FlemKen Community Legal Centre

This heartwarming and enlightening oral history project celebrates FKCLC’s 40 years of ‘Challenging the System’.

The FlemKen staff and volunteers throughout its history were challengers of the first order.

Their work was challenging, which is not surprising once you understand the endless different ways their clients were challenged by extraordinary conditions of life, bringing with them a plethora of legal needs.

Listening to their stories was challenging, and inspiring.

This was a collaborative project with social history filmmaker Malcolm McKinnon of Reckless Eye Productions. Our task was to produce a ‘Storytelling Project’ and incorporate it into their website. We did this by working together on the research and interviews before heading off on our own.

We harnessed a thematic approach to understand the important stories that had shaped the Community Legal Centre and its FlemKen community over the years. These are represented in a series of short chapters using the storytellers own words. Case studies exemplify the issues they faced. A brief timeline and other website content put the people and stories in context. Malcolm created a short video with lots of local imagery enabling readers and watchers to get closer to the issues and put names and faces to the people and place.

You can click on the image to read the booklet.

Postscript: the Centre has since merged with Inner Melbourne Community Legal, which now hosts the Storytelling Project here with links to the timeline, video and booklet.