that holds stories worth keeping and wants them told in the community's own voice, not handed to an outside crew.
We teach the skill, we stay alongside while the confidence builds, and then we get out of the way. The community keeps the skill, and keeps telling its own stories long after we are gone.