The Border Mail - “A Lasting Tale founded by Albury's Dimity Brassil now has a global reach”.

This feature article by Ellen Ebsary was featured in The Border Mail on Saturday 8th August 2021. The original article can be read here.

Written by Ellen Ebsary of The Border Mail. Full text reproduced below.

A Lasting Tale founded by Albury's Dimity Brassil now has a global reach

Researchers for the The Australian Institute of Family Studies interviewed 4479 people in November and December, asking: All things considered, how was 2020 for your family? Those answering 'good' made up 27 per cent of respondents - of those, 4 per cent added 'very'. The 32 per cent who labelled last year 'bad' or 'very bad' were more likely to have lost a job, known someone who had COVID-19 or been isolated from partners and family.

It might be surprising to read that 41 per cent of people answered 'neither good or bad' in the national survey. While everyone has experienced the pandemic differently, common to us all has been a process of reflection.

Albury's Dimity Brassil, who records life stories for a living, describes the shift in people's outlooks as "a feeling in our hearts". "The pandemic has made many reflect on their inner circles," she said. "We're doing so much to protect others; we've turned and looked at the most vulnerable in our lives. "And when we turned and looked, we have really seen the value we place on them as a community and also as individuals in our family."

Ms Brassil has seen a noticeable increase in people reaching out to her business, A Lasting Tale, in the past four months. When confined by lockdowns, they have made advanced bookings to have stories recorded and bought gift vouchers for loved ones. There have also been more people accessing a free app by the same name.

"We've all been isolated in some way and I'm sure many of us have felt loneliness ourselves or looked to others who we thought would be lonely," Ms Brassil said. "It's now getting more and more downloads, and with all of us locked down over COVID in various ways ... I'm really working on getting as many people to download the app and use it for free as we can."

Small(er) beginnings

When The Border Mail first interviewed the mum and author in 2018, A Lasting Tale was one year old and a prototype app had attracted $3500 from a Jobs for NSW Regional Pitchfest.

The final iteration launched earlier this year, has now been downloaded by 2600 people in Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom and India.

The idea was spurred many years earlier by Ms Brassil's realisation, after losing her father and sister within three months, that we often seek to make memories of our loved ones tangible when it's too late. She writes on her website: "An ill-defined something whispers in my soul about needing to do this. "A pressing need to make sure time doesn't run out when it comes to mum. Am I alone in feeling this need, I wondered? "So that's it. I suspect I'm not alone. I suspect other people share this need. This need to capture the stories of the people they love - hear them in their own voice - while they can."

Those who now have a permanent record of their loved ones after reaching out to A Lasting Tale - from Wagga, Albury, Berrigan and beyond - have described the power of it in testimonials. "When mum was diagnosed with cancer, I knew I wanted to have her life story recorded, whatever the cost," one user wrote. "She had so many amazing stories to tell that would be lost after she passed, and luckily Mum was open to the experience. "I didn't listen to Mum's audio life story until a few weeks after she passed. Wow! It was magical to hear her voice. "It brought joy, I laughed, I cried."

The expanding reach of A Lasting Tale was aided by a Breakout Accelerator program run by ACRE and SecondMuse in Beechworth between November 2019 and June 2020. "It's growing exactly how I envisaged and in a different way too," Ms Brassil said.

"It's very exciting that a regionally based business and app can have this kind of global reach. I came into this starting it as a side project, and now its my full-time job and I've signed on new interviewers." 

Expanding nationally

Former ABC radio presenter Bronwen O'Shea and actor Rachel McNamara have been recruited as interviewers. Their training and questioning take the audio life story to another level, in comparison to the free app which guides users in asking a series of questions and recording answers with a smartphone. "We're doing interviews all over the North East and we have interviewers ready to go in Sydney," Ms Brassil said. "We can't launch that at the moment, but that will be happening."

"In COVID, I've also released a guide that shows people how to record stories over Zoom and I've had Australian expats contact me for guidance to do Zooms with their parents here." Ms Brassil said these Zoom guides had been taken up by palliative care providers in Victoria, facilitating recordings between patients and their families. "(But) it's not just elderly people in care, or palliative care - it's also people who are 60 or 70 and looking to record their own life story during COVID, or their families looking to do it with them," she said. "In the short-term, COVID has slowed us being able to get out face-to-face, but it's really created a far stronger desire from people wanting to do it in the future."

"We thought everybody would want to talk a lot about COVID... but I'm discovering people want to focus on other things; they want to have a conversation about life and how COVID is just one small component of that."

Successful pilot programs

In an initial pilot with Mercy Health Albury at the end of 2019, A Lasting Tale trained the palliative and aged care volunteer base to record audio life stories as part of their regular volunteering program. This helped to refine the app's development and last year, Ms Brassil supported Melbourne not-for-profit Lively to run a COVID-19 program. A Lasting Tale provided questions and tools so young people trained by Lively could connect remotely with their matched older person during lockdowns. 

"It's not just about what you preserve at the end, it's the connection in the process of telling the story," she said. "I hope to get the mobile app into quite a lot of palliative care and aged care homes and run pilots. We're also talking to local government, both the Snowy Valleys and Towong Councils, about developing projects there, going out and interviewing as many elderly people in our smaller towns as we can and doing a life story archive project."

"I am looking to run some more pilots in aged care homes here, so would welcome contact from any aged care homes that would like to come on board."

Precious resource

Despite all that has happened in the past three years and the growth of A Lasting Tale, Ms Brassil has found the essence of questions needing to be asked has remained - even for the interviews now tailored to palliative care life stories. "It's always a wonderful thing when I interview people who are in the palliative stage of their life," she said. "People just want to have somebody ask them questions and to listen to the answers. When somebody is dying, I think it can become an even more pressing need. Even if people don't listen to it straight away, there's comfort in knowing it is there."

It also remains the case that people find recording life stories challenging. "Sometimes these interviews can be left too late and the families don't get what they might have been looking for," Ms Brassil said. "So if there is somebody reading this article who is palliative or their family member is, take a look and act on it now".

"You're more scared about asking somebody to record their life story than they are of you asking them. Normally, the person you will ask has thought about doing this in some way. You could record your life story now and listen to it yourself when you're 90."